It’s been a few years since I’ve posted up a Christmas themed spell-list. Since it’s been a particularly trying year and the ICE Forums are down once again I thought I would post one here on the Blog.
I’m finishing up a usable version of Chapter 5 of my “Legends of Shadow World” tournament module. This final encounter takes place in the north of Kulthea, a desolate realm of ice and snow which takes me back to my early years as a player in the Iron Wind. I was also thinking of Terry’s upcoming module in Wurilis–he mentions introducing a new race or culture of Snow Elves. All of this led me to finishing up a widowed spell list I had in the master BASiL file–“Arctic Law”. I see this as a cultural list or even a natural list for “Snow Elves” or similar magical races. This one isn’t as light-hearted as “Santa’s Ways“, but a useful list that could add some flavor to your adventure or campaign.
The first fail was when I set up the Line of Sight on one of the maps I had left a small gap around one of the alcoves. When a character stepped into the alcove they could see across to a ‘secret’ area. This was an area that I did not intend to use in the adventure, and had blocked off using the wall tool in Fantasy Grounds.
The player immediately told me that there was a problem and they could see more of the map than he should be able to.
So that was a failure in preparation. My fault.
That disclosure that they could see another area had an instant effect on the other players. They were three levels down into a temple and had not checked for a secret door at all in all that time. All of a sudden they were checking every wall. Because the players thought they knew something was there, they couldn’t resist searching for it. The more detailed their searching, the more detail I gave them. The more details they got, the more convinced there had to be something significant about the damp patch on the plasterwork, or a section of bricks that looked like it had be repaired at some point.
If they had had a hammer or a pickaxe, they would have started exhuming 40 year old bodies.
Meta gaming, tsk, bad players.
I did find that about 60% of the entire talk amongst the players was directly about their tokens on the map, where to move them to, where not to move them, trying to step their characters forward to get maximum line of sight. This part was particularly tedious.
The players seem to like the map, but they are dyed in the wool wargamers, they do love a battle map. It is just a pity that I think they really spoil a game.
I am going to try and wean them off of maps. I am not adverse to imagery. I am going to try and give them a flow of pictures of what buildings and places or beasties look like, and try and tone down the map use. Not sure how that will work out.
What I am thinking is to not make maps of the entire place, do that by theatre of the mind. But when they enter combat then give them a battle map so they can use the ranges and positioning.
Finally, something went very wrong with my Fantasy Grounds set up last night. Clicking on the prepared encounters would not open them. I had to try and recreate the encounters in real time, not ideal. Once I had done that, there was definitely something wrong as I could not roll any attacks for the foes. The player rolls worked just fine, but the foe rolls did not register. I didn’t notice for two rounds as the foes were closing the distance and the players used missile weapons.
That glitch effectively ended the session. It was then pooling our limited knowledge of FG to try and work out what went wrong.
Tuesday night was the first proper Rolemaster session I have run. I was prepared or it to be either a one-shot that degenerated into a learning experience, and prepared for it to be the start of a campaign.
The opening adventure was Creatures of the Night. It didn’t go strictly to plan, the first thing the characters did when the murders started was try to use the church tower to get an overview of the town.
Leaping from plot hook to showdown without passing through the adventure.
I set up my adventure using a story panel, to get what I imagined would be the general progression.
Of course, no plan is ever going to survive first contact with a player character party.
I am a fan of the story element. It made it very easy to just to the right place in my notes when they bypassed most of it and jumped to the church.
The “Church Horror” encounter was with the Gargoyle. That was one 5th level beastie against three first level characters, two fighters and a thief.
That fight was touch and go for a while. The three against one odds was the main deciding factor. One character was down to half a dozen hits, and bleeding at the end.
They have yet to explore the crypt, if they even bother.
That is probably where they will end up. There are more people who have disappeared than have been accounted for by the remains found with the gargoyle.
Two of the missing bodies are in the crypt, just waiting to be released. This is part of a side plot that they haven’t discovered yet.
So, at the end of the first real session, no one died, they all gained some experience and one mystery has been solved. Not a bad evening.
I uploaded the 44th issue of the Rolemaster blog fanzine yesterday (Sunday 6th). I am not sure how or why, but I seem to have settling on the 6th of the month as release day for it each month. I suspect that without a deadline it simply would not get done.
While I was in adventuring mode, the fanzine contains two adventures this month, I also wrote my next 50in50 adventure. I have passed that to Egdcltd/Adrian for his editing and battlemap making.
The 50in50 is going slower this time. First time around we were banging things out weekly right up until near the end. This time it is more like two a month, and 50 in 100 sounds a bit sad.
There was no way that anyone could have played everything the first time around in 50 weeks, we wrote just too much material. The supplements this time are slightly longer. I have been leaning towards short adventures or situation that would take one or two sessions to complete, possibly more.
You can tell by the cover that these adventures are not city/urban adventures for a change! I also think that they are ideal for characters at above 6th level.
So, after last week’s problems we had a much more successful session using Fantasy Grounds Unity.
My group has pretty much settled on Tuesday nights being game night. We all had characters now, and the group ran into a band of five goblins, two hobgoblins, and a goblin chieftain.
The fight was fairly bloody, on both sides. Somehow the players all forgot about the need to parry, or even to move.
Out numbered, and out gunned the result was fairly predictable.
I am hoping that it was because it was all new, but the game session did end up focussing on the map and tokens than on any roleplaying. This is what happened when I played in a 5e game online as well.
The good thing is, even the players said that it was very wargamey or boardgamish.
I want to run something more theatre of the mind next time.
Things I liked was the line of sight in Fantasy Grounds Unity maps, and I like the character creation.
What I found difficult was that there was a massive lag between someone rolling an attack, and the Tabler Resolver appearing and showing the right attack table.
I am not sure if I can bypass that. I don’t know how to add damage to a foe, and the conditions. I would still like to use the condensed combat system by hand, but I am not sure if that is going to be possible.
I have read online that FGU is still being optimised, so I am hoping it wall become more responsive over time. I don’t really want to buy a new laptop just to run FGU.
The other alternative is to let someone else GM. Wouldn’t that be a shame, if I only got to play 😉
As part of my practice and learning I have been making quite a few characters. I cannot decide which I want to play. I am hovering between an Illusionist and a Mentalist. I am also considering building a monk tomorrow and seeing how he turns out.
After last week’s hiccup, I have managed to track down the source of my problem using FG Classic. It turns out that my Satellite broadband provider closes all ports on inbound traffic, unless you pay for their premium services.
Having spent days trying to figure out why port forwarding would not work, reading hundreds of forum posts and guides, it did turn up on a forum that this was the root cause. I sent off an email and got a sales message back about upgrading.
The other alternative was to upgrade to Unity, and run a cloud hosted game.
I bought unity, and the RMC package at the same time, and I got an upgrade discount, so that is not bad.
We had a session on Wednesday evening and made some characters, played around with sharing maps and moving tokens around.
My experience with FG was all Classic, I think I am going to have to rerun some of the FG College videos just to come up to speed.
Now, I am spending time just making characters, which I will be able to utilise as NPCs, and just becoming more comfortable with character creation.
In the next week or two, I would like to get to the point of running a short adventure for my old face to face group.
My only concern is that when I have played, not GMed, online games have degenerated into almost table top battles, everyone more concerned about pawing over the map and positions. The actual roleplaying seemed to take a back seat after a while.
That was the main reason why I was not a fan of online playing.
Hopefully, if we are on our guard against it, it will not be such a problem.
After writing adventures for over 35 years, one of my goals is to try upending my players’ expectations. Coming up with a new monster, adversary or spin on standard adventure tropes doesn’t truly challenge my players; most who have been gaming for decades.
For me, the discipline is not just “one upping” the group or seeing them through an adversarial lense (GM vs Player), but to literally challenge their long held perceptions that create standard encounter reactions that might as well be behavioral tics.
If you’ve read some of my 50 in 50 Adventures, you may see where I’m going with this post. For instance, in The Cabin in the Woods, appears to be a straight up bandit encounter, but there is a “more than meets the eye” aspect. In The Hermit of Castle Ruins, the typical foe may not be the villain the villagers think he is. Feldaryn’s Flying Ship introduces one of my favorite NPC tropes: the mysterious mage who is NOT as powerful as the players assume. (Because every old man is tattered robes must be a powerful mage in disguise!) I could go on with most of my other adventure hooks–most have some twist or reversal that will require the players to think on their feet or change their viewpoint.
Here are a few of my favorites:
“The Usual Suspects“. I’ve only done this once, for a stand-alone adventure. But basically one of the PC’s is actually the bad guy! In the process of chasing down a shadowy figure, the group actually eliminates the bad guy’s opponent, or recovers an object needed by the baddie. The fun is watching the player try and manipulate the group’s decision making to his/her benefit.
“Friend not Foe”. Similar to The Usual Suspects, this is the simple idea that the MOB is actually a good guy, friend or potential ally of the group. What happens when they rush to combat and kill someone that should have been a friend?
“The Burden of Power”. While all players are in an endless quest to level up, advance their characters wealth, abilities and equipment, there could be a cost to that. If the player possesses a famous weapon, what stops NPC’s from attempting to steal the object, challenge/kill the PC to acquire it or attack the group when they are injured and at a disadvantage? Does being powerful also make them a target from rivals, adversaries or less powerful NPC also trying to level up? It’s one thing to obtain power, it’s another to hold onto it!
“The Sting”. I’m surprised how easily it is to con my players. Feldaryn’s Flying Ship is a good example of using a mysterious character to manipulate and fool the players into doing all sorts of things–many to their detriment. When my players get complacent, greedy or foolhardy I know it’s time to bring in a “Sting”. Nothing sobers them up like losing a treasured item, having their wealth taken in an elaborate ruse or being used as pawn’s in someone else’s ambitions.
“Paranoia”. One of the harder plays to run successful is the subversion of a PC. Whether they are tainted, charmed, possessed or similar, it relies on the good faith and roleplaying ability of the players. When it works, it’s fabulous.
“Fools Gold”. A long arduous quest for a mythical object. What could be more tropey than that! What if the object was never powerful, magical or valuable. Maybe it was a hoax, or a story twisted over time, or maybe the object held is a counterfeit–the original having been stolen long ago.
“Job and The Capricious God“. I’ve written a lot about Channeling/Priests. What if the God is just an asshole? He/she blocks spellcasting randomly, enacts hardships and curses of the player(s) to “test their faith”. The follower can not rely on anything and must take extreme steps to please his diety. How will the rest of the group react when they realize they are joined to a cursed player–who could drag the group into one disaster after another!
“Dopplegangers”. What if the player or players had someone pretending to be them? This foe was causing harm, hurting their relationships or reputation or taking credit for their triumphs. What would the PCs do if they were framed and pursued by the law? That could be fun?
So those are just a few ideas. I’m curious and interested if other GM’s have tried to subvert their own adventure narratives. What are your ideas?
My face to face group is finally coming around to using Fantasy Grounds. I have played in Fantasy Grounds games in the past, but was not massively impressed, I find the roleplay element became stilted and the maps and tokens took a lot of peoples attention. In many ways it started to resemble a table top wargame or board game, and not an RPG.
Our group is not going to get together any time soon. Fanasy Gounds is going to get another outing.
If anyone is running games on the platform, I could do with some assistance. As I say, I can join other people’s games but I cannot get the Port Forwarding to work to be able to be able to host a game.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it is because I am using wifi extenders, and I need to configure the port forwarding on these as well as the main router.
I am beginning to hate wifi networks, or is that wifi notworks?
For the first time in what seems like months, we get two blog posts out in the same week!
I also published the Fanzine [Issue 43] last Friday and it is a double adventure issue.
I returned to the Undead this time. It seemed fitting seeing as the US was going Hallowe’en crazy, as normal. Things that will not just lay down and die seem quite fitting right now.
In Brian’s post, he talked about the fine details of RMu’s rules. I am hoping to receive a review copy before, or as, it hits the shelves. If I do, it is my intention to do a complete read-through, similar to the one I did for Zweihander a couple of months ago. A chapter by chapter analysis of what is in there and how it all works now.
To me, it feels like everything is waiting on the release of RMu now. It has been a very long wait and we deserve nice things.
This is meant to be an intentionally vague and open question! A few thoughts from me.
The Rolemasterblog has dropped a bit in internet RPG blog rankings from a few years ago. Now #59. https://blog.feedspot.com/rpg_blogs/ Is this as simple as we are writing less blog posts? Has the initial enthusiasm for the RMBlog or RMU or even RM dropping a bit? So maybe neither good nor bad.
COVID. Here in Maine, we are experiencing another surge in the pandemic. This could lead to another “shelter in place” or business shut down. I haven’t been able to visit my father in Florida for over a year and my family can only meet up via zoom. Heading to bad.
RMU. Things seem to be progressing, but I’ve lost track of the small minutia around the rules. There still seems to be enthusiasm, so that’s good!
Shadow World. Over at the discord server there seems to be a concerted group effort to write a SW module. This has been tried before, but they appear to be making progress. That’s good.
50 in 50. Things have really slowed down, BUT, the quality of our work has improved I think. Peter is putting out solid small adventures rather than the basic adventure hooks we focused on in version 1.
My SW stuff. Obviously, I don’t have support of an editor, help with artwork and don’t have the time or skills to do so myself. I find the lack of feedback, positive or negative, to be disconcerting! I try to skew as close to Terry’s tone and style as I can, base it on Canon, (but filling in between the lines whenever possible). Is this material helpful? Useful? Used by other people? I don’t know! I would really like a few more collaborators to help push the SW “secondary market” further.
Roleplaying. I look on with some envy on the popularity of “critical role” and other D&D based pop culture phenoms. Personally I cannot stand the tropes of Humans, Dwarf, Halfing, Elf vs Orc, Goblin, Troll; fighting dragons or Gygaxian settings. I don’t want to fight skeletons, large rats or live in the hollywood version of Middle Earth. That’s just me. However, I certainly love the fact that RPG’s are reaping the rewards of a life of gaming, fantasy, creativity and literature. Yay.
