Category: Rolemaster

My group has really got the Fantasy Grounds bug. It started with my running a game, then one of the other regular GMs started his game, so I get to play a Monk in that one.

On Friday, our Shadow World GM starts his game. I have created a Druid for that game. I will be serving the role of group healer, so I will be trying to pick up those closed channeling healing lists. At first level I have Druidstaff and Concussion Ways as lists.

One of the other players is just starting to come up to speed with FG as well. I have not played in a game run by this GM since Bushido was a new game. I think it must have been around 1987, maybe 88? I really have no idea what to expect.

So Many New Characters

I have never needed to create so many new characters before. What is particularly interesting is that this is the first time that I have played a profession that is not in the Character Law, I am referring to my new Druid.

All my characters up until now have been in the core books. I never felt that the professions in the companions added any value to the game.

Sure, new spell lists are nice, but you could collapse the new spell lists into the existing professions. Do you need a thief, rogue and burglar?

I broke that duck in this game because I know that the game will be a lot of hack and slash, and I like to be useful outside of combat, and I like playing the party healer. The Druid gives me access to the healing lists, they are one of the most aggressive spell casters in the game, and they are great in the wilderness.

They are also very self reliant. The druid staff gives you that starting magic weapon, stone mastery gives pretty powerful ranged magical attacks starting at just 5th level (basic ranged attacks are a first level spell).

It is that self reliance that I find attractive for this character. I don’t know Shadow World very well, I don’t know what the GM has in store for us, and I don’t know who else will be in the party. I am hoping that I will be able to fit into a role whatever the campaign brings.

With a resurgence in RPG’s I am wondering what the impact of the new generation of gamers would be on classic collectible RPG products: modules, supplements, rule sets etc.

I was able to amass a collection of “Old School” products in the late 90’s early 2000’s when role-playing interest had died off and I bought out the inventory for several game stores. Before eBay we didn’t have market pricing on rare or interesting products so I was able to accumulate new shrink wrapped MERP products, parchment ICE material, old Midkemia supplements and most of the 1st edition AD&D modules at bargain basement prices. Those products from the early 80’s were pure nostalgia with simple line drawn artwork, heavy stock paper and cruder presentation.

The first demand bump I saw was after the announcement for the first Lord of the Rings movie. MERP products, already out of print but of great quality (it was reported that the movie designers used ICE MERP products extensively) started increasing in value. Then OSR started manifesting and the early D&D products started to grow in demand. Early second tier materials: Midkemia, Loremaster, HARN and Judges Guild also added value in the early 2000’s.

Has the demand for these supplements faded? A quick check on eBay shows that Court of Ardor sells for $70 or best offer–with the map. The hardcover edition of Minas Tirith, an amazing product is now only $80! What about ICE? Early products can be bought for prices far lower than 10 years ago.

Given the ubiquity of DriveThruRGP, the availability of out of print products in PDF form and a younger generation that is more open to paperless products; will new products ever become “classics” in the future? There does seem to be value in some ICE print on demand products that are no longer available, but in general prices seem stagnant. As original gamers get older, will these early books lose their allure?

It’s that time of year where we look ahead to a new year and review what, if anything was accomplished this past year! For me, this was truly a lost year and when I look back at early 2020 blog posts I can barely remember writing them. Strangely, the pandemic and the resulting shut down of my businesses actually freed up a lot of my time; but psychologically it was very hard to write or be creative. So how did the year look?

1. Blogging. I wrote a total of 27 blog posts; or 1 every other week. Not bad compared to other RGP blogs but not what I would consider amazing output.
2. Topics. One theme this year was a harder look at various RM Professions. My take on Rangers, Bards, Druids, Warrior Mage, and Mystic. Peter and Hurin added their own posts and I thought it was a fun to have everyone’s perspectives.
3. Spin Cycle. I’m also a fan of re-purposing MERP modules for Shadow World. The SW “DNA” is imbedded in these early ICE products given that Peter and Terry had their hands in both lines. This year I tackled Umbar (one of my favorite all-purpose supplements), Assassins of Dol Amroth.
4. Most Engagement. My blog post on the aging RM gamer demographic, “Thoughts on Mortality” garnered 22 responses.
5. RMU. Another year has come and gone with RMU just around the corner. Will 2021 be the year?
6. ICE. The ICE website and forums are down again (3 times this year?). This time, the site has been down to the point that google in no longer indexing it for searches! Is that bad? Right now the Blog and the Discord Server seem to be carrying the water for Rolemaster gamers. Personally, I don’t get a lot of utility from Discord, but it seems like a solid resource for gamers seeking games online and the group adventure project appears to be moving along which is encouraging.
7. Master File List. I had the time to post up a list of most of my uploaded files here on the Blog. I didn’t include the BASiL material, and it needs updates. Unfortunately, most of the links go to the RM Forums, so right now it isn’t that useful.
8. Other 2020 Completed Projects. From a writing standpoint, 2020 was a below average year for output. I put some finishing touches to Priest-King in May and handed it off to Nicholas for further editing. Will it ever get published? Who knows, but it’s out of my hands. I also posted up a shrapnel/swarm critical chart, a handful more Mentalist spell lists, an Essence list, The Book of Pales, completed the user versions of all 5 chapters of “Legends of Shadow World” and have put out 2 or 3 new adventures for 50 in 50 Pt II. I think the total uploaded output was around 100 pages.

Looking ahead. 2021. I’m already well underway on several new projects and finishing up long gestating ones.

1. Legends of Shadow World Omnibus. I’d really like to format this for RMU once it’s finalized. I think the new system needs support material and no one has really tackled a 50th lvl adventure for Rolemaster. I’m going to consolidate all 5 chapters, polish things up, add a scoring system for each chapter so it can be used for tournaments and will look into 3rd party artwork and floorplans. I’m happy to pay for the work but I’m always hesitant when it comes to Shadow World material…
2. Empire of the Black Dragon. This was originally part of Priest-King, but to keep the size reasonable and avoid any serious canonical disputes I split it off. It had been siting at 50 pages for years but I’ve been plugging away at it. Ultimately, it will be Part III following the last adventure of Priest-King and combined with Part I: The City of Nontataku. This module is basically 5 fortresses so it’s layout intensive.
3. Mentalism. 2021 will be the year for me to put out the rest of BASiL: Mentalism.
4. 50 in 50 Pt 2. I got off to a slow start but have 10 out of the 25 complete or drafted. I just need to focus on them for a week to catch up.
5. SW Channeler Players Guide. I’m excited about this–I consolidated all of the SW religious spells, religion material and added more player specific information to help flesh out Priests in Shadow World. It’s averaging 5 pages/diety so it should finish up around 60-80 pages!

So, a look back, a peak ahead. Hopefully we start climbing out of this pandemic over the next few months, ICE gets back up online, RMU is published and Terry finishes up Emer IV. That would be a year.

Don’t forget to vote for RMU on ENWorld’s poll of most anticipated RPGs of 2021: https://www.enworld.org/threads/vote-for-the-most-anticipated-rpg-of-2021.677253/

And Happy Holidays everyone! I hope to be back to posting by the end of the holidays. Look out for several new Armsmaster spells lists for RMU in the near future.

I am just stopping by to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

I hope you get a good one thus despite the circumstances.

Be safe, be happy.

I have mentioned a few times that our group has multiple GMs. Last night I got to play a character in one of the other GM’s RMC game.

It was the first session of the campaign, running on Fantasy Grounds.

We bought the new Companion One for FG this week and at least two of the characters were built using that.

The party is comprised of a rogue, lay healer, paladin, high warrior monk and my character a ‘normal’ monk.

The high warrior monk and paladin are both companion one professions.

The first thing that was striking was how high the stat bonuses get for characters built using the Skill at Arms and Skill at Magic background options.

One of the curious things, and it was really apparant starting again at first level, was the difference between a starting arms user, the high warrior monk, and the a semi spell user, my monk.

One had an OB of +66 compared to my +21. The HWM had bought Rank 1 and Rank 2 martial arts. I could only afford Rank 1.

The gulf between us is of course that I am investing in magic, the HWM is a pure arms profession. I fully expect to be in the HWM’s shadow for about the first five levels. After that I expect the diminishing returns to start kicking in for the HWM and I my magic to start becoming more useful.

In last night’s session we had two combats vs goblins. In the first fight I got almost taken out in the first round. I went from 26hits to 2hits in a single hit by a goblin arrow. Our lay healer gave me some herbs which helped somewhat and I did get to rejoin the fight for the last combat round.

In the second combat, almost exactly the same thing happened to the high warrior monk.

We are both running around in AT1, if someone lands a blow on us, we don’t have the hits to absorb the damage. My defence is largely going to be built around Adrenal Defence, but that is no good to you when surprised. I will also improve my ability to self-heal, but that is limited to Flow Stop 1 at the moment.

Last night we got ambushed when the path went through the woods, which we did survive, but far from unscathed. We met some farmers who complained about the amount of goblin activity and point us to an old ruin of a keep. We found the keep without getting lost, by no means certain given our skill level, and ran into some goblin lookouts.

That fight went much better for us, only some light wounds. The HWM took the brunt of it and that was just concussion damage and stunned. No broken bones or anything nasty.

In the next session we are going to press on and explore what looks like a dungeon level below the keep.

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.

Enjoy and have a safe holiday season!

Last night’s game was not very successful.

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.

All in all, not the best session.

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.