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Life Giving

Funnily enough both Brian and I spent some time over Christmas planning a few blog posts in advance to take a bit of pressure off. Brian published his on Wednesday and has a proper Shadow World bent to it. Inspired by the same forum post I wanted to take a look at what Life Giving actually means in terms of practicalities for the PC.

If I remember correctly D&D’s Raise Dead spell left the newly returned to the living person on 1hp for a week while they recover. I think you had to be a 9th level Cleric to cast it as well.

I was thinking today about Rolemasters equivalent which is Life Giving. As with most RM spells there are multiple versions Life Giving I, II, III, IV, V and True. They start at 12th level and Life Giving True is the 50th level biggy. What changes between iterations are two parameters.

When Life Giving I is cast not only does the caster have to successfully cast the spell but the person being brought back to life needs to roll under their constitution on a D100. With the first version for every day that the person was dead 10 is added to that percentage roll. Now technically the spell can bring back anyone who has been dead for up to a year but for that to happen they would have to roll under their Con stat with +3650 on the dice. That is a hell of an open ended downwards roll. In practice a successful raising is unlikely to happen if they have been dead for more than 5 days unless they were built like and Ox.

Once a person has been brought back they are at -100 to all actions for a period of time. With Life Giving I that period is 100 days for every day dead. So if you were dead for two days then you are at -100 for 200 days. That is a bit of a steeper tariff than the 1 week at 1hp back in my D&D days.

So imagine a PC is killed and it takes three days to get them to a suitable cleric. The character rolls under their Con despite the +30 on the roll. They are now at -100 for 300 days. That is the best part of a year. I think that pretty much puts the character out of the game. Unless the entire party decides to do a year’s worth of spell research to bide their time while the character recovers I cannot see that character remaining part of the party. In my RMC game the party came together about 4 weeks ago. When they met they were 1st level now they are mix of third, fourth and fifth level. That has been non-stop high combat fighting for their lives. What would be the disparity in the characters if one took a year off while the others carried on? Obviously the levelling would tail off slightly as exp demands got tougher and I have been accelerating the characters though their first few levels to allow them to grow into their skills, but still I think you are looking at a 10 or 15 level difference if you extended that a year into the future.

Life Giving I will put your character out of the game despite being technically being alive.

Life Giving I is not that useful for characters/PCs but it is brilliant for NPCs. It is a damn sight easier to interrogate someone who is alive than someone who is dead! It is easier to claim the reward for returning the kidnapping victim if they are still alive and not every bounty is Dead or Alive, some are a bit more specific. Life Giving I is a great spell when cast by the characters rather than on the characters.

Now this is a playing group ‘thing’ but we do not tend to play beyond 20th level if we even reach that level. In my level less game spell lists rarely get above 20th level as that requires an open ended roll for each spell about 19th.

So what does a 20th level Life Giving look like? This is much more useable. The roll under your Con penalty is +1 for each day dead so our three day dead character has just +3 on the roll. That should hopefully be doable. The recovery time is 1 day for every day dead, so just 3 days in this case. That is Life Giving IV. There are not going to be many 20th level casters around but if you can find one and they are prepared to cast the spell then that is viable for PCs to carry on their careers.

Of course that is just the mechanics in the core rules whether your game world and the gods agree is a completely different issue!

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Thoughts on Resurrection in Rolemaster & Shadow World.

First off, Happy New Year! Over the holiday break I’ve been able to plot out a number of blog topics for the coming year and working on at least one new interview. I’m also hoping that my long gestating Shadow World module: Priest-King of Shade will make publication this year! (It seems unlikely that “Empire of the Black Dragon” will be published anytime soon even if I get the final draft to Terry and Nicholas in the next few weeks).

There was a recent POST on the RM Forums about Resurrection that caught my attention. It included a great poll that broke down some good options for Resurrection, but I wanted to explore the subject in greater detail as it touches upon several other blogs I’ve written recently. This topic is really a subset of the “impact of magic on a setting”. I explored another subset of this in a blog on “Musings on Magic and War” and a sub-topic of the “Gap between game rules and setting“.

RM was initially designed as an insert rule-set for the D&D world, and as such, still contains quite a bit of D&D DNA that is rarely questioned. As the forum responses suggest, Resurrection and its uses differ from GM to GM and raises a lot of issues around the games metaphysical setting as well.

RM expands upon the basic DnD Resurrection by dividing death into 3 separate processes:

  1. Soul departure. RM Soul departure rules are byzantine—calculating the time of death from unconsciousness and then applying a number of rounds for soul departure based on the character’s race. Unnecessarily complicated? Absolutely.
  2. Physical deterioration (stat loss). There are some vague rules in RM about recovering lost stats but despite a comprehensive healing system RM never fleshes out a consistent framework for causes of stat loss (undead, Unlife, spells, drain etc) and spells to cure temporary stat loss. A consistent system could unite various processes that use different mechanisms: unlife draining, life levels, Unlife corruption etc.
  3. Soul recovery. Returning a soul to the body is a fairly straight forward affair, with a number of spells at various levels allowing for resurrection.

Spell Law provides three spell mechanisms to deal with these: lifekeeping (keeps soul from departing), preservation (keeps body from decaying and stat loss), and lifegiving (returns soul to body). There are various iterations of these spells and herbs that allow for body preservation and lifekeeping. The first question I have is whether this is the best framework to deal with death and resurrection and at what level should these spell abilities occur? I don’t think I thought about this enough in my Spell Law rewrite so I may end up going back and changing some things! The second question is how rare is resurrection and how does the metaphysical framework of the setting  enable resurrection?

Barring the two extremes: resurrection is very common and easily obtained or it doesn’t occur at all except in myths, there are two aspects that could be explored.

Economics. If we conflate resurrection with technology and healthcare than the U.S. healthcare system is a great model for seeing resurrection in an economic framework. Resurrection can be seen as an expensive, elective procedure available to the wealthy and/or privileged. Is this any different than what we know of medieval or class based societies? The wealthy live longer, healthier lives because they have access to healthcare, safer environmental conditions and better diets? Does treating Resurrection as an expensive, exclusive, service unbalance or disrupt the game setting? Resurrection alone is not an age prolonging treatment, just an option for traumatic injury or illness. (I would argue that life-prolonging magic should also be available either through a spell list or ritual magic).

Religion. For resurrection to work there needs to be a meta-physical framework for “souls”. What is a soul? Where does it go? How does it come back? In Shadow World, Eissa is the Orhan god of death, but does she alone control the gate to death and the disposition of souls? Why/how do some souls stay on as ghosts or undead while others pass to somewhere else? Do Elves have souls? If not than what happens to them? Are followers of the Dark Gods prohibited from resurrection since they are opposed to Eissa? Even if you don’t use Shadow World as a setting these can still be valid questions. What about “spirits” and other totem spells introduced in the RM Companions—how do they figure into all this? To me, this seems like the setting drives the mechanism and not the other way around. This makes it hard for generic rule sets like RM to be a good fit for any setting without the setting being genericized.

For the GM that wants resurrection and wants it rationed via the settings religious structure than there are lots of great options. Perhaps resurrection is only available to followers of a “God of Death”. (Probably not the most popular of Gods) Getting resurrection from a Death Cult might require quite a bit of sacrifice from the party. Another option is that a priest can only resurrect someone from their own religion. That would neuter the “generalist” Cleric in the group unless the party was all part of the same religion.

Some things to think about. Personally I’m going to review and revise my spell list “Life Mastery” and follow this basic framework.

  1. “Resurrection” is a higher level ability (starting at 12th lvl?) thus making it rarer in general.
  2. As a Closed list, Life Mastery is only available through a few of the Gods.
  3. In general, most religions are reluctant to provide services to follower of another god. (UOC and the Orhanian pantheons provide some leeway).
  4. The cost will be high in either an offering or services.
  5. Stat loss, both temporary and potential will be notable, increasing the cost of resurrection.

These rules almost preclude a battle-field resurrection occurring. Instead, the group would need to find a cleric of the right religion, of the right level, pay the cost in either money or service and the resurrected player will need to recover and pay a cost in stat loss. That’s a lot of hurdles that may not make sense for the group. However, it does provide an adventure hook if they do.

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2017 ahead

Well we have completed the 12 days of Rolemaster as Christmas is now over.

We thought we ring a few changes for 2017 and the first of these is that we have a new blogger!

Hurin is a stalwart if the ICE forums and an avid RMU play tester. His Rolemaster background is very much RM2.

We have a new schedule. Individually we will be creating less posts. I will be posting every Friday or ‘something for the weekend’ as I like to think of it. Brian will be posting on Wednesdays. There will be weekend round ups as well. This gives us room to bring you Hurin’s posts and we hope to have a fourth voice to announce soon.

We also hit 500 twitter followers over Christmas which is really cool. The last time I looked we were at 520+.

I am hoping that in 2017 we will be able to bring you more product reviews. ICE certainly seems to be gearing up for more and more frequent new products.

So until next Friday, when I will post the second instalment of my RMU play test, have fun.

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29th The most useful piece of technology (hardware or software) for Rolemaster?

Brian: There are 3 things that are indispensable to my game: iPad which has everything in PDF for reference, tri-fold GM screen and my “noteboard”. www.noteboard.com. I’ve never tried any RM software—I guess I’m too old to learn new tricks.

Peter: I agree with the Tablet PC. I don’t have a GM’s screen but I have created a small PDF with just the few charts that I need for running a game that serves the same purpose. I tend to print the important specific rules that relate to bits of the adventures and insert them into my plot notes at that actual point so I don’t have to access any rulebooks during play.

I have tried Combat Minion for a single session but didn’t like it the added prep time setting up the encounters doesn’t suit my play style as I often have no idea how many foes I am going to throw at my players until part way through the session.

Incidentally here in the UK the BBC is supposed to be non-commercial and impartial and if they ever mention a brand name they have a habit of saying “Other brands of Tablet PC are availaible.” and I had an irresistable urge to add that in after Brian’s mention of the iPad!

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28th Have you ever regretted allowing an optional rule or house rule into the game?

Brian: “Talents”. Can’t stand any rules that are “one-offs” are turn into crutches that underpin the entire character.

Peter: The extended character background options from RoCoI particularly the Skill at Arms and Skill at Magic. These are prime examples of where a single (un)lucky dice roll can complerely change a character. There is no balancing factor and no relationship between the result of the dice roll and the initial character concept.

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27th Best NPC? created or in a module.

Brian: Feldaryn. My favorite NPC was “Feldaryn”, a crazy old man is tattered robes and a long beard. I’m pretty sure it was in a campaign I was running for Matt and his friends (matt, any recollections?). Feldaryn had “found” himself a flying boat (this was pre-SW) and picked up the group. Given his appearance and confident proclamations they all assumed he was a powerful mage or perhaps a god in disguise—the Dragonlance effect. In reality he was crazy, low level and being pursued for stealing the flying boat. The fun was seeing the players agree to almost anything Feldaryn suggested!

Peter: There was a high level Drow Sorcerer who the party caught completely by surprise along with his apprentice. His plans were to decieve the party for long enough to put his grand plan in place to destroy them but the party were having none of it. They chased him from pillar to post without a moments respite until he had to flee in a rather pitiful manner killing his own apprentice so that he could not give away the location of Sorcerer’s final hiding place. One day he will be back and he will have his revenge but unfortuneately he is having issues achieving his full potential.

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25th What was your first experience of Rolemaster?

Brian:1983. One of my friends who lived in another town played in a group that used Rolemaster. He tried to explain it to me (any profession could learn any skill) and intrigued, I went out and bought Character Law. (blue cover w/ Jorgensen artwork). I immediately rolled up a Warrior Monk and was hooked! I joined their game group and we started a new campaign using Court of Ardor

Peter: I cannot remember the exact year but there was a games shop in Bristol called Forever People. It was your typical games/comics and miniatures store. I bought the red book version of MERP as I had a friend who was LotR mad. We were playing a lot of Champions at the time and I thought this would be a bit of a change. The first character we created was a Dunlending warrior with a hobbit sidekick. The first true rolemaster product was the Arms Law Claw Law box set with the naff fake parchement paper.

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Season Greetings and Happy Holidays!

This may be my last post for the year due to the holidays and travel so I thought I would finish up 2016 with some random thoughts.

  1. I started posting earlier this year and I’m not really sure how many articles I’ve posted. I keep a running list of ideas that pop into my head: some random, some sparked by comments on the RM Forums and some when I’m working on RM/SW stuff. A few times I come up with great ideas and don’t write them down—only to forget them. That’s frustrating. Obviously Peter has been doing this longer and keeping up a 2 blog/week pace takes quite a bit of discipline. Other RPG blog sites post MUCH less frequently or have lots of contributors to share the load. Both Peter and I have encouraged others to write posts but haven’t really gotten a strong response. That surprises me given the number of people that write fairly long and technical arguments in the RM Forums; I would think they would have other material to contribute?
  2. I’ve posted up a number of blogs and RM posts regarding to big projects I’ve been working on for over 10 years. Project BASiL (Brians Alternate Spell Law) and SW “Red Atlas” (name inspired by the Redbook used for RMC I). Our SW “Red Atlas” is over 300 pages without charts, pictures, graphics, layout or any creatures and a narrative timeline rather than the standard date timeline and fills in a lot of fundamental information that we needed to address during our own gameplay. More importantly it consolidates all the “world level” info into one tome, drawn from all the canon books that Terry has written. Differentiating world info from local or regional info was a useful exercise—and allowed us to identify gaps in material that could be expanded in a future Master Atlas.
  3. Priest-King of Shade. Terry has hinted that he’d like to get “Priest-King of Shade” done this year. The module is 27 years in the making—the original manuscript was approved by Coleman in 1989 and sent back with hand-written notes by Terry but life got in the way and ICE when through changes and I never finished it. “Shade” is actually a spin-off of that original project: Empire of the Black Dragon (which is now a separate module I’m finishing up). There has been some speculation on its relationship to “Shade of the Sinking Plain” so I thought I would provide a few answers. In fact, Priest-King was meant to be a re-imagining or ret-con of the “Sinking Plain”—a module that really never fit in with the Loremaster or Shadow World series. I took some of the material from Empire of the Black Dragon and worked to make a loose adaption or “inspired by” module. If you have ever read “Sinking Plain” you know that there isn’t much info that fits into SW—it is very D&D in style and feels like an early Midkemia Press or Judges Guild product. However there were some cool elements that were used for inspiration. Here is an early blurb I wrote for the back cover:

Agyra. Far from the historic events of Emer and Jaiman, this region has been cruelly shaped for thousands of years by both natural forces and the powerful flows of Essence.  Scattered and isolated tribes peoples are a legacy of a nation that sunk beneath the waves in millennium past. Monolithic blocks scattered along deserted coasts and leagues of crumbled ruins lying in shallow waters are remnants of a lost civilization.

 However, these lands are not dormant. Powerful nations and secretive groups are at odds: a war of not just arms but of politics and commerce.  Into this conflict a new power has risen. A mysterious Priest-King and his devout followers have occupied an ancient citadel and are slowly expanding their power across the lands.  For the nearby tribes that inhabit the coasts, these newcomers are viewed with outright fear. Rumors of demonic armies, missing children and empty villages have cast a pall throughout these lands.  

But adventurers have come nonetheless. Ancient ruins have been discovered: a sprawling city lying submerged in the shallow waters off the southern coast of Agyra. Many believe the ruins date millennia back to the First Era and holds untold wealth and the secrets of the Ancients.

The Priest-King of Shade is a module detailing the lands of South West Agyra and the growing empire of the Priest-King of Shade.  This product contains a regional guide, maps and layouts of key places, detailed description of key NPCs and 12 adventures ready to play.  Designed for player’s level 5-20.  Will you confront the minions of the Priest-King?

 

  1. Empire of the Black Dragon. I was focused almost exclusively on getting “Shade” published and let EotBD idle for several years. Now I’m back working on it and hope to have a draft ready for review in the next few months. I’ve always found Ulya Shek the more interesting of the DragonLords and the tech angle adds to the creative design choices. It feels more like a “Fortress” book (MERP) rather than a linear adventure or regional overview module. We’ll see. I had also wanted to tackle Drul Churk but Terry covered him in Emer III.
  2. It’s amazing how much work has gone into the RMU re-design. Given the fact that it’s all volunteer you really have to applaud the contributors. House ruling professions or combat sequences is quite different than designing a framework for attack tables and critical charts or a foundation for creature development. Yes, some of it is very crunchy and may not need to be in the initial product offering, but it’s a tremendous amount of work. So Kudos to Matt, Vlad, Dan and now Jonathan (sorry if I missed anyone else) for all their effort. I’m sure they have felt unappreciated at times but they carried the load for all of us.

If you are regular reader here at the Rolemasterblog, thanks! If you have an interest in adding your voice to this blog than please reach out to Peter. Best wishes to all on this holiday season.

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My Take on Adventure Design

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I was going to post the second instalment of my RMU playtest but I will try and post it later in the week. Instead, inspired by Brian’s post I thought I would share how I like to go about trying to create new and hopefully original adventures.

The basic premise is ‘take to its extreme limit’ by which I mean I like to take an idea or inspiration and then try and see how far I can take that idea.

When I say idea it is often not so much an idea but rather an inspiration. It could be a profession that I want to make the bad guy, it could be a particular spell on a specific list. In the past it has been a tactic that the players have used and I wanted to use against them.

Once I have this inspriation point I then see just using that core idea how much could you achieve with just that one thing. In a recent post I outlined an evil illusionist and his plans. Once I know what is happening I can then see where would this encroach on the characters lives. How would they first become aware of what is going on and how? Often this first possible contact is completely ignored by the characters. It could be just a mention in the Waterdeep broadsheets or a rumour in the market place. Once I have placed the events in the world though I try and advance the villains plans and see where and when the characters could next become aware of them. They may or may not take the bait that time but it doesn’t matter. In theory at least as the villain’s plans proceed he should be getting more powerful and the longer the characters ignore them they should be advancing in level as well so both are in step.

I think every spell list has the potential to be the inspiration for an adventure. If you only had Sleep V as a spell and nothing else what crimes could you commit?

Not every adventure needs a spell caster behind it. How about a single intelligent creature, an enterprising goblin for example? What could a goblin achieve if he really thought through his plans? Once he starts to make some alliances he suddenly gets a lot more threatening. If he plans a few raids and they are successful then others are more likely to follow a winning leader that beings in loot and freah meat. Put his lair or hold on an easily defending island or in a marsh, inhabited by something equally threatening from lizardmen to the undead to noxious marsh gas and the Goblin chief now has natural defences as well as his band of goblins and their allies.

Each and every adventure can be embedded in the game world and existed before the characters came along and continues to grow in scope until the characters deal with it.

Occaisonally if the characters are either staying in an area or revisit an area then I have had these embedded adventures actually come into conflict with each other. If you have two villains both of which have designs on taking the same town or goblins trying to raid traffic on a particular road and someone else using it to smuggle goods then there is going to be a conflict. Put the characters in the middle of that and you have potentially complicated situation for the characters to sort out.

I think to put it in a nut shell I think I am saying, take something simple and take it to its extreme.

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RPG Game Design. Leveraging familiar elements into your creative process.

The more things change the more they stay the same. When designing an adventure it’s difficult to avoid using established tropes—most stories can be distilled down into just a handful of plotlines. Some GM’s and players embrace common fantasy standards but for the GM that wants to create something a bit different what can you do? After 40 years of RPG history, thousands of modules and game ideas can you really come up with something unique?

 

Even Shadow World has been accused of being too “kitchen sink and it’s obvious that many of SW’s elements are fairly standard tropes are similar to our own world:

  1. Greek/Roman pantheon of Gods.
  2. Planets and moon names.
  3. Orcs, Goblins, Immortal Elves, High Men
  4. Classical western architecture.

If no idea or plot device is truly original, how can we continual design new adventures that feel fresh to our game group, challenge them, or surprise them? Here I want to discuss three mental models that I use when developing adventure content: the “Loki”, “Bohdi” and “Constanza”.

  1. The “Loki”. This is one of my favorites. Loki was quite the trickster and a good head fake can throw the players off their standard operating procedure. Embrace an established idea but give it a twist: the Dungeon Boss that the players confront for their final challenge? Make him a low level impostor. The Orc lair in the foothills of the mountain that the players want to raid? Turn it into a monastery and school of learning. Messing with established tropes can challenge player’s ready assumptions and tactics and put a new spin on the game.
  2. The “Bohdi”. The Bohdi is adopting an established idea, trope or reference as a framework to build your own material. For instance, I had a culture descended from an ancient high tech race (Xiosians) living in the mountains. The people were genetically modified but appeared to be barbaric due to the loss of the technical heritage. I thought that the depiction of Khan and the crew of the Botany Bay marooned on Ceti Alpah VI (fyi Star Trek) would be a great template to use. By adopting this idea I anchored a strong image in my mind as the basis of my desired culture which sped up the writing process.
  3. The “Costanza”. What does George do when nothing seems to be working? He does the opposite of his normal instincts! This is a more extreme example of the Loki—doing the diametric opposite of a trope or established idea. The supposed bad guys are actually the good guys, food has more value than gold or treasure, the “Good” gods are actual manipulative evil bastards, traps that heal not harm etc. A perfect example is the “Killer Bunny” in Monty Pythons Holy Grail movie (I think that deadly bunny is in C&T?).

Combined these three mental models help me write new adventure material. The “Loki” keeps the players off balance, the “Bohdi” helps create material that seems new or novel but with a foundation of familiarity and the “Costanza” teaches the players not to get to comfortable with long held beliefs and assumptions.