Making Monster Conversions (D&D to RM)

I have been away for quite a while but I am back in the land of the gaming now and I have a face to face gaming session coming up in just two weeks and I have a lot of monster nonversions to do!

I started looking at the game notes again this week and noticed I had quite a few D&D creatures to convert over to Rolemaster for the coming sessions. The main problem being that the party could go in one of two different directions and so I had to be prepared for both.

In the back of the original Creatures and Treasures book there are rules for converting D&D and Runequest creatures to Rolemaster. The RMC Creatures and Treasures doesn’t have this section. The reason for the omission is that the original RM rules were intended as an alterntive to the D&D rules that any DM could slot into his game. Therefore it was necessary to provide them with the conversion rules for them to work with. Rolemaster Classic on the other hand is a full standalone roleplaying game and is not intended to be used as supplimental material to another game. Rolemaster Classic then does not need the conversion rules. I am using RMC in the D&D setting Forgotten Realms and consequently I keep coming across creatures that are not in the standard Creatures and Treasures menagery so I need to do these conversions. Thankfully the conversion rules are also available on the ICE forums, in the downloads vault.

This week I grabbed the rules, created a spreadsheet and have been curning out the creatures I need. It doesn’t take long to get the basic stats but I still need to find the most fitting spell effects in Spell Law to finish them off and make them useable.

One of the things that stand out in this process is that D&D magic is in many ways both more powerful and less flexible than Rolemaster magic. Many of the Rolemster spell lists contain nearly useless spells (in combat situations mostly) such as heat solid that do not do any damage and in no way compare to D&D’s burning hands as an example of a spell at about the same level. Where your D&D magician may have 2x1st, 2x2nd and a third level spell at 5th level, the same level RM magician could have up to 15 power points that could be spent in any combination from 15 x 1st level spells to 3 x 5th level spells.

Some of the creatures I have been converting have druidic or animist type spell effects and if the creatures are not killed off in the first encounter they have some very interesting possibilities outside of combat because of the interesting nature of the spell lists.

Nightshade

After the game session, if the creatures come into their own I will share my stats for them!

One Reply to “Making Monster Conversions (D&D to RM)”

  1. Peter,
    You mentioned you did a spread sheet in your article MAKING MONSTER CONVERSIONS (D&D TO RM) . How willing would you be to pass that along to others… Me. I am at the start of a campaign and am also converting over some modules from D&D and the Forgotten Realms. It would be a gigantic help if I could get a converter. I understand it doesn’t do everything but anything would be a help and a speed up. I’ve been playing ICE RM for many years and your help would be much appreciated.

    Thank you,
    Mark Hudgens

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