Articles and discussion on Roleplaying including Shadow World, Forgotten Realms.
I’m in the final stretch of a hectic professional life, so I barely have time to write, post or respond. However, the Rolemasterblog must go on so I’m going to do a quickie for today. Hopefully this will spark some feedback. We are nearing the end of our “50 Adventures in 50 Weeks” challenge we …
Continue reading “50 in 50 adventure hooks. What works, what doesn’t, what can improve?”
In Rebel Without a Chance, the characters come across a halfling village where many of the residents have been mentally dominated by a half-orc that they rescued. The remainder are trying to free themselves. The dominated residents will try to get the characters to leave the village; if they stay, the characters will not know …
One topic that we keep coming back to is RM’s setting. There is nothing inherently wrong with a generic fantasy set of rules but it does set any single game at a disadvantage in the gaming market place. The reasons why generic is a disadvantage is twofold. Firstly, settings get people excited. Middle Earth = …
Love em or hate em, you cannot escape charts in Rolemaster. This feature, more than any other, distinguishes it from other surviving game systems. I cannot have a conversation about modifying or even understanding the game system without talking about charts and their impact. Specifically, I am going to talk about complexity and efficiency, the …
I used to have a GM that would start the first game session with dishing out about 5 pages of questions about your character. The format was sort of question followed by about 10 lines of space then next question and so on. I cannot remember the actual questions except the very last one which …
Welcome to the fourth part of my Spell Law Series. In Pt. 1 I discussed Spell Law and BASiL in overview. In Pt. 2 I delved into the mechanics of the Essence realms, Pt. 3 into Channeling and now is Pt. 4 I wanted to discuss “Notational” Magic, or written/inscribed magic. Rather than offer my …
Continue reading “Revisiting Spell Law: Spell Casting Mechanics Pt. 4 Notational Magic”
Last October I posted up some of my work with “Special Armor“: cultural armor that utilizes special materials that is specific to various Shadow World cultures or groups. Since then, I’ve been building on this idea with weapons, and specifically weapons made of bone. While bone may seem too fragile or may splinter too easily …
Continue reading “Bone Weapons in Rolemaster & Shadow World”
Hi, RM is famous, renowned, infamous for its charts, for its criticals, for its fumbles, but I don’t see these charts as the heart of the game. Charts? Yes. The central feature of Chartmaster absolutely must involve charts. But these are not the charts I’m looking for. I’m probably wrong about this. RM has never …
Poisons, diseases, curses. Oh my. In the earliest days of D&D, adventurers not only had to avoid traps, navigate mazes and defeat monsters, they had to contend with other insidious agents like poisons, level drains, curses or cursed objects, petrification and the diseased touch of the Mummy. Not really a safe vocation when you really …
Continue reading “Adding “dark things” to your Rolemaster and Shadow World games.”
Today I have for you an interview with Jonathan Dale about the current state of RMU and I did my best to get the release date out of him but he was having none of it. Peter: For those people who are not part of the RMU Beta test on the ICE Forum could you …