Shadow World Spin Cycle: Thieves of Tharbad

Welcome to another “Spin Cycle” blog post! If you aren’t familiar with my previous entries on re-purposing MERP products for Shadow World you can find my take on the Court of Ardor HERE, HERE and HERE.

As stated, this entry will look at the MERP adventure module “Thieves of Tharbad” and how the material could be spun into the SW Setting. There are similarities between ICE’s Middle Earth products and the later Shadow World series so it can be easy to grab one of these modules for adventure ideas, maps and layouts.

Thieves of Tharbad (ToT) is only 34 pages but it starts with a great Angus McBride cover of some nefarious goings-on in the harbor and docks. It’s another great McBride picture that captures the kinetic energy of action and story with great use of lighting and shadows.

The table of contents reveals the familiar ICE book format: Intro, Lands, Inhabitants, Politics & Power, the city of Tharbad, Adventures and then the various tables. For those that want to grab quick to use adventure material, much of the into, history and background can be ignored. One of the “complications” of re-using MERP material is the flavor of Middle Earth names. ICE did a fantastic job leveraging Tolkiens language and naming conventions, but they are obviously different than the names and language words in Shadow World.

The real “meat & potatoes” is the city map, floor plans and adventure material. The city map is color with color codes for various professions and businesses. It’s typical of ICE and a great map for a city adventure. Again, some of the map names are very ME but can be overlooked.

The city material, maps and floor plans take up 9 pages so there is some good material. There are around 100 businesses identified with descriptions of varying length. This is more than enough for a GM to have a ready to run mid size city. There are detailed floor plans for the House of Healing, Embassy, a typical Row House, and a Merchant Home and Shop. No taverns though!

Adventures. The first adventure is called “The Extortion Ring and is almost 4 pages in length. It includes several floorplans as well. It’s a good adventure plot with the opportunity to expand it as needed. The second adventure is “Theft of the Tiara” and involves a theft and recovery of a valuable object. Part of the adventure takes place in the sewers and a basic map of the sewer system is included! The real gem is the “water fortress”:

It’s nice to have artwork like this to add the adventure. The third adventure has the players deal with a smuggling ring, and the fourth short adventure involves bandits in the wilderness.

A quick review of the charts indicates that most NPCs average between 4th and 7th lvl. There is a 20th lvl Fighter, a 14th lvl Mage and a 12th lvl Bard. The rest of the PC’s are much lower level. My sense is that Tharbad would be great for starting characters up to around 6-7th lvl as is.

All in all, Thieves of Tharbad is a great resource to use as a city to base the players, several good adventures and of course the framework to add even more plot and intrigue.

You can drop Tharbad onto most any area of Shadow World, but I use it for the city of Arakin on the eastern shore of the Sea of Votania (Haestra, Emer I).

https://goo.gl/images/sSPKEH
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The Black Companion

Thanks to Marc and his discord server I have had an opportunity to look into someone else’s RMu game.

Everything I run will of course be coloured by my own preference for play style. Marc was half joking when he said about me “You don’t don’t use any rules.” when we were discussing our GMing styles.

One of the things that came out of talking to Marc and seeing his campaign discussions is how RMu is always going to struggle with other people’s expectations. That gave me an idea, the so called Black Companion.

Part of the inspiration comes from Shadow of the Demon Lord supplements. In the descriptions on DriveThruRPG they explicitly list which core and companion books they use.

One of the difficulties with writing for Rolemaster, in the past, has been knowing what optional rules are in play as nearly all the optional rules end up increasing the power level*.

There will be some alternative methods or missing elements in the core books when they are released that have been discussed on the forums but rejected by the dev team. I am thinking of dedicated two handed weapon tables, charging rules, movement costing AP and alternative Called Shot rules. Those are the few that spring to mind. What I am thinking of is collecting these together and getting the authors to formalise their ideas based upon all the feedback that happened on the forum and then publish them as a ‘Black Companion‘ or alternative rejected options. Once we have a freestanding reference source of them then people an choose to adopt the included rules or not. At least they will all be using the same house rule to solve the same problem rather than having 50 variations to solve one problem.

So over the next few months I am going to trawl through the RMu Beta forums and try and identify these rejected, good ideas. Get the authors’ permission and then collate them all. It may even be easier for me to collect the ideas, summarise them and then just ask the originator’s permission to publish.

*Power Level in RMu could prove to be a real issue. How are we going to deal with adventures written for one power level but played at another? I would seem to be a case of having to adjust every single NPC in the book which is going to be a pain in the arse!

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Elegance and Symmetry for Characteristics in Do-It-Yourself d100 RPG Design

In his four histories of the tabletop rpg hobby, Shannon Apelcline claims that the industry moved, from the 70s through the 90s, roughly from D&D-centric to complicated and simulationist to emulationist, this last often with a specific intellectual property as its referent. Our beloved Rolemaster belongs in this second category, of course. It is a more granular and “realistic” derivative of D&D.

One aspect in which RM is more detailed than D&D is in its range of Attributes. RM uses ten of them, whereas D&D employs six. Is it desirable to have ten rather than six? Well, I consider Attributes to be tools first, descriptors second, and if they prove to lack any real mechanical component—or if, in other words, there is no device to fit the tool—then they are devoid of purpose and threaten to disrupt elegance or symmetry in game design. This observation is not meant to argue that D&D’s six characteristics are a reasonable amount; we all know that Charisma is a frequent “dump stat.” Nor does this argue that ten Attributes should be the high end of descriptive qualities in character design. I maintain that if there is a meaningful purpose for, say, one hundred characteristics, then those one hundred qualities should be baked into that specific game design.

A further consideration for characteristics in game systems should be the intended emulation. If a game focuses on investigation and discovery, for example, it might not make sense to commensurately detail physical, combat-oriented aspects of character design. Of course, RM wasn’t interested in emulation but simulation (at least within the context of D&D-esque fantasy), so I think the ten stats were an attempt to codify as many aspects of the human person as is reasonably possible within an rpg. Of course many games that came after RM cared less about this.

I also must notice that RM is a d100 system, so it might be no accident that it contains ten Attributes. This raises yet another consideration of systemic and thematic elegance and symmetry. I’m not convinced that RM is able to find a symmetrical use for all ten Attributes—many of them appear synonymous or overlap with other qualities—but the impulse is admirable. The latest version of RM has streamlined this design by applying three distinct Attribute bonuses to every Skill, whereas earlier versions of the system seemed unclear which Attributes to apply to which Skill and lacked symmetry by not codifying the amount applied to each Skill, sometimes averaging the results instead.

RM’s ten stats is an example of systemic elegance, but theme and intended game experience should be a further influence on this aspect of game design. One feature of the rpg Yggdrasill (translated from the French by Cubicle 7 and published in English) that fascinates me is its Nine Characteristics in character definition. I have capitalized “nine” because these strike me as simultaneously simulationist and emulationist. To begin with the simulationist quality, Yggdrasill regards the human person as being composed of three basic aspects: Mind, Body and Soul. Each of these components is subdivided into three micro-stats for a total of Nine. This is neat systemic symmetry but also meaningful while considering Yggdrasill’s Viking Age emulation: Odin hung on the World Tree Yggdrasill (Odin’s “horse” or gallows) for nine nights; his ring Draupnir makes eight new ones every ninth day; the Old North cosmology contains nine distinct worlds.

Why have I been thinking about this? Well, though I love Yggdrasill, some features of that system stopped working for me at the table. In spare moments my mind returns to it, worrying at it, redesigning it until, by now, I think I might have something serviceable. Then, in another spare moment, I began imagining what a d100 Viking game might look like (Yggdrasill is sort of a dice pool system), using, perhaps, VsD’s promised Open100 license. So I began to build, and of course I started with VsD’s six MERP/D&D stats.

I used these for awhile, during my process. Finally I needed to discard them for Yggdrasill’s nine, with much better results. It’s difficult to find symmetry in six stats. There are three keyed to body, two to “soul,” and one to mind. Or perhaps the six break down more neatly into just body and mind, convenient for worlds and worldviews that don’t precisely accommodate beliefs in “souls.”

As I developed my emulation, I changed more of VsD’s system, too, then still more. I fell down a rabbit hole: what I wrote exceeded what I had produced for my Yggdrasill redesign. For my d100 emulation, I rejected subsystem after subsystem, and the possibility of telling the stories of just what I wrote and what I discarded strikes me as tedious. In the end, though, I believe I have built something considerably new, something that uses the nine stats of Yggdrasill, a vastly reduced Skill list fit for a northern milieu, a spell system lifted right out of the Havamal, a Skill Resolution table adapted from VsD, and a combat system inspired by Antony Cummins’s ebook An Illustrated Guide to Viking Martial Arts and Peter R’s claim that “realistic” combat must entail nearly every blow landing nearly every time.

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Using organizations in your game to ground your PCs.

While it might be setting specific, I have always felt that most RPG systems ignore the importance of organizations for starting characters. In Rolemaster, chargen involves skills developed in adolescence and another set of skills in apprenticeship. There is a implied idea that the characters received some sort of systematic training to build the skills that establish their class or profession. But from that point, most games just drop that idea and players immediately become freelance “adventurers” (excluding perhaps Clerics).

In virtually every quasi advanced society, specialized training, knowledge and skills are transmitted through organizations: guilds, schools, associations and religions. Unlike it modernity, you don’t simply graduate with a degree and a specialized education, it’s understood that you have an obligation and loyalty to that organization now and in the future.

These organizations may be secretive or hidden, but most will have wealth, resources and members that give them financial, social or realpolitik power. Perhaps the reluctance to provide low level characters access to these institutions stems from a fear of game imbalance. How can a player enjoy the challenges of low level gaming if they belong to a group that will provide cost of living stipends, equipment and protection? It sort of defeats the purpose of the game?

However, it’s common sense that most player professions had to be the result of organizational training. Maybe a Rogue or Thief learned their skills on the streets, but a teenager isn’t going to get access to a library and learn to become a Mystic or Warlock. So rather than hand wave the issue, I encourage GM’s to embrace the concept of organizations and would offer a few ideas:

Mentors. Even if it’s only intermittent help, a senior member of a players professional organization could be a great mentor. As a mentor, they’ll want the player to learn through success and failure and not just hand them aid and advice; but a mentor can still be the guiding hand the GM often needs to further the plot. Plus the mentor can be the active ingredient in a adventure plotline.

Training. While actively using a skill can be a common sense mechanism for skill rank development, at times, skill advancement will need the input from a tutor or other source to initiate advanced techniques, concepts and abilities. An organization can be the obvious source for continuing education of special skills.

Safety. Am organization will want to protect their members, even initiates and apprentices. When appropriate, this gives players (and maybe the group) a safe haven to rest or avoid an adversary.

Healing. Healing doesn’t just have to be a resource found in a temple, church or even hospital. Many powerful organizations will have other professionals on retainer: healers, astrologers, spies etc. It may cost the player in dues or services, but their organization should be a source for professional services.

Shelter. I travel a lot but I don’t live in a hotel 365 days a year! Is it realistic to assume that adventures either live in a roadside inn or sleep on the ground all the time? Having a room at a “chapter house” or organizational dormitory gives a PC a place to live between adventures and during downtime.

Equipment. Organizations would probably provide basic kit to their lowly members and could provide additional equipment and/or magic items to a PC member for special missions.

Missions. GM’s are always coming up with fairly thin motivations for players and groups to go on an adventure. Organizations make it easy–they are hired or ordered to. No questions asked (and no answers provided!).

NPC Network. Organizations will be made up of a variety of other personalities and members that can be helpful to the player or even be problematic competitors!

Identity. While most players rely on their profession/class to give them identity, being a member of an organization can be more interesting. Organizations don’t need to be demised purely by profession (Thieves Guild, Magician Academy, Fighters Club etc), they can be made up of a variety of class types or have a over arching objective or purpose besides pumping out adventure classes.

What are some ideas for organizations?

  1. Military. Being a soldier is a useful background for a player. Armies don’t just employ soldiers; they need spies, spell-casters, cavalry and almost every type of skill imagined. PC’s would be veterans and probably no longer in the military, but would still have some advantages. A network of soldiers they were friends will; starting kit they take with them, a small stipend or land grant upon retiring, medals or some small fame, fighting or other skills etc.
  2. Militia or Constabulary. Similar to being ex-army, a PC could have been a city guard or policeman. That might give them access to a information network, call in favors from active guards, or given them special knowledge of a city or town.
  3. Criminal Enterprises. Smugglers, pirates, bandits etc are great backgrounds for PCs. These organizations don’t need to be inherently evil and the PC could have been recruited at a young age and given little choice. Ties to a criminal group might be a cool advantage for a PC: fence goods, rumors and tips, access to hard to find items, etc.
  4. Cults. I have a great time with cults; I define them as “un-organized religions” and often don’t even worship an actual God. My cults tend to take more than give to their followers, but they can be a great source of fun and conflict when a player gets into the role-playing aspect.
  5. University/Monastery. Educational organizations are great for removing the looting for profit motive from a player. Instead they are chasing knowledge and this allows me to have a player that is tracking key narrative points and exposition that might be lost on other players. This works especially well with Shadow World and it’s deep history and timeline.

For me, barring a few distinct player background situations, my players are all going to be tied to an organization. What have you used?

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Discordant Thoughts

There are a couple of things I would like to write about this time.

The first is Marc’s Discord server. He has dropped the link on the ICE forums but that was a while ago so I thought I would repost it here.

Aby channel for discussion is better with more people involved.

https://discord.gg/6RP8Wyn

The second thing I want to talk about was inspired by a couple of things that were said in the discord discussion. These were “not sure why everybody likes to use real life examples in rpg. This is a game, stuff is abstracted etc.” The rest I cannot directly quote as it was a longer discussion and it was more of a sentiment than any one explicit expression.

I want encapsulate it into ‘who owns the rules?’ So the situation was that the GM said that X situation was resolved using Y rule and the result was Z.

That would be fine apart from one or more players then said that they have real world experience of X and Y rule is wrong and Z wouldn’t happen.

Years ago, it seemed to me, the GM had the rules and what the GM said was the law and that was that. Today everyone can have a copy of the rules in PDF and check them at any time and if a ruling is not perfectly clear then they can question them.

The issue for gritty, simulationist, d100 games is that they are endeavouring to create a realistic game world experience. The game developers cannot have years of detailed experience of absolutely everything in life and you do not want 16million individual rules to accurately model everything. When you get a player or players with that real world experience they see the rule as written and recognise it as a poor model of reality.

So now you have a dilemma. The experienced players could house rule parts of the game to make it more accurate whilst still sitting within the RMu way of doing things but as GM do you want the players writing the rules of the game?

I had this recently in a game I am playing in. The GM wanted a very high magic game and picked all the RM2 optional rules that he thought would create the effect he wanted.

The result was that it all went too far towards everyone having too much magic too quickly. At 3rd level I have 12 spell lists and by about 7th level I would have had just about every spell open to me in my realm.

I had taken this opportunity to ignore the most obvious ‘go to’ lists in my realm and instead focused on learning the lists that normally get ignored as they are less useful or their utility is not immediately obvious.

Once the GM realised his error he told us all that he thought he had made a mistake and he was changing the rules.

His adjusted version was actually so restrictive that I thought he may have over reacted. It would certainly be the case that by about 8th level we would have no more lists than had we used the rules RAW. By 10th level though we would have less spells than RAW would have given us.

I know this to be the case because he has put certain limiting factors into the game and if they are to have any effect at all then they must limit our ability to learn lists. Any one of them would have been sufficient but their net effect is to dramatically reduce the ability of casters to learn magic.

For my character the effect is minimal and apart from a highly improbable situation where I fail every spell list acquisition roll for the next three levels it will have no noticeable effect. It will stop me learning the less useful and little used lists and make me stick to the tried and tested mainstays but no one else would notice that.

For other characters the effect will be dramatic and immediately obvious. If you take it all into account it is the same as changing the spell list cost for semis to 8/*. That is going to make learning lists rather expensive!

I emailed the GM and told him that for semis I thought his changes were too drastic and I showed him some examples. I don’t know what he has decided to do.

So is it OK for players to suggest rules changes? Who has ownership of the rules? If the rules are there to help everyone have fun and are really just guidelines should they all be up for negotiation?

My personal opinion, purely in theory at least, is that yes they are all negotiable but only before we start play. I dislike changing rules once the game has started as the amount of work for the GM to ‘fix’ hundreds of NPCs is rarely taken into account by players who only see the effect on their one PC.

What do you think?

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Outside looking in

I have been looking at the way that other games publishers deal with community content recently and at the same time at the way that they put adventures together.

7th Sea is the most Rolemaster-esque when it comes to community content. Although there is a community content programme, free art and templates available, there is little or no company support for content creators. There are not enough staff at John Wick Presents and I suspect that the community content programme doesn’t earn enough money to warrant the investment in time.

The net effect is that there are not that many titles and they are of rather patchy quality.

Grim & Perilous Studios is right at the other end of the spectrum. They have a new CCP and are actively courting creators. Everything is fresh, new and exciting. G&PS is not keen on forums, preferring their Discord server but on the server content creators are given special status and a role title so you can spot them a mile off. Creators also have a dedicated channel.

The content creators, known as Librarians after the Grim & Perilous Library, actively discuss what they are working on and even have shared project management software, trello, to manage titles and collaborate to create supplements a bit like the Guild Adventurers (not to be confused with the Guild Companion).

G&PS also provides stock art and document templates for creators but also uses their social media accounts to promote new releases. That is a virtually free way of advertising these supplements and generating sales. It presumably will make the Library financially profitable sooner because of the advertising.

Schwalb Entertainment is another Discord advocate. They to have a dedicated channel for 3rd party publishers. The level of support is not as proactive as G&PS but the creators are actively discussing and assisting each other.

The interesting thing about Schwalb adventures is there structure. As with most community things in life people try to fit in. The ‘official’ supplements have an accepted structure. They cost $8 and for your money you get a 30 to 50 page booklet that details the background material and then six to ten adventures. Each adventure rarely extends beyond a couple of pages, a couple of NPC descriptions and a floor plan if you are lucky. It is more about explaining the ‘how and why’ of the protagonists and then letting the GM run the adventure in the best way for their group.

Each $8 booklet is an entire campaign in a book. I think that has a lot of merit. If most of the supporting material is already in C&T/C&M then just point people to the book. I have also seen caveats that says exactly what books are required. So if the book uses something from a companion that is listed as required.

There is nothing to stop anyone copying the Schwalb Entertainment model. It explicitly avoids using copyright material by pointing GMs at the core books and companions. The text dense, art light format is kind on the independent developer who doesn’t have access to an entire art department.

Somehow, I cannot see some of the big names on the forums going for the collaboration model but for us small fry it has worked well in the past.

I just wished that the RMu rules were finalised so we knew what rules we were writing against.

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Further deconstruction of Resistance Rolls/Saving Throws.

I wanted to touch upon the subject of Resistance Rolls again, after a couple of discussion HERE & HERE and over at the FORUMS.

To start off, my “Deconstruction” articles are about stepping outside the box, and YOUR mental model built over 30+ years (based on the average age of the blog participants).

The basis for RR/Saving Throws were built out out of early war game mechanics. But even now they are so built into RPG systems that it’s hard not to use them in any future iteration. Let’s try?

Unless you want a early rpg “hand wave” mechanism to allow a player to avoid a mortal result (which can be dealt with via fate points) than we should apply a realistic approach to saving throws? ie verisimilitude.

So what should a character be allowed to save against? Should RR/ST be level based? Can we identify what certain types of attacks would require a “save”?

Physical biological attacks. Poison/disease/nano-particles/etc. Obviously this is a real, physical attack. It seems clear that a “constitution”, “hardiness”, “toughness” factor be applied to that.

Surprise/Dis-orientation. Most RPG’s treat these differently, but the ability to maintain clarity in quick, off-setting, or dis-orienting circumstances are separate from other abilities. Should there be a RR vs. Stun or other dis-orienting factors? Rolemaster places importance on stuns in it’s critical results; but it also can be a game changer. Should there be a RR vs. Stun given it’s impact on combat?

Physical Trauma. If you want a less specific game play, than a roll vs. shock might work. Is that constitution, endurance, will power or something else?

Mind Manipulation. Whether a sleep spell, mind reading or other than “will” comes into play. I think its reasonable to set up a “war of wills” for mind intrusion whether that is mind reading, patterning, charm or other types of personality or mental influence.

Unwanted physical manipulation. Do you “resist” spells or other actions that change your body or physical being? Is that the same as a mind/will resistance or should it be a physical or physical trauma attack?

These are the basic “resistance” situations in my game. Make an argument for more other others!

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Saturday Whiskey Thoughts: Umwelt and fantasy roleplaying.

A recent article in The Atlantic, which is worth reading for it’s implications on bio-enchancement also mentioned a concept I hadn’t thought about in a while: the Umwelt. While the concept of umwelt is much more nuanced, in general it’s how the world is perceived by a specific organism. I wanted to comment on this from two roleplaying perspectives: the macro and micro.

Umwelt in the macro. Isn’t one of the foundations of roleplaying subverting our umwelt? Instead of changing how we perceive the world, we change the world we perceive by imagining a different setting with different rules (magic) and even formal reality (physics). Part of the enjoyment, for me at least, is the challenge of taking players out of the mundane or understood and presenting them with a new reality.

Umwelt in the micro. Conversely, we are also changing our umwelt by playing characters that are able to perceive the world different. Whether that is a Dwarf that can use infravision, an Elf with a keen sense of hearing or vision or a caster that can use a spell that allows them to see through stone. All of these are changes or expansion of our normal human-bound umwelt environment. Digging even deeper, we often look for motivations both physical and psychological to help us roleplay a character. Perhaps there is no better example than those damn Elves! Immortal, immune to disease and often with ethereal powers or auras, it’s a standard trope that Elves have a very different umwelt than humans. They just view the world in a completely different way–and as players we try to understand Elven umwelt to guide our roleplaying. It isn’t easy to play something that you can’t intrinsically understand, and I generally don’t allow players to choose “High Elves” as their race.

For whatever reason, this reminds me of Descartes’ thoughts on formal and objective reality:
The nature of an idea is such that of itself it requires no formal reality except what it derives from my thought, of which it is a mode. But in order for a given idea to contain such and such objective reality, it must surely derive it from some cause which contains at least as much formal reality as there is objective reality in the idea.”

While Descartes was arguing that any thought must be based in part in some formal reality (what is real) and was the basis for his argument for the existing of God, I think roleplayers are masters of creating and experiencing objective reality, and umwelt is the lense in which our characters experience it. That’s pretty cool and maybe the underlying, powerful allure of roleplaying?

Today’s whiskey thoughts are brought to you by Rip Van Winkle.

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Inherent benefits of religions in Shadow World?

One of the ideas I’ve been playing around with are bestowed abilities from a characters God. Channeling spells are already premised on the idea that a God imparts powers to a Priest; and we use a mechanism called “Invocation” that allows a player to beseech their god for aid but I’m thinking of something different from those.

The idea is that a player (or Priest only) receives a part of their God’s aspect. Maybe this happens at a certain level or some other benchmark but the ability is imbued in the player and reflects their God’s nature. A Priest of a God of Luck might get a bonus to RR’s. A follower of a God of Fire gets a bonus vs Fire attacks, or is immune to natural heat and fire.

Of course many of these abilities are already encoded in Spell Law or BASiL, so it might be cool to think outside the box and have a power that isn’t already a spell. Since I already wrote specific spell lists for all the Shadow World gods, I’m finding it difficult to come up with some other inherent benefit. I’m also hesitant to grant powers at certain levels: this smacks of AD&D and I try to make my game as level-less as possible.

One method I may employ is imparting a benefit to any player (not just Priests) based on their ranks in the “Prayer” skill. I already use the Prayer skill for the SCR, Invocation and a general proxy for “religiosity” so using it as a measure for a god imparted bennie works as well. The rational being that as a player dedicates themselves to their god (measured by Prayer) they are able to tap into or connect in a way that transfers some base power.

Because religion & gods are inextricably linked to fantasy RPG’s, spell casting and Shadow World, I put a lot of energy into building it into the game play. I was recently re-watching Game of Thrones and liked how the followers of the Lord of Light were able to ignite their weapons in combat. That adds atmosphere to the game! I’m going through the various Orhanian Gods and trying to come up with an appropriate ability. I’m not worried about balance; some Gods may not impart anything while others may offer frivolous abilities (followers of Kieron can cleanse themselves from alcohol/drunkeness ).

If you have any ideas for the Orhanian gods, please comment!

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Adventuring Clichés – Revenge

This is one of those classic starting adventures. Someone has done something bad to the PCs or their family and the characters are out for revenge.

What I am wondering is how we can stretch this out to a nice round 10,000 exp per character?

This post could get a bit rambling and contradictory as I have planned nothing and I am just writing off the cuff.

The first thing that is a challenge is how to bring the characters together in the first place. My gut instinct here says the characters need a mentor. I am picturing a Jedi master type NPC. This has two advantages. The first will be slightly controversial. I am going to suggest that we give the 1st level characters 60DPs worth of hand licked skills. So a fighter PC gets ranks in core fighter skills, the ranger gets core ranger skills and so on. This is the training provided by their mentor. It is also the boost that 1st level characters need to make RMu more competent.

The second advantage of the single mentor is that he represents the closest thing that all the characters will have as common family.

This would entail a bit of extra work by the GM but it is also an opportunity for the GM to make characters, cultures and professions unique to their setting.

I think this is a useful exercise for the GM to think about how skills are used to create cultures and professions.

So the start of the adventure would be the kidnapping of the mentor. This is an opportunity for investigation and a more role played session. We can bring in non-combat skills.

If I am writing this I would make the investigation a percentage action based investigation. The longer the characters take to find the clues as to what happened and who was responsible the greater the headstart the bad guys have.

I know this is not strictly how RMu is expected to work but I think this is better, especially for 1st level characters. If you go for pass/fail skill tests for finding clues and identifying the culprits then it is entirely possible that the adventure ends here and everyone can roll a few crap rolls and then go home.

The clues that the characters find should suggest that their mentor is still alive and was kidnapped. The footprints left by the invaders contain lots of sand which suggest that they came from the local beach.

The kidnappers have indeed captured the mentor and have made their way to the beach. They are waiting for a boat to whisk them away.

Ideally the characters should arrive before the villains escape. If they were really good at the clue finding then they should fall upon the villains while they are still on the beach awaiting a launch to get from a ship in the bay to the beach.

If they were averagey then they arrive as the villains are loading their captive into the launch and they get very little time to plan and act.

If they were slow at finding the clues and putting the pieces together then they arrive as the villains are pushing their way through the surf as they make their escape.

There are two options here. The first option is that the mentor can be rescued here and he will identify the villains and charge his students with exacting his revenge. Option two is that the heroes have to mount the rescue on the ship.

There are great deck plans available for free from Rooster Games.

I am thinking that the villains send two launches to the beach, one to collect the kidnapped mentor and one to provide a rear guard. Unless the characters are exceptional then the mentor is whisked away. The rear guard launch provides the characters with a way get to the ship. The players can be given an opportunity to plan how they are going to take on a launch full of bad guys without destroying the boat.

Now the characters hopefully have a boat and a way of getting to the ship holding their mentor captive. They will also hopefully have some sailor style uniforms. The challenge then becomes can the characters get on board the ship. The attention would be on the captive so this would give a window of opportunity to get on board.

The challenge is now that one party of PCs vs an entire ship is simply not viable but what if the ship was actually simply a charter and the real villains are only paying passengers? This would even the odds a great deal and the ships crew would more than likely throw up their hands and not want to get into a fight between factions.

There is then a big fight and the characters obviously win and defeat the kidnappers. They are bound to want to interrogate survivors.

It turns out that these guys are simply mercenaries hired to commit the kidnapping. The real villain is a mysterious stranger in a port up the coast.

This would then prompt a conversation with the characters’ mentor about is old rival and the bad blood between them. How this rival went to the bad and had sworn to slay him and his students [the characters].

It would be too much to ask for the characters to take on this evil double of their own mentor but it could turn out that the mysterious stranger in the port was not the evil mentor himself but one of his students.

The characters then travel to the port, track down the villain try and defeat him.

I think we could then offer the GM a number of branches at that point. If the evil mentor had a ‘party’ of students and each one had a dark scheme to try and defeat the good mentor, a sort of competition or right of passage then we have an extended set of adventures.

So far we have had an investigation, conflict on the beach, conflict on the ship, investigation in the foreign port and finally conflict against the evil student. That would be a four significant story goals and/or session goals. The reveal of the evil mentor and the conflict would be a campaign goal. That is probably be enough to level up the party.

Having skimmed read this back I also think that the conflict between to two mentors could be due to the evil mentor making a choice to dabble in demonic trading. Doing the demons bidding in exchange for power and forbidden knowledge. The good mentor could be human and the evil double an elf which would then fit into the Elf Demon vs the Human Demon theme.

This could be the first adventure. From here we could send them to the temple ‘dungeon crawl’ as a side quest because they had heard a rumour that one of the evil mentors students had journeyed there to consult the priest at that temple.

The Murder of Crows encounter could be run before, on the road from the port to the temple, or after the temple adventure. Thus stringing the three adventures together.

By the time they have finished this, the murder of crows and the temple they would be around 3rd level and had two demonic adventures.

This is beginning to sound like the start of a campaign.

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