The Rolemaster Blog

We nearly all suffer from something called Unconscious Bias. This is where we are much more likely to believe things that we agree with and disbelieve things that we don’t agree with. In games and especially when you are reviewing a game we tend to think that rules we like are great and rules we don’t like are terrible irrespective of how well they may work at the gaming table.

Reviewers have another dilemma, often reviews are based just upon reading the rulebook and they never get played. That is not something I agree with and try not to do. I have my own solution to that but even that is not perfect.

So, I have learned since last time that Zweihänder is shortened to Zwei, which is possibly more respectful than just Z.

Character Creation

I created my first character last night and I have never made a character like this. Frankly, I never want to make another one either. The entire process was a bit of a rollercoaster ride.

The entire process took 1hr 25 minutes last night but there was a lot of reading seeing as this is a read through. To create a character it could be done a lot faster. In addition it took 27 minutes this afternoon.

It was suggested that I use the random method of creating the character and that is what I did. I would never do that again as it is the source of everything I disliked about the process.

There are four choices to be made in character creation. The GM chooses whether you can be a non human race or not. You have a choice to replace one below average attribute with and average score. I was given the choice between having a pike, a sword or a crossbow. You get to choose your characters name. That is it.

Everything else about your character is randomised, and I mean everything. You roll your attributes of which there are seven. Although this is a d100 system attributes are between 28 and 55. They are generated using 25+3d10. The average is 41 or 42. One low attribute can be replaced with a 42.

You then your gender, background, height, weight, disfiguring scars, socal standing even the season you were born, I apparently was a spring baby. The most ‘shocking’ was that you roll your profession. There may have been a roll to see which hand you wipe your arse with but I think I missed that one.

That was where I got to last night. There was zero player agency in the creation process and it was all rather depressing. The character I had in front of me was not one I would ever choose to play. There were two moments of unconscious bias and I will come to those later.

Professions

At the end of the random process you are given 1000 points to spend on improving your character and customising your profession.

Today I thought I could finish my character and see if I can rescue this character.

When it comes to your character you need to buy a professional trait of which there is a choice of one, ten skills of which there are 10 to choose from and three talents from the selection of three. These are compulsory purchases and they cost exactly 1000 points.

There is no customising to do, you just write the fixed changes to the character on your character record.

The net effect is that every PC is a pregen. If you didn’t stop and read everything you could create a character in about 5 minutes. The character would be just as detailed as a Rolemaster character, you get loads of detail but I was a passenger all through the process.

Automata

Two of my skills are being able to code interactive web pages and being able to write Android apps. If something really grabs me about Zwei in later chapters then I could easily create either an online or an app to create characters in a single click of the mouse or tap of a finger. There would be just a toggle for Humanocentric vs Demihumanity, one button to create the character and a text box for the name. Character creation in 1 to 5 seconds depending on your typing speed. That is how much involvement there is in this process.

How Biased am I?

I dislike fantasy elves as they are portrayed in the vast majority of games. They are just too good or superior. This whole idea of elves who tire of life ‘go west’ is just a cover for a 100% suicide rate amongst elves. It is probably the moment when they realise that they are, at least mostly, to blame for nearly all the evil in fantasy worlds and that they sat on their arses for periods of sometimes up to 10,000 years doing sod all about it and achieved nothing, no technological advancement, no sciences, nothing except a blindness to some future growing existential threat.

Zwei elves are not superior.

All of the non human races are refreshing versions of the standard fantasy fare.

If I were to build the rules for creating elves, these are the sort of elves I would wish I would come up with.

A Clash of Opposites

When I use the word alignment I want you to put your DnD ideas to one side. Zwei alignments are nothing like DnD alignment. I wish in a way that they hadn’t used the word, too much baggage.

Way back in August I wrote about how I create my characters. What I wrote was this:

“I like to define my characters fledgling personality by using two seemingly contradictory thoughts and then see how the character rationalises them. “

That is a Zwei alignment right there. What you do is roll d100 and you get an order/chaos pair. Your alignment is a roleplaying aid, allegedly but it is also quite definitely a lense through which you experience points (Reward Points) are assessed.

Alignment is a big thing in Zwei. The two aspects are not intended to be a good and evil aspect but although a lot of words are spent in trying to get over what they are meant to be has left me no clearer. Thankfully, this paragraph is in there…

“Remember – your Character’s Alignments are merely a guide. They do not strictly bind you to a specific outcome or behavior, but should help to define and reflect your Character’s persona over the course of a campaign.

…and that is what I have been doing since about 1989 so I can just carry on as I have before. It is nice to see that someone else has come up with the same method as me though, I have no not come across anyone else that does this in my gaming circles. I obviously need bigger circles.

About Professions

There is plenty of choice of Profession in Zwei. There are 75 basic professions and a further 46 advanced professions which are accessible later in the game. Zwei doesn’t have strict levels as such but three Tiers. You start at the Basic Tier and as you progress from Basic to Intermediate to Advanced you can change profession. It would be a bit like running an RM an extended campaign but forgoing leveling up and just doing the first section as 4th level characters and then a second chapter as 9th level and a third chapter at 14th. That seems to be about the power level.

About skills

There are 37 skills in the game. That is just about right in my estimation. You get a single rank, giving a +10 bonus, at the apprentice level. You can spend reward points to buy additional ranks. You start the game with 10 skills and one rank in each. To make a skill test you add any skill rank bonus to the governing stat and roll under that number.

This means that you have about a 50-ish% chance at your 10 core skills for your profession and a 40-ish% at most other skills. After a session or two that would become 60% in your favourite couple of skills 50% in other core professional skills and 40% across the board. You can see why I suggest the basic tier is roughly equivalent to 4th level in RM.

Talents

Every profession imbues the character with three talents. Each talent has a single effect such as a bonus to a particular skill or skills checks in a specific situation or a penalty to others acting against you. A talent making your intimidation checks more effective may work by making your victims switch their tens and units dice around (so a 37 becomes a 73) if they are trying to resist you.

There are more than 80 talents and they all seem to be focused on refining the broader professional archetype down to the specific professional roles. My character has Mariner as a Talent and that gives +20 to his navigation rolls when in sight of land.

So What do I think?

The only flaw in the character creation process is that it is entirely random and there is no input from the player. I can see the logic. There seems to be a desire to push players out of their comfort zone and challenge them.

What this deadhead process does do is get you up and running in minutes and there is no min/maxing and there is no worrying about having chosen the wrong skills. The profession side of it is brilliant. If the designer dumped the paragraph where they say you have to spend 1000 reward points and then give you a list of compulsory things that add up to 1000 reward points then I would not have a complaint. Tell me I can customise my profession and then give me a choice of one option is to just piss me off. Don’t give me a choice but tell me that you have prepared a well balanced and rounded character that I can customise later and I would be fine with that. Infact Hurin has been begging for exactly that from the RMU devs for months!

If you gave me choices then this is a great looking system that is detailed any yet simple. It looks like there are lots of things that will have an important bearing on the game later on. You can leave them as random, it makes no odds to me when my character was born but it does matter to me what my characters personality is like. In many respects it does matter to me what my character looks like.

I am prepared to play my random character and I will do so this weekend I hope. If I create a second character I would pick and choose what to roll for and what to decide to get a character I want to play. The character I have, I don’t really care for and I am struggling to get any enthusiasm up for.

And Finally…

I have a player that has a really tough life. His wife as multiple complex medical conditions and they have a couple of children one of whom has an autistic spectrum disorder disorder and can be violent. The child without the AS disorder also deserves time and attention. In addition he has to work two jobs. When he wants to play he has to arrange additional support for his family to get him the time to step away and play. The escapism aspect and the chance to simply play is really important. That need for escapism means that he invariably plays some sort of elven magician / sorcerer / conjuror. Anything that is distinctly magical and highly destructive.

To tell this player “Sorry, but your one dice roll means that you are human hunchbacked beggar, but you do get to choose to have a flintlock pistol or a garot, which would you like?” is not a thing I am prepared to do. Fun is good, escapism is good, deontological ethics is a bit further down my list of gaming priorities.

Next Time

I will look at skills and talents in a bit more detail.

Today I thought I would outline another 1st level adventure and a bit of a cliche of “Go get the cure”. The villains are Ghouls and seeing as Rolemaster undead are not like DnD undead it is not a bad introduction. I have introduced a bit of wilderness travel to increase the variety of encounters and to teach the players that you don’t have to kill everything. There is also opportunities for developing the unique aspects of the setting, I have presumed it is Shadow World.

Opening Scene: The Offer of Employment

In this starting adventure the characters start out in the employ of a the mayor of a small market town. The mayors wife was attacked by the most disgusting of beggars the other night and has been feeling quite unwell ever since. At first the mayor thought it was just her nerves but it is now quite apparent she is quite unwell. They are given a simple enough task. There is a reclusive hermit that is extremely wise in the treatment of disease. He lives a few days journey away. All they need do is take one of the mayors riding horses with them, go to the hermit and ask him to accompany them back to the town. The mayor has provided the horse for the hermits use as he is quite elderly and somewhat frail by all accounts.

This is a private arrangement between the mayor and the characters, they are not employed by the town. The mayor is not going to provide them with any additional resources or equipment, he is employing them as the professionals. They are expected to leave pretty much at once as the mayor is extremely worried about his wife.

Scene Two: The Journey

In this scene we can introduce some of the elements of the caravan guard, such as giving them an idea of the game setting. Essence storms on the horizon, skyships overhead and so on. We can present the characters with a couple of encounters such as when the characters reach a rise in the road and they get a chance to see a potentially dangerous foe camped up ahead, maybe some orcs or goblins who have been sleeping the day through and just waking up as the characters are looking for a camp. Either way the characters have the advantage of being aware. They then have the choice of avoiding the fight, trying to use there advantage to swing the odds further in their favour or charging foolishly into battle. The encounters should be indicative of the setting and region.

Another encounter could be a non-monster encounter such as a washed away bridge that creates a challenge of getting them and a horse over a fast running river.

The point of these challenges are to give each profession a chance to shine. The ranger/druid may be able to lead the party to a different safe crossing, the thief/magent may be able to scout out the possible foes and learn their strength of numbers.

Eventually they will reach the hermit but he is unable to accompany the characters. He is extremely old and tells them that his time is at an end. He will allow them to rest and recover. He is capable of healing magic so can heal them of any wounds. That evening he dreams of the mayors wife and discerns her disease. He then sets about creating a curative with some urgency. He then impresses upon the characters that they must return to the town as fast as possible as the entire town is in danger. The mayors wife was not attacked by any sort of beggar, she was attacked by a ghoul and not only is it still at large around the town but the wife is infected with ghoul rot. If she is not treated soon she too will become a ghoul and an epidemic could spread.

The characters now have a race against time to get back to the town. Ghoul Rot takes a week to turn a healthy person into a Ghoul. The wife, who we will call Dolly, was attacked three nights before the characters were engaged, their journey was two days and they rested over night to this is the third day since they left town. Dolly will be undead by tomorrow or a day before the characters return. Depending on their lore knowledge they may not know this. The curative they are carrying is a mix of healing herbs and holy water and they have instructions that any wounds inflicted by the Ghoul must be washed clean with this mix. They have sufficient to treat 20 such wounds.

We can now throw a few more encounters at the characters which they will hopefully choose to avoid in their haste to get back to the town.

Hi Honey, I’m Home!

The characters are too late to save Dolly. She and the original Ghoul have gone on a killing spree, killing the mayor and their servants before attacking the local tavern. Here they were driven off by the towns folk and they disappeared into the night. There were of course a dozen wounded in the fight.

That night the ghouls return. The original ghoul had not been idle in the week that has passed and has raised more ghouls. That night a force of ghouls attack the town. We can vary the number to provide a suitable challenge for the characters with NPC townsfolk playing an active role. As each character dispatches a ghoul we give them a perception roll and they a chance to see town folk in need of saving. This is a chance to use some classic set scenes such as a child corned by a ghoul where a character gets to attack from behind or flank and save the child. Non-combatant PCs such as 1st level mages or illusionists can fight with burning torches which I would treat as a club but with a secondary A heat critical. Any ghoul that is not finally burnt will of course regenerate a 1hit/minute and rejoin the fight or dawn is approaching slip away into the night.

This then leaves the problem of wounded characters and towns folk. The characters have the healing salve but possibly not enough to wash every wound. This is a great role playing opportunity if they have to make choices over how will get the cure and who doesn’t.

The second level open channeling spell Disease Purification should be sufficient to cure an individual. This is possibly castable by the characters. A lesser Ghoul is only 1st level so it does not seem unreasonable to use a second level spell to purge its disease.

So this is the third outline of a starting adventure and the first use of the undead. Including the one I am writing right now that is four starting adventures that will be available for completely new GMs. The big question mark is the starting level which we will not know until A&CL is actually released.

Anyone have any good additions to this one?

So, I think I have enough of an outline to create the wagon/caravan starting adventure based upon yesterday’s post.

Another cliched starting adventure is starting the party in some sort of jail or prison.

This cliche has the advantage of pretty much forcing the characters to trust each other as if they are on the run then they probably don’t have anyone else to turn to.

I am thinking that the starting point would be the evening before the prison break out. The setting would be a that the characters have been bought as slaves. The remote house, probably in the mountains, is a gladiator style training camp. How the characters end up as slaves can be part of their backstory.

So word goes around that a group of gladiators that have finished their training are due to be sold in the next city and are being shipped out in the morning. The carts that are going to transport them arrived today. These gladiators would rather die fighting for their freedom than die for someone else’s sport. They have a plan and anyone who wants to take their chances has to be ready when the word goes round.

The actual break out is structured so that the players get a limited about of information about the layout of the castle, their characters movements have been severely limited. I am imagining a castle like Eltz in Germany.

So we offer the GM a encounter for every location. These would be things like a fight going on in the main courtyard against three gladiators and three guards, the gladiators are being pushed back. The characters have the option of joining the fight and putting the numerical odds very much in the escapee’s favour or using the fight as cover for their own escape. There could be fights going on in on the walls, the courtyard. We can have physical challenges such as filling a stairwell with fire, collapsing ceilings raining tiles down from a great height. Someone can release the hounds.

The players would have complete freedom as to how they want to approach their escape and there will be plenty of action going on around them at all times. The only part that is contrived is that the characters will be the only escapees to make it.

Once outside we have a chase scene with the characters having to deal with extreme mountainside terrain and being hunted by dogs and men. I can envisage a single road up to the castle and that holds the castle guards, thus baring it to the characters, the guards then send dogs into the woods to hunt down the escapees.

We can use the sound of other escapees being hunted down and caught to keep up the sense of tension. I have checked the Large Dog stats in both RMC and RMFP and they are identical. 4th level, AT3 (40), OB 45 and 65#hits. For a bunch of first level characters more than one dog at once will be a serious challenge unless they cooperate, one on one my money would be on the dog!

I would like to work in a false reprieve into this scene. The characters think that they have succeeded at escaping the dogs and guards but then some new threat confronts them.

So I know that RM2, RMC and RMFRP use identical stats. RMFRP and RMU both have the carnivorous flying monkey as a monster. It is not in the RMC C&T but I can include these stats in the adventure.

So the second part of the escape down the mountain changes the emphasis from hunted by dogs to a threat from the sky as the flying monkeys track them. A flying monkey is 4th level, AT4(30), OB 70MBa/60MGr/60SB« and 65#hits. These will be a serious challenge. These will be encountered as singles or pairs depending on how strong the party is at combat. What weapons and armour they had picked up and so on.

The chase comes to an end with the characters arriving at a cliff edge, a river below them. They have the choice of fighting a gathering group of carnivorous monkeys to jumping off the cliff and into the river.

The final act has the characters being swept down river and into a cave. There are lots of opportunities here for skill tests, swimming is the obvious one, endurance (body development) rolls to keep themselves or each other afloat as they tire.

The river ride takes them into a cave system where we can wash them up onto a shore. They then have to make their way through the caves to escape.

This one is unfortunately populated by Lizardmen (Sohleugir). As it happens these are actually weaker foes than the dogs or the monkeys.

When the characters emerge from the caves they are effectively free, out of reach of the slave owner on the different side of a mountain range so noone is ever going to associate them with any eventual rumours or new of the gladiator escape.

So we have three four foes, human guards (or do they need to be human? I think evil elves would be quite cool). Hunting dogs, flying carnivorous monkeys and lizardmen. We have environmental challenges of the burning and collapsing castle, a mountainside rush through steep forested terrain, whitewater ride down the river and then a cave exploration.

So that is my second suggested starting adventure.

What would you add?

The Cardinal Rule of Adventure Design
A good adventure should maximize meaningful player decisions.

Matthew J. Finch

Yesterday I was obviously not that enamoured with the idea of “caravan guard” as an adventure backdrop. I admit that it can be done well. The best example I have ever seen of the caravan guard was the entire Battlestar Galactica franchise, created in 1978 and still going now. It encompassed a line of book adaptations, original novels, comic books, a board game, and video games (according to Wikipedia). At the heart of it Starbuck and allies are just caravan guards. Replace Vipers for horses and Cylons for Orcs and we are back in fantasy land.

The caravan guard vehicle does have a lot of things going for it. To start the characters are unlikely to be commanding the entire security of the caravan so you have a superior officer who can simply tell them to go there, do that, hold them off while we get the wagons away. You also have a stock of disposable NPCs in the form of other guards and the wagon drivers and their families. One can create a body of guards and let the PCs decide who they like and who they don’t. Each NPC can impart a nugget of setting information so you avoid the info dump where you tell the players all about the world and they forget 90% of it even before you finish telling them. They can learn bits and bobs as they go by talking to NPCs.

A big enough caravan is basically a town on wheels.

If the cardinal rules at the top of the page is true then we need ways of separating our PCs who are subordinate to the caravan commander and to some extent the caravan’s owners.

One such adventure could have the characters given some money and told to ride ahead to the next town. They are told to secure food and fodder that the caravan requires and get it all organised before they arrive the following day. A simple enough task. The money the characters have is enough to serve as a deposit on the goods they are securing but not enough to make it worth while absconding with.

The characters ride over the hill and late in the day arrive at the town. Now we can force a meaning for decisions on the players.

Let us look at the town. This is not intended to be a roll a d4 table, I just had four ideas off the top of my head.

1. The town is a burned out ruin and there is nothing to buy.
2. The town is already host to a second caravan and there is no spare food to buy.
3. The town is in the grip of an epidemic or plague and to enter is to risk death or at least infection.
4. An illegal toll is in place blocking a bridge between the characters and the town. The town folk do not support this as it is killing their trade.

My first thought on looking back at them is that they are a bit static. The first, the characters have to return and tell everyone about the town. It is more likely that the characters will then be sent to a further away town or one on a more dangerous route. It is still not the characters making any meaningful decisions.

The second option could be a source of conflict, you could present the characters with decisions to make, maybe they get offered work with the new caravan, abandoning the original caravan. They could try and trick the other caravan out of their supplies. They could learn of some rivalry between caravan drivers. There is potential for many role played challenges here but it does still feel like a jumping off point for a ‘real’ adventure.

The third option is actually beyond the abilities of most first level characters to help. Elves would be OK as they are immune to normal diseases, anyone else is likely to fail a RR and die. Maybe a mini quest to find some herb or ingredient to formulate a cure?

The last option is, at first thought, more of an encounter than an adventure.

So let’s try a different tack.

The characters are with the caravan, the light is fading, rain lashing down, the river to the side is swollen and threatening to burst its banks. Far off the howl of wolves hangs in the air. Up ahead there is a bridge over the rushing river. The caravan makes to the bridge as fast as it can manage, lightning flashes and horses rear and shy. The wolves howl, closer this time. Everyone is on the ground trying to get the carts and wagons over the bridge and calm the horses, the weight of the water pressing against it is making the bridge shift and creak. The last few wagons are make it across when with a lurch the bridge gives way and crashes into the water. A flash of lightning reveals two wagons on the far bank.

And the characters are ordered to get back across the river and protect those wagons, find another crossing and bring them back. That is the start of their real adventure. We could throw a mix of challenges at them with the wolves for a combat encounter, some skill based ones, driving the wagons over rough terrain, survival skills, maybe someone is injured, which was why one of the wagons was too slow to get over the bridge, so the NPCs are dependent on the characters for aid. Region Lore would be needed to know where to find a different crossing. Maybe this was the safer of the two crossings? Maybe the other lies in goblin territory?

Now that sounds like more of a starting adventure. If the characters survive then they will have earned their first little bit of hero kudos.

Here is another idea…

The caravan, unknown to the characters, is transporting a stolen religious artifact. So during its journey all of the above things happen but in addition the caravan is being pursued by a force of 1st level monks, replete with martial arts, shuriken, halberds, staves and all that sort of stuff. A couple of nights after they leave town the characters are on guard duty when they are forced to fight of a group of these monks. A couple of days later on a long descent down a hill side road a driver is killed by a thrown shuriken, or maybe a poison dart from a blow pipe. The cart builds up speed and then crashes over. In the ensuing chaos the monks attack again.

It turns out that the caravan is carrying a holy item that belongs to these monks and they want it back.

This would now give us an over arching story. It could turn out that the artifact is stolen and the caravan captain is the villain on the piece, the caravan is a cover for a smuggling operation and the characters hired to protect him from the monks. The climax becomes a showdown between the other caravan guards and the caravan captain against the characters and the monks. The victorious characters end up winning the friendship of the monks and learn that the caravan captain is rumoured to be the brother to a notorious pirate than is often seen in and around the town the caravan was originally heading to. Maybe the smuggling operation involved the pirates?

As an introduction we have lots of encounters here.

We can stage a couple of monk attacks. We can separate the characters for a couple of days with the swollen river and bridge incident with wolves and goblin attacks. We can have the second caravan competing for food and supplies from the original list. That would give the characters a chance to try and learn more about the monks. Has the other caravan been attacked? Do they know who they are? Where do they come from? You could give a chance for the characters to see a wanted poster for a notorious pirate and they could mistakenly think that their own caravan captain is the pirate but then have the facts contradict them. The poster is new and says that two days ago the pirate burned and sank a convoy of ships. So the captain cannot be the pirate but the likeness is uncanny. You then get the wagon crash and monk attack. Finally the climax with the big reveal that the characters are working for the villains, maybe provoked by the characters overhearing a conversation about how they are going to be disposed of once they have arrived at the port. If the characters try to escape the caravan they run into the monks and get to talk to them and learn their side of the story. If the characters try and fight their way out of the caravan it could provoke a monk attack and the characters and monks are now on the same side. If the characters suspect nothing (damn that failed perception check) then when the other caravan guards try to do them in that coincides with a monk attack and again the monks and characters are now on the same side.

Actually, I don’t now see this as the climax. This is the penultimate scene. In the confusion the caravan captain has made a break for it on horseback with the artifact. The characters can steal horses and give chase. There is then the final showdown between the characters and the caravan captain. This could take place in the final town and the previous scene in a warehouse when the characters were expecting to get paid. The chase is through the town’s cobbled streets and ends at the dock. There is the final showdown and as a backdrop you keep referring to a tall ship making its way into the harbour. If the fight is over quickly then the ship hoves too, turns are heads back out to sea. If the fight is drawn out then the ship gets close enough to the harbour side for pirates to leap from the rigging and try and rescue the caravan captain and the artifact. They then try to fight a withdrawal and get away.

Now that sounds like a proper first module. It has heroic rescues, kung foo battles, monsters, pirates and dastardly villains.

It also has no magic, which is good because 1st level characters are notoriously bad at magic. All you need is a town about a weeks drive away from a port and a river. That must exist in every home brew world everywhere!