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Rolemaster deconstruction: questioning the undead.

The “Undead”–a popular creature class drawn from a wide range of cultures, legends and mythology. Rolemaster has Egyptian Mummies, European Vampires, and Ghosts combined with the established D&D creatures like Wraiths & Ghouls. But are all of these actual “Undead”? If not, what are Undead? Are they:

  1. Animated corpses? If they are just magically infused bodies/skeletons are they truly undead anymore than an enchanted sword?
  2. Re-Animated corpses via a “spirit” or “will”? Is the body/corpse/skeleton infused with a soul or spirit? Is that Undead or is that a imbedded intelligence?
  3. A non-corporeal entity via a “spirit” or “will”? Does a persons dis-embodied spirit define an Undead?
  4. A being created via a spell or magic ritual? Does a entity that becomes something else, post death or beyond death meet the definition of an Undead?
  5. A possessed corpse? Is a corpse possessed by another entity an “Undead”?
  6. Something else?

Certainly in it’s more simplistic form an Undead is merely a creature or entity that is functional “after death”. The problem with that all-encompassing definition is that it embraces a wide variety of  Undead tropes.

  1. Only be hit by silver weapons.
  2. Only be hit by Holy weapons.
  3. Only be hit by Magic weapons.
  4. Only be affected by “turning”
  5. Can or cannot be banished.
  6. Immune to stuns/bleeding etc
  7. Causes a stat or level “drain” of one sort or another.
  8. Affected by the “moon” (if only one) or sunlight.
  9. Susceptible to “Clerics”.

So what is the underlying mechanic or philosophy behind Undead? Are animated corpses “undead” or just magically infused meat puppets? How does one draw a spirit from beyond? How are Undead created? How are special Undead created? Why do typical Undead need to follow common western European tropes (Mummy, Vampire, Wolfman, Zombie?). If you were to create a world from scratch, would you just populate it with common fantasy Undead? Is there a better, more consistent way to create Undead? What is “draining”? How does it work? How do you recover lost stats or levels? What spells protect against Undead? What type of Undead Does a Clerics spell turning work against a animated corpse? Does the Clerics patron god allow for powers against Undead or that specific type of Undead? If you allow many types of Undead, should they require different spells to deal with them? Do the Undead fit into the setting, afterlife and “soul” mechanics of the world?

Once you take away the Judaeo-Christian concept of Undead/Possession and symbology (crosses, silver, holy water), I’m not it’s clear what the strict definition of an Undead might be.

What do you do?

 

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Adopting BASiL

I had a strange week last week. I was away at the weekend and ended up spending the entire week trying to catch up with what I should have done over the weekend and so I was a busy week. The end result was that I quite simply forgot to post something on Friday. I don’t think I have ever simply forgotten before!

I have been batting ideas about for a few years about what I want to do with magic and spell law. I instinctively want to get rid of the realms as an archaic D&D legacy concept. I don’t like lists as they turn every wizards spell book into a carbon copy of every other wizards spell book. That is an exaggeration but the principle is the same. No magician that can cast Fireball cannot cast everything else on either Luminous Elements or Fire Law because them come not as spells but as giant sized bolt-ons of all or nothing.

I have loads of ideas how to fix all of this but I simply do not get to play often enough to actually test my solution let alone revise and improve it.

So I have decided that I am going to adopt BriH’s BASiL as my core magic system. This is both a personal decision and it really has no bearing on anyone else but also a public one. All the monsters I create that have magical abilities or innate lists will now be BASiL related.

I am a bit behind with uploading even the monsters I have to the wiki so I will make changes to those I haven’t uploaded as I get around to them. This week I am writing an adventure based around a troupe of Sprites so I will create a sprite monster for the wiki. This will be the first native BASiL monster as they will have innate magic at the core of the monsters design.

Another consequence is that the fanzine is turning into a GMs magazine containing adventures and monsters. Rather than having to point readers to the blog every time to download the spell list before they can use the monster and/or the adventure I will be publishing BASiL bit by bit starting in Jan 2018. I checked with Brian this week if he is okay with me publishing BASiL this way and he gave the green light so it all looks good.

The final consequence of my decision seems to be that it is one big task removed from my unending to-do list that now means I can get on with other things. So that looks like a win-win situation for me. For BASiL it now means that Brian knows that it is really being used elsewhere, which is a nice feeling for people who put our their own work. It also means that it [BASiL] will be at the heart of adventures and our free monster wiki.

Finally, my to-to list got three Rolemaster things completed or removed from it this week and seven things added. Is this normal?

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Turning Tropes Upside Down: Feral Elves and other thoughts.

When I was writing “Priest-King” a few years back, I ended up locating the module in SW Agyra and started fleshing out the geographic area. The land to the immediate south was Chaal-chu and in Terry’s description (Master Atlas p.34) was this fascinating tidbit:

In an (apparently) unique and frightening aberration, there
are Half-elven Eritari tribes in Chaal-chu who are cannibalistic.
They believe that feeding on their full-mortal cousins the Thesian
tribes will extend their lives.

I blogged about Elves back in June and last year as well, so it’s known that I’m not a fan of Elves in general. It’s hard to beat immortality and although the system tries to balance things with stat bonuses and other mechanics, it still doesn’t feel right. Elves are just too good. However, “Feral” Elves or Cannibalistic Half-Elves–sign me up for that!!

This is another great tidbit that is sprinkled throughout the Master Atlas, the idea of a primitive, regressed, Elven tribe, is ripe for gaming opportunities. Maybe these cannibals are more animal cunning then intelligent and wise. I visual them as  Reavers — terrifying!

This trope subversion is another reason why I like the Malazan series so much. In that setting, Erickson has included traditional “monster races” as normal races:

For instance, one of the powerful ancient races are the Jaghut, which I think are Ogres. Another race are T-Rex like creatures that had advanced technology!

We have racial stereotypes in our real world and so too in our fantasy settings: gruff Dwarfs, barbaric Orcs, flighty Elves etc. Why not flip some of these? Why not have a powerful, peaceful nation be made up of Orcs? For me, I’m going to enjoy my feral, cannibal half-elves! I know my players will too….

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Getting your Rolemaster Fix.

It’s now been 7 days that the official Iron Crown website and our favorite ICE Forums has been down due to domain expiration. Per Nicholas yesterday:

“Hosting & domain provider being a royal pain.”

While we are all waiting for the larger ICE community to reconnect via the RMForums, here are a few ideas to get your Rolemaster fix:

  1. Read some older RMBlog articles. There are 481 posts here on the RolemasterBlog going back several years. Some are “meh”, some are good and many of them are pretty great I think!
  2. Vote for your favorite blog post! In the comments below, note which older blog post is one of your favorites, sparked a creative thought or made you look at some aspect of RM or rpg’s in a different way.
  3. Write a blog post. We always need new contributors–write a blog entry and send to Peter.
  4. Comment. Even older posts could use your insights or thoughts.
  5. Check out the RolemasterBlog “50 in 50”–our project that wrote 50 small adventure hooks and are publishing them over the course of a year.

In general, contribute and get involved. Sure, there are a handful of us that probably sound over-opinionated; but we also all agree to disagree at times. Your thoughts not only matter, they are greatly appreciated!

Hopefully, ICE will have things up and running soon!

 

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Rolemaster Deconstructed: Action Resolution Mechanics

Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings! This is going to be a short post and not as well thought out; I wanted to link to a few RMForum comments and the ICE website is still down with an expired domain. (That’s not good for brand equity). So while I wanted to dive deeper into skill bonus and penalty ranges I’m going to skim over that for now and just open up any thoughts on d100 resolution.

While Rolemaster is a d100 system, success is measured in a variety of ways and using some different mechanics.

Maneuvers: This is probably the most “pure” mechanic where a success is a 100/101 or better modified by penalties and skill bonuses.

Combat: Weapon tables go to 150 and there is no real emphasis on a 100+ result. There are a number of penalties and skill bonuses.

Resistance Rolls: RM uses a lvl vs lvl chart to generate a threshold number the resister needs to make.

SCR: hmm..I haven’t used this one is so long I forgot how it worked in RM and RM2…some sort of table?

Anyway, the point is that those are 4 different mechanics that seem close..maybe close enough to “unify”? Can we design a 101+ mechanic for all action resolution? The hardest one would be combat; giving up the individual weapon charts would be hard for me! Has RMU mostly done this? Does this need be fixed?

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Playing for time

Have any of those reading this ever played an adventure backwards?

What I mean is, your group sits down, you hand out the character sheets and then say “You are stood on the rocky ledge with a precipice falling away into darkness at your feet, opposite you the rock cliff face disappears up into the darkness above your heads. Waves of heat emanate from the depths below. The only sound is the approaching beat of leathery wings, you have found the subject of you quest, the Dragon Lord is coming. What do you do?”

Having played out the finale you can then retrospectively go back and reveal how the players got there.

To take this one step further you could just suddenly reference an NPC they have never heard of, one that didn’t feature in that first/last scene. As soon as someone notices this new NPC, you put the current scene on hold and play a flashback to how the party met that NPC and how they joined the party. Once that is played out you then pick up the previous scene exactly where you left off.

If you use miniatures then you could prepare tableaus of the key scenes and reveal them every time there is a cut in the action.

If you were playing this traditionally the session(s) may go like this.

  1. The players get given a quest to slay a dragon
  2. they adventure into the mountains
  3. they meet a hermit/ranger who can show them the way into caves
  4. battle with dragons kin/defenders
  5. hermit dies
  6. adventure further into caves
  7. dragon lord end of level boss
  8. joyous return to the starting point.
  9. Deliver whatever thing the quest giver demanded
  10. Start next adventure

To play it in an alternative manner could go like this.

<session 1>

7. dragon lord end of level boss
1. The players get given a quest to slay a dragon
2. they adventure into the mountains <cut scene>

<Session 2>
4. battle with dragons kin/defenders <cut short>
3. <flashback> they meet a hermit/ranger who can show them the way into caves
4. <concludes>battle with dragons kin/defenders
5. hermit dies

<Session 3>
8. joyous return to the starting point.
9. Deliver whatever thing the quest giver demanded
10.Start next adventure

So why even attempt this?

What I am thinking is that sometimes ending a session with the successful conclusion of the quest can seem a little contrived. It is a bit like when you know the perilous scene in a movie isn’t the end because you still have an hour to run. Ending the session at the end of a quest can sometimes rob the end scene of some of its energy, or even, if you know that your players have to leave at a particular time to catch trains or planes then you could hurry a scene up to get to a convenient stopping point. Putting the end of the quest at the front of the session means that for an action ending (point 7 above) it gets a real wow! factor. For a story ending (point 9 above) ‘the end’ is obviously not ‘the end’ and so does not bring with it a loss of energy.

So imagine again that you took your players character sheets and made multiple copies. To one you tippex out their primary weapon and replace it with “Blade of the Balrog”. As soon as your player notices you stop the scene and play a flashback where the players play out a scene that ends with the character acquiring the Blade of the Balrog. If someone dies you pass a prepared note to one character saying that “You have a vial that contains a shard of a saints soul, if someone on the point of death is anointed with it they will be restored to life.” If anyone questions where this came from then, you guessed it, cut scene back to before the character died and you have a challenge where the prize is the vial.

I have painted this very much in a hack and slash sort of way but then my main group is a hack and slash group. It actually works even better in a role play heavy session. In a hack and slash group if someone dies in the opening/quest completing battle then it doesn’t matter as they were alive and well in all the flashbacks so they are still included. You may have to keep people alive through some mechanism if they were alive at the start of the battle; they must arrive in that state. Without the hack and slash element then chopping and changing the time line is easier.

This time imagine an adventure where the players start trapped in a collapsed mine. Where you would normally describe the setting and NPCs if the players were in a normal scene, this time you do the same but you put much more emphasis on the NPCs, as if the characters know them. It soon becomes apparent that someone has triggered the mine collapse trapping the characters and NPCs here. As the characters talk to each NPC it triggers a series of flashbacks as to who they are and the players learn why they are here in the mine and what part of their back story. Think alone the lines of a TV detective in the final scene where they reveal who the killer is.

As a session format it certainly is challenging and something different. Any thoughts or experiences?

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Rolemaster Skill Deconstruction: Perception, is it even a skill?

PERCEPTION: This skill affects how much information and how many clues a character gets through observation. It may be used to notice the right things, to find carelessly hidden objects, to see that pile of old clothes in the corner, to notice the imperfection in the wall that hides the secret door, the trigger for the trap ahead, the ambush. These are the type of things that the GM cannot mention to the players because to do so would call them to special attention that the character’s perception might not allow. (ref. Character Law)

Arguably one of the most important skills for any character to have is Perception. At least in my player groups, it’s a skill that is taken at least 1 rank every level. Why is it so important? Perception is the gateway for the game narrative. This is critical for table top role-playing where most information is provided by a GM through exposition. Information can be provided or withheld based on a players perception skill–it’s a throttle that can increase or decrease the game experience!

Like many elements of Rolemaster, the perception skill was probably based on the “find traps” or “detect secret door” ability in D&D. But RM perception is a massive expansion of that specific ability and it’s not just an active skill, but can be used as a passive one which greatly improves it’s utility. In my game it’s almost automatic that a player will announce that they are going to make a perception check. Basically what they are asking, is for any “hidden knowledge” based on a skill roll. For me, that’s very reductionist, it lowers the roleplaying experience down to a randomized game mechanic. And because every character in the group has perception, it’s also not uncommon for every player to make a perception check to maximize the probability of a successful result. Even if every character has an average +50 skill bonus, one of 4 or 5 players is going to roll high. At higher levels every character is a “crack observer”. No absent minded or myopic mages in my groups!

As a GM, I usually WANT the group to find secret doors and other mysteries to enhance their enjoyment or reward them. So having them able to perform successful perception checks can be important. On the other hand, these rolls also take some of the narrative control from me. Either way there is no denying the importance or impact of the Perception skill.

So what makes up perception? Quality of eyesight? Tactile sensitivity? Smell? Hearing? If that’s the case, than perception is based on innate physical abilities. Can you train up better vision? Teach yourself better hearing? Probably not. Perception should be purely physical based with an added emphasis on any racial ability.

Or is perception a trainable skill with “rules”, “systems” and processes that can be taught and learned? Aren’t spies taught the ability to notice small details? Are policemen taught to “detect” things? Aren’t soldiers taught to detect tripwires and boobytraps?

If perception is mostly physical capacity then perhaps it shouldn’t be a skill at all. However, if it is a trainable skill shouldn’t it be considered quite specialized and not classified as a general skill? Shouldn’t it be left to professions like thieves, assassins or mystics? Wouldn’t that make it more interesting for game play and give a cool niche role for certain profession types?

What are your thoughts?

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The Monster Wiki

This morning the monster wiki was born.

So right now there are only about four or five monsters in there. I have two dozen more to add just to bring it up to date with the monsters I have converted over so far.

I also need to organise the navigation to make them findable. I need category pages and links to individual monsters. The basic site search will find them but as you can imagine searching for Orc will find a lot of pages not just the monster description.

In theory anyone who is logged into the blog should be able to edit any monster, add any monster and so on. If you want player races then get stuck in! Over this weekend I will try and bring this up to date with the monsters I have so far. Having said that I am away this weekend so progress could be limited! If anyone has any thoughts then fire away. I will do anything and everything to make this as useful as possible.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that none of us own these monsters, they are a gift to the RM community and free for anyone and everyone to use.

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Diversity vs. Playability: Skills in Rolemaster

Today I’m looking at the ‘problem’ of skills in RM: consolidated skills (of which RMFRP is the paradigmatic version, and which appears to be a certainty in the new version, although with far less skills) or individual skills, each with their own development cost, as was the case in RM2. Let me nail my flag to the mast: I am rather more in favour of individual skill costs, primarily for the tremendous variety and granularity they offer. You simply can’t get that under the skill category system (although the RMFRP rules do allow a certain amount of tweaking, and my rather freewheeling interpretation of the talent rules enabled more).

Further to this is the issue of the dreaded skill bloat. It seems that many folks object – quite reasonably, I feel – to the tremendous explosion in increasingly fine-grained skills introduced by the RM2 companions (and carried over to RMFRP, although restrained and managed by the category system). I understand the objections: if you have, say, 300 skills and 50 professions, that’s a lot of trawling through tables in order to generate a character, and a lot of skills to study up on, in order to decide whether your Burglar is better off taking Defensive Manoeuvre, Feinting or Tumbling Attack, or just ignoring it all and retiring to a farm after buying ranks in Horticulture, Herding, Animal Handling, Animal Healing and Weather-watching.

I only wanted to play Rolemaster!

But, and here’s the thing, I love having that range of options – ridiculous though that may seem – simply because of the ways in which, as a GM, I can fine-tune races, cultures, professions and NPCs. I can understand how you might justify having a Prepare Herbs, Herb Lore and Using Prepared Herbs skill, or a Using/Removing Poison, Poison Perception and Poison Lore skill. I can imagine a rough-and-ready soldier who knows nothing of herbs, but has grown used to applying unguents to wounds. I can equally imagine a scholarly-type who has learned a bit about poison but has never handled it – or even considered using it! That argument makes sense to me, although there is, conceivably, a limit beyond which realism need go.

There are ways of managing skill bloat without consolidating or eliminating skills. The last RM2 campaign I ran I divided skills into Core, Professional and Extra-Professional skills. Everyone, regardless of profession, race or whatever had instant and permanent access to the Core skills. Then, each profession had 25 professional skills to which they had access. All skills outside that group of Core + Professional were restricted, requiring the expenditure of Character Points (which accumulated as the character reached Prime Levels, of which more on another occasion).

I’m including a link to a table showing an example of what I did in my attempts to manage skill bloat whilst maintaining breadth and diversity. This is the RM2 Hunter from the Arms Companion. I’ve not included the development point costs for copyright reasons, but the table is hopefully sufficient to demonstrate the idea. The listed skills show those available to the Hunter at level 1. They can’t consider new skills until reaching their next Prime Level (i.e. level 3). At each Prime Level, a character gains Character Points equivalent to 3 + the modifier derived from their Prime Statistic (the first appearing of their Prime Requisites, in this case Quickness), as if it were a Power Point stat, rounded down. (For example, if Bhorg the Hunter has a Qu stat of 95, he’d gain an extra 2 Character Points, giving him 5 in total. Bhorg could then spend his Character Points unlocking access to an Extra-Professional skill, or buying talents, or saving them for later).

I thought it a reasonably elegant solution, although like all my solutions, it generated a fair amount of work to get it up and running. I’d be interested in your thoughts on possible futures for this approach, any problems you locate and any possible fixes.

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Rolemaster Races & Monsters: Friends or Foes?

I’m curious and interested about exploring niches of Rolemaster and fantasy RPG’s in a novel way–subverting tropes, high level adventures, monsters as PC’s, eliminating the Profession system etc. In my last blog I discussed some one-off adventures I’m working on that consists of a party of “monsters” and both Peter and I have written blogs about certain creatures being classified as a Race or Monster. All of this touches upon whether various creatures or traditional monsters would make good PC’s–a subject I’m looking forward to exploring much like I’m doing with 50th lvl characters.

But these questions ignore the broader issue–why are certain races and creatures “Monsters” or adversaries to begin with? Should PC appropriate races be determined by a race’s intrinsic morality? Does RMU’s creature creation system open the door for any creature (assuming a base level of  intelligence) to be played as a PC? Assigning levels, special abilities and skills to creatures draws them into the Character Law system–why not open the door a bit wider for PCs–not just more traditional races, but “monsters” as well?

 

Perhaps the residue of Gygaxian Naturalism reinforces our views that monsters reside outside the natural world and setting. Without a childhood, ecosystem, culture and hopes and dreams these monsters lack the foundations of “Personhood”–they are merely there to be obstacle to the players. But what if that weren’t the case? Perhaps your game world would be like the cantina setting in ANH or TFA–filled with an endless variety of races, creatures and monsters anthropomorphized for the purposes of a working game narrative. Perhaps “monsters” aren’t inherently evil, but motivated by the same self-interest and beliefs that direct us all.

 

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