Happy Holidays to the Rolemaster and Shadow World community! I thought I would stretch my legs after MANY months, and post up some quick items. With winter approaching and some scheduled time away I’m planning on finalizing a few projects and pushing out some more content in 2026.
- Player engagement. I check in to the RMForums and Discord every now and then to get a sense of participation; both regular contributors, new players and ICE “staff”. I also get updated on any RM mentions in Reddit, RPG forums and other channels. The Forums have been continually hit with spammers and activity seems really depressed over this past year. Discord seems the preferred channel and there are certainly a handful of very active participants to drive discussion and support new players. I’ve said this before, and it’s probably a feature and not a bug of Rolemaster in general, but the predominance of discussion seems around rule arbitration/clarification. I don’t really see this level of technical support in other RPG forums and threads.
- Ritual Magic. This is very intriguing and exciting to me! On one hand, magic rituals could really just be a hand wave by the GM that occurs off screen with some general guidelines and guard rails. However, as an in-game mechanic it really opens up the sand box. As I’ve fine tuned my organigram of magic in SW, it’s clear that early magic use had to be less constrained, less defined–more ritualistic. While this challenges my need to organize, index and disambiguate, it leans into my desire for a more flexible, ad hoc, approach to GMing.
- GMing. Finally, after a few years I’m close to rebuilding a gaming group. The mainstreaming of gaming and the opening of new game cafes in my area has allowed me to find new players. Of course there are additional hurdles of building consistency, but one step at a time. Game sessions really help me dynamically test ideas, both rules and SW content with players–especially players without a strong background in RM. New perspectives and all that.
- Adrenal Defense. I should broaden this to DB in general with the new RMU rules. I admit a bit of confusion on all the different ways to increase DB: AD, dodge, partial dodge, parry, running, footwork etc. Not sure if that’s a complete list, or if it’s even correct, but reading comments overwhelms me. It’s not just the parsing of complex action but the actual need for it. OB was always meant to reflect a flurry of blows and DB was meant to represent active and passive avoidance by the target. I remind myself that Adrenal Defense was just another example of “Rules for Rules”: AD was meant to address the lack of armor for Monks/Warrior Monks and model the cinematic version of martial artists that could dodge attacks. But this need was predicated on the idea that you needed a weapon to parry and Monks used martial arts. Simply allowing the idea that MA included techniques for dodging within the forms would have alleviated the need for AD. Of course, that would have removed the extreme DBs possible for monks.
- Shadow World. Basically nothing going on here, with virtually no updates from management. There are, or were, a number of unsanctioned Rolemaster products on Drivethru. That was curious. It seems that all of my various files that were pulled from our definitive Master Atlas really need to be put back together into 1 comprehensive document.