Over the past three months, [January, February & March] I have been writing up a piecemeal campaign. It is all based around a single map, but one I am chopping into smaller parts.
Each of these bite sized pieces I have been publishing in the fanzine. So far it has been two locations each month, and I have done about fifth of the map.
This was going to be a 2021 project, but it looks like it will end up taking longer than that.
Something else I am doing with this series is using a much wider variety of monsters.
The three parts so far are:
In addition to the named sites on the Sabre Lake map, and the start of the campaign story arc, one can also drop in other encounters, locations or adventures.
I noticed that the RolemasterBlog Adventures, also known as 50in50 despite that name being a bit outdated, have now gone over 60 titles. There is a bundle of latest and #61 [Elemental Tempest] is also out.
The original idea behind 50in50 was to publish 50 short ‘drop in’ adventure seeds, encounters, or locations in 50 weeks. The first set actually took a fraction over the 50 weeks, but real life tends to get in the way. We then launched into another 50, but this time without the time constraint. I think we are putting out one or two a month.
I never expected these to be very popular, Rolemaster is a rather niche game, after all, but we have literally sold hundreds of copies of some of these and thousands if taken as a block.
The point of this article is that I had not really kept track of how many of these were being sold. Then today, someone was complaining that their magazine used to be in print, but due to a lack of growth, I think they are selling less than 20 a month, they are going to just online.
This is what happened to the Guild Companion, from print to online to …. flatline.
The Adventurers Quarterly took about 7 years to publish 4 issues and the withered away.
I think this is rather sad. Games are often a labour of love, but at the same time, if you give up, everyone loses. The past 12 months have been far from normal, and not every business is going to grow during a pandemic, especially if people are worried about their jobs/income.
This blog has seen a nice up turn in activity in 2021, I am impressed. I also feel like RMu is finally going to happen.
Rolemaster definitely does not feel like it is in remission, if anything, it is on an upswing.
Many supplements fail to reach even Copper on DriveThru yet 43 of the 61 RolemasterBlog Adventures have achieved that level, and 11 of those are Silver. So, I definitely think there’s a market for Rolemaster.
That looks like a good ratio! What does it take to go “Gold”??
I think less than 50% of all supplements hit Copper, so it is a good ratio.
51+ Copper, 101+ Silver, 251+ Electrum, 501+ Gold. Two are steadily heading towards Electrum; they’re in a different bundle as well as the RMBlog bundles.