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Fleckles and Hip Action?

I may be making some assumptions here but I am guessing most of the readers here are English speaking. That most English speaking territories have some sort of TV shows along the lines of Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing with the Stars, Dancing on Ice. I also assume that as roleplayers we do not watch Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing with the Stars, Dancing on Ice.

Bear with me, I am going somewhere with this.

So whereas the fans of those sorts of shows are avid watchers of fleckles, hip action and correctly pointed hands and feet we are more interested in different sorts of moving manoeuvres.

Now, last week Brian brought up the old topic of No Profession and his idea of the free market economy for skill costs. Another element of making Rolemaster more accessible and faster to play is meta skills.

One of the arguments against meta skills was put something like this. Meta skills are fine for fantasy and historical settings but in modern settings subjects are far more specialised.

I am not saying that meta skills are right and a multitude of specific skills are wrong. I do not believe in right and wrong at all in rpgs. We make and play the games we like in the way that we like them. This is all about an idea I had on Saturday evening when Mrs R was watching one of those dance shows!

So in a RM2 game every typical farmer that the players meet probably have the a cross section of or even the majority of this mix of skills.

  1. Animal handling Pig
  2. Aminal handling Cow
  3. Animal Handling Chicken
  4. Animal Handling Donkey
  5. Aminal Handling Dog
  6. Animal Healing Pig
  7. Aminal Healing Cow
  8. Animal Healing Donkey
  9. Animal Healing Dog. No farmer can afford to lose live stock and this includes animal midwifery.
  10. Herding Pig
  11. Herding Cow
  12. Herding Chicken
  13. Loading
  14. Driving Cart
  15. Flora Law for crops
  16. Wood working for repairs around the farm
  17. Rope Mastery for repairs around the farm
  18. Weapon Skill (spear encompassing pitchforks etc) as someone has to deal with foxes, coyotes, mountain lions and join the lynch mob to drive undesirables away.
  19. Perception to spot foxes, coyotes, mountain lions and undesirables.
  20. Body development as farming is hard work.
  21. Trading to buy and sell seed and produce.
  22. Weather watching to know what tomorrow brings.
  23. Singing
  24. Dancing
  25. Musical instrument. These three are essential social skills for finding a wife and making your own entertainment.
  26. Time Sense.

So that is not an exhaustive list. You could add in a lot more Lores depending on how the farmer manages their land. If they have water wheels, a smithy or a tannery on their farm then that comes with a skill burden. If they have farm hands beyond the family then they may need some public speaking or people management skills.

If the typical secondary skill has a cost of 2/6 then my snap shot of skills requires 52DPs per level or straight 70+ in every stat. Or the alternative is that some of the skills come from culture and hobby skills ranks and they do not have all the animal skills, if a cow goes sick they call on the neighbour that does know about cows and people come to them when their pigs are sick and so on.

So the idea that modern settings do not fit in with meta skills as modern skills are too specialised does not work. Portraying historical farmers in RM2 are just as detailed.

Now going back to our Strictly Dancing on Ice with the Stars their are often athletes, sports personalities and former Olympians as contestants. These people almost invariably do extremely well. The reason they do so well is partly down to the fact that almost all sports require a combination of hand/eye coordination, core strength, balance and footwork. All of these translate well to dance apparently. Some of the people who have done well in the past have been gymnasts, rugby players [rugby is like American Football with the training wheels taken off 🙂 ], and track and field athletes.

In my vision of the Athletic Games meta skill the list of  hand/eye coordination, core strength, balance and footwork is almost the skill definition. Taking these dance programmes seem to say that all forms of athletics provide a great level of cross over.

The way I handle unfamiliar situations is by using higher difficulty factors which would mean that as the weeks and months (although it feels longer) that these shows go on for the contestants would be able to apply more of their full skill to each routine and the Difficulty diminishes.

I do not really want to reopen the argument on Meta Skills. I think we have done that to death but this came to me this week as I was writing whilst Mrs R was watching the show and I noticed that one of the highest scoring contestants was Jonathan Peacock who is a para-Olympian and amputee.

Finally, I think it is a damn sight easier just give Vocation:Farmer as a skill and move on to doing something more fun.

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Wicked Witches

I want an wicked witch for my next game session and I have been playing with the RM2 RoCoII witch profession.

This is quite easily one of the most powerful professions I have ever seen!

In my world spell multipliers are as rare as hen’s teeth. This means that power points are not overly abundant. Permanent magic items are not common either including rune paper. It does exist and the characters do have a few runes (they are all about 5th level) but there is not much of it about.

The witch can create their own potions, spell infused candles and as they are hybrids they can use Symbolic Ways to create standing stones and Rune Mastery to create runes. One ton stones are not actually that uncommon if you live out in the wilds. That gives the witch access to some home made daily items even if they are low level and not movable.

The runes as I have said are hard to make without the rune paper but if they have some then they are easier to make than standing stones and more potable.

Candles and potions though are easy to manufacture and carry around.

I am extremely tempted to give the witch some candles of Sleep V or Sleep VII and let the characters walk off with them. That is going to do their heads in for a while as I am making them roll resistance rolls almost every evening!

This profession can easily have almost unlimited low level magic. Power points can be burned using their most powerful magic as they will have tons of low level stuff just lying around.

I am thinking along the lines of a pretty high level witch as a sole adversary against 5 5th level characters. I am now thinking that I may have to tone down my NPC or they will eat the party alive (you can interpret that last sentence as you wish).

Have any of you use the Witch as a single Foe?

p.s. The boggle-eyed witch is back just because she freaks BriH out!

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More Musings on Professions: Are they Necessary in Rolemaster?

For a game system that was predicated on “no limitations” for player characters, I still find the need to cling to Professions curious. More importantly–beyond PC creation and occasionally leveling–do Professions serve any other purpose? Is a Professional label important for NPCs–the most generally the predominant characters in a game world?

Besides acting as a general trope label, NPC’s in ICE products still list out all skills, skill bonuses and spell lists. Unlike D&D, there are no intrinsic skills or abilities imparted to professions at various levels in Rolemaster. The Profession listed on an NPC stat might give a GM a “sense” of that character, but what really matters is the stat block itself. There is really no need to know a Profession for an NPC–only their stats and abilities. That’s the whole point of a skill based character system.

In Shadow World Terry pretty much throws away strict adherence to Professions; in my mind this an acknowledgement of the creative limitations such a system produces. Loremasters and Navigators are clearly a Profession, but due to RAW, are first assigned a standard RM Profession and then given extra base lists. The Steel Rain, Priests Arnak etc are all given extra lists on top of the Profession (whether it be Mentalism, Channeling or Essence) with NO REGARD to realm limitations.

As a GM do you build an NPC from the ground up? When creating a 22nd level NPC do you go through all 22 levels of character build using Profession skill costs??  I don’t, I just fill in stat blocks based on a general sense of power level and the narrative needs the NPC serves. Have you looked at any NPCs in MERP or Shadow World and analyzed whether the skill stats have any relation to Profession skill costs, ranks or bonuses?

My point being that “descriptors” are more useful to me than some arbitrary Profession assignment in an NPC stat block that serves no other purpose in the game mechanics. Unless PC’s know the NPC’s Profession and then make meta-gaming decisions based on that, they serve no purpose.

That means, in practice, that Professions only serve a purpose for a handful of people; the 2, 3 or even 5 players in your group. All those rules, all the arguments about skill costs and the nitpicking about whether Weather Watching should be 2/3 or 2/4 for a Animist seem complex for complexity sake.

I’m building a city in Shadow World: Nontataku.  Like any RPG city, this is an NPC intensive environment. Per RAW (RM2), I need to assign a Profession to shopkeepers, blacksmiths, porters, etc. Obviously giving them a RM Profession is absurd. Assigning a shopkeeper the Profession of “Figher, Thief or even Mage” is pointless. Some versions of RM do add non-adventure tropes as additional Professions (craftsmen, laborer and even “no-Profession”) but, for me, that is just another example of “Rule for Rules”.

For me, simple descriptors like “Shopkeeper” or “Loremaster” or “Merchant” work better than some arbitrary, and limited, Rolemaster profession.

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Seconds ticking away

Following on from my last post about movement and mounted combat I have been thinking about combat rounds.

There are three combat round lengths in the ICE world. RM2, Spacemaster and I guess RMSS use the 10 second round. RMU uses 5 second rounds and HARP uses a 2 second round.

If was obvious that the 10 second round didn’t work for modern day and Sci Fi. There is no way you can only squeeze  the trigger of a gun once every ten seconds. The fix was to introduce fire phase 1 and 2 into the standard RM2 phased combat round.

If everyone was using firearms, which was not unusual in modern settings then it left anyone who had to move wading through molasses. If you could not get from cover to cover in a single move then you would get ripped to pieces.

Splitting the round into two five second rounds does improve things slightly but there is always going to be a disparity between how long different tasks take. Picking a lock could be seen as a 10 second activity for a skilled thief but it becomes more of a stretch at 5 seconds and surely for the typical PC two seconds is not likely?

Is it better to have some actions take multiple rounds compared to some actions happening multiple times in a single round?

I think I am inclined to go for the very short round and things just take as long as they take. We are used to bows taking rounds to reload. I think those times are a little exaggerated in RM2/RMC but that is because they have been rounded to an easy number of whole rounds. I know that I can shoot five arrows in twenty seconds from a galloping horse and be on target. That does not marry up with one arrow every 2 rounds for a short bow in RM2. One arrow every two rounds in HARP is closer to my observed reality.

But lets ignore combat for a moment. A real dramatic plot device is the hero in action movies defusing the bomb with 3,2,1… seconds to go. If you are in combat time, the rest of the party are keeping the enemy at bay while you are defusing the bomb then ten second time chunks do not fit well with this staple of the action genre. If you treat bomb disposal as a static action you really want to avoid partial or near success as either of those leave you with having another go 10 seconds AFTER the bomb went off.

The more I think about this the more I think the 5 second round is not the right choice for RMU. 2 seconds is tried and tested in HARP and works without compaint. Sure it means rejigging spell casting, durations, movement and critical results (bleeding) but they are rebuilding all of RM anyway so now is the time to do it and not in a future companion as an optional rule.

What do you all think? 10, 5 or 2?

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RolemasterBlog Fanzine Issue #0005

So issue 5 is out on both RPGnow (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/220906/Rolemaster-Fanzine-Issue-0005) but more excitingly it is also on Kindle (https://www.amazon.co.uk/RolemasterBlog-Fanzine-September-2017-Issue-ebook/dp/B075D79LH7/)

I also hope that by the time you read this it is also in print on Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1549678930)


I find the simple fact that anyone can write, publish and distribute a book now in virtually no time and at virtually no expense is very democratising.

This month I am trying to train myself to try and write 2,000-3,000 words a day on RPG related stuff. The fanzine is about 7,000 words but it also includes an adventure and a monster complete with stats. These take longer than just writing an essay or prose.

My guilty pleasure is the other game I have written, 3Deep, which is also available in print on both Amazon and RPGnow. I have both books on my bookshelf and I get a lot of pleasure just to pick them up and flick through them.

We have touched on something a few times recently and that is that you cannot truly divorce setting from rules. The rules exist to bring the setting to life. My game is billed as ‘generic’ and is sold without a setting. The fact that I am one of the ones who says that you need to have setting and rules in harmony how have I squared the circle?

My core rulebook is intended to be used with a setting companion. Each setting has its own companion that not only gives background and flavour for the GM wanting to play with that genre but any necessary rule tweaks. In this way the core magic system can be tweaked to create super powers for a Marvel style game or Mental abilities for Stranger Things.

So rather than being truly generic what I have built is something I conceive to be adaptive. The rules are only half the equation. Referring back to my challenge of writing 2k-3k words a day, my core rulebook is about 26,000 words in length but by the time you add in the obligatory tables and art that turns into an 80+ page rulebook.

3,000 words a day gives me about 20,000 words a week. I have nearly finalised my page layout style by begging, borrowing and stealing from the best looking books I have seen recently. So I theory I can write an entirely supplement in a week to ten days. Give me another week to edit it and another to do the page layout and I think I can publish a 60 to 80 page companion at a rate of one a month.

To make that even more impressive is the fact that I only really write this stuff while Mrs R is watching crap on TV. She rather likes period dramas such as Poldark, The Queen and Downton Abbey as well as Strictly Come Dancing. If you are not in the UK none of those may mean anything to you but the point is that I am just making use of time I would otherwise be wasting in front of the TV.

So far I have only hit the 3k target a couple of times but it is getting easier each day to get in the writing ‘zone’ and start getting productive. This week I wrote less but I did have to read a game for a review for a different blog.

I know that none of you care about my game or my insane desire to produce supplements but this does relate back to Rolemaster as well.

As long as we steer well clear of ICEs intellectual property we can, between us, produce non canon companions. ICE are not going to support RM2 any more but we could. Our 50 adventures are one such project. Brian has a  wealth of projects on the go from adventures to SWARM to BASiL and I even tried to tempt him with another cute acronym the other day, anyone fancy an alternative to Arms Law called BAAL?

So, in theory(!) if RMU turns out to still be one to two years away, and that is entirely possible. What bits of the companions did you find the most useful?

For me it was probably new open and closed base lists for the three realms and new base lists for the core professions.

What about you?

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Assorted Musings! Rolemasterblog, Rolemaster and random topics!

So I’m heading to Spain for some vaca time but wanted to get a few blogs scheduled to post while I’m gone or getting prepped. I still have some work to do on 50 in 50 adventures so I thought I would post misc. points for thought and/or discussion. In no particular order:

  1. Noble Games has a “cloth bound” edition of Spell Law for $195 and a “leather bound” edition for $95. I have the a copy of the leather bound Rolemaster book which has SL, CL, AL. Anybody remember these Spell Law products? Did ICE do leather or cloth bound versions of other products?
  2. Why/how is the BASiL Essence Pt 1 being downloaded at a ridiculous rate? As of Thursday its averaging 50 downloads/day. It’s hard to imagine RMBlog has tapped into a secret reservoir of RM players. Some sort of ‘bot’ doing this?
  3. In reference to a recent blog post on Summoning. Peter, the idea that summoning a creature means drawing a concept or consciousness from a alternate plain that then manifests in a physical form is a powerful concept. For me it raises some setting issues: in reverse, how can players visit these alternate plains? Do they DeManifest there physical form while visiting these plains and then reconstitute upon returning? (btw: read the Punch Escrow for some thoughts on this via a technological solution).
  4. Following up on #3, we are confronted with the setting driving the spell mechanics. Yes, once RM was a bolt-on for DnD, but those days are long gone. RM needs to pick a setting (Shadow World by default given the amount of existing material) and build the rules around the physical and meta-physical world described.
  5. New games are as much about the setting that they create, or imply, than the actual game mechanics. NO ONE is really choosing RM first and then selecting a non-conforming game environment, barring an experienced minority. The new reality is that rules and setting are synonymous. Based on some ‘googling’ many RM users initially adopted RM to play MERP. Since MERP is no longer an option, my advice is to put resources into a setting and then adjust a default rule set to support it. That’s what I have done with BASiL(Brian’s Alternate Spell Law) and SWARM (Shadow World Alternate Role Master). Much of what I did with those projects was to adjust RM to integrate with Terry’s SW. Shadow World sets meta-physics for magic and death, diverges from standard RM profession standards, incoporates hi-tech, connects with Space Master etc. My theory is that creating a great adventure setting drives rule adoption. I’m not sure continually rewriting rule sets (planned obsolescence) drives new customer growth.
  6. 50 in 50 is starting soon. Many of these are simple ideas than full fledged adventures, but I’m excited that RM Blog will be publishing real content.
  7. I’m even more excited for the RM Blog 50th level adventures.
  8. One profession that really struck me when I first started with RM was the Astrologer. It was quite different than the D&D tropes we left behind, and IIRC, city maps in the early MERP products had color keyed buildings for Astrologers. I’m not sure if Astrologers fit into the Tolkien world, but by integrating them into the world build, it inferred the profession with social context. Interesting.
  9. I’ve read a lot of good blog posts about waiving the need to roll dice for simple actions as well as simplifying rules to reduce dice rolls. I agree with the former but not the latter. Players like to roll dice! They are chomping at the bit to make rolls during combat! Is that just my group?
  10. After “50 in 50” and “5 of 50” I had a few other themed adventure challenges: “5 Adventures for Evil Groups”; “5 Grand Heist Adventures”, “5 at 50′, (underwater adventures)”.
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#RPGaDAY 8th, 9th, 10th and11th

So this is my third instalment of #RPGaDAY. Most of the questions this week seem to be about different systems so it will be hard to relate them Rolemaster.

8th What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?

This depends on how you read the question. I think RM is a good candidate for this. One of the cool things about RM character sheets (booklets?) is that they hold just about everything you need to play. This is especially true if you include combat tables and spell lists in the character sheets. Bolt on things like Combat Minion and you get a game that you can get into and start playing very quickly. If you need to create characters in that 2hrs then having the first session exclusively dedicated to character creation will get all the characters made with time to spare. So my answer is RMC.

9th What is a good RPG to play for about 10 sessions?

This time I don’t think RM fits the bill. As a rule of thumb is seems that most GMs are levelling characters up every 3 sessions or so. In a mini campaign of 10 sessions that would advance the characters three or 4 levels. There is not really that much difference between a 1st and a 4th level character. At those lowest levels fighters are king and even the pure spell users have little more than shock bolt. Looking at the time, some players take forever to level up their characters so levelling up 3 times in 10 sessions takes a fairly big chunk out of your available playing time. So RM is not a good option for this particular format.

What does work well (shameless plug!) is my own game 3Deep. The game is set up for emulate TV series and episodes. With that in mine you can easily turn a 10 session mini campaign into 10 related one shot adventures and the whole into a ‘season’. Character creation is fast (roll five stats, pick a culture, spend 7 skill points and then flesh out the backstory) and there are no levels, experience is handled by improving stats and/or skills. While I am blowing my own trumpet the latest version of 3Deep will be available to buy from RPGnow and Drivethru from next week!

 

10th Where do you go for RPG reviews?

For me, my favourite RPG blog is http://www.stargazersworld.com/ which gives me a mix of reviews, news and opinion. they have a small team of bloggers and interestingly they like to experiment. Right now the blog is experimenting with being sponsored by Patreon.

11th Which ‘dead’ game would you like to see reborn?

Do games die? If that were true then there would be no RM2 players. The game is going on for 40 years old and has not had a new book published in decades and yet it is still probably the most popular version of RM there has ever been with many actives groups. Even in my previous answers I harked back to Car Wars with is a game from my youth. I honestly do not believe games die as long as people want to play them.

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If you cannot stand the heat…

A Lamprey

So far we have sent the characters up the creek without a paddle, half drowned them and made them fight under water against a new and unknown monsterous race. Today, it is apt to make their day go from bad to worse!

The river they have been careering down so far has been randomly generated and designed to make it virtually impossible to swim out of or row out of.  anyone reaching the shallows would be facing swimming rolls at something like -90 and taking krush criticals should they fail.

Now, I suggest giving them a bend in the river that has formed a bit of a calm pool. The river widens here and the rate of flow slows and the characters get a chance to reach the bank.

Finally, staggering to the bank it is time to reintroduce the Orcs that we had start this whole thing off in the first place. These have been tracking the river down stream assuming the characters will be killed in the rapids and their bodies washed up in this pool or another one further down stream. This is easy pickings for the orcs which is why they hand out near here in the first place.

This pool is also the domain of a huge lamprey. Once upon a time the orcs attacked a group of adventuring heroes just like the characters now. That party included an alchemist who was adept at making potions and the group regularly enhanced themselves with these. A perfectly normal lamprey fed off of one such magically enhanced hero and in drinking the hero’s blood also consumed a potion of Enlarge designed and dosed for a human. The same thing happened again with its second victim. The second potion was one of Extension used by the hero’s magician to extend the duration of his defensive spells. The final victim of the lamprey was the monk who had cast Strength III on himself. The combination of all this magic infused blood on the poor fish turned it into a huge monstrosity and trapped it in this pool. It now spends most of its time lurking in the mud at the bottom of the pool waiting for a victim of sufficient size to satisfy its hunger.

So returning to a current party they have just escaped or slain the freshwater merfolk and ended up in this pool where they can finally emerge from the river. As they do so they will be confronted with a band of orcs in front of them who have arrived at the same time. There should be just enough orcs that the party should not be certain of the outcome. I will not be specific as this is largely dependent on how the river run went, that could easily have broken many bones on its own and the fight against the merfolk.

The orcs know full well what lurks in the pool and will not go too close. They would prefer to use slings and spears to hold the characters off. They know full well what is coming next.

A Lamprey
Lampy The Lamprey, victim of mixing too many potions.

Warning: The image at the bottom of this post is really disturbing! It is a real, but dead, lamprey. It is just to give you a sense of how horrifying a lamprey is. That is a real one, we are dealing here with a fantasy 30′ one!

Behind the characters rising out of the water is Lampy the Lamprey. This is a 30′ long, 3′ diameter blood sucking fish.

Level 8
Base Rate 90
Max Pace/MN Bonus Run/0
Speed MS/AQ SL/SL
Size/Crit Huge/LA
Hits 90
AT (DB) 3(0)
Attacks 110 HGr 100/Special ✓ *
Enc 1
Special Attack Lampreys suck blood. If its grapple attack delivers a critical it will suck 3-30 hits of blood per round, starting the round after the critical was delivered. Ripping the lamprey off yourself or off someone else will deliver 4 ‘A’ slash criticals to the victim. Fire or eletricity may (Very Hard maneuver roll) cause the lamprey to release its prey.

So as the characters face off the orcs, out of the water behind them rises the giant lamprey intent on attacking the person most in the water. It will attempt to grapple and latch on to the victim and drag them back into the pool and down to the bottom. As soon as they are dead i.e. drained of blood it will return for the next victim.

If the body is not too laden down with equipment it will just be left to float back up. As the death is probably going to be from loss of hits if enough concussion hits can be restored before the soul departs then the character can be revived without the need for life giving. That does make it rather important to finish off the orcs quickly!

This ‘misadventure’ is a potentially interesting way of weakening a party or even bringing low a very powerful party. It is unrelenting, the river is extremely difficult to fight but can deliver real harm to the characters. The orcs are do not need to be particularly numerous or high level. Many partys will almost discount an encounter with half a dozen orcs but in this case the orcs are just the trigger at the start and by the time they are encountered at the end they may be significantly more dangerous!

The fresh water merfolk and the Lampy are not things the characters are ever likely to have met before and tucked in the middle there was a Naiad. I have given the Naiad an additional power. She can rescue some of the characters by casting waterlungs on the characters. The mechanism for doing this is actually via another of the alchemists potions. The ‘drowned’ characters will not have known this at the time but the naiad had taken a draft of the potion and delivered it using a ‘kiss of life’ type action.

The anatomy of a story metaphor that we started with was put the characters up a tree, throw stones at them and then get them down again. Over the past three posts we have done the up the tree and thrown the stones. The getting them down again is the perfect time to throw the characters an adventure hook. Right now they are God knows where, beaten and bloodied. Now is a good time to kick them into a different direction.

Scroll down for the scary Lamprey photo!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A real lamprey
A real lamprey
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But I am no mermaid

This post follows on from A River Runs Through It. We left the characters in the water in a fast flowing river, going over rapids and generally up the creek without a paddle.

I was once told the general anatomy of a story is ‘Put the hero up a tree, throw stones at him and then get him down again.’ Now it is time to throw some stones metaphorically speaking at the characters.

It is entirely possible that one or more of the characters may have drowned by this point. If you had one character go overboard early on during the river run they could have gone under and drowned long before the last character goes overboard. For now, we will let them believe they have drowned. Think of them as being unconscious rather than dead as that may have implications regarding automatic spells.

So everyone is by now in the water. Some have drowned others are keeping their head above water. We are not just going to wait for them to drown. Those that are still with us will feel something brush their legs under water. They can maybe see some massive sort of fish maybe six to eigth feet long and silver green moving deep below them. More seem to a circling and coming closer.

Let the characters worry for a couple of rounds and then have the first one feel a hand grab an ankle and drag them down. I would have a knot of the forms grab the characters attention in front while the first attack comes from below and behind!

As the character goes under they will get the first real look at what has them and it looks like merfolk! These though are bigger than your usual half man half fish types. That does depend rather on whether your characters have ever met any merfolk before.

What we have here are freshwater merfolk. These are bigger and more deadly cousins of the more common saltwater variety.

Any characters that have previously been ‘drowned’ have actually been rescued by a naiad. This water spirit has cast waterlungs on them once they were unconscious and towed them to a safe underwater cave. The naiad wants the merfolk gone from her river and the characters landing in her lap are the opportunity she has been waiting for. Once the merfold attack she will revive any unconscious ‘drowned’ people and quickly convey to them not to ask questions but go save their friends. The characters should then see the scene of the surviving characters being attacked and circled by the merfolk.

Freshwater Merfolk.

Freshwater Merfolk – Found in treacherous waterways such as rapids and below waterfalls; 6’6″–8’6″ from head to fin.
Crippling Flaw (Must totally immerse once a day in water, –10 to all activities for each missed day (at –80 a coma ensues, at –100 death occurs).

Innate Spell Caster, has the following mentalism lists to their own level. Speed (closed mentalism), Self Healing (open mentalism), Attack Avoidance (open mentalism). They gain 3PP/level.
The fair skin of a merman’s torso blends at the waist into the silver and green shimmering scales of their fish’s tail. Freshwater Merfold are very uncomfortable above water but can breath air if they must.  They are fond of sunlight and like to bask in shallow streams.

Unlike their sea born cousins they do not build manors and palaces. They are much more ‘barbaric’ by comparison. Freshwater merfold wear strings of animal skulls, bones, precious stones, or gems as raiment. Average lifespan is 30 years.

Level 6C
Base Mv 90
Max Pace Dash/+25
Speed MF/MD
Size/Crit M/-
Hits 80D
AT(DB) 1(35s)
Attacks 95 Melee/60 MCl 30
Enc 1-10
Bonus EP E
Outlook IQ Aggressive

For weapons they prefer daggers, knives, short swords and short spears. Things that do not compromise their manoeuvrability in the water or weigh them down.

Next time we will put the characters in even more trouble.

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Is Rolemaster Worth Saving?

This is a bit of a gloomy post but if you don’t like it skim down to the ‘…and finally’ which hopefully is a bit more fun!

Over the decades I have bought a great many role playing games. Many of them, or most of them, got played once and are now just on top of a wardrobe. The death blow for all of these games was either I didn’t enjoy running it or my players didn’t want to play it.

It doesn’t matter which side doesn’t want to play, if either withdraws their support the game is dead.

My first RMU play test ended when my players didn’t want to play it anymore. These are all players that have played RM2 and RMC since the early 1980s.

My second play test is going a bit better especially since I have adopted JDales new tables.

Now what happens if the RPG community treats RMU as so many of us have treated other games, that it is condemned to the top of the wardrobe? What if the existing RM community condemn RMU to the wardrobe of oblivion?

The first reaction is to say “stick to RM2/RMC/RMSS/RMFRP (delete as applicable)” but that is not going to work. If ICE is committed to RMU then there will be no more legacy publications. All the new Shadow World material will be HARP or RMU compatible. There will be no more companions and no more guild companion articles. I guestimate that 95% of all the forum discussion is about RMU in the beta boards. If you are not playing RMU then the ICE community will wither away for you.

The second option is to house rule just about everything you don’t like in RMU so you get a working system that your players will play. That fixes it for you but not for the RPG community.

This is a rather gloomy look into the future but it is a real possibility. The RM community is not big. RMSS did not convert all the RM2 players. RMFRP did not convert all the RMSS players. RMC is the most recent version of RM that you can buy and none of the RMSS and RMFRP players will have converted. Very few RM2 players have converted to RMC. It was recently revealed that the core books have only just achieved Silver status on RPGnow. What that means is that 250 copies of the core rules have been sold up until 2 weeks ago. 250 copies in 4 years is not a lot of sales!

Given the really negative impression touted online about chartmaster, rulesmaster and rollmaster any new version of RM has to overcome these prejudices and misconceptions and go on to enthuse a new generation of players. That is not going to be easy in this world of thousands of free or almost free games and in a time when OSR and simplified games are rising in popularity.

I suspect that ICE have a massive marketing challenge ahead if RMU is to be a success. Given the effort so far in getting RMU as far as beta two and the current ‘behind closed doors’ changes, I think that the greatest effort is yet to start for the RMU team.

…and finally

My adventures regardless of whether I write them for my own game or for publication always have a title. I frequently take a film title or a song title or lyric. I was on a long journey recently and one song stuck stuck in my mind. The song was Here Goes Norman by The Undertones.

My gut reaction was when hearing the song was a sort of Bates Motel style of adventure but then I thought what if Norman was the victim in the story? Think along the lines of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with the outsider vilified by the public. So with the title of There Goes Norman what adventure hook does that inspire with you?