Yesterday City of Spiders, one of the first 50in50 adventures became a Silver best selling title on Drivethrurpg.com. That is no mean feat. We still get sales of those adventure hooks most weeks. It won’t be long until we get a raft of them going silver.
I am going all out to complete outstanding projects before the end of the year. Ladt week I was working on my Wild West game. That is now ready to go to kickstarter. That is new territory for me. I gave had to pause that for a few days as jump through the legal hoops.
As I cannot go any further with DS:WW right now my attention has turned to Navigator RPG.
Navigator RPG
Since Friday I have completed the Star Knight meditations and Mystic Gifts. These replace the Telempath’s psions in Spacemaster. I have also converted all the equipment over from White Star to Nav and started building the Nav version of Arms Law. Ladt night I finished the last of the melee weapons tables. Tomorrow I start the ranged weapons which include bows, guns and energy weapons.
When I am working on projects like this they often seem really simple before I start. They then go through a phase where for everything one part I complete I notice two more sections that I need to do.
I am in that phase now but I don’t think it will be long until I am crossing things off faster than I am adding them.
As of today you can create a character using any race, culture, profession learn and use psionics and beat each other up using hand to hand combat and ranged attacks, even grenades and make maneuvers.
No one will die because there are no critical tables.
There are no spaceship rules, no monster/aliens/robots. The only healing is through gifts and meditations. There is no natural healing yet.
There is no universe either.
I am sure there is a lot more that I haven’t thought of but the current list is not overwhelming.
I am mentioning all this as I think I am only a week or so away from sharing what I have so far.
I do need some help though. See right at the bottom of this post if you are feeling creative.
City of Forgotten Heroes
I started to detail the city last month in the fanzine. The first month I did the marshes around the city, the city walls and the gate house on the causeway. This month was the library, complete with ghost book, the orchard and a new location called the architect’s tower.
In the October issue will be the palace, the cistern and Octomancer.
I think I will have completed the entire RMu adventure path before the end of the year. I estimate the entire thing will take characters from creation to 12th/14th level.
I mention this because I am aware that sometimes I can seem really enthusiastic about something and then it disappears from view. I don’t just drop things, it is just that actually doing the hard bit of writing it all up isn’t very exciting and having a monthly publishing schedule means that nothing moves quickly.
Amusingly, I don’t know what the end of the adventure path is. I am not entirely sure how to get from the past bit I have written and the point where the characters save their world and defeat the BBEG.
I am sure it will come to me. I have 7 weeks to think of it and get the characters from where they are to where they need to be in time from the final climax in December.
I wonder if I will complete the adventure path before RMu is released? It is supposed to be in Nicholas’s editing queue now. How long will that take and the same goes for art commissioning and layout.
On September 22nd there are 100 days of 2019 left and we were promised RMu in 2019.
Help
What I could do with is a bit of help coming up with witty and graphic critical descriptions.
At the moment I have need of the following critical tables. Puncture, Slash, Krush, Fire, Unbalance and Impact. I would really appreciate some suggestions for the criticals. There are 120 entries on a critical table and I have six to do giving 720 lines to come up with.
All help will be greatly appreciated. Just comment below.
I’m not sure it’s fair to saw we were ‘promised’ RMu this year, but I do hope they are able to get it out.
I would love to see a preview of an attack chart!
I’m trying not to take on any new projects though because I have a heavy teaching semester. I see that you put the ‘Hurin’s RMU Houserules’ section up there; thanks so much for that! That is going to be my project then, to get all my rules up over the next few weeks.
White Star, the source material, only has 3 armour types, 4 if you count no armour. These equate to the RMu armour types for greaves etc, light, medium and heavy. Consequently the basic attack charts only have 4 columns. No armour, light…
They look very like the MERP attack tables BUT every weapon has a unique attack table and I am not using the compressed critical tables where you added up to +20 for an E critical. In those the same critical come around too often.
What I am after is functional attack tables. I have set everything up so that this is an extremely basic version of a Spacemaster style game but it is also a framework from which absolutely anyone can expand and drop in optional rules. The game will be released under Creative Commons giving free rein to all comers.
I have a skill system and rules for creating new skills and how to cost them. I have character species and rules for how to create them. The same goes for cultures and professions. I am hoping that people will create the level of detail and crunch that they like but will also share their innovations.
You will see that there are quite a few bits of suggestions from the forums. Where it seemed like a good idea but there was a lot of pushback from JDale and the Devs, such as your free move and AP for movement, I have stolen that idea and incorporated it because I thought it was right. I am not sure how many of your ideas may have creeped into the game, your smoothed skill costs are in here.
I have not included Dodge, Evade, Footwork and Running but as I said you can add any skill you like.
Nicholas’s words were…
2019
One way or another, we are going to bring RMU to a resolution this year.
Ok, that does sound closer to a promise than I remember! I stand corrected.
you can condense the critical tables to 1/3, if you bell-curve them into: 01-25, 26-48, 49-68, 69-82, 83-91, 92-96, 97-99, 00 = 8 slots x (A,B,C,D,E) = 40 entries
you could even condense each critical table to 8 entries by using A: 2 slots down, B: 1 slot down, C: rolled slot, D: 1 slot up, E: 2 slots up.
I did consider this but 40 x 6 tables is 240 entries compared to 720 isn’t a massive leap.
I think compressed tables turn up too many similar results in the same combat.
I would rather struggle with building the more granular tables.
I’d love to help, but I’m neck-deep in working on my own revised crit tables as well as HtH stuff. Since I decided to go my own way, I’ve had to redo the crit tables for the most part. This has turned out to be a “good thing,” since the RM model (especially as it changed in RMU) really doesn’t work well for firearms. Redoing the other stuff is time-consuming, but I’m also finding ways to do things that fit much better with the model I’m after.
One thing I learned from Sea Law is many crits are actually portable and reusable. I’d honestly say you need maybe three basic tables and then you can modify those to fit the other three. Impact and Unbalance can be fairly similar, for example. Once you get the basic framework in it goes fairly quickly.
Yes, I think you are right. A result that is a 60 on an A critical could be a 40 on a C and a 20 on an E.
Did you take our advice and get your Publisher account set up on DTRPG already?
I have. And if you think crits are hard, grinding through new attack tables is worse… Luckily I’ve cut down to roughly four armor types (clothes plus three recognized categories for body armor), so that makes less work. Still…
I have developed what I am starting to think of as a ‘salt and pepper’ method. I spend a couple of hours analysing existing critical tables and arriving at probabilities for hits, stuns, bleeds, penalties, special effects like death and dismemberment and hit locations. I can then generate a full table at the click of a mouse. I can then retrofit witty comments into a fully populated table.
My combat tables were all generated by spreadsheet using formula as well. They may not be perfect but they are certainly unbiased.
My ‘business model’ for this game is very much that I will provide a playable, but basic game plus the tools to build as much crunch as you want.
Other people can produce books of species, talents, cultures, professions, skills, weapons and critical tables to their heart’s content.
The Creative Commons license gives them unfettered access to the system. I have also produced a style book so people can emulate the look and feel of the game across all books.
The playtest will be fully public, nothing will be behind closed doors.
As you know I do firearms damage based on a precise formula, so the variable is really just where I want damage to begin and how to deal with that. Damage reductions based on armor type are done using existing ballistic information from the standardized rating system, so it’s also pretty non biased.
What takes time is the HTH and melee stuff. RM never seemed to have an actual formula for its stuff (stemming, I suspect, from the broken “flurry of blows” model), so I’m sort of starting over there.
I wonder if it might be easier to build one “master list” of criticals, then tweak that list for each type. So you have, say, damage to an eye. For a slash, it would be slice across the target’s face and eye, for puncture, popping the eye like a balloon, krush would be smashing the eye socket and fire melting the eye. Not sure what unbalance would be on that though.
I want to keep the critical tables as recognisably Rolemaster or more accurately Spacemaster as possible. I think that they are one of the most iconic parts to the game system. Also in my research for this the full A-E critical tables are the thing that HARP players most wish that HARP had from RM. On the other hand scaleable spells are the one thing in HARP the RM players look upon and think wouldn’t that be good. As White Star had discreet spells and is based upon vancian magic where Spacemaster was much more mana meter. No one admires HARP’s condensed combat tables.
I wrote nearly 30 criticals last night. They are not difficult or time consuming but neither are they exciting. The next time I am going to get to spend time on this will be tomorrow night. It would be good if I could get at least one complete critical table written.
I am not good at grinding through lists. I get bored easily. Last night I was alone in the house as Mrs R went to see Blinded by the Light. I managed to bring over/create/edit healing and experience points and leveling up in addition to writing the first criticals.