the journey continues…
While parsing and developing rules is exciting, RM seems to have less game/adventure content than other systems. That’s where I want to put my focus on for 2019. Peter, Adrian and I have a great concept for the next iteration of the 50 Adventures in 50 Weeks for basic d100 applications–hopefully we can finalize and announce those plans shortly. In the meantime I’m still 3 adventures short of my 25 total for the 50in50! I’ve submitted 1 and working on the last two. I’ve also been slow on the remaining chapters of my “Legends of Shadow World” high level adventure. My group never played more than 1 iteration of the last two chapters, but they are pretty fluid and I should have them out here on on the RM Forums this winter. Finally, I hoping that a new artistic break-through will help me finalize the Empire of the Black Dragon. Like Priest-King of Shade, this will be put out as a free download in a rough draft format. My goal now is to get things out there and then maybe, one day, ICE will decide to polish them up, add new content and officially publish them. Until that day comes I want to wrap long gestating or languishing products before I get too old, too tired or distracted by real life.
There’s no “seems” about it…RM in any incarnation has always lacked adventure support when compared to almost any other major RPG from the same era. If you take out MERP there are only a handful of products, and very few of them could be considered introductory or low-level friendly. This becomes doubly true with the source books, and SM also lacked solid adventure support.
As for me, I’ll likely fade away working on the modern, non-fantasy stuff. I’m too firmly in the simulationist camp to fit in well with the general line, and the stuff I’m working on doesn’t fit well, either. Hopefully your adventure hooks and free downloads will help get a new wave of gamers into RM in whatever iteration they use, and actually give them tools to see how the system works.
It looks like Priest-King is finally moving again according to the latest Director’s Briefing.
Yes, I did mention Priest King in a thread on the Forums and how badly Brian had been treated. Maybe I am putting 2 and 2 together to make 5 but it seemed a bit of a coincidence to me.
Mind you the current ICE cannot afford to get tarnished with the same ‘not paying freelancers’ brush of the previous incarnations.
In my book accepting a proposal and letting the freelancer do all the work and then turning your back on them is the same as not paying them. Brian could not self publish Priest King because of all the Shadow World content and ICE were not taking it forward so he could not get any royalty payments so basically he was being frozen out.
Yes, the timing is rather coincidental, especially as Brian has released Priest-King as a free supplement now which means ICE are not earning a penny from it.
Paying freelancers is vital but, if you pay them a percentage of each sale rather than a fixed fee, then as long as you sell through OBS that is all handled automatically. As soon as you go off OBS it becomes a bigger problem; I’ll need to work out how to handle that from a bookkeeping point of view, probably next year.
Just noticed something I missed the first time I read the briefing; Nicholas says that they are in discussion with potential licensees.
Yes, that is very strange. My first thought was that the Spanish language version would sit right alongside the German translation that is already available.
Then I thought about the practicalities of this. The whole point of RMU was that ICE could not or did not want to support multiple versions of Rolemaster. So when RMU does live the RM2 and RMSS product lines will be retired.
If you licensed the existing catalogue to translate it you would logically want access to the new edition when it comes available. If the singularity is imminent then spending money, or even just time, translating books about to be withdrawn makes no sense.
So either the singularity is really imminent or it is a long way off. From the tone of the briefing I guess it is a long way off.
Although perhaps it’s only HARP that they’re licensing. Maybe we should inquire about HARP.
That is certainly a viable idea.
I’m not sure if congratulations are the right word, but in any case, yay for Brian! I am glad it is going ahead.