New Wandering Monster Podcast: Rolemaster Fantasy RPG

 It can be heard here.

Magic Item of the Week: Hammer of the Thunderbolt's Wrath

For Rolemaster FRP or RMSS

Hammer of the Thunderbolt's Wrath: +20 war hammer with thrown ranges of 1'-60' (-20) 61'-75' (-40) and 76'-100' (-60). When thrown it returns to its user from up to 300' away. In melee it uses the war hammer table but when thrown it uses the war mattock table for damage. Against all giants it does slaying criticals. When thrown it emits the sound of a thunderclap and does an unbalance critical of the same severity as any other critical done (30^th level weapon).

These hammers are heavy and require great stamina to use;the user must be at least 6' 0” tall (a creature shorter than this has a -15 OB and cannot throw it), weigh at least 195 lbs (a creature lighter than this has a -20 OB penalty and cannot throw it), and have a total Strength bonus of +10 or more (natural or with magical aid) (-5 OB penalty per point of St bonus under 10 and cannot throw it). All penalties are cumulative, so a 5'10”, 170 lbs creature with an St bonus of 0 would be unable to throw it and suffer a total -85 OB. In melee using a Hammer of the Thunderbolt's Wrath is twice as tiring as normal (1 exhaustion point per round) and throwing it requires prodigious stamina (5 exhaustion points per throw).

Play Report: First Session in Whiteford

  The world building was summed up or linked.

Characters
Jack played Flavius, a 3rd level Cleric from a mariner culture.
Sam played Harald, a 3rd level Warrior Monk from the Patchwork Lands.
Nick played Butters, a 3rd level Dabbler from the Patchwork Lands.

Worldbuilding: More Details of Whiteford

Continuing from here.

Patchwork Lands: Whiteford Town

Population: Humans: ~1,100 (about 185 households)

Dwarves: ~120 (about 30 households)

Halflings: ~60 (about 10 households)

Elves: ~20 (about 7 households)

Worldbuilding: Whiteford town in the Patchwork Lands

I have been slowly building up a Rolemaster campaign setting for some time. The players are making characters, so I am drilling down to a specific starting point.

Worldbuilding Afternoon

Taking a long weekend off and had 3 hours free so I cranked out a few things: three villains for my street-level Champions game; more work on the sector map for my Traveller setting; an adventure for my Seaward campaign; and some details for my Rolemaster setting. I only had an hour for Rolemaster, so I apologize for how raw it is:

Worldbuilding: The Rhythm of the Year

  This time of year can be tough for my family for reasons that will seem a little odd to most people.
  It is because of the calendar.
  You see, to us it is not the Christmas Season, it is Advent. We don't put up ornaments or lights or a tree until December 24th. Then we go to the Vigil Mass for Christmas. Then the Christmas season starts and we celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas until Epiphany, then we take down the tree but leave up the lights until the Christmas season ends with Candlemas on February 2nd. I finally take down the lights on February 3rd.
  Why?
  We're Catholics with traditions from the Old World.
  In the liturgical calendar the beginning of the new year (for the Church) is the beginning of Advent. Advent begins on the Sunday closest to St. Andrew's Day (November 30th) which is the 4th Sunday before Christmas, of course. Advent is traditionally a time of penance and fasting in preparation for Christmas, almost a sad time as we reflect on why Christ had to manifest. Once Christmas actually arrives then we celebrate, decorate, and play Christmas music.
  Why is this hard? Look around! For almost everyone else the Christmas music starts the afternoon of Thanksgiving, the tree and lights go up the weekend of Thanksgiving. The music stops on December 26th and the tree and lights come down around New Year's, if not before.

  No, this is not about me telling you that you are doing Christmas wrong. You aren't. You just have a different calendar.

Rolemaster Unified Playtest Report: Skills Check

  Recently I ran the party through a short adventure to check the use of skills in RMU. The party:
  [All 4th level one-shots]
  JR - Rogue
  AJ - Thief
  ST - Paladin
  NH - Ranger

  The scenario was very cookie-cutter because - playtest. Villagers were asking for help because locals were vanishing near the stone circle atop a mound deep in the woods. I set it up to require a lot of tracking, searching, stalking, hiding, opening locks, reading old documents in foreign languages, Lore checks, etc. There was enough combat (mainly created undead and a low-level evil Channeler) to keep it interesting.
  We also used the newer version of initiative from the ICE Forums (thanks to the forum members for all their help!).

  Feedback-
  JR - "Using skills was smooth, intuitive, and didn't break the flow of narrative. The newer initiative system was much better. With the open structure I can also see collaborating with the GM to make "new" skills, too, without wrecking balance."
  AJ - "I didn't spend any time at all 'looking at the sheet for the solution': I wanted to sneak up on a guy; I rolled; we moved on. Easy."
  ST - "I agree with AJ - this didn't turn into 'something on your character sheet solves the problem'. With maneuver rolls and such it was very easy to just say 'I do x' and resolve it quickly."
  NH - "Rolemaster was always my favorite version of 'RPG with skills' and RMU is solid in how it presents them."
  Me - With a quick GM screen I threw together in 20 minutes it was easy as pie to resolve combat plus maneuver plus skill usages at once. The flow was smooth and the pace was fast. Loved it.

Rolemaster Unified Beta Playtest: Profession - the Astrologer

  Back in the day when I was playing Rolemaster twice a month, I played an Astrologer. To me, the Astrologer is a good example of everything good about Rolemaster. Let me explain.
  The Astrologer is a hybrid spellcaster mixing Channeling (what Clerics use) and Mentalism (sorta' like psionics). So it is, in a way a multi-class cleric/psionicist for magic-user/cleric. Another hybrid Channelling/Mentalism class is the Healer.
  The Astrologer has some great 'base spells' (or 'primary class spells') that allow them to communicate over vast distances, use some precognition, do a lot of cool tricks with lights, etc. This makes them an interesting mix of diviner and minor illusionist. They can also throw in a broad range of minor healing spells, invisibility, etc.
  But very few attack spells. They also couldn't wear a lot of armor and they could, potentially, be OK in combat with a single weapon. Maybe.

  But everyone in the party wanted the Astrologer along. In addition to being a decent backup healer he was also really good at things like 'no, there is a troll that way' and 'that stair leads back to the surface' and 'don't touch that, it is cursed'. And the Far Voice spells were great for talking between people hundreds of miles away, Really Big Deal in any pseudo-medieval setting!

  The Rolemaster Unified playtest is a ton of fun and we re enjoying it immensely. But since it is a playtest they are sticking to the core professions. So - I made my own RMU version of the Astrologer:

  This is a bare bones version, but complete enough to play in the playtest!

  Anyone have their own favorite profession they;d like to see return?

Rolemaster Unified Playtest: First Session

  Today was a brief (3 hour) playtest of the new Rolemaster Unified. The focus was on a quick, simple combat encounter with travel, etc.

Players and Characters:
All are 4th level, made as Legendary.
My Wife: Melinda Rosybranch, halfling (sylvan) Rogue
        Focused on stealth and ambush with locks and traps
        25 year veteran of RPGs, never played any Rolemaster before.
Oldest Son: Timorbatar 'Timor' Khalyn'Ku, human (nomad) fighter
        Horse archer focus with spear and dagger
        All the boys played 6 sessions of FMFRP with me 3 years ago. All are very familiar with all versions of D&D, HERO system, and many more.
Second Son: Shin, human (highlands) Cleric
        Broad mix of spells with good medicine and herbalism skills
Third Son: Ingmar, human (urban) Magent
        Built as a crossbow sniper and con man
Fourth Son: Fen Chang, human (highlands) Magician
        An eclectic scholar and good combat spell caster

Rolemaster Beta Playtest - Resources: Character Quick Reference

Although not a full Character Sheet, this is a solid reference.

Rolemaster Beta Playtest - Resources: GM Screen

  As I prepare for the playtest I put together a GM Screen designed to fit the Savage Worlds GM screen. I also have a 'handout' of other charts,too.

Rolemaster Unified Playtest. Character Creation is starting

As we prepare for out Rolemaster Unified personal public playtest the kids have so far created [we are starting at 4th level]:
 Names may change before sit down.

Oldest son: 'Tomorbatar KhadynKu', a nomad from the Grass Sea. Fighter. Uses Spear/Lance, Composite Short Bow, and Dagger. Focusing on Riding and Mounted Combat as his main skills.
Background - born and raised in the vast plains called the Sea of Grass that the equivalent of all of Asia, Tomorbatar [or just Tomor] is from a family of leaders amongst his people. As many young men from his people do, he left the yurts as a teen to travel with friends to the Cities and earned gold and scars guarding caravans. During a raid by the Grey Orcs he was separated and forced to ride West, eventually riding on out of curiosity. He has reached the Patchwork Lands and hopes to find more than gold - perhaps a land for his people to trade with. Or plunder.
  While he seems rather a straightforward hack and slash fighter, he is more subtle than he appears. He learned to outwit other tribes, the wily Goblins of the ravines, and the merchants trying to fleece young men from the plains. He plays a very convincing 'dim witted, uneducated barbarian' while seeing and hearing everything around him.

Third Son: 'Guarin', a thief from Ravensport. Thief. Uses daggers. Focusing on the core thief abilities and social skills. Guarin is from a family of thieves. His grandfather was a pickpocket, his grandmother an expert at sweating and clipping coins. His mother, who was run out of a decent, if poor, family for associating with his father was a con woman of the first water who specialized in rolling drunks while his dad was a second storey man. His uncle was one of the best box men in the business and his older brother branched out into smuggling. In the meantime all his paternal cousins were in protection, gambling, loansharking, and blackmail.
  Guarin started at the age of 6 helping his cousin as a beggar (he played her poor, blind son) and graduated to beggar/lookout by 8. He went on to work short and long cons, work as distraction on snatch jobs, and a touch of smuggling.
  But he wanted more than to be just another member of the family living in the same quarter of Ravensport doing the same things. So on a smuggling run he hooked up with another group of smugglers, then a greay market merchant, then just kept traveling. He is hoping to find something he can use his skills with that can fill him with pride and that other people, decent people, will admire.
  While he is very genuinely a nice, charming young man his instincts and training are always there. People that meet him tend to share this experience - he is funny, charming, and a great companion. He pours wine for all as he tells stories ranging from hilarious to gripping. He recommends the very best food and shares bites of his dish with all so they can also enjoy it. He dances a jig, teaches new drinking songs, and gives excellent advice. Then he begs off, bids everyone well, and leaves - the bill, for everyone else to pay. In the morning he is off to another town.

More to come

Building a World: The Regional Map

  This is the result of a bit of doodling on Hexographer. Each hex = 9 miles/3 leages.

  Sidenote: If Hexographer had existed in 1980 - 1995 it would have had an additional 4 hours of life a week. Or a lot more maps

  I haven't done any smoothing nor added any towns, cities, etc. Or roads.
  My dear wife, whose marine biology studies in college involved a LOT of work in marshes, likes the swamps, etc.

Next time - world maps!

Building a World, Nuts and Bolts: The Patchwork Lands

 Part I of my series on how I am creating a new campaign world is here.

  So now that a broad sketch of world history is done, the core ideas of the world are gelled, the races and professions are in place, and the concepts of the primary adventuring region are in place (as discussed in part I) It is time to get to adding in the details that make place memorable.

 One thing I like to do is make a few memorable geographic features so that I have some places to mention in everything from my narratives to the contents of old books. I do this on a macro scale (the entire world) and a local scale (the regional area of the campaign).
  So I glance through the broad outline of history I made and note that the original home of the first High Men was lost when a magical/something cataclysm sank an entire continent.
  Why an Atlantis? because I have never, ever done one before. Heck, there is a Lemuria, too.
  But instead of having the entire thing be lost and the very idea be mythical I placed an island, an Ireland-sized one, in the midst of that vast ocean I mentioned previously. The tallest peak of that drowned continent became this island and it is still occupied by the last descendants of the first High Men.
 
  I wanted to have a 'weird place', a nexus for the strange and unusual so I placed a large plateau in a distant mountain range, wrote up some basics on the strangeness that congregates there, and dubbed it 'the Plain of Glittering Lights'. I will later put something relatively plot-important (a magical academy, library with rare tomes, lost city, etc.) on or near the Plain to entice players to risk a trip there.
  The main campaign area will be on the western edge of a cluster of three continents and (mentioned in part I) I want the eastern edge of this cluster to be dangerous enough to almost force the players West.
  Why, you ask? To make places like the Plain of Glittering Lights more remote and legendary! Doing it this way will make it easier/more explainable why low-level parties stay within the campaign area while high-level parties travel more freely.
  I have the continent holding the campaign area come very close to the next continent - few miles, at one point. Then I flank this narrow strait with large volcanoes and call it the Gates of Fire. I additionally call the oceans around this area the Hot Sea and describe how underwater magma and hot springs make the ocean almost boiling hot.
  The next continent south of these is mainly jungle, swamps, and mountains. In addition to giving me a great place to place lost cities of the jungle I also put a lot of Orcs with ships along the coast, meaning that sailing anywhere near is dangerous. This Corsair Coast will be dangerous at low levels, a great source of adventures at medium levels, and a nuisance at high levels.
  Maybe one more big place. one more location or thing that the entire world would know of.
  I am a big fan of Clark Ashton Smith and recall his short story, the Isle of the Torturers as being wonderfully atmospheric. So, well East of the main campaign areas (and the barrier I placed, above, I put the Isle of the Sorcerers.
  If you aren't aware, in Rolemaster the Sorcerer class is infamous for spells like, oh, Break Limb and Long Soul Destruction, so they aren't pleasant, in general.
 
  So with just a bit of thought I have a handful of Big Name locations that serve and both plot elements and something for the players to remember ('Isle of the Sorcerers' is a lot more memorable than 'that distant archipelago with one large island').

  Next: closer to home base

Building a World, the Big Ideas: The Patchwork Lands

  If you don't already know this, I have 5 sons. 4 of them are old enough to play RPGs and, for some odd reason, they love 'em.
  I know - weird.
  Anyway, for many years I talked about how much I enjoy Rolemaster so, about 4 years ago, the 5 of us started acquiring Rolemaster FRPG and we soon had, essentially, All The Books. The kids read the rules, the kids love the rules, so - time for a game or two!
  They liked actually playing, so it was time for a decision:

  Place the adventures in either Blackstone (my 8 year old AD&D 2e campaign world) or Seaward (my 35+ year old AD&D 1e campaign)?
  or
  Use an packaged campaign world made for Rolemaster?
  or
  Just sort of let a campaign world grow from the bottom up as we play?
  or
  Engage in a bit of world building?

  I chose world building!
  For those of you who don't know, Rolemaster has a lot of classes, a lot of skills (especially RMFRPG), a lot of types of magic, and a lot of races and cultures. While this means there is a great deal of flexibility in what you can put into a world it threatens analysis paralysis - so many choices you never choose. To overcome this I decided to do a high-level description of the world, pick an overall tone, throw in a "shocking" concept critical to the world and its development, and limit the classes and races a bit as first steps.

**Spoilers Follow - Players in my campaign should stop now!**

  I mean it, kids!

  So I started by limiting playable races to dwarf, halfling, elves (wood, grey, high), half-orc, half-elf, and human (common, high, and mixed) (all cultures from the core book and Character Law).

  NPC races I limited to all listed as Subterranean, the Orloc, and the Quishad. The Fey also exist. So gnomes, kobolds, orcs, etc. are out there but no lionmen, wolfmen, reptilemen, etc. as full blown races. Hidden pockets of them may lurk about, but they are going to be mythical/legendary at best.
  I'll admit: I didn't limit classes very much at all! I mainly kept the semi-spell users and hybrid magic users to the 'most common'.

  For overall tone I wanted to whipsaw around a bit. As I have mentioned before Blackstone has a 'manifest destiny' feel to it with the players in a powerful Human kingdom as it starts expanding against neighboring evil nations. Seaward is largely a 'frontier outpost' setting with the characters in a small, remote kingdom trying to defend the innocent from marauders. So I want the new campaign to not look too much like either but have plenty of room to adventure.
  I decided the PC-level setting will look like the Italian City-States - many small nations, in relatively close proximity, with intrigue, politics, and such but also a wide mix of cultures, plenty of chances to travel, and the like. As i sketched out what the local map would look like (which includes enough mountains, thick forests, etc. for plenty of monsters!) I decided on the name the Patchwork Lands for both the regional map and the campaign.
  But I also decided that the overall setting is going to be much more of a 'Lost Ages Past' world, hopefully evoking an overall aura akin to Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique Cycle. So I wanted everything to have a feeling of being very, very old and of the world being very, very big.

  To start with, I made the planet physically huge - double the Earth's diameter, as a matter of fact. Gravity will be the same (well; the creatures that live there all act normally, how's that?) because I'll-figure-that-out-as-I-go/magic. The world map clusters a few continents together and then has three more scattered about. The continental cluster will be Very Dangerous on its east and have a vast ocean (as in '20,000 miles across at its widest' vast) to its west, creating a situation where the scattered continents are 'lost in legend' distant from the campaign center.

  The 'feeling old' part is tough, so I shelved it for a few - along with the 'shocking concept' because nothing had hit me as of yet.

  So I had very rough sketches of a world map and a regional map, a gigantic world, and a desire for things to have the weight of ages upon them. Looking at the races I noted that several (elves, orlocs, quishadi, black orcs) are immortal and some (notably high men) live a very long time. There was a not in the Creatures book that orlocs 'existed in the long ages before men' and 'created the quishad' at which point I had an idea that led to the shocking concept (well - two related concepts).

  I started blocking in a long history covering more than 300 million years (most of it in very broad strokes, obviously). but throughout the history the world is marked with the appearance of new, intelligent races and with some of these races suddenly becoming immortal or (in one case) very long-lived. Each race that becomes immortal faces an inevitable decline.
  This is one of the two shocking concepts - virtually all of the intelligence races on the world are from elsewhere, mainly arriving from other worlds via space travel, some created by science or magic. The orloc, for example, came in a colony ship. The elves from a scout ship, the humans from a heavily-damaged ship that had a  jump drive malfunction (a ship that is still in orbit!). Dwarves from a parallel dimension, etc.
Halflings are the result of scientific experiments on humans, orcs the result of magic experiments gone wrong by elves.

  The other concept - this large, old, odd planet attracts these visitors, draws them in because of the powers and spells of the vastly old, almost completely forgotten natives of the world, the super-intelligent reptile-men that ruled the world for half a billion years before vanishing two full Ice Ages ago. Facing a world of no offspring they struck a foul pact for immortality, unaware that the cost was a loss of their essential racial vitality.
  The races that learn of the reptile-men are drawn to their centers of power and allowed to bargain for favors. Creating bargains similar to the very one they, themselves, made the reptile-men offer gifts, knowledge and, eventually, immortality.
  Those races that choose immortality give up some little part of their species' long-term vigor to the reptile-men. The humans that became high men were suspicious and 'just' took long lives, limiting the damage. Eventually, over eons, the reptile-men will have enough of whatever it is that they are gathering to return to their world full of the vigor they, themselves, traded for immortality all those hundreds of millions of years before.

  This 'backdrop' allows me to explain the rise and fall of races and empires, have a sort of 'hidden threat' lurking about, provides a secret history of the world, makes the world pretty creepy underneath the surface, and certainly makes it feel very old when I think and talk about it.

  Now that the Big Ideas and a framework of history was in place, time for more detail, which will be my next post.