Riding the Storm Out

I recently picked up Stormbringer 4th and 5th editions.

I really like both of these games and I might spend a couple of posts discussing various topics related to them.

I think there are two primary aspects of the game that drew me to it:

1. There are no "character levels". I also like that in the BRP based 5th edition there are no "classes". I really like rolemaster but at the end of the day it is a D&D game with class and level and a huge number of options thrown in for crunch. The magic system and combat system have been changed and you have skills, but you still gain experience points for stuff and you still go up levels and have classes. I really wanted to see if you could play a fantsay RPG without the exp, class, and level systems.

2. The chaosium d100 system is similar to Rolemaster in that your character may grow more powerful, acquiring more magic and skills, but they still can be killed relatively easy with a single (or several) hit. The stormbringer setting brings in a random die for armor level into the runequest system and I think that is a brilliant piece that adds tension to the game. In addition the major wounds section brings realistic "critical" type hits to the game. I've tried adding critical hit tables with detailed wounds to D&D in the past. However, I always felt that it changed the game from being D&D to something else and my players always hated me for it.

I've read both the 4th and 5th editions over at least in part and there are things about each that I'm really loving and some things that I'm not sure would play out well in the type of RPG I'd like to GM.

D100 Gaming

I've been pretty silent on this blog for about 1-2 months now. I had a wicked bout of migraine headaches that forced me to limit my computer usage. Since I'm not sure I'm completely over it I'll make this quick.

While I have been away from the computer I did get an amazon gift card a present... I made pretty good work of it scoring:

Rolemaster Express (love this book!)

Chaosium BRP hardcover
Stormbringer 4th Edition
Glorantha 2nd Age
Call of Cthulhu 5th Edition Rulebook

Yes that's right, lots of d100 gaming goodness!

I've been reading them over and when time permits I plan to review some of this stuff. The Chaosium skill based system has me the most interested. It really works for Call of Cthulhu - I've been playing the PBEM game with Daddy G, DungeonMum, and O4E for a while now and it runs smoothly for that style game. The question is can it correctly handle all the other genre that it advertises in the BRP book. I like that it has so many options that can be brought in and out of any campaign yet the core is straightforward and simple.

Well, that is all for now, hopefully my head will stop this nonsense and I can cover some of this game material in better detail.

Fighting back the Gamer ADD

I was talking to my players this week and they really asked me to fight back the Gamer ADD. They had a real blast playing in Mystara and running through Castle Amber and they would like to keep these characters for a while yet. One of the players is lamenting that he has never had a PC make it to over 10th level and would like to try making it there with his wizard character in this game.

I told them that I have a group of adventures that I've been buying up that should get them up to at least 10th level and maybe beyond.

I'm thinking to run them through a heavily modified Master of the Desert Nomads (which could have a massive detour to the moon if the players play things right), followed by the Temple of Death adventure. That alone should get them up to about 8-10th level.

Then I'd like to use one of these three products that I got off Ebay:

Isle of Dread (maybe I could beef it up a bit for high level PC's, add some kind of twist?)

Empire of Dawn boxed set (I'd like to take my PC's to Alphatia and have some cool mid-air battles among the ramparts of flying castles).

Hollow World Boxed set ( I got this whole boxed set for free, the guy threw it in with another product that I purchased, I think it is pretty neat, and the altered game physics with the magic and stuff could throw off my players in a fun way).

Does anybody that reads this blog have any other ideas for really good 8-12th level adventures?

After some greater than 10th level play, I want to reboot our campaign and have the guys start brand new PC's at low levels. I'd like to run in forgotten realms. However, I would also really like to run Rolemaster - my series on running Forgotten Realms and Rolemaster together probably all ready showed what I'm thinking about. However, my players are really loving the stripped down aspect of Basic DnD and I'm not sure if they are ready for anything close to Rolemaster. They are asking me to "quit it" with the changing game systems each week stuff. It is hard, most of the time I feel like this guy...

Rolemaster Customization of FR Deities&Clerics

I went through the major deities that usually crop up as PC clerics and NPC clerics in my games and customized them such that each one would have spell lists to choose from that represented the deities well:

Lathander: Clerics and Paladins gain Light's Way as a Base list, Summons is considered closed for them.

Mystra: revered by Magicians and Sorcerers (who gain their channeling power from her). True clerics of Mystra are mysterious and rare, and their powers are currently unknown.

Oghma: Priests of oghma gain Past Visions and Lores as Base Lists. They lose Summons and Repulsions. They focus on Linguistics, Runes, Mathematics, and star gazing as secondary skills.

Shar: She loses lights way, weather way ,calm spirits, life mastery, repulsions, but gains Curses, Darkness (from Evil Magician list), and Dark Channels as Base Lists. Seduction and subduing are important skills for clerics of Shar.

Silvanus/Chauntea - their clerics are Animists and Rangers.

Talos: Clerics gain weather ways (Lightning Bolt I from Light Law is added to the Weather Ways at the 9th level slot, and Lightning Bolt II is added at 17th level, the GM could give Talos clerics access to higher level Lightning bolts at even higher levels). They also gain Dark Channels, but lose life master, and repulsions.

Tempus: gain the typical cleric list, but gains the Mind over Matter (+25 to Adrenal Moves) during combat. I thought about giving them an option to be berserkers but I never liked that in 2eAD&D so I didn't add that. I might let clerics of Tempus have a little lower weapon skill acquisition costs to reflect the militant nature of the order.

Clerics of Tyr and Torm are as found in Character Law and Spell Law.
Clerics of Helm and Ilmater are also unadjusted. - all of these clerics have summoning but can only summon good aligned creatures (no demons).

Clerics of Mielikki are rangers - rangers will have quite a few deities to choose from.

Clerics and Animists of Selune are unadjusted on their spell lists, however all of them are affected by Lycanthropy from the Creatures and Treasures book. They also focus on star gazing/ moon cycle knowledge as secondary skills.

Priests of Tymora are unadjusted in regards to their spell lists but all have the Lucky advantage (they may adjust any roll affecting them per day by +10/-10). Tymora also frowns on her clerics summoning demons - so her clerics should veer away from that ave.

"Clerics" of Mask are usually PC thieves who select the Channeling focus and gain their channeling spells from Mask. There are also reports of some "chosen" of Mask that are actually clerics with good thieving skills - they are extremely rare and their exact skills are unknown.

Clerics of Llira/Milil loose the summoning spell list, and gain Controlling Songs; additionally they focus on dance, singing, seduction, drama, and other crafts and musical skills.

Clerics of Umberlee gain Water Law(magician list), but lose the repulsion, and calm spirits lists. They tend to have good ability in swimming, navigation, rowing, sailing, diving, etc...

This is my list so far... I have kept most of the "evil" lists a secret for two reasons. No use letting my PC's know exactly what I have in store for them.

Another thing I'm going to have to deal with is the rolemaster rules for clerics/paladins and metal armor...

Men of Forgotten Realms Rolemaster Style

Since my last post on combining Forgotten Realms with Rolemaster I purchased the Rolemaster Companion I - it has various races of men and like 6 varieties of half-elves which I found excessive, but it also had a paladin class that seems pretty good.

From this I decided to go with:

Men of the Savage North: The lands around and above Icewind Dale have a group of men who fit along with the same line of "proud, well built, tall, and blonde peoples of the north" from pg 45-46 of the RC1. For PC's who would like to use an even more barbaric stock of man, such as the Uthgardt barbarian tribes, I would have them use the Bear Tribes from pg45-46 of RC1. Obviously, PC's could use the same two categories of men for the eastern northern areas such as The Ride.

Men of the Heartlands: I'm going to split up the men from the heartlands of forgotten realms into two flavors - Common Men and Mixed Men. The common man would represent 80-90% of the humans living in Faerun. Those men living in close enough proximity to the deep elvish woods (examples: the dalelands around Cormanthor, and men living around the Wood of Sharp Teeth or the eastern portion of the High Forest where their stock has been blended with elves since the time of the lost civilizations of Askavar and Eaerlann). I think the common man & mixed men could work from Silvermoon to Calisham and from Thay to Cormyr - men are men. Mixed men are not quite half elves, but have a bit of the fay or magical blood in them which gives my players an option or two to choose from.

Horse Warriors: any character from the horde could pick "Common Man" or "Dark Tribes" from pg 45-46. Dark tribes are supposed to represent nomadic horse people, similar to the culture of the Hordelands.

I think this is enough variation in men for me. I for one don't really need game mechanical adjustment for every little village in the realms. I'm planning that 80-90% of the men played in my game will be either the Common Man, or Mixed Man. Maybe there will be one horse warrior or barbarian among them.

Page 45 of the RC1 also has a great deal about customizing clerical orders for Rolemaster. I plan to start working on that next, and will try to cover at least most of the greater gods and work on important lesser dieties.

Forgotten Rolls

Gamer ADD strikes again. I've been reading my Rolemaster Classic books again and leafing through Waterdeep and the North and my Ruins of Undermountain boxed set. It then hit me that I could combine the two and satisfy two cravings at the same time.

Adapting rolemaster for AD&D isn't that hard, but I'm going to have to take care of a couple minor details...

1. No Gnomes in Rolemaster - do I add gnomes to Rolemaster or delete Gnomes from Faerun? I will probably add the gnomes. Maybe I can find something online.

2. "High Men" - do I delete them from Rolemaster or do I come up with a way of making two (or more) flavors of men work in Faerun? I could imagine separating a few different "sub-races" of men - Northern Barbarians, Calishites, and men of the Western Coast.

3. "Eastern" martial arts professions in Rolemaster, they don't groove with the more medieval/Ren vibe of Forgotten Realms. These could easily be switched to NPC professions only.

4. I'd like to add the paladin profession somehow, I've heard that this profession was covered in one of the rolemaster supplements or maybe I can find a fan version online somewhere. This class is important to a lot of the faiths on faerun so I want to make sure I get it in there.

5. I wouldn't allow my players to take on Orc, Trolls, and other humanoids as PC races. Just doesn't fit with my vision of the realms. I don't even like half-orcs and half-ogres as PC's in the realms - it just doesn't fit for me. When I think about the realms I think about Ed Greenwood's Spellfire, without a doubt. It just occurred to me that I need to review that book here, it was one of my original influences in how to play D&D.

6. I think playing in and around Waterdeep would allow for a lot of Roleplaying and less ROLL playing, which should keep the PC's alive for a decent amount of time. Directly adapting the kick down the door, kill the monster, and take all the loot approach of D&D would definitely fail miserably using rolemaster when all the PC's are knocked out, with broken bones, and slashed jugulars. I have both the City System boxed set with the glorious map that fills an entire room and also the FR1 Waterdeep and the North book that I will probably use more in play.

Rolemaster (Take 3) and Amethyst

Having read over the rolemaster core books I set right out to make a character. I started small - a common human ranger. I rolled some stats, then potential attributes, then modified for race, chose some languages then started flipping through the skill list and figuring out things like development points and power points, etc...

Well, lets just say that I may have been accustomed to a simpler way of making characters over the last couple of years (during which the only systems that I have used are Fudge, Risus, and 2nd Edition DnD). I'm not sure I have the time or patience right now to make Rolemaster characters unless I got a group together who would get me inspired to do so. Or maybe if I can figure out that Fudge conversion for Rolemaster that I think is a really juicy idea....

Anyway, I shelved Rolemaster for the short term and I am following the sacred teachings of Risus Monkey by trying to get a Mythic game started up. For now I may start up solo and then add my buddy in later if that makes sense. I'll probably post something up about the game I am planning in the next couple of days. I read through that book over the last couple of days and it immediately "clicked".

Also, Chris Dias of Dias Ex Machina contacted me about his game Amethyst which is being sold by Goodman Games. I checked out these links here, the pictures here, the free adventure Biohazard ( a zombie apocalypse style game), and finally this youtube clip. I wrote this blog post a while back about adding guns to ODD, well this game adds guns, and computers, and cars, and pretty much everything about our modern world to the conventional D&D game. Chris popped the top off his head and completely imagined a really excellent world where all the stuff that exists in our DnD games "came out to play"...

I think this picture that I popped into this post pretty much sums up the game (to Chris Dias or artist Nick Greenwood - if you want me to take this down I will immediately). They talk about it quite a bit in that cool YouTube series where they not only discuss the gameworld but how it evolved with the art from Nick Greewood (who did like 99.9% of the art for the game apparently). I've said before that having Peter Bradley do like 90% of the art for the Castles and Crusades game set up a consistent look and brand for that game. I think the same will hold true for amethyst.

Anyway, I can't say much more since I haven't picked up a copy of the game (I probably won't anytime soon since it is written for 4th edition DnD which I have no plans to play). The combination of technology, magic, fantasy, politics, and interesting imagery makes me want to slap my practical side silly and BUY THIS GAME (which is saying that I have like 50 different campaign worlds that I downloaded as part of the Haiti bundle and like 50 more campaign worlds that I have thought up in my sick head and don't in any way need another game world).

I'm not a fan of the 3rd edition, 3.5 edition, and 4th edition DnD rules - however, just because you don't like the rules doesn't mean there is a lot of gold in a game world/concept regardless of the rules. I could see me running a game in the amethyst game world using any of the familiar rulesets that I have become accustomed to over the years. Or if my DM buddy would get his $#!& together and want to start up our tabletop game (which was supposed to use 4th edition rules- since this DM likes 4th edition and convinced all us "old-timers" to try it but then never started the game all winter long after we made characters in November)

Maybe, just maybe I could convince him to run this game-world instead of the standard fantasy world he had been thinking of running a campaign in.

Who knows, I may go rogue and pick up a copy after all. If I watch that YouTube video about the art one more time I'll probably fail my saving throw and cave in to a moment of consumer weakness :)

Rolemaster

Now that I have partially digested the three core books of the Rolemaster Classic edition that I have purchased I've come away with a couple of thoughts:

1. I'd really like to play this game in the traditional table-top form... I'm still working on getting a gaming group together, maybe I can convince them to try Rolemaster.

2. Arms Law is awesome and you could use it to add some critical hits to almost any game.

3. I think you could use a Fudge based system for attributes and skills to simplify character creation. Fudge and Rolemaster are both very modular so I think the fit could work out. I love the ease and detail of Fudge/Fate style character creation but I'm not a huge fan of the granularity of fudge dice and the way combat plays out in that game. I'm going to be thinking about how the two could be combined over the next couple of weeks.

Unrelated to rolemaster I picked up the Mythic Game Master Emulator and I might try to use that to run either a solo game or a game with a good buddy of mine who is separated by some distance and I think has the right kind of mojo for playing this Mythic game style. I ran into the Mythic system by reading over some of the stuff here. Maybe I will even post some of the game content up on my website in a similar fashion to the monkey if it ends up working out for us.

Crunch, Crunch

I just placed an order for Rolemaster Classic. I used the coupon that was posted on the RPG Blog II. I'm pretty excited about it. My main goal for this year is to actually get a consistent tabletop gaming group. I thought I had a group starting up in November of this year (and I didn't have to be the DM wooooo hooo!!!) but alas I'm pretty sure that will never happen. We haven't met up since we made characters in the first week of Nov. I even said that I would play some 4th edition DnD even though I'm not a fan of the rules.

I've thought about it and since my two games online use very rules light systems I'm going to play a crunchy rule system. Initially, I was thinking Savage Worlds, but I purchased the explorers edition and for some reason it didn't "click" with me. Then something got me remembering the fun that we had with the old MERP system a long time ago. I found the Iron Crown Website a couple of days ago and then I finally pulled the trigger on a package of 3 Rolemaster Classic's softcovers.

I guess the only additional book that would really be nice to have after these is the monsters and treasure book. Lets see how my initial reaction to Rolemaster is first. I haven't looked through a rules heavy system book in a long time - so I may want to take it slow. But I have to say... I'm pretty much slavering over the thought of all those critical tables.

Maybe I'll post some fliers and see if there are any folks who would like to play some rolemaster in my area.