Tag Archives: RPG

Rolemaster: Introducing Spell Law

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The post below is written by UbiquitousRat, a guest blogger for The Iron Tavern.

Having had roughly 36 hours to read and digest (at the time of writing) the new Rolemaster rules, this article presents an overview of what Spell Law is all about.

Spell Law was the second book released for the new Rolemaster public playtest, and it sits alongside Character Law and Arms Law at the core of the rules.

What’s in Spell Law?

The top 10 cool features of Spell Law are:

  1. 171 Spells Lists, or roughly 4, 275 spells
  2. Three Realms of Magic
  3. Base, Open, Closed and Evil spell lists, helping GMs to manage the power
  4. Loads of utility and informational spells, not just combat magic
  5. Options for GMs which magnify the roleplaying aspects of magic
  6. Possible spell failure, making magic risky but manageable by clever players
  7. Cool and simple magic enhancement items
  8. Magic Ritual rules to allow for larger magical endeavours
  9. Spells for 15 of the 21 Professions in Character Law
  10. The possibility for even a Fighter to learn a spell or two

Spell Lists

It was with genuine glee that I printed off and poured over the 171 Spell Lists in the book. A Spell List is a collection of related individual spells which are learned in progression from the easiest rotes towards the most powerful effects.

Each list has 20 levels of spells, one through 20, and then additional spells at levels 25, 30, 35, 40, and 50. In short, you can cast a spell at the level equal to your Skill Rank in the related Spell List. Doing the arithmetic, you will see that Spell Law contains around 4, 275 spells. But that’s not all.

Spell Lists are also classified based upon their ease of learning and power. Open Lists are the easiest to grasp, while Closed Lists (and also Evil Lists) are the toughest to learn. Each magical Profession also has their own customised Base Lists, which are of medium difficulty to learn.

Realms of Magic

Rolemaster presents magic through three distinct yet interconnected Realms of Magic. These are the Essence, Channelling and Mentalism realms.

Essence is the classic Mage magic, utilising the raw energies of life to create elemental and other cool effects. The elements of Cold, Earth, Fire, Light, Water and Wind are all at the mercy of the Essence worker.

Channelling is all about pulling down power from an external power, usually imagined as a deity or other supernatural entity. Of course, as with everything in Rolemaster, this is up to your own setting and GM’s call, but the spells are tangibly different in feel to those of the Essence Realm.

Mentalism is the magic of the internal self, projected into the world, the power of the mind and will. Mentalists (yup, I still love that name) are all about influence and shaping perceptions. In some ways these are the most limited spells in terms of range and scope, focused on individuals or small groups, but their power can be profound.

We also need to mention that there are Semi- and Hybrid- spellcasters. Semi-spellcasters, like the Paladin, Ranger or Bard, mix their own Base Spell Lists with skill at Arms. Hybrid-spellcasters, like the Sorcerer, mix two of the realms of magic (in this case Channelling and Essence to make lovely destruction magic).

An All-Round Magic System

There are a lot of aspects to Spell Law that I really enjoy. At the risk of skimming over the details, here’s a run-down.

Firstly, I like that magic is risky and yet manageable through clever play. You need to make a Spell Casting Roll each time you cast, but you can decide how long you want to spend wiggling your fingers and chanting. You can decide cast fast at higher risk, try to cast with either hands full or your mouth gagged, or even try to be subtle and sly so that others don’t notice. All of these options are handled by simple modifiers to a basic Spell Casting Roll. One d100 roll, pass or fail. Spell failure gives you a roll on a nasty table tuned to your realm of magic.

Secondly, I love the way that Rolemaster helps the GM to make magic more believable as a roleplaying issue. For example, spellcasters learn spell lists as they ascend in level. However, the GM is reminded that the spellcaster needs access to the spell list within the context of the setting in order to progress in their learning. Thus, as a GM, I am reminded that I can arrange for spell books to be stolen, lost or destroyed if I want to frustrate the linear development of magic for the heroes. This kind of detail is not onerous, is also optional, but is written right into the fairly “Old School” tone of the rules.

A third thing I enjoy is that there are cool rules for Magic Rituals too. These involve multiple casters working in concert. They also allow for slower-to-cast effect with altered parameters. One example would be casting the Level 4 “Concussion’s Way” spell, Heal III, for up to a x5 healing effect; this makes 15 Hits recovered into 75 Hits healed, all for the trade-off of visiting the local temple and getting the priests to perform the ritual over a few hours. This gives the GM all manner of roleplaying options, and the players have incentive to use local priests and temples even if they reach high levels.

Overall, I like that this is a system geared towards all-round spellcasting, not just combat casting. Anyone can learn a spell or two (if you allow it in your campaign) but magic reaches into all aspects of play, not just the combat scene.

Last Words

Spell Law excites me because it puts a lot of options back into roleplaying. Instead of simplistic generic effects conveniently labelled as “magic”, this book gives you a coherent magic system which feels magical.

Spell Law is available as a FREE download for the duration of the Rolemaster Public Playtest. Why not grab the .PDF and have a look for yourself?

Bio

UbiquitousRat is a long-time roleplayer and gamesmaster who has a history with gaming going back to 1979. In 1994 he joined Games Workshop, spending 12 years in the gaming industry at the coal-face of tabletop wargaming. In 1998 he founded the Friday Night Roleplay group at his home in suburban Nottinghamshire, UK, and ever since has been the primary GM. The group was involved in the playtest of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition and Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, as well as giving air to the development of 6d6 RPG. The core five players are all looking forward to the new Rolemaster and everyone is excited to be sharing the story in The Iron Tavern. Oh, and he’s also a high school teacher during the daytime.

Review: Through the Cotillion of Hours

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Author:  Daniel J. Bishop
Publisher:  Purple Duck Games
Art: Scott Ackerman
Price: PDF $3.50 / Print(+ PDF) $7.50
Pages:   15

Through the Cotillion of Hours is Purple Duck Games third release in their Adventure Locale line supporting the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG and the second written by Daniel Bishop. The Adventure Locale series of adventures written to be dropped into nearly any DCC RPG campaign with minimal prep. One of the unique characteristics about this particular release is it can be used for any character level and any number of characters.

As noted in the blurb text for the adventure, sleeping characters are invited to a masked ball of the Dreaming God, Somnus. Donning masks the characters are granted entrance to the palace where they are left to find the Dreaming God Somnus to possibly ask him to grant them some request. Best be careful though as not all requests are met with pleasure.

The adventure can be run as a drop-in as it can occur while characters sleep. That keeps a DCC RPG judge from having to work it into the current campaign as it can literally happen at anytime in a campaign path.

I mentioned earlier the Adventure Locale series are designed to be run with minimal prep and dropped into existing campaign worlds. This adventure truly delivers on the drop-in factor. Given that it can be run with any number of players and any level of character, it really is quite flexible. I could easily see prepping this and having it ready to run for nights that we are a couple of players short. This module could certainly save me from needing to cancel a session due to last minute cancellations. All I need is for the characters to sleep and I have an adventure for them to take part in.

The other nice thing about this adventure is that they might not complete it the first time through. That isn’t an issue as it can become a recurring dream. So if I were to run it for a couple of players one night I could always pick it up again on another week where we were short some players.

The prep factor of this one is higher than the first two in my opinion, mainly because the judge needs to learn the dream world and how things work there. The adventure is also timed and the judge needs to be ready to track that time and know how to advance that “clock” forward. The previous two adventures I could literally run after a brief skim of the PDF. This one needs a slightly more thorough reading to be ready to run. The time needed is well worth it in my opinion, but it does need a bit more prep time.

Another thought that kept passing through my head as I read this one was the tie-ins to Coliseum Morpheuon from Rite Publishing. I reviewed Coliseum Morpheuon here at The Iron Tavern several months ago, but it covered a whole dream world as well. It could be an interesting area for a DCC RPG judge to explore if they chose.

All in all another solid adventure from the Purple Duck Games for DCC RPG. This one will be nice to have in the back pocket for times we have a couple of players cancel. I look forward to the next in the Adventure Locale series.

Rolemaster: An Evening with Character Law

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The post below is written by UbiquitousRat, a guest blogger for The Iron Tavern.

The public playtest of Rolemaster began a few short hours before our regular Friday Night Roleplay meeting. To be honest, I was holding out hope that this would be the case because I’d been bigging-up the start of our new campaign using these rules for months. The hour was here and this is an account of how things went down. This is slightly longer than usual, but we’ve got a lot to cover.

The Rolemaster Books

Two of the five core books for Rolemaster got released in the first wave: Spell Law and Character Law. The latter book is what we spent time using at our first session, although the guys did dip into Spell Law a tiny bit to choose Spell Lists. We’ll drop you another article on Spell Law just as soon as we’ve explored it in depth.

Character Law covers the core rules relating to creating and running a hero in Rolemaster. In addition to the material dedicated to a step-by-step walk-through of designing a hero, you also get chapters covering Equipment, Experience and Advancement, Maneuvers and Movement, and The Environment. Combat, for the curious, is found in Arms Law which (at the time of writing) is expected to release to playtest in a few days.

Character Law

Overall we were mightily impressed with Character Law. Bearing in mind that we received the rules a scant 2 hours before meeting, we managed to build four heroes (with four players involved) in around two hours. This included about 30 minutes of time spent by the players writing notes in answer to the background questions in Chapter 3 (of which more in a moment).

The book is nicely laid out over 77 pages, with two columns of text. Even without art it looks neat and is very accessible. As far as playtest documents go, it makes the usual “Word file turned .PDF” look laughably cheap.

There is a very nice introduction and overview of character creation to draw you in. In terms of style, this is a very clean read which is clear. The only problems we had with understanding it were due to players (and me) trying to speed-read sections; on a proper read the text seems very clear. The game comes over as simple to understand and play, but certainly not simplistic.

Making Heroes

We dived in the deep end. Certainly my players are nervous about whether they have made appropriate choices but, as GM, I’m going to allow some tweaking of the numbers after a session or two of actual play. Overall, however, everyone seemed happy with the rules and seemed to grasp the main concepts readily.

The nice thing about Rolemaster is that it begins character creation with a chapter entitled, “Background”. Here you are invited to think through a strong concept for your hero with a series of relatively easy-to-follow questions. The text explains the process of thought quite nicely, and my players set to reading and scribbling down thoughts for around 20-30 minutes. This was reportedly a positive experience, and really set them up for the next series of steps. For me, this was refreshing as most games tack the background thinking on at the end. Not so with Rolemaster: characterisation and story are front and centre.

Stats and Potentials

There are 10 Stats, exactly as veteran Rolemaster players will expect. Everything plays off of a d100 or d10-based roll. So far, we’ve not had to roll another die type. There is a choice of random or points-buy system for choosing your Stats.

We chose to points-buy and I am REALLY pleased that we did so. Rolemaster uses a really cool system whereby you choose the Potential value of each Stat – i.e. the best your hero will ever be in that ability – before you choose their current Temporary value. The players, although initially taken-aback, quickly reported that they liked this because it meant that they immediately envisioned the hero as he or she will ultimately be.

Essentially, Rolemaster sets the expectations of the players and draws them towards wanting to play their way to their potential. Actual starting values are relatively modest, meaning that you are a slightly-above-average hero to begin with. That being said, GMs have options to raise or lower the power level of their campaign by altering the starting points allowed.

As an aside, min-maxing seemed very much harder to achieve because the players realised that everything is important… and the first rule of Rolemaster, to my mind, is that you can choose anything but you are always making sacrifices of other stuff.

Races

Rolemaster offers Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, Halflings, Humans, Orcs and Trolls as character races. It also gives the GM rules for designing their own races, which is a very simple process. Each race is balanced with the others through the one-time blessing of extra (never reduced) Development Points, used to buy Skills and Talents.

Each race modifies your Stat bonuses (not the Stat), Resistance Rolls (think: Saves), and other core details such as how many Concussion Hits (think: Hit Points) you begin with.

My players loved the choices available and really seemed to get a kick out of the Height and Weight chart. We also introduced the first Optional Rule from this chapter: Individual Stride, wherein the hero’s height affects how quickly they can move. Easy to implement and something my rules-wary players asked for. Amazed? I was.

Culture

Next you select a Culture, which is a sort of background package of free Skill ranks. There are loads of cool choices, including Reavers and the Underground culture, both of which we found to be very cool. Rules are also there for GMs to add their own Cultures, and this looks very simple to implement.

In short, the guys thought that this was a good no-brainer choice to round out their heroes. As GM I could see that this side-steps the need to encourage players to take a minimum of 1 Rank in Body Development, and other such bare minimum Skill levels, and adds flavour for the characters to boot.

Professions

Professions are not “classes” but it’s easy to start with that misconception. Professions are what your hero is funnelled towards being good at without constraining you like classes might. We chose to create a Fighter, a Ranger, a Mentalist (we LOVE that one!), and a Dabbler. There are 21 Professions to choose from.

Your character can train in any Skill, but your Profession makes some Skills easier to learn than others. Profession sets up the cost (paid for with Development Points) for your Skills. Each level you get new Development Points and can upgrade your Skills by purchasing Ranks. Each Skill Rank is worth a percentage bonus to your skill, starting with 5% increments. Professions also have nine “Professional Skills” to give you a small top-up bonus each time you buy a rank in each of them.

Buying Skills was the slowest part of the creation… and initially it confused my players. That is, until they read the text instead of just staring at the cost chart. Timing the process, it took about 30 minutes for each totally new Rolemaster player to complete spending their Development Points. What was great, however, was seeing them interact and advise each other.

Thinking about it, I don’t know many games where I have seen quite so much group discussion of which Skills or Talents might best fit another person’s concept. It was really cool to listen in on.

Talents

Talents are one-time bonuses and abilities that don’t fit the Skills list. Examples include bonuses such as Ambidextrous or Darkvision, and Flaws such as Mumbler or Blood Shy. These are simple to implement (bought with Development Points) and really colourful. There are just enough to make it tough to choose but not too many. My players just seemed to pick one and smile knowingly.

Overall?

As a GM this rules set excites me. But then I was excited about it anyway.

My players’ reactions were mixed but overall positive. The guy who fears the grind of “roll-play” was nervous about the arithmetic in totalling up Skill Bonuses (which totals five numbers for each skill), but also admitted that he was tired after a long day at work. Nobody seemed to struggle with this, however, and the other three guys seemed to feel it was acceptable.

What did we like? We like Stat Potentials in this rules set (which I hated in previous Rolemaster editions) because it sets you up with a “target” vision of your hero. We like the choice of Races and Cultures because they are not rigidly paired to force stereotypes. We like the choice of 21 Professions, including Warrior Monks and Sorcerers because they are all pretty appealing.

Overall, we also like the ease with which we have started playing. Two and one half-hours of play time is not bad for a serious RPG character session, and we spent 2 hours doing the details. We have four very cool-looking and totally unique heroes, and we are ready to play.

The only fly in our ointment was that there is not yet an official Character Sheet, and it’d be useful if a decent one comes out soon.

If you fancy taking a look at the playtest rules for Rolemaster, they are free to download once you agree to the basic terms of the test. Check out the Iron Crown forums article, “Director’s Briefing – the Rolemaster Playtest”. Just please don’t be a jerk and file share… get your mates to grab their own copy too.

Game on!

Bio

UbiquitousRat is a long-time roleplayer and gamesmaster who has a history with gaming going back to 1979. In 1994 he joined Games Workshop, spending 12 years in the gaming industry at the coal-face of tabletop wargaming. In 1998 he founded the Friday Night Roleplay group at his home in suburban Nottinghamshire, UK, and ever since has been the primary GM. The group was involved in the playtest of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition and Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, as well as giving air to the development of 6d6 RPG. The core five players are all looking forward to the new Rolemaster and everyone is excited to be sharing the story in The Iron Tavern. Oh, and he’s also a high school teacher during the daytime.

DCC RPG Limited Edition Cover

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When Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG was released it was available in two different covers, the “normal” cover and a gold-foiled limited edition cover. I was a little behind getting into DCC RPG. I knew about the Beta but did not pay much attention to it as I was happy with my Pathfinder game. So I only ended up with the “normal” cover.

Recently there have been rumors and talks of a second limited edition cover for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. To make it even better it was going to include a few small fixes and an index the second printing of the game received. A black-and-white sketch was posted of the cover as well.

Yesterday the pre-order opened for the second limited edition book and a picture of the cover was released. It simply looks great! The art is done by Doug Kovacs who really has the “feel” of DCC RPG art down. He has another winner with this cover as well. The book is now available for pre-order from Goodman Games website.

DCC RPG Limited Edition Cover

OSR as a State of Mind

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The post below is written by Shortymonster, a guest blogger for The Iron Tavern.

Every RPG could be an OSR game, it’s all a state of mind.

I want to start by saying that I do not consider myself to be a part of the Old School Renaissance (OSR)  movement; when I came into gaming it was with such systems as Vampire: the Masquerade, Cyberpunk 2020, and a mate’s home-brew system heavily inspired by Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. All these were quite crunchy systems, and as a new gamer, I liked that. It was comforting to know that if I wanted to try something out that there was a rule to cover it, or at least a guideline to give the GM a position to adjudicate from. As time moved on and I grew as a player, there was always a room in my heart for games like this. I’m still using CP2020 as a system for my next campaign, and although the World of darkness has fallen out of my favour, I still like Gothic horror games with a bit of crunch, such as Unhallowed Metropolis.

What has changed however is that I’m spending more and more of my time as a GM to the point that I spend more time running games than playing in them. Quite often these days I feel the need to ignore rules in favour of maintaining the flow of the story. Some may think this might not be in the spirit of fair play to my players, but I promise one thing, if I drop a rule for them, that same rule drop applies to all the NPCs too, and vice versa. Often I’m not dropping a rule because it doesn’t work, or because leaving it in gets in the way of me telling the story I want to tell, but because it gets in the way of the free flow of play. This is something that should be just as much of a concern to me as it is to my players, but they should never have to deal with, in fact it should happen so seamlessly that they shouldn’t even notice it.

This to me is the essence of the OSR; finding a set of rules that allows – nay, encourages – the GM to make on the spot decisions about character and NPC actions without having to check through countless chapters and tables to get the answer from the rules. This doesn’t mean the rules should be ignored unilaterally, just that they can be put aside when they become an inconvenience. Quite often, they wouldn’t exist in the first place to slow things down, as the game designer could trust the GM to make the right calling. So, why don’t fans of OSR just run any game they choose like that?

If I didn’t like the combat resolution system in CP2020 I would ditch the needlessly complicated rules and come up with something that allowed faster resolution of a fight but didn’t get in the way of my players performing the actions they think they should be able to. And you know what, I don’t like it, so I did change it. My way is way quicker, easier to explain, and opens up combat for the players to take a bit more of the initiative with what they would like their characters to do. This seems to be in line with a lock of hacks I’ve read about, people taking a setting they like, and retro-cloning the rules the fir an easier or more comfortable play style.

To be fair, a lot of the adventures I run don’t have much in common with what most people think of when you mention OSR. As an example, I don’t do dungeon crawls. I find them a bit boring and they only exist for me as a way of having a laugh at the expense of the preconceptions of the genre. I will be running Something Went Wrong for instance, but not because I like dungeon crawls; because I love the multi GM aspect and the fact that it makes fun of the genre in a pleasingly light-hearted way. For the very same reason, I’m a big fan of the Munchkin card game.

So, to fans of OSR games, and I know there’s a load of you out there, I would like to say that I love what you do, and the effort you go to just to keep your ideal play style and rule sets going – when I see free RPGs out there in an OSR style, I grab them up quick and love reading them and thinking about what I could do with them – I think I’ll just keep playing whatever game I choose, and keep the OSR feel going by how I run the game, and how my group plays it. And a big thank you to folks of a like mind out there, who keep on hacking things to fit the way want to play; you’re saving me a ton of work.

Bio

Shortymonster is new to this blogging lark, but if you have enjoyed what you’ve just read, head on over to his own site and take a look at his thoughts on a variety of subjects across the spectrum of role playing games.

Pathfinder Beginner Box Transitions

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Today Paizo released a free supplement to their Pathfinder Beginner Box product called Beginner Box Transitions. This PDF release is designed to help a player that entered the Pathfinder system through the Beginner Box to transition beyond 5th level and into the Core Rulebook.

Readers of The Iron Tavern know I have posted a fair number of articles around the Beginner Box. While I have played Pathfinder with my son in the past, the Beginner Box was the set that allowed me to hand him a set of books and he was able to read them himself and learn to play and GM his own games. Even many months later, my son still can be found reading his Beginner Box rule books, creating characters and designing encounters. I was certainly curious to see what this Beginner Box Transitions PDF was all about.

The artistic quality of the PDF is excellent as one has come to expect from Paizo products. The PDF does include an index at the end to help find certain rules quickly. I was disappointed to see that there was not a bookmarked table of contents. Those can be very handy when looking to jump to a certain section of a PDF. Not a major issue, but it would be nice to see a Bookmarked table of contents, maybe in a future update.

The PDF includes 9 chapters covering a myriad of topics from new rules to know when moving to the core rulebook, reading stat block entries from the core rules and bestiary, adventure conversions, leveling your character, and more.

The PDF handles all of this in a very clear and easy to follow manner. New rules are covered in small sub-sections, graphics are used to help dissect spell and monster stat blocks. They really strive to make the transition as easy as possible.

The PDF includes a conversion guide for Master of the Fallen Fortress. Using those steps a reader can get a good feel on how to convert many other modules in the Pathfinder Module line. The PDF includes a list and short summary of several eligible modules.

There is a lot of information in this free download from Paizo to make a person’s transition from the Beginner Box to the Core Rules as painless as possible. My post here is based on a quick read (it has only been out for a few hours), but it looks like an excellent free product to transition those Beginner Box players into the full set of rules. Well done Paizo!

The Rolemaster Files

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The post below is written by UbiquitousRat, a guest blogger for The Iron Tavern.

The Rolemaster Files

Some time around 1985 my friends and I discovered a new fantasy RPG which would very quickly replace D&D in our regular gaming slot. Then a school boy gaming most nights at a friend’s house, I was a player of a character named Goriel Swiftfoot, a Halfling Thief. We immediately fell in love with this new set of rules because of two major innovations it presented to our gaming: flavourful critical hits and totally open character choices.  This game was Rolemaster.

Now in 2012, after many years of confusion about which edition of Rolemaster might be the best to own (and consequently having collected all of them), I have been delighted by the news from Iron Crown Enterprises that there is to be a new edition of the game.

One Rolemaster To Rule Them All

Rolemaster is about to be reborn for the 21st Century. A new edition is imminent for release into a Beta Playtest, open to anyone willing to pick up the eBooks from OneBookShelf. To save you the time and money, and given that I will be getting involved in the playtest myself, this post is the first in a series aimed at opening up the system for a closer look.

Our home RPG group is planning to launch a whole new campaign in our own home-grown setting of Heroic Mykenaea using these new rules. This series will also reflect on our struggles and joys in adapting the new Rolemaster to fit with our setting.

What are we expecting?

Rolemaster is promised in the form of five core books, each of them providing the tools for a different aspect of fantasy roleplaying. Initially the game will go into playtest using the first three tomes: Character Law, Arms Law, and Spell Law.

Character Law will present the core rules of the system along with extensive details allowing the players to create their heroes. In the grand tradition of Rolemaster we are expecting a large selection of Professions, representing the early training of a character, allowing us to customise and build heroes which will fit our setting in just the way we envision them. Tired of the restriction of “classes” or the woolliness of a skills-based system? Welcome to the best of both worlds.

Arms Law will provide the detailed but easy-to-play combat system for the game. Those gorgeously entertaining short epitaphs for the creatures unlucky enough to receive a critical hit (or “Crit”) will be back. Whether with combat or spell-slinging, there was always a certain joy to be had in sharing such classic moments as delivering an E Critical, the most severe form of damage, and reading the pithy description of events, for example: “All that remains of foe are charred bits of teeth and bone. Add +20 to your next roll.”

Spell Law will give us the classic and original Rolemaster magic system. We are expecting the Spell Lists, in which mages and other spell-casters learn related spells ordered into lists, allowing them to cast increasingly potent effects. Want to sling a Firebolt? Well, Mister, you need to learn Fire Law and master lighting candles first. As you gain levels you will eventually develop the skill with fire magic that you need. Focused on providing spellcasters with roleplaying options as much as raw power, Spell Law is a much-anticipated return to meaningful choices in spell play.

All-in-all this version is promised as both a new edition and a blending of the best from the past. The idea is to unify the disparate past editions into a version for modern gaming. Our challenge to Rolemaster will be to adapt it to fit our own fantasy setting.

Want to know more? Rolemaster is imminent and as soon as the books hit my iPad I’ll be bringing you an overview of what is actually in the game… and what it means for our campaign in Heroic Mykenaea.

Bio

UbiquitousRat is a long-time roleplayer and gamesmaster who has a history with gaming going back to 1979. In 1994 he joined Games Workshop, spending 12 years in the gaming industry at the coal-face of tabletop wargaming. In 1998 he founded the Friday Night Roleplay group at his home in suburban Nottinghamshire, UK, and ever since has been the primary GM. The group was involved in the playtest of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition and Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, as well as giving air to the development of 6d6 RPG. The core five players are all looking forward to the new Rolemaster and everyone is excited to be sharing the story in The Iron Tavern. Oh, and he’s also a high school teacher during the daytime.

Mini-Review: Midgard iPad Atlas

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Today I received my regular Kobold Courier email from the now Kobold Press. Immediately catching my attention was the phrase ‘Midgard iPad App‘. With my attention caught, I hurriedly opened the email to discover that Kobold Press has released a Midgard Atlas application for the iPad. This sounded very cool.

For those that are unfamiliar with Midgard, it is Wolfgang Baur’s personal campaign brought to the masses via the Open Design Project. With Wolfgang’s notes as a basis and lead design work by Wolfgang Baur, Jeff Grubb, and Brandon Hodge the patrons of the project worked hard to bring this campaign world to fruition. With efforts to produce rulebooks from Midgard for Pathfinder, D&D, and AGE rule systems it strives to be a setting for groups regardless of rule system choice.

This application for the iPad brings the entire world atlas to the iPad in zoom-able form. The map was created by Jonathan Roberts, a name well recognized in the RPG map-making community. Here are just a few of the highlights from the product page in the iTunes store:

  • Detailed maps of 9 major cities
  • Animated clouds
  • Removable text
  • High-resolution

I have played with the map on the iPad and was very impressed. I had some concerns my generation 1 iPad might be a little laggy with this application, but it zipped right along. I was able to zoom and move about the map with almost no delay.

The resolution of the map is spectacular. I could zoom in quite close on any terrain feature I wanted to see and it was quite clear. As noted above nine cities are included with detailed maps. I could readily tap on one of the detailed cities and pop open the city map and also zoom in and see wonderful detail as well. The detailed city maps are keyed with numbers as well.

The animated clouds passing over the campaign world are a neat touch as well. The animated clouds can be removed from the map at a touch of the button. The same goes for the text that is placed on the map, a touch of the button and it is removed form the map as well. Tap it again and the text reappears with city names and other noteworthy landmarks.

My only wish for the application would be to include textual pop-ups when in the detailed city map. Key buildings will have a number on them to indicate what they are in a look-up table. I would like to be able to tap the number on the detailed map and have the name (and since I am wishing here, a short description of the place too!) of the building pop up in a text box.

I think Kobold Press has shown other RPG publishers the new standard in electronic campaign maps. The application is available for $3.99 from the iTunes store. Check it out, if you like maps I think you will love this app.

While several screenshots are available at the iTunes store, I took a few to show folks some of the areas from the Midgard Atlas. I tried to show non-descript areas to avoid giving too much away. I also scaled the images down some as well.

15 Minute Work Day

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A frequent complaint one hears about D&D (and Pathfinder to a degree) is the 15 minute work day. The 15 minute work day is the potential for a party to want to rest after they use all of their big resources. This is often at the behest of the Wizard or Cleric of the party after they have used their more powerful spells.

This problem generally lines people up on two sides, both of which can be rather vocal about the issue. One side says this is a problem in nearly every D&D game they have played in and the other says they have never seen it in their games. These arguments usually fall between “it is a systemic problem it isn’t our fault” to “you are playing the game wrong, there is not a problem with the system”. This debate has been going on for a long time, occasionally resurfacing on various forums or twitter feeds.

Why bring it up today at The Iron Tavern? Conan. Conan and The People of the Black Circle actually.

Let me back up just a step though before I get into Conan and the 15 minute work day. I obviously have an opinion on the 15 minute work day, I think everyone does. I fall into the group of people that really has not seen the issue that often.

As a player our groups nearly always push onwards and our wizards tend to be conservative with their spells and manage their resources. That does not mean we adventure on until our resources are completely depleted, but we typically carry on for a good number of encounters before seeking out a place of rest. This has been the case for my local group, for the many organized play games I have participated in, a multitude of play-by-posts, and games I have played online in. Do the casters sometimes announce that they are running low on prepared spells? Yes. But the group as a whole typically pushed onwards.

From the GM perspective I have similar experiences. Players I GM for also tend to push onwards in adventures I run. Sometimes to the point where I actually think it might be best for them to rest up a bit before continuing. This experience is from many varied mediums as my play experience has been.

Given the number of different groups and situations I have a really hard time thinking this is a systemic problem as many like to state. To me a systemic problem would be widespread enough that I would have run into the problem in my playing of the game. I can see room for abuse by a 15 minute work day, but I don’t see it as being a systemic problem in the rules.

There has been one campaign where I found myself facing 15 minute work day scenarios. Kingmaker. The way the exploration portion of Kingmaker works the group will very often find themselves facing every fight at full resources. Now this is an example a systemic problem. As the Kingmaker Adventure Path is written, the PCs are only ever going to face one, two, maybe three encounters in a day during the exploration phases of the campaign.

Back to Conan. I recently started reading People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard. As I read that book a distinct thought tumbling around in the back of my mind was if GMs ran their games like that story, the 15 minute work day would never be an issue. The heroes (and even the enemy for that matter) have several moments during the story where they have no choice but to continue on regardless of the status of their resources or how depleted their forces were.

Conan and his companions cannot stop to wait or rest, even as they watch a good number of their forces perish. The girl must be rescued! To wait and recoup health, forces, or arrows is sure to meet with the untimely death or worse for the girl.

The defenders are heavy users of sorcery and at one point in the book are shown using various spells to defend themselves. As the battle unfolds Conan even remarks that they must have lost their capacity for magic as they further retreat. But those sorcerers cannot simply stop and rest! They have a fierce barbarian and his dwindling horde knocking at their doorstep!

Pacing as shown by example in People of the Black Circle is what GMs should strive to obtain. This puts the PCs in an exciting adventure with stakes that mean something to the characters. It paints that sense of urgency that will keep things moving forward and not a series of fight, sleep, fight, sleep and so on. The type of magic system simply will not matter, because it is irrelevant. The PCs must go on to be the heroes, to do otherwise simply ends in devastating failure.

D&D Next: Playtest 2

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I have not talked much about D&D Next at The Iron Tavern, but I have been keeping an eye on it along the way. I liked the direction the first playtest was headed, save for a couple of small things that could easily be fixed – either through modifying the core rule or a “module”. I was eager to download the second playtest packet earlier this week when it was released.

Before I get into this post too far, let me advise that my comments here are based solely on a read through and not an actual playtest.  I am also aware that the playtest docs are trying to get the tester to play the game with these rules. In the future these rules could easily be a module and possibly not even a core assumption of the game.  While I may not like some of the rules in this second playtest packet, that could be remedied by the final product by seeing the core rules simplified and other portions being moved to modules.

This post is looking at certain rules from the playtest that grabbed my attention and is not intended to be a thorough review of each rule or the playtest.

Character Creation

We have character creation rules this time! It is broken down into a fairly simple process. Ability scores are generated by random dice rolls. The totals are assigned later in the character creation process. For those that do not like such randomness a standard array of numbers to assign is also included. Point buy is obviously lacking, but I suspect this will make its way into a final release of the rules and the provided mechanisms of ability score generation are more to keep things constrained for playtesting.

Character race and class are chosen next with nothing too outside of standard choices for the playtest. Two optional rules at this point allow a player to choose a background and a specialty for their character. Background helps give you a default set of skills and a specialty provides feats and helps provide some focus for the character class you chose.

The rest of the process is calculating your various modifiers for attack, initiative, saves, etc. This portion is clear as well. The player moves on to choosing equipment, describing your character and choosing alignment. The traditional 9 alignments players of the D&D genre are included as well as an unaligned category for creatures that it simply does not make sense to have an alignment, think something like a plant.

Character creation is laid out cleanly in the playtest. It is easy to follow and walks you through the whole process in an orderly manner. As noted the playtest rules do lack a point-buy option that many players and groups like. I strongly suspect it will have an appearance in the final rules though, so I am not too worried about the lack of that option being spelled out.

I am not a big fan of Backgrounds or Specialties, but I will go over that in a section dedicated to those options. It is worth noting even in the playtest both of those selections are noted as optional.

Backgrounds and Specialties

Backgrounds and specialties appear to act as packages for skills, traits and feats. Backgrounds are where your character came from prior to their adventuring life and Specialties are further refining the character’s class. Backgrounds bring a bundle of skills to the table, Specialties bring a bundle of feats to the table.

While there are several of these packages to choose from, I grow hesitant with a defined template of skills or feats to choose from. Admittedly it might make a new person’s entry to the game a little easier, it strikes me as stifling creativity by needing to fit into one of these templates. New backgrounds and specialties could be created, either as officially released material or by DMs in their home campaigns, but there is still something about them that I do not like.

Backgrounds are essentially introducing a full skill list again instead of relying as much on lesser defined ability checks. Specialties are similar appearing to be adding feats again as well. By having these introduced one could likely choose skills and feats a la carte to better emulate a character truly customizing their character background or class specialty.

Classes

The major classes are represented in this playtest.

The cleric has rather weak magic and weapon attack progression and does have access to several domains that come with suggested equipment lists, grants additional weapon and armor proficiencies in some cases and other domain features.

I fear the cleric is being delegated back to a healing only type class. Perhaps some the classes spells can make up for it, but at this moment I am not seeing anything that makes me really want to play a cleric.

The fighter comes with the combat superiority feature. I like how this one starts. You get a die, a d6 at first level. This die can be used for combat maneuvers which can be gained by spending the die, i.e. trading it for a maneuver, or rolled as part of maneuver to add damage or some other effect.

I liked the premise when I first read about this from the Wizard’s site. Unfortunately I think they will make this mechanic overly complex and I can see the beginnings of this already in this playtest packet. The framework being attached to this mechanic of only being able to use combat maneuvers you have unlocked and trading dice versus just rolling the dice. I think the overhead is too great and is going to hurt what could potentially be a really fun mechanic.

In comparison I present Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG Mighty Deed of Arms mechanic. Here too we get an extra die to roll during the attack. This die grows in size as our character levels. The results of this die get added to attack and damage and if you exceed a 3 on the damage die you can be creative as a player and perform a special move or call it a combat maneuver. The big difference is that the player can be creative! We aren’t restricted to a set of combat maneuvers that are well-defined or that the character might not have access to yet.

The rogue’s sneak attack escalates pretty quickly in the playtest packet. Some think too quickly. I have not looked at it long enough to make a call one way or the other. There is also some attempts to make the rogue truly skillful through Skill Mastery. I am one that thinks rogues should be very good at skills, it is their bread and butter. I think the rogue is one I would need to get some play time in to make better comments on.

The Wizard class is fairly typical. Certainly more Vancian magic oriented which I like to see. A nice low hit die which I am sure will make some upset. In my initial glance I do not see too much that I dislike about the wizard, though I withhold comments about spell power at this point in time.

Opportunity Attacks

I am glad to see these back in. I found the game played funny when there were not opportunity attacks. Even just bringing them in for moving out of a threatened square is a move in the right direction for me.

Long Rests

They have added a couple of variants to the amount of healing one gets for a long rest, but I am still not entirely happy with that offering either. First, the core assumption being all hit dice and hit points back after a long rest seems to be at the high end of the scale. I would rather it become an option, but maintain an assumption for more a middle ground.

The variants still seem to miss what I would consider the sweet spot for me. I would like to see a long rest for the core assumption to mean you get to roll all your hit dice and regain those as hit points and get all of your hit dice back. For example, if I have 5d8 hit dice, after a long rest I roll 5d8 and add that back to my hit point total and start the day with 5 hit dice to roll during the course of the day if I wish.

Wrap Up

I have only looked at some of the highlights from this most recent playtest packet. Frankly I need to take a closer look at the spells and bestiary before commenting on any of those. At the moment I prefer the first playtest packet to this second as some of these additions are not for the better. I will provide more in-depth commentary on the packet as a whole once I have reviewed the spells and bestiary and spent some more time looking at, and hopefully playing, with the rules as they are in this set.