Thursday, December 30, 2010

Exploring Rolemaster

Pondering a new campaign world for Rolemaster I wondered what was available out in "cyberspace".  Well, I found the website of Iron Crown Enterprises , and I started poking around there.  Harumph,  apparantly they consider the Rolemaster Standard System a "vintage" game, and have "archived" it, and they state that for the most part they do not support the archived vintage games.  Although I notice they still sell some PDFs and some of the books of the RMSS.  Although, to be fair they did say questions would be answered about vintage games in the forums.

Heck, I wasn't even sure ICE still existed as a company.  I was a faithful follower of most of their products up through RMSS.  I'm glad to see they're still around, and may check out some of the new stuff, but I plan on sticking with RMSS.  I like it.

I was also reminded of Spacemaster.  It was kind of cool, but not something we really got into in our gaming group.  However, since I want to try out some cross-genre sessions I may need to get it again.  Predators in a fantasy setting might be cool.  A Predator versus a War Troll might be quite a fight.

If you really don't know anything about Rolemaster you can check out the Wikipedia page, it's a fairly good explanation about the system.

The current edition, Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing is compatible with RMSS, and this article on the ICE Webring is a good overview comparing the two editions.

Browsing the official forums has shown me that RM is still popular and that people play it, and are developing software to help in running it.  All this is exciting to an old RM player like me.  Woot!

3 comments:

  1. I never experienced Role-master other than its incarnation via Middle Earth Role-Playing. My buddy was what into it, though. I hope you get that campaign off the ground!

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  2. I read the Wikipedia entry. Combat resolution sounds like a real strength, though the use of tables does put me off a little, unless of course they're the kind of tables that can be memorised over time. I like the idea of a vast body of rules that can be picked and chosen from too. All in all, it's easy to see the attraction.

    Marking a game as 'vintage' with the internet around does seem a little strong. Surely better to stick to a classification by setting or mechanics, but use age to list rather than, say, alphabetical order.

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  3. Porky, no need to memorise the tables. It really doesn't take that long to look up the result. All of the original ICE products were intended as replacements or add-ons to other systems, the first being Arms Law, IIRC. We never used them that way and instead waited until they came out with their character creation rule set, i.e. Character Law.

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