Rolemaster!

[Flash of lightning and evil sounding music]

Well, I've been busy this year, with work restructuring (the perils of a right wing government), my friend making lots of extra locations for Skyrim, Skyrin itself, and the new edition of Dwarf Fortress.

But I've managed to both find my long lost Dragon Warriors/ Adventure Path campaign notes and sheets.  Three Dragon Warrior characters being run through a slightly modified and converted (on the fly) "Age of Worms".  The series from Dungeon Magazine...

It was worth a shot, and the first adventure [The Whispering Cairn] was fun, with interesting NPCs, a ghost, the characters befriending the 'wrong' side, ancient mysteries and the killing of a necromancer.

The second one, "Three Faces of Evil" was not fun, as it consisted of three linear dungeon crawls, and as combat in DW is quite dangerous and healing is quite rare, it dragged on and made little sense.  That's where it ended, slogging through a grimlock infested gauntlet with low health points.

I've glanced at the later adventures, and they start to be infused with 3rd Ed. D&D silliness, where too many types of creatures appear and plot lines are stretched or left unfinished.  The setting I use is much lower fantasy and less heroic, so if we ever pick up that group of immoral treasure hunters, we may go back to one page dungeons. 

And recently, I've rolled up a Rolemaster character and am experimenting with the Combat Companion instead of Arms Law.  It's quicker and faster (less tables to flick through) but the 'armour by the piece' bit looks good. As I've played RM before, and we're going roll-lite (i.e. only roll dice when something dangerous/serious is happening) I'm finding it fun. 

Even though all I've done is have one battle against two goblins.  Rolling a natural 00 on the final critical was icing on the cake, and reminded my why I keep going back to this system, even if my 1st level ranger did have trouble extracting his sword from the goblin's skull...

I'd like to point out that I'm using Rolemaster Classic, as the RMSS 'revised' system seems, to me, to be adding extra skills and rolls for no reason.  I draw the line at the requirement for a three page character sheet.  But I know that some people draw the line at 6 attributes and find 10 too complicated.

I'll blog soon about the settings I'm considering, but there's a bit of work to do on each...