Shadow World: In the Days of the Loremasters

ICE, the publishers of Rolemaster, made no secret of their love for Tolkien right out of the gate – their very name, Iron Crown Enterprises, is a reference to the crown of Morgoth in the Silmarillion. Landing the tabletop RPG licence for Middle-Earth and getting to make Middle-Earth Role Playing was probably a dream come true for them, but at the same time a tabletop RPG company which relies exclusively on a licensed setting is setting up a trap for itself (as ICE would discover when their income near-evaporated once the Tolkien licence got pulled).

ICE, however, would not put out their first Middle-Earth material until 1982, in the form of the system-neutral Campaign and Adventure Guidebook For Middle Earth. The development of MERP as a stripped-down version of Rolemaster would come later – ICE naturally wanted to get something on the market quick, ideally in a form which people using any fantasy RPG system could buy and use without being faced with unfamiliar stats, and it’s worth bearing in mind that Rolemaster had only just come together as a full standalone RPG (as opposed to supplements providing an alternate combat/magic system for other games) at that time.

Before that, they would put out in 1980 the first version of The Iron Wind – an adventure supplement which was one of their first releases, alongside the original version of Arms Law (the first plank of what would become the Rolemaster system). The original version of The Iron Wind was billed as being usable with any game system and as the first of the Loremaster series of setting supplements (to run in parallel with the Rolemaster rules releases), with more products promised soon.

It’s evident that ICE quickly got sidetracked with developing Rolemaster and exploiting their absurd good fortune in landing the Middle-Earth licence, however, because the Loremaster concept would not be revisited until 1984, when a heavily revised version of The Iron Wind and three new supplements in a broadly similar vein would emerge. In the long run, these would become the seeds of what would be known as Shadow World – the all-original Rolemaster campaign setting. With the Tolkien licence well and truly out of ICE’s hands, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to rerelease any of their MERP stuff any time soon, but the Loremaster and Shadow World material should in principle still be theirs to develop, refresh, and rerelease for their new Rolemaster Unified system. Let’s take a look at those old modules and see whether they still have much in the way of potential even after all this time…

The Iron Wind

This module leads off with a broad-brushstrokes description of the world and its overarching history. It’s highly Tolkien-influenced, right down to history being divided into three Ages. Back in the First Age, the Lords of Essence – magic users who had attained godlike power – warred, reshaping the world. In the Second Age the Loremasters, who are basically Tolkien-esque Istari, spread throughout the world to galvanise its peoples against the spread of resurgent evil, and though the Loremasters were mere shadows of what the Lords of Essence had been, they won through in the end. Now it is the Third Age, and the Loremasters have gone from being lordly presences to humble travellers (think of the Second Age ones as being like Gandalf the White, whilst the Third Age ones are a bit more Gandalf the Grey or Radagast the Brown in nature), and evil is rising again.

Still, give ICE this much credit: when it comes to riffing on Tolkien like this they actually aren’t that bad. The World of Loremaster, as Shadow World is referred to at this point, at its best shows the same knack as Tolkien for tying in geographic features with ancient lore – for instance, the world consists of lots of mountain ranges and has a low ratio of land to ocean in part because of the conflicts of the past, so by mentioning that a region of the world has a lot of extinct volcanos that’s a nod to it having been the site of a particular Lord of Essence’s activities in the past.

The main purpose of the worldbuilding, however, is to justify a setup where the world is divided into little regions and it’s quite hard to travel from region to region, but the world as a whole has a common cosmological underpinning rooted in the Rolemaster system’s assumptions. The intention seems to have been to allow for designers to cook up small settings for the world that could be slotted in wherever, without worrying overly much about what’s going on in neighbouring regions, which is unrealistic in terms of verisimilitude but is also probably a big help when it comes to managing and editing different projects being developed in parallel. It also means each Loremaster module can be dragged and dropped into your own fantasy campaign world should you wish – just pick an out of the way area you’ve not defined and doesn’t have much in the way of outside dealings and has more or less the correct climate and poof! You’ve got a fresh new locale ripe for adventure!

Twilight: 2000’s New Dawn

Thanks to buying into a Bundle of Holding a while back, I’ve ended up with a cluster of Free League PDFs, and I’ve just gotten around to taking a look at their new version of Twilight: 2000 – the game’s 4th Edition. As I noted in my review of Twilight: 2000 1st Edition, the most widely-known versions of the game were put out by GDW; the original 1st Edition boxed set was a startlingly good seller for them, outstripping sales of the roughly contemporary MegaTraveller boxed set with ease. Their 2nd Edition started out strong, but they managed to confuse the market with a rapid patch to a “2.2” edition, as part of a perhaps misguided impulse to try and convert all of their RPGs to their house system. (The same drive saw the creation of Traveller: The New Era, kicking off one of the earliest truly nasty edition wars in the hobby.)

After the shuttering of GDW in the mid-1990s, Traveller creator Marc Miller and his Far Future Enterprises became the curators of the GDW legacy, producing reprint material here and issuing licenses for new games there. In 2006, 93 Games Studio announced that they’d be putting out Twilight: 2013, a third edition of the game with a tweaked timeline (due to the passage of time making the old one anachronistic); a PDF limped out in late 2008, print products followed, but then they swiftly shuttered in 2010.

That’s hardly likely to be the case with Free League – or if it happens, it probably won’t be Twilight: 2000 that does for them. They seem to be going from strength to strength, they have a series of widely celebrated game lines under their belts, their Kickstarters are operating smoothly, and they didn’t touch Twilight: 2000 before they were already fairly well-established as a publisher. It’s an apt subject for them to kick on – with games like Mutant: Year Zero, they’ve already proved their chops at the post-apocalyptic genre, after all.

On top of that, the folks at Free League are gamers like the rest of us; according to the designer’s notes in this edition, the brainwave to actually go for the licence came about because some of the key people there ended up running a Twilight: 2000 1st Edition campaign, with the action shifted from Poland to their native Sweden, and had such a blast that they realised that they could apply lessons learned from Mutant: Year Zero and its very similar “open-world survival simulation” approach to Twilight: 2000. After checking in with Marc Miller to secure the licence, they ran a Kickstarter, and this new edition is the result.

Castle Falkenstein: A Stirring Journey To a Europe That Never Was

I realised a while ago that the body of work of R. Talsorian Games – which pretty much equates the body of work of Mike Pondsmith, since he was the core designer of all of their key RPG lines – makes a ton of sense if you think of them in terms of anime. For Mekton, the connection is obvious – the mecha genre originates in anime, after all – and for Cyberpunk, though the company would turn to the literary genre for inspiration I still think the game “clicks” best once you view it in terms of slick, violent cyberpunk anime of the era.

Carry this through, and even though Castle Falkenstein is perhaps the most literary of Pondsmith’s designs, you can still defnitely see it as being set in a very particular type of fantastic Europe – the sort of mingling of steampunk and romance you might get if you blended elements of Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle In the Sky, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Castle of Cagliostro. (Damn, Miyazaki really loves castles, doesn’t he?) Sure, on the face of it Cagliostro is set outside the time period, but it riffs enough on The Prisoner of Zenda that you can imagine it as an adventure of Lupin I instead of Lupin III. It’s a Europe of mystery, steampunk invention, and magic, seen through a lens distant enough to make the old continent feel unfamiliar and romantic to those of us that live there, which I rather appreciate.

I mentioned that Falkenstein was rather literary in its conception, and I meant it: Pondsmith goes highbrow with the presentation on this one, based around a premise which I was worried would make the rulebook burdensome to navigate but is actually rather neat – specifically he gives the game an honest to goodness framing device. This is based around the fictional conceit that the Castle Falkenstein core rulebook wasn’t written by Pondsmith, he only edited it – like how William Goldman poses as only being the editor of The Princess Bride. The “real” author is Tom Olam – a videogame artist and old friend of Pondsmith’s who disappeared on a holiday in Europe some years ago. One day, a package showed up at Pondsmith’s house, containing a bundle of documents and illustrations – and a covering letter from Olam, explaining that he was safe and well; he’d just been isekai’d into a parallel world whilst visiting Castle Neuschwanstein, one of Crown Prince Ludwig’s castles in Bavaria.

Best Practice, Bushido Style

Bushido is a tricky game. On the one hand, it pushed genre boundaries in tabletop RPGs when it emerged and, despite being the product of Western writers holding forth on someone else’s culture, it’s actually aged reasonably well on that front; authors Bob Chartette and Paul Hume gave every impression of having done their research and made a very wise decision to say “this is set in a fantasy version of Japan we will call ‘Nippon’ to distinguish it from the real Japan, the two will diverge in important respects and we encourage you not to conflate them”, as well as being fairly forward thinking for 1970s game designers when it came to saying “yeah, let’s have women warriors if you like, we can diverge from historical norms and assumptions for the sake of a more enjoyable experience”. Despite a system which is rather of its time, it’s aged better than you would expect.

At the same time, it’s had incredibly sparse support over the years – a consequence in part of the fire-and-forget approach taken for much of its history by publisher Fantasy Games Unlimited, who long took an approach of picking up games looking for a home, unleashing a core book, and then kind of not bothering with a support line unless the game’s creators or highly motivated fans were willing to put in the work essentially themselves to cook up product proposals. (The major exception seems to be Villains & Vigilantes, which seems to be the one RPG from FGU to really get a sustained promotional campaign behind it.) This does mean there’s a bit of a gap when it comes to the question of what you actually do with the game.

Despite this, though, Bushido ended up sustaining a fanbase for a surprisingly long time for a product which was essentially tossed out onto the marketplace and left to sink or swim. Thanks to sales of imports and coverage in magazines like White Dwarf it seems that the UK managed to develop a small but enthusiastic Bushido fanbase – enough for the game to pop up in the Arcane top 50 RPGs poll in the mid-1990s despite over a decade of neglect by FGU. In fact, it managed to get the number 17 spot, which considering some of the games it beat (including then-hot material like Rifts, Earthdawn, and Werewolf: the Apocalypse) is incredibly good going.

Now, to be fair, whilst Bushido had very little support beyond the core set at that point, it didn’t have no support; beyond those magazine articles, a smattering of adventure material came out in the early 1980s, and more recently FGU made a return to the line. One of these products would offer an interesting model of best practice when designing Bushido scenarios. The others… would not follow best practice.

Valley of the Mists

Designed by Bushido co-creator Bob Charrette, this is pretty much the only source material beyond the original core rules that FGU ever put out in the game’s early years, and is mainly significant for how it sets the model for subsequent published scenarios. Opening with a rundown of mountainous Hida Province which gives an overview of the basic terrain, the general political situation, and the disposition of the samurai clans, yakuza, and ninja in the area (as well as a cantankerous hermit-wizard who could be a potential contact for the player characters and an overview of the main town of the area), it then provides two plot-based scenarios and a sandbox area for exploration.

Paranoia Perfected?

In looking over Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground – and its supplementary zine, Experience Points – I got to thinking about Paranoia again – for a new edition came out last year, and I’ve been slack about getting hold of it. But to properly talk about that, I need to talk about the game’s history. I covered that a while back in fairly epic Kickstopper article concerning the release of the previous edition, but a quick recap for anyone who doesn’t want to trawl through that article is probably sensible. The story so far…

• 1984: The 1st Edition of the game is released by West End Games. The core book is alright, but it’s really in the supplement line that the distinctive Paranoia style comes into its own.
• 1987: A tightened-up 2nd Edition of the game is put out by West End, a grand improvement over 1st Edition’s core book on all fronts. The early 2nd Edition line continues the game’s golden age, but eventually things go a bit awry when a series of misguided metaplot events see the game straying from its original concept (and the style of play it handles best), and the writers who best “get it” drift away from writing for West End.
• 1995: West End, circling the drain somewhat by this point, put out the “Fifth” Edition. The bit about it being the 5th version of the game when it was, in fact, the 3rd is the funniest joke involved by quite some margin – and given how stunningly un-funny it is, that should give you an idea of how poorly it is regarded.
• 2004: Having retrieved the rights from the wreckage of West End, the game’s original creators give Mongoose the licence and they put out the edition initially known as Paranoia XP until Microsoft suffer a lack of sense of humour about it. It’s an excellent return to form, most particularly because it recognises three distinct playstyles popular among Paranoia players – from slapstick “Zap” games to gag-light, satire-heavy “Straight” play, with the “Classic” style somewhere in the middle – and provides both clear guidance on how to cater to each of these.
• 2009: A 25th Anniversary repackaging essentially provides a slimmed-down edit of the 2004 core rulebook – now called Paranoia: Troubleshooters – and two other core books, Paranoia: Internal Security and Paranoia: High Programmers, bids at fleshing out styles of play alluded to in past supplements like HIL Sector Blues and Extreme Paranoia but which, it’s probably fair to say, don’t seem to have the same legs as the decades-old tried-and-true Troubleshooter-focused version of the game.
• 2014: Mongoose began the fractious, much-delayed, ill-tempered Kickstarter process which led to the release of the “Red Clearance Edition” (RCE) of the game in 2017 – a major system revision spearheaded by James Wallis of Alas Vegas infamy and Grant Howitt, whose preceding Goblin Quest was a fun fantasy take on Paranoia and whose subsequent Spire shows some influence from design ideas he worked into Red Clearance Edition.

As I outlined in my previous article, the Red Clearance Edition had a difficult beginning. It was subjected to extensive delays which caused no small amount of ill will; the Kickstarter backers were badly annoyed by the delays, and became outright furious when one backer was given a preview PDF to use at a convention but the same courtesy wasn’t extended to the backers in general, creating an impression of undue favouritism. In the process of mollifying the backers, Matt Sprange – founder and head honcho at Mongoose – laid the blame for the delays squarely and unambiguously at James Wallis’s feet. (Not, let’s be very clear, Grant Howitt – I say that not because I take any joy from slamming James Wallis, I’ve done that enough in the Alas Vegas articles, but because it’s not fair to include Grant Howitt in the blast radius here; at no stage did I see Matt Sprange express any dissatisfaction with how Grant had been handling his end of things.) In the annotated versions of the core materials that Kickstarter backers at some tiers received, Grant and James expressed dissatisfaction with Mongoose’s editing, proofreading, and quality control processes. Everyone was left just a bit sore-headed and grumpy by the whole thing.

That included me, especially once I got the final product, which ended up looking cheap and with a similarly uninspiring tactile feel to it; between the lacklustre hard copies and the somewhat shaky artwork (particularly on the cards and in the internal art), it felt like a tatty and half-hearted sort of product. The shift to incorporating special dice and a set of bespoke cards as key game components – not a Wallis & Howitt decision, the cards were apparently a Mongoose mandate – might have made a degree of sense if Paranoia were being repackaged as a pick-up-and-play game, something which could sit attractively and eye-catchingly on a boardgame shelf and be pulled out for a quick game when the mood strikes, but the apparent desire in the text for somewhat more sustained play, combined with the less than appealing quality of the final product, kind of combined to sabotage that. (Those proofreading and editing complaints Wallis and Howitt had don’t exactly add to the sense of a well-honed product either.)

Stray Gems From Horvath’s Hoard

A while back I reviewed Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground, Stu Horvath’s engaging run-through of RPG history told via product overviews. Stu’s actually been nice enough to send me a little supplementary product – the zine-sized Experience Points, a selection of material cut from the book. The zine is available via Exalted Funeral, a well-regarded distributor who still, after years of promising they are Definitely Working On It, Pinky-Swear, don’t have an adequate UK/Europe shipping solution – a ridiculous situation that’s persisted for years and has left Necrotic Gnome without a local storefront shipping to their own country, because they closed their own store in the expectation that Exalterd Funeral would get their shit together on this front in an orderly manner – so I’m extremely grateful to Stu for making it easier for me to get hold of it.

Experience Points is, essentially, more of the same, but a touch more niche; I can’t put hand on heart and say that any of these entries absolutely should have been in the book at the cost of one of those that did make it in, but it is still nice to see these. There’s more D&D stuff, of course, primarily third-party releases this time; the collection starts with a discussion of the Judges’ Guild supplement The Unknown Gods and ends with a look at Petty Gods, which was conceived as an updated riff on the Unknown Gods concept; there’s also a look at the Stonehell megadungeon, but it’s the deities books which offer the most interesting narrative, if only for illustrating how a community-led project can fill a gap which the commercialised industry wasn’t touching and no one individual self-publishing creator would have spawned by themselves.

On the first-party side of the coin there’s a deep dive into the novels and modules which TSR put out to cover the Time of Troubles metaplot event. This was a bid to try and provide an IC explanation for the shift from 1E to 2E, a concept I always thought was pretty muddle-headed in its undertaking to begin with. Why even bother explicitly stating that all the assassins have spontaneously died when you can just stop mentioning their existence? Why publish the original Forgotten Realms box to begin with if you’re going to render it out of date almost immediately? Why run big cosmic events to tidy up continuity issues when you can just quietly decanonise contradictory perspectives that don’t pan out? Horvath unpacks why such metaplot events can rake in money for publishers even though they arguably provide no net benefit to players or referees on balance.

Horvath’s Hoard

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground was penned by enthusiastic RPG collector Stu Horvath as an outgrowth of his other work documenting vintage RPGs, which began with a humble Instagram account and now takes in a weekly podcast. It’s a handsomely-presented coffee table book, offering a sort of tabletop RPG equivalent of A History of the World In 100 Objects in which Horvath goes over his extensive personal collection and picks out RPG books to discuss – core rules primarily, but supplements, adventures, campaign settings, and less easily categorised items also feature.

Rather than simply offering a run-down of Horvath’s favourites, Horvath attempts to select items which help illustrate something about the tabletop gaming zeitgeist. If a game is historically significant or extremely influential, that counts for a lot, but Horvath also allows himself to include a few items which represent noteworthy oddities, intriguing creative dead ends, or outright screwups, because as in other creative fields infamous failures can be just as illustrative as celebrated successes. In addition, Horvath sticks to items from his own collection – he won’t include something he hasn’t heard of, or has not at least at some point owned and been able to make his own assessment of.

In this respect the biggest gap, as he acknowledges in the introduction, are RPGs in languages other than English; I don’t know whether or not Stu is multilingual, but presumably if he was multilingual enough to read and appreciate RPGs written in other languages, he’d have included some here, so this is really a tour through the Anglophone segment of the hobby; we get only second-hand glimpses, via translations, into areas like the Swedish scene, and nothing on Germany or Japan, all territories where games other than D&D rule the roost.

Supplement Supplemental! (Lustria’s Secrets, God’s Teeth, and Arkham’s Almanac)

It’s been a while, but I’m back here with another round-up of game supplements I read recently. This time around I’m looking at thick books touching on difficult subject matter. Two of these are guides to fictional places which riff on places in the real world but have crucial differences; one of these gets very, very real indeed.

Lustria (WFRP)

As the title suggests, this is a thick supplement describing the continent of Lustria – the Warhammer Fantasy world’s equivalent of South America. (North America is Naggaroth – a brutal place colonised by the cruel, sadistic Dark Elves.) Whilst the Empire is a fantasy funhouse mirror version of the Holy Roman Empire, Bretonnia is the France equivalent, Albion is Britain and so on and so forth, the course of the colonisation of Lustria has taken a very different course in this setting – for Lustria was the stronghold of the Old Ones, the failure of whose science led to the contamination of the Warhammer world with Chaos, and much of it remains firmly in the hands of the lizard people, led by the enigmatic frog-wizards, the Slann.

That said, the lizardfolk have an aesthetic inspired by Pre-Columbian cultures like the Aztecs, Inca, and so on. This gives rise to some headaches; it means that whilst several European cultures get represented in the setting with distinct, fully-developed human societies, an entire continent’s worth of people kind of get erased and replaced with non-human caricatures. That it’s a colonised population suffering this indignity kind of makes it worse.

To be fair to Cubicle 7, this is not a problem of their own making – it’s Games Workshop’s setting, and whilst they have been admirably happy to let WFRP hit its own tone distinct from the wargames in this edition, they’re hardly going to let Cubicle 7’s team outright redesign an entire continent to address this issue. Equally, though, they didn’t have to grasp this nettle; just like they’ve largely skirted around the flavourful but, in retrospect, extremely dodgy issue of Chaos Dwarves, they could have kept Lustria firmly out of the spotlight, said “there’s all manner of rumour about what’s out there but the fact is it’s out of the scope of the RPG and your PCs will never find out for sure”, and leave it at that.

Instead, they’ve made the creative decision to open up the RPG somewhat to exploring other regions of the setting – the Salzenmund and Sea of Claws supplements providing avenues to get Empire-based characters off on seafaring adventures to other lands – and so this means they have to tackle Lustria and flesh out both the lizardfolk and the various attempts to colonise the region.

The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 14)

It’s time for another entry in my slow trawl through the Fighting Fantasy back catalogue. In my previous article, I mentioned that we’d been travelling through a bit of a golden age for the series. We’ve now made it up to 1992, the ten year anniversary of the series, and plans are afoot at Puffin Books to evergreen the series – get the thing to 50 books, call it a day, and then coast on long tail sales of the back catalogue. That, however, is not what will come to pass..

Siege of Sardath

Scenario

You are the heroic protector of the settlement of Grimmund, a small community in the depths of the Forest of Night. With sword, bow, and lore learned from valued allies, you do what you can to keep the place safe, and have been honoured for your efforts with a place on the Grimmund Council. One day, you are awoken from strange and troubling dreams and called to an emergency meeting of the Council. Matters have been troubled of late: monsters stalk the woods and the elf-paths have closed, cutting Grimmund off from their dwarven allies at Sardath. An adventurer, one Morn Preeler, has just arrived with news – hence the hastily-assembled Council meeting. Preeler declares that the Forest itself is making war on Grimmund, and the startled Councillors begin making plans to take the fight to the forest.

You, however, are not so sure. You’ve always been acutely aware that the Forest has its perils – but also that the Forest is the basis of the livelihoods the folk of Grimmund eke out in its shadow. Its dangers must be resisted, but to burn out the forest would be to weaken the town gravely – possibly fatally. On top of that, your unquiet dreams have left you convinced that some other dark force is at work. When you express your doubts, Morn offers to take you to one side to better explain his discoveries to you and talk you around. Once you two are in private, Morn swiftly declares that he is not Morn – but an impostor who has stolen his form, and who now intends to slay and replace you!

Siege of Sardath is the sole Fighting Fantasy book by the mysterious Keith P. Phillips, who so far as I can tell never wrote any other gamebook material and seems to have been a complete unknown. This puts you in the position of not really knowing what to expect – though goodness knows that siege narratives and “track down the big bad” stories are a well-worn default in the series. Indeed, the return to Allansia and more classic fantasy tropes after a run of weird, outlandish, and horror-tinged gamebooks gives this something of a back-to-basics air. Let’s see how that shakes out.

Supplement Supplemental! (Static Solo Scares, Old-School Architecture, and Freshened-Up Cats)

Time for another entry in my occasional series offering brief mini-reviews on RPG supplements interesting enough to pass comment on but not quite spurring enough thoughts for a full article. This time around, it’s various items from the Basic Roleplaying family of systems.

Alone Against the Static (Call of Cthulhu)

South Dakota, the 1990s: Alex and Charlie are a couple whose relationship is not doing great. Charlie’s brother, Mark, has offered them the use of his cabin in the woods, which should give them a chance to have a nice getaway to have some fun, talk things over, and patch things up. As Alex and Charlie settle in for their first night, they decide to watch a movie – but the broadcast reception out here is lousy and the vast majority of Mark’s videos are horror movies, which they’re not in the mood for.

Eventually, they hit on a tape which they hope contains something different, and it certainly does – because it proves to be camcorder footage of the cabin from the last time Mark and his wife visited, filmed by an unseen figure a la Lost Highway, cutting off partway through and playing this hideous white noise static. Then the power to the cabin cuts off. The next day, one of the couple wakes up to find that the other has taken the car to town to try and get help fixing the power. A day alone in the cabin – or walking in the surrounding woods – can’t be that bad, right? (Oh yes it could…)