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!

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.

Rolemaster Escapes Under Cover of Darkness

Rolemaster, in terms of its official editions, is stagnant. I know that’s a stark statement, but it’s essentially true. No major new version of the game has come out for over two decades (Rolemaster Classic is not a new edition but a rerelease of the second edition with spruced-up art and layout). The fanbase is splintered between several camps. Some consider the original system as developed during its first and second editions to be, if not perfect, at least solid enough for their purposes, and regard the changes of later editions to be mistakes which ultimately took the game in the wrong direction. Some swear by the Rolemaster Standard System (RMSS), which the consensus seems to regard as the most complex variant, perhaps because they consider the complexity to pay off or because they prefer it as a generic system which yielded some extremely interesting contributions outside of the fantasy genre, or Rolemaster Fantasy Role Playing (RMFRP), the 1999 version which retained a lot of the crunch of the Standard System but pivoted back to a focus on fantasy. Others prefer HARP or MERP, simplified systems which incorporate ideas from Rolemaster to differing extents without encompassing the whole package.

The current incarnation of Iron Crown Enterprises has, for some years, promised that a new edition is forthcoming, and have billed it as Rolemaster Unified. In and of itself, that title is making a big promise, and it’s one which is reiterated by the first line of ICE’s webpage about the playtest process.

Looking forward, the multiple variations of Rolemasterwill be unified into a single Rolemaster system. This new edition of Rolemaster will include the best of all versions of Rolemaster as well as new enhancements and improvements to the Rolemaster system for the 21st-century.

That FAQ concludes by saying that “the voice of the community is very clear that multiple competing editions are a major problem.” However, I feel like the very mission statement of Rolemaster Unified gives ICE a tremendously difficult task, and one which is perhaps impossible. Sure, it is probably possible to make a version of the game which takes elements of Rolemaster Classic and RMFRP/RMSS and blends them together, but the differing tastes between the camps mean that producing a new edition which will please everyone (or even the majority of invested fans) is a tall order – and that’s before you consider how a failure to reach new fans to cover attrition in the player base and maybe even expand it would also be undesirable.

An Arcane Followup

So, a while back I did an article looking back at Arcane‘s Top 50 RPGs list from back in 1996, as polled among their (primarily UK-based) readership. At the time, I said that no truly comparable list had been produced since, but I’ve recently become aware of Tabletop Gaming magazine’s June 2018 piece on the Top 150 games. This includes board games and card games, but RPGs are healthily represented there – in fact, the top game on the list is an RPG. It’s also a UK magazine which feels in some respect like a present-day update of Arcane with a wider remit and some somewhat deeper insights, and the list was also based on a reader vote.

So, I thought it would be interesting to extract just the RPGs from that list to get a “Top RPGs” sub-list, and compare it to the Arcane list. Perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into it – the readership may well not be that similar – but it’s interesting to think about, right?

The Arcane Top 50 – Where Are They Now?

Arcane, a short-lived British tabletop gaming magazine from Future Publishing which ran from December 1995 to June 1997, is a name to conjure by for many gamers of around my age. I came to the hobby after White Dwarf had become a Games Workshop in-house advertising platform, and just as Dragon was on the verge of dropping its coverage of non-TSR RPGs altogether; that meant I got a brief taster of TSR having a broader scope of coverage, and missed out on the golden age of White Dwarf altogether.

With other RPG-focused gaming magazines available in the UK either consisting of patchy US imports or a few local magazines published on a decidedly variable basis (whatever did happen to ol’ Valkyrie?), the arrival of Arcane was immensely welcome. Sure, even by this early stage the Internet was already becoming an incomparable source of both homebrewed material and cutting-edge RPG news, but much of that was in the form of Usenet and forum discussions of variable quality or ASCII text files. To get something which was informative, read well, and looked nice, print media was still just about where it was at.

Truth be told, taking a look back at Arcane in more recent years I’m less impressed than I was at the time. It took largely the same approach to its own subject matter (primarily RPGs, with some secondary consideration to CCGs – because they were so hot at the time they really couldn’t be ignored – and perhaps a light sniff of board game content) that Future’s videogame magazines took to theirs, particularly the lighter-hearted PC Gamer/Amiga Power side of things rather than the likes of, say, Edge. That meant it focused more on brief news snippets, reviews, and fairly entry-level articles on subjects than it did on offering much in the way of in-depth treatment of matters.

Expanding Rolemaster

Poking about further at classic-era Rolemaster, I’ve begun to suspect that the system’s reputation for being overcomplex hails less from its core rules – which, whilst crunchy, are perfectly manageable – and more from the extent to which they were expanded by subsequent releases in the line. With supplement after supplement churned out, the mass of material available for the line became unmanageable, and when the revision into the Rolemaster Standard System was made ICE made the error of pandering too much to the hardcore fanbase who were absolutely fine with all of these additions and who relished all the crunch, resulting in an edition which dialled them up entirely too far.

This is an evolution we’ve seen time and time again in gaming – it happened to 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons too – though at least ICE have the excuse that they were operating early enough that these pitfalls weren’t so well-known and widely exemplified. (The custodians of 3.X D&D had less excuse, given the influence that Rolemaster had on that game.) Still, that doesn’t mean that no expansions to Rolemaster are welcome – here’s a quick look at some additions I’ve found quite interesting.

Visions of Middle-Earth

People like to express doubts as to whether Tolkien’s legendarium is really suited for adapting to tabletop RPGs, but people keep doing it anyway. Over the years we’ve seen the licensing rights for such things pass from company to company, resulting in three different official RPGs over the years – MERP, the Decipher-published Lord of the Rings range that tied in with the Peter Jackson movies, and the latest official RPG incarnation of Middle Earth, The One Ring. Recently I had a chance to acquire two of the three second hand for a good rate – and the two with a better fan reputation, at that – so I thought I’d dip in to see whether they were what they were cracked up to be. The two games – MERP and The One Ring – both represent very distinct and different takes on the same setting, but only one of them captures the weird mixture of comfortable fairytale and doom-laden epic that is the hallmark of Lord of the Rings…

Middle Earth Role-Playing

MERP was produced by ICE, producers of Rolemaster. Having landed the Middle-Earth licence, they had put out a world guide to the setting in 1982, but they went system neutral with it, providing guidelines for adapting a range of different popular fantasy systems of the time to the needs of a Middle-Earth campaign. This strikes me as a smart move -after all, when you’ve landed what is arguably the biggest IP licence in fantasy literature, why limit yourself to just selling it to customers of your house system? – and it was in keeping with the commercial trends of the time, Chaosium having given Thieves World the multi-system treatment the previous year.

However, as the 1980s went on such cross-industry collaboration and permissiveness would go out of style, particularly once TSR and Palladium Books started to flex their legal muscles as a matter of course. On top of that, ICE must have realised that the Middle Earth licence had the potential to reach an audience beyond the existing roleplaying fandom, so an entry-level rules set aimed squarely at them could be a big hit – and if they played their cards right, it could drive sales of both their MERP setting material and their existing RPG rules.

Debuting in 1984, MERP is famously based on a scaled-back version of Rolemaster, and it seems to have been designed with the assumption that people would graduate to using Rolemaster in place of the MERP system when they were good and ready; the text directly encourages this and goes out of its way to mention that you are only getting a fraction of the magic and rules for characters of 1st-10th level and so on and so forth if you stick with just the MERP rules.

The big problem with this drive to encourage people to take up the advanced game is that even the lower-powered characters of MERP don’t really seem to fit the Middle Earth setting. The glaring problem is magic. In Middle Earth magic is rare and always getting rarer, with explicit magic use basically being limited to the Valar and Maiar and mmmmmmaybe elves and dwarves if you count their exceptional craftsmanship as quasi-magical. Conversely, because all of its character classes are inherited from Rolemaster, everyone in MERP can learn magic, and magic a good deal flashier and easier than what Gandalf pulls out of his hat in the books. Relatedly, whilst Rolemaster-style critical hits might be awesome, I don’t remember Tolkien making a habit of using precisely described maimings and injuries to spice up combat scenes, though I guess I could see Peter Jackson drawing on the critical hit tables here.

See, the thing about games based on licences is that they really need to capture the atmosphere of the work they are based on, particularly when that work has a tone as unique as that of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. MERP does have a particular atmosphere of its own, but that atmosphere doesn’t say Lord of the Rings to me – it says Diet Rolemaster.

And the thing is, even if I wanted to go through the exercise of running Rolemaster in a setting it doesn’t really fit to see how the rules end up warping the setting, I’d be inclined to just use full fat Rolemaster, particularly since the version here isn’t really significantly more simple than core Rolemaster, it just tends to provide you with less options, which isn’t the same thing. (And in some cases it actually offers you more options than you really want -there’s a baffling range of different types of human, and also it offers the opportunity to play several types of orc and troll, which I suspect 99% of people wanting to play a Middle Earth-based game will have no interest in doing.) If you can handle the combat in this, you can handle the wider range of critical hit charts in Arms Law; if you can handle the mechanics of learning and using spells in this, you can handle Spell Law; if you can handle character creation in this, you should be able to work out Character and Campaign Law for yourself.

In short, MERP could only be mistaken for being rules-light by folk who’ve been immersed in rules-heavy RPGs for so long that they’ve forgotten what a genuinely simple RPG system looks like; whilst this could pass muster in the 1980s, when the general fashion was towards increasing complexity, by the 1990s genuinely rules-light RPGs emerged and ICE ended up putting out a Lord of the Rings Adventure Game, which was a simplified version of MERP because they realised MERP wasn’t a simplified enough version of Rolemaster.

It feels like I’m being harsh here, and I don’t really want to be. MERP is a fun game, but that’s because it’s basically Rolemaster, which I’ve previously said is a fun game in its own right. From what I’ve heard it succeeded at introducing a receptive audience of Tolkien fans to RPGs, and it would be churlish to hold the fact that one of those newly-minted gamers grew up to become Varg Vikernes against it. It just doesn’t feel like a Middle Earth game, and that kills stone dead more or less the only reason to opt for MERP instead of just running core-rules-only Rolemaster.

The One Ring

Here is the real magic. Originally released in a handsome slipcase version with a player’s book, a book for the referee (called the Loremaster here), two nice big maps and a set of special dice, it’s also been rereleased recently in an updated and revised single-book version (presumably in part because of the high cost of reprinting the slipcase edition). I happen to own the slipcase version, and it’s absolutely gorgeously illustrated and presented; the company that actually has the tabletop games licence for the books (and who subcontracted the work out to Cubicle 7) is called Sophisticated Games, and this certainly fits the bill as far as that criterion is concerned.

The special dice are a mild concern, but they aren’t absolutely required to play. One of them is the Feat Die, which is rolled whenever a character attempts something worth a dice roll; it’s a D12 numbered 1-10, with the Eye of Sauron in the 11 spot and Gandalf’s personal rune in the 12 spot. If you roll the Eye of Sauron, it counts as a zero and something bad is likely to happen to you, whereas if you get Gandalf’s rune the task automatically succeeds, at least usually – otherwise the number you roll plus any numbers you get to add to it have to beat a target number to succeed at the task. The other dice – Success Dice – are six-siders, with 1-3 in outline and 4-6 filled in to aid quick counting (and to remind you that results of 1-3 are ignored when you are suffering from the Weary condition) and a little tengwar rune accompanying the “6” on each; for each point you have in an appropriate skill, you get to roll a six-sider along with the Feat Die and add the result to the total. The tengwar runes are helpful for assessing the magnitude of success – if you get one such rune then you may get a little bonus, if you get two you might get a substantial something – and are also used in the optional rules for Epic Feats, where the GM has the option to let you roll to accomplish something really, truly, amazingly unlikely but you only succeed if you roll the Gandalf rune on the Feat die and at least one tengwar rune on the Success Dice. (For flavour purposes, it is suggested that when rolling for characters who serve the Dark Lord – wittingly or unwittingly – the Eye of Sauron should be an auto-success for them and the Gandalf rune should be a setback for ’em.)

It is absolutely trivial to substitute in ordinary dice for these, but the special dice are quite cleverly designed – between the runes and the colouring, they are well-optimised to allow you to quickly eyeball a roll and see if you’ve got beyond the target number quickly. Moreover, the use of the runes helps capture the atmosphere of the books – and The One Ring really does go all-out to do precisely that.

Characters don’t so much level up as gain Wisdom and/or Valour; each increase in one of those simultaneously lets you pick some form of more concrete character advancement and also gains you additional respect from those who value the quality you decided to boost. Likewise, you have a “Hope” score to denote where your mental reserves are at and a “Shadow” trait to show how much your resolve has been shaken or undermined by the influence of the Dark Lord (whether this be due to ill acts on your part, or witnessing the works of evil, or simply being tainted by the Shadow’s influence in the world); if you end up in a situation where your Hope dips below your Shadow score, you end up with the wonderfully-named “Miserable” condition – which can also be the forerunner of a bout of madness if you end up rolling the Eye of Sauron whilst Miserable. Each bout of madness sends you further along the appropriate track (based on your Calling – your character class, in other words), so some characters will find themselves becoming greedier and greedier from the dragon-sickness, others will find their temper becoming shorter and shorter, and so on. Hope can also be used to give bonuses to rolls – spend a point of Hope on a roll, and you get to add the appropriate Attribute to it (thankfully, unlike in Numenera where spending points like this will almost always be wasted, you are allowed to wait to see what the roll result is before spending Hope) – and the party as a whole has a pool of Fellowship points you can dip into to replenish your Hope in a pinch. You can seek the approval of the majority of the party to take points from the Fellowship pool – or you can be all like We wants it, it’s our birthday! and grab the points anyway, getting yourself a dose of Shadow as a result of being a grabby piglet.

Similarly, when characters are exerting themselves a lot (for instance, in combat or on long journeys) and their Fatigue level exceeds their Endurance score, they become Weary, which has various effects – for instance, whilst travelling if party members become Weary it’s likely that the party will run into dangerous hazards. The journey mechanics in this are extremely well-explained and actually make this one of the few games which make me want to bother counting hexes on maps and tracking encumbrance levels (thankfully, the encumbrance system is quite simple), because of course the more of a burden you are carrying the faster you get Weary when travelling. (Frodo was unlucky enough to have a Loremaster who dicked him over on just how much encumbrance a single gold ring represented…) Between the rules for getting Weary and the hazards you can face, the game makes travelling through Middle Earth feel like a slow, desperate slog in particularly Shadow-blighted realms whilst allowing you to cut a fast pace in more gentle realms, and in general captures the feeling of the travelogue sections of the books remarkably well.

Moreover, when you take the Hope/Shadow/Miserable and Endurance/Fatigue/Weary mechanics together, they really get across the way Tolkien presented adventures in the books: process that are both physically and spiritually draining, which if you are lucky and wise you can emerge from with your spirit emboldened and enriched but which can equally leave a permanent taint on you that you can never quite get away from. (In particular, characters who have had bouts of madness will have gained a permanent point of Shadow; men, dwarves and hobbits who let their madness meters max out end up going off and dying alone at best, or become agents of the Shadow at worst, whilst elves who have the same happen to them despair of Middle Earth entirely and sail off to the West to get a Shadow-enema from the Valar.)

Another way in which the game captures the spirit of the books is in the structure of gameplay. In particular, you are encouraged to have significant talky encounters take place in an interestingly formalised manner that is reminiscent of the almost ritualistic way characters present themselves to strangers in the books; first the party decides whether to have a single spokesperson speak for them or whether they’ll all be talking, then a Tolerance level is set for the encounter in question, based on the Wisdom or Valour of the party in question and the Standing of its members amongst the people addressed. Run out of Tolerance with someone you’re negotiating with, and they’ll lose patience with the encounter and send you away at best. This encourages players to take care when negotiating, and in particular to avoid dragging conversations on interminably, and also is appropriate to the subtle emphasis Tolkien puts on manners and etiquette in the books.

Another aspect of how gameplay is structured is the division of the game into Adventuring and Fellowship phases. Borrowing an idea from Pendragon, the game assumes that most PCs at most go on one adventure per year and allows for a rest period (the Fellowship phase) in between adventures during which PCs can take various downtime actions.

This generational style of play is in keeping with the selection of time period for the game; the assumed start of campaign date is five years after the Battle of Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit, and Cubicle 7 intend to produce material to support play all the way to the end of the War of the Ring. This is more focused than MERP, which tried to support play from any time from the Second to Fourth Age, and also positions the player characters to usefully engage with major events of the saga. The setting covered in the core set consists of Mirkwood and the lands around Dale, Laketown, Beorn’s House and the Lonely Mountain; this is an area which is simultaneously familiar from The Hobbit but where we don’t know much about what went down in the locality during the War of the Ring, so whilst the PCs might not get to dump the One Ring into Mount Doom (unless the Loremaster decides to deviate from canon), their actions could still make the difference between this region standing strong against the depredations of Mordor or being reduced to wasteland.

Gorgeously packaged and illustrated, The One Ring is the BBC radio drama to MERP‘s Peter Jackson movie – it’s the only RPG adaptation I’ve seen that seems to have a remote hope of feeling like you are stepping into the books, and I can’t wait to give it a proper try.

Giving Rolemaster Another Chance

Rolemaster as an RPG system gets a lot of shit. For about as long as I can remember being involved with the hobby (so since the early 1990s at least) it’s been the butt of every joke about system complexity going, dismissed as Rulemaster or Rollmaster by gamers who didn’t realise that to the average outsider to the hobby Vampire: the Masquerade seems about as oblique and involves just as much die-rolling.

To be fair, publishers ICE have rarely done themselves favours in this respect. For its first decade or so of existence, Rolemaster had stuck to a more or less consistent format, with a tight set of core rules and a series of Rolemaster Companion volumes providing optional rules. Then in 1995 ICE gave the game a thorough reorganisation, applying a wide range of rules changes, and came up with the Rolemaster Standard System, an attempt to make the game applicable to any genre. This was one of those fanbase-shattering edition changes, with many fans (including original Rolemaster co-designer Terry Amthor) sticking to the tried and true 2nd Edition of the game, and so far as I can tell amongst fans the Standard System is generally held to be the most complex and fiddly iteration of the game.

Referee’s Bookshelf: Nightmares of Mine

This book was originally published by ICE ostensibly as a supplement for the Rolemaster Standard System – perhaps the most complex iteration of Rolemaster due to its aspirations towards shifting from being a fantasy-based game to becoming a generic system (an experiment which arguably was reflected in the development of D20/D&D 3rd Edition). In retrospect this is a bit of a shame, because aside from having the Rolemaster trade dress applied to it it’s actually an almost completely generic product, with a tiny, miniscule smidgen of Rolemaster system stuff pitched in terms which could be easily translated to other systems.

What Nightmares of Mine actually boils down to is an expansive book-length essay by Ken Hite (with contributions – I suspect the Rolemaster system stuff – by John Curtis) on horror RPGs. Over the course of the book, Hite breaks down horror as a genre to see what makes it tick, considers how horror RPGs differ from those of other genres, and provides extensive advice on running both horror-oriented games and the occasional scary scenario in an otherwise less fright-focused campaign.