Last night we played Tunnels & Trolls for the first time. It was ok. Actually, it was a lot of fun. But I digress…
For me, the best moment of the evening was when the guys asked for me to extend the Rolemaster playtest to a full dungeon adventure.
As regular readers know, I’ve been working on testing the latest iteration of Rolemaster for a couple of weeks now. The challenge of running a full adventure, however, had me delving deeper into the third book of the set: Creature Law.
And I decided to convert Dyson Logo’s excellent “Dyson’s Delve”. Or, at least, the first couple of levels.
Dyson’s Delve
If you’ve not come across Dyson’s excellent maps then you’re missing out. At Christmas, I received the printed editions (as well as the .PDFs) of his first two tomes… and it’s from Dyson’s Delves I that this adventure springs. (It’s also freely available on his website!)
This is an 11-level old school dungeon designed for Level 1 characters in Labyrinth Lord. I’ve decided to pitch things at around Rolemaster Level 5, beefing up the opposition in a couple of spots but otherwise making it a reasonable romp for the players who are new to the system.
Creature Law
At more than 800-pages of largely unformatted rules and stat blocks, Creature Law is the most daunting chunk of the playtest docs. It is, however, lovely! (Yes, despite the raw presentation)
What I like is that you have hundreds of creatures and monsters all available for combat and interaction. I mean, as far as I can tell, everything that was ever included in Rolemaster-past is here. And then there are rules to customise all of it. And also rules to create new stuff.
Honestly, what more can you want?
For me, it all looked scary and daunting until I took the plunge. As with all good playtests, you need to dive in a play with it. It took no time to dig out the stats for standard creatures (such as Goblins and Hobgoblins), and not much longer to substitute some Undead. Unlike most games, Rolemaster has a variety of Undead types and levels so that even a “skeleton” has several options at varying levels of power.
Custom Creatures
At this stage, I was ready to tinker with the rules to create the things that were NOT in Creature Law.
First, although there are rats and ferrets, there are no GIANT rats or GIANT ferrets. It took about 20 minutes of reading and fiddling the numbers to correct that – very quick and easy because of the plug-and-play nature of the “talents” used in the system. In this case, it was just a matter of Giantism and some small adjustments to size, weight, and movement rates.
Next came “Tha Boss”, the creature found on Level 2. He’s a boss of a certain goblinoid variety who just needed to be uplifted in level. This took about 10 minutes, including reading time. Quick and simple because you just boost the affected abilities based on the details shown in a single “archetype” table in the rules. Oh, and I bought him an extra combat talent. Neat!
Honestly, in use this is pretty flexible and (considering the relative complexity of the system) very easy to play with.
All In A Morning’s Work
You know, there aren’t many times where I’ve picked up a new game and converted two levels of a dungeon to that game inside a morning. Rolemaster really demonstrates flexibility and adaptability. Me like.
Now then, shall we add Level 3?
Game on!
