Welcome to the ICE Roleplaying WebRing

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What is this Site?

This site contains the information needed to join the ICE Roleplaying WebRing as well as lots of additional Information and Resources for Rolemaster, Spacemaster, HARP, Silent Death and other games from Iron Crown Enterprises.

What is the Webring?

This webring is devoted to sites containing information on or usable with the Roleplaying Games owned and produced by Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) particularly Rolemaster, Spacemaster and HARP (High Adventure Role Playing)

How do I join?

Just click the "Joining the ICE Webring" link in the left hand menu and follow the directions on that page.

Short Update

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ICE has been busy with the beta release of the Rolemaster Unified line of products, gathering feedback from playtesters and proof readers.
I have decided not to participate in the beta testing phase, although I did download some of the initial pdf files. I briefly skimmed Character Law and haven’t looked at the other books at all.
I think the reason for my lack of interest is two fold. First, I haven’t played Rolemaster in ages, the only group I’m playing with at the moment is a Pathfinder group and I’m having enough fun with that that I don’t feel the need to seek out another group, or to try and convert that group to Rolemaster.
Second is simply a lack of time, or rather, a decision to allocate the time I do have to things other than Roleplaying Games, article writing and website maintainance.

ICE is also still in the process of rebranding many of the older products and making them available again. I will have to take some time soon and update my product lists to reflect this. I’ve also been debating what the best way to represent “Print on Demand” products would be, I may just continue to list them as Hardcover or Softcover rather than adding any particular tag to them.

I will continue to maintain this site as long as people find it useful, and, as always, if some new sort of web technology comes along that I want to try out, this site is usually the one that gets used as a test for it.

Cheers!

HARP Fantasy is back! $5.00 until Sept 15 2012

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Quoting directly from the August Briefing:

HARP Fantasy is back!

Join the new road to high adventure with HARP Fantasy. Enhanced, remastered, HARP Fantasy has drawn upon years of actual game play experience, fan feedback, and logical reasoning to improve the rules from the original 2003 and 2004 editions without compromising their playability.

Here’s your checklist of rules changes:

  • The Professions have been rebalanced in terms of their professional abilities
  • Flat 50 Development Points is the default for calculating Development Points
  • Races have been better balanced in terms of stat bonuses, some racial abilities have been revised, and Humans now get Skill Flexibility (the ability to make a single skill in a NonFavored category Favored)
  • Blood Talents have been rebalanced in terms of Development Point cost
  • The Mandatory Subskills rule has been incorporated from HARP SF
  • Four new Influence skills have been added from HARP SF
  • New talents have been added from HARP SF and Development Point costs of existing Talents have been properly balanced
  • The use of Spell Adders and Power Point Adders has been clarified
  • Clarifications and improvements have been made to the rules for Light & Vision, Fighting Blind, Asphyxiation and Holding Breath, Drowning and Stat Loss
  • Life Points have been removed and the Stun rules made consistent with HARP SF
  • All of the spells have had their base costs and scaling options made consistent with the revised spell creation system (to be published in the enhanced College of Magics) and descriptions have been clarified in specific cases
  • Herb and poison prices have been rationalized
  • A new monster creation system has been used to rework the monster collection with some monsters being replaced with new creatures
  • Several magic items have had their effects adjusted
  • The guidance on customizing clerics and magic users has been revised to better fit with the rules given in the enhanced College of Magics and future envisaged sourcebooks.
  • The Language Table and associated rules have been made consistent with HARP SF
  • The “Non-Adventuring Professions” have been removed – these will return in in a future sourcebook in a form suitable for PCs

    • We have also improved the interior artwork, replacing virtually every filler piece with meaningful illustrations. You’ll love the new art.

    Here’s the link to the RPGNow page but read the rest of this Briefing first! -
    http://www.rpgnow.com/product/104176/High-Adventure-Role-Playing-Fantasy

    The proper price for the HARP Fantasy pdf is 20 US dollars. However, as we promised in previous Briefings, we are making a special time-limited offer for any ICE fan who would like to buy the new HARP Fantasy pdf. Use the following link to buy the HARP Fantasy pdf for a mere 5 (yes, FIVE) dollars
    http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?discount=91524
    (if you prefer www.drivethrurpg.com/index.php?discount=91524 and so on for all the other OBS affiliates. You may need to directly put in the discount code 91524 at the checkout screen.)

    This is a time-limited offer and will END on 15th September. Do not procrastinate, do not dither, just take advantage of it.

    The pdf version is already available. Softcover and hardcover versions will become available as soon as OneBookShelf approves the print files.

    Best wishes,
    Nicholas

    Novus RPG

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    Novus Fantasy Roleplaying GameNovus Fantasy Roleplaying Game by Tim Dugger

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    The back cover of “Novus” says:

    ” Firehawk Games did not set out to reinvent the fireball, it tried to make a fun and flexible game that can easily be adapted to many different styles of role-playing and many different settings. Firehawk Games wants to give you and old school experience with modern, up to date rules, and we believe that Novus fits the bill perfectly.”

    I think the author did a good job with what he wanted to do, reading through the book was reminiscent of reading the old D & D Rules Cyclopedia, with some of the style of Rolemaster and HARP, which isn’t surprising since the author was involved in both of those, particularly HARP.

    One thing that was new to me was the Snags and Boons. If you suffer a fumble, failure or are exceptionally successful then instead of just getting a bonus or being assigned a particular occurrence, the player gets a certain number of Snag or Boon points which they then immediately spend to purchase a modification to whatever they are doing, which could be extra damage, or breaking a weapon or many other choices. It’s interesting to me because it does give the Player more control over what happens in those cases.

    The 128 page book gives you everything you need to get started in playing a game, character creation rules, races, backgrounds, character classes, spells, and monsters.

    The system could easily be used to run most of the older AD&D or Basic D&D modules, particularly the ones designed for lower level characters.

    Although I haven’t play tested it yet, it seems like a nice little system. Unfortunately, I don’t really think there is anything outstanding enough about it for it to get much attention, or to cause most players to want to switch from whatever their current favorite system might be.

    I think to really be successful, it would need to get used as the underlying system for some sort of popular setting like “Game of Thrones” or another popular TV or book series.

    Having said that, it will be interesting to see what sort of follow up material is produced and how well it does. There are a set of short pdf “Libram Novus” articles that are available that I will have to check out as well.



    View all my reviews

    Rolemaster on Goodreads.com

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    I started using Goodreads.com awhile ago to track all my books.  I put in all my novels and have now started working on my gaming books.  I’ve discovered that the ICE books in general are a bit of a mess, so I’ve started working on getting them cleaned up.

    I applied and got granted Librarian status which means I have the ability to go in and edit existing books and to add new books when required.

    The first thing I’m doing is going through and finding as many of the existing Rolemaster and Spacemaster books as I can.  Then I’m putting in covers for any that are missing them.  After that I’ll go in and add any missing books, and finally I’ll do some editing on the Titles and series information to get things into a consistent format and fill in whatever missing information I can on the books.

    HARP SF, HARP SF Xtreme and the Shadow World Player’s Guide available in print

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    HARP SF, HARP SF Xtreme and the Shadow World Player’s Guide are now all available in print in multiple formats

    Click on the links to purchase them from RGPNow.

    These are the first Print products for ICE RPGs to come out from Guild Companion Publications and I look forward to seeing what they look like once I order and receive my copies.

    I believe the last print product that came out was the Cloth Bound reprints of the RMFRP products in August 2009. The last new item to come out in print was Rolemaster Classic Combat Companion in March 2008 if I’m not mistaken

    New Banner and NavBar

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    I’ve now set up the new banner at the top of the page. Because of the height of the banner, it looked a little strange with such large blank bars on each side of the banner, so I set it up to be centered but to repeat parts of the banner to the side. Let me know what you think of this and if you think having the blank space would be better. Of course how it looks will depend on the width of your moniter and the resolution you are set to.

    I also set up a WebRing NavBar using the new banner. It is quite abit larger than the old one, hopefully it doesn’t cause any problems. If need be, I could shrink it down a little more. Currently it is 75% of the size of the banner itself.

    I also added in all the pdf’s that the Guild Companion has added to RPGNow over the last month and a half.
    One product in particular may be of interest, and that is HARP SF XTreme, as it is a new release rather than a re-release of an older product. I’ll do up an individual post about it when it becomes available as a POD (Print On Demand) product.

    Redirecting old pages

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    I’ve put in redirects for the First Edition MERP pages, which means that any sites that have a link to the old individual pages will be forwarded to the correct new page that is built from the database.
    I’ve also done the Rolemaster First Edition, Rolemaster Second Edition, and Rolemaster Fantasy Roleplaying pages.
    Anyone that does have direct links to the old pages should update their links to point to the new pages as at some point in the future I will be completely removing those old pages.

    Spacemaster, Silent Death and Misc ICE Products Updated

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    The Spacemaster, Silent Death and Misc ICE Products have all been updated to use the database. In fact, the only items that haven’t been updated now are the Translations and the Never Released products. Both of those will require a little extra work to get done. I’m not even sure if I will do the Never Released Products or if I’ll just create a seperate page for those rather than having them in the list.