Comments on: What is Rolemaster?

By: Two Wee Adventurers – Session 1 and a preview « Tolen's Blog

Two Wee Adventurers – Session 1 and a preview « Tolen's Blog — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:53:11 +0000

[...] And for those of you who know nothing about Rolemaster: http://www.ironcrown.com/, and http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php are good places to get info. Also look here: http://www.icewebring.com/what-is-rolemaster/ [...]

By: Justa

Justa — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:51:50 +0000

We’ve played a number of campaigns in Rolemaster (both RMSS and RM2) that were based on MERP source-books. It works out well enough, but a little conversion is neccasery.

The good thing is that most difficulty-levels of actions and all attack/critical-stats of creatures/etc can be used almost verbatim.
Only thing that needs a little bit of attention there are the armor-levels (especially in the area of metal/non-metal heavy armors and electricity-bolts, etc).

You’ll need to cook up some of the missing stats for RMSS unless you already use 10 stats there.
Note, however, that a lot of the ‘low-power’ aspect in MERP will be lost once you start integrating extra realms of magic into the game and/or allow _all_ spell-lists to be chosen (according to the rules for spell-development costs for inter/intra-realm choices). Some types of spells really don’t work well within a Tolkinesque framework. Especially ‘Arcane’ , ‘Elemental’ and doubtlessly a lot of stuff from the ‘Spell-user’s Companion’ is gonna be _waaay_ over the top for MERP.

Other than that; MERP is basically a ‘simplified’ Rolemaster… tuned for a specific fantasy-setting. Much like CyberSpace RPG was a Rolemaster/Spacemaster simplification for Sci-Fi.
Making both the system-mechanics AND the fantasy-setting be containable in one book are the main challenges for those types of games, really.

By: Brent

Brent — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:44:24 +0000

If you are using the actual MERP modules then Rolemaster Classic is closer to the MERP system than Rolemaster Fantasy but I think either one would be usable.

By: Dora

Dora — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:39:38 +0000

I wonder… which system would be more appropiate for running a MERP-compatible game – Rolemaster Classic or Rolemaster Fantasy?

By: Brent

Brent — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 21:20:34 +0000

An introductory version of Rolemaster, called Rolemaster Express is now available as well. This is a stripped down version of Rolemaster Classic and contains everything needed to play in one book.
As far as Rolemaster Classic, Spell Law has been out for awhile now and Creatures and Treasures has just been released.

By: Brent

Brent — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 04:28:28 +0000

Just to confuse matters more, there is now a new version of RM2, called Rolemaster Classic (RMC) which is a re-release of the RM2 books. The books have been reorganized and tidied up, with a little bit of new material added, particularly examples. at some point I’ll update the article to include this new release. So far Character Law, Arms Law, and a beta of Spell Law have been released