ROLEMASTER
FIRE and ICE
The Elemental Companion
Addendum
Designers: Robert J. Defendi and Lyn Mortensen
Reviewed by Brent Knorr, 2002
Rolemaster Fire and Ice, The Elemental Companion Addendum is a 32 page (plus covers) pdf file that can be purchased from the ICE Website (http://store.ironcrown.com/detail.jsp?itemId=6880&category=2039) for $5.00. This contains material that needed to be cut from Fire and Ice: The Elemental Companion to bring it down to the required page count. The Elemental Companion is complete on it’s own, the material in the Addendum is extra material. It shouldn’t be confused with the Errata for the Fire and Ice Companion, which is a free pdf download available on the ICE Website at http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=item252.
The Addendum contains two new professions, the Elemental Explorer, an Essence/Mentalism hybrid Spell User and the Storm Mage, a variant of the Magician with more weather based spell lists than the Magician. There are three additional training packages added, The Elemental Wanderer, the Elemental Scholar, and the Guild Elementalist. The Elemental Scholar was actually included in error, this Training Package appears in the main Fire And Ice book. There was supposed to be a Training Package for the Storm Mage included instead, this included in the errata page on the ICE home page http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=item252.
Six Closed Elemental Spell Lists are added, as well as nine Base Lists, six for the Elemental Explorer and three for the Storm Mage. Under the Closed Elemental Lists, it’s mentioned that some of them may also be used as Closed Essence Lists, but none of them are actually specified. They should be the Lesser Light Control and the Lesser Water Mastery lists.
Following these are some optional rules, including a more detailed method of handling criticals inflicted on creatures like Elementals when they are attacked by their scourge element, and an optional method of handling interactions of two or more elemental effects existing in the same location at the same time. It’s more complicated, but could add some interesting flavour to an encounter that this occurred in. You can get effects ranging from cancellation of both elemental effects, to having one elemental effect feeding and enhancing the other elemental effect. An interesting example given is a Water Mage casts a Water Wall in front of himself as a Fire Drake breathes on him. The Fire feeds the water and the water wall grows from 10’ x 10’ x 1’ to more than 500’ x 500’ for a round. If you want to know how Fire can feed Water, and why the Water would absorb the Fire, you’ll have to buy the Fire & Ice Companion.
There’s also a section that goes into more detail on how to handle Cone Attacks and Breath Weapons, with rules for Normal, Strafing, and Sweeping, and Flaring attacks, again, it adds more complexity and calculation, but provides for some interesting effects.
There’s also an alternate Planar model presented. The main book detailed a multi-planer model, the Addendum presents an alternate single plane model, where the Elemental Lords exist on the same material plane as the inhabitants of the world instead of on their own Elemental Planes. It’s a nice alternative, and one I would probably use in my own campaign.
The last section presents some Magical Items varying in strength from a simple Ring of Warmth to the artifact level Hammer of Aether. Each item has a code listed after it, the key to the code can be found on page 102 of the main Fire and Ice book. Fortunately, the items are well described and the code isn’t required to use the item in normal game play.
Overall, the Addendum is well done and for $5.00 is definitely worth picking up if you intend to use the material from the FIRE and ICE The Elemental Companion in your campaign.
Contact Information:
ICE
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Charlottesville, VA 22902
USA 434-244-0881
Web: http://www.ironcrown.com
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