Shadow World Characters

Although I have had several articles published in the Guild Companion, I have also had one official piece of work for ICE. That is the Powers of Light & Darkness Addendum – RMFRP Stats This is a free download from the ICE Website. The Powers of Light & Darkness book was published with RM2 stats only and ICE needed someone to convert those stats to the newer RMSS/RMFRP system, and that ended up being me, with Terry Kevin Amthor doing the pagemaking.

While doing those conversions, I developed a Frankenstien’s monster of a spreadsheet to help me do the conversions quicker. I took a couple of spreadsheets that I already had that listed the skills for RM2 and the skills in RMSS and fused them with Jonathan Dale’s Character Generation Spreadsheet.

The first page in the spreadsheet is the RM2/Spacemaster sheet. It is sorted with the Primary Skills first, then Secondary Skills for Rolemaster, then any Secondary skills for Spacemaster that did not exist in Rolemaster. It is then sorted by Skill name within those three categories. This is basically the same order that the skills were listed in the Powers of Light & Darkness book. There are several columns with various codes for categorizing the skills that aren’t really used for this project. The official abbreviations for the skill names are also listed. There are then some columns that map the RM2/SM2 skills to the new RMSS/RMFRP/SPAM skills.

I had to go through the list of skill names on my original sheet and make sure that they were spelled the same as in Jonathan’s sheet. Following all the columns with information on the skills is a set of columns with the names of the characters in the Powers book. With a great deal of help from my then girlfriend, now wife, I entered all of the values for the skills for all of the characters.

I got hold of a couple of variations of Jonathan’s sheet that had been updated for Shadow World, verified and corrected some of the information in them to create an accurate Shadow World sheet which I then added my RM2 Skill List sheet into. On the Stats page, I changed the Name field to be a dropdown box that allowed me to choose a character name from the RM2 Skill List page.

Then on the Skill page I added a couple of extra columns after Jonathan’s Total column. The first is an RM2 column which does a lookup on the Skill Name from Jonathan’s list and cross references that with the selected Character Name to display the value of the equivalent RM2 skill. Next I added a column with the abbreviations for the RMSS/RMFRP skills that were listed in the 4th Edition Shadow World Master Atlas. I then wrote an “Export to Text” macro that would produce a text file with the character stats in the same format that the Master Atlas had used, using the Abbreviations when available and the full skill names when the abbreviations were not available.

Ideally I would have liked to develop each character one level at a time, calculating DP’s and buying skills at each level, but I was on a short time frame, I think only a couple of weeks, as ICE wanted to have the conversions ready when the book came out (it was close, but a little late), and even excluding the last couple of chapters on Gods and Spirits, there were still around seventy five or so characters to convert, many of them fairly high level.

So, my approach was to look at the value of the skill from RM2, see what skills landed in the same categories in RMSS/RMFRP and see how close I could come to the same values without exceeding the maximum number of ranks allowed to be purchased per level, occasionally resorting to making some particularly high skills Everyman or Occupational.

It was a bit of a juggling act, as there were sometimes some RM2 skills that landed in the same RMSS/RMFRP categories, but some were low and some were high. So, I didn’t buy the category up too high if I didn’t need to, but often even buying a couple of ranks would end up giving a skill a higher value in RMSS/RMFRP than what it was in RM2. Spells were a completely other story, the spreadsheet doesn’t really handle them at all, I just did them all manually. There were also a few RM2 skills that mapped to multiple items in RMSS/RMFRP and a couple cases (Andraax for sure) where the stats in the Master Atlas were different than the stats in Powers of Light & Darkness. I did what I thought was best, but I’m sure I made some mistakes, and a lot of things are up for interpretation, but one of the reasons I decided to post the sheets is so that others can customize the characters to their liking and will find the sheet useful in converting other characters. I’ve posted the final sheet, which should have all the corrections and changes done to date, The characters are listed in the order that they appear in Powers of Light & Darkness.

I added an updated sheet, RM2toRMFRP_SW.xls which fixes some problems that I discovered in the original RM2toRMFRP.xls sheet.

I eventually did a second similar project when “CloudLords of Tanara” was redone as a new PDF. Here are the spreadsheets for the NPC’s from that module