Why do I love Rolemaster?

Rolemaster. Or Rulemaster. Or Rollmaster. Tables, tables everywhere. The butt of table jokes from all the cool roleplaying kids that play on that table over there since 1980. And one of my favourite systems. But why?

To find out I guess we might have to go back a couple of years, to something like 1995. I had dipped my toes in the hobby with Drakar & Demoner (Apparently called Dragonbane in the latest Free League Kickstarter instead of Dragons & Demons? Boooo!) before deciding to buy a game for myself. The local game store had a copy of Sagan om Ringen – Rollspelet (SRR) or Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) as it’s called in English. Being a huge Tolkien nerd, I of course went for that instead of D&D, even though it had a badass Elric cover. But MERP had Angus McBride, whose middle earth drawings are just amazing.

ANYWAY, so I started reading the rules, all the while staring at the illustrations. The rules were simple, all you needed were two d10, the character sheets, the pamphlet of tables and a will to adventure in the world of Bagginses, Aragorns and Galadriels. And off we went.

The first playtest with my group was a total disaster.

The mage learned a spell from the movement list (Lofty ways? I dunno my book isn’t here with me right now) and used it on every monster to teleport them 30 feet into the air and when they fell they were either dead or stunned and soon dispatched. Everyone had fun except me as a panicking GM trying to find out a way to make this troublesome mage go away.

But we kept at it, and we learned the rules, and soon we found out that MERP came from Rolemaster, and Rolemaster had MORE TABLES! We just had to have it. We bought just about everything for Rolemaster Standard System, and later on Rolemaster Fantasy Roleplaying. And we played, and played and played. We had high level characters teleporting into Nazgul strongholds and trying to beat them by throwing a snake at them (What the hell Dave?) we had a burly dwarf and a nimble elf trying to save the Empire from going up in flames but failing and running away from a collapsing Bögenhafen. As a generic system, we used it for just about everything.

How much fanboying did I do? Well I went to high school in I.C.E gear. It’s a wonder I managed to make any friends at all.

We prepped games, printed and laminated weapons tables, everyone knew at least the rules that mattered to them, and I skipped all the cumbersome rules that I decided didn’t matter for our game. Battle was fast and gore-y, skill challenges were exciting and let everyone play to their strengths and the mages, dear god the power of the mages when they got a couple of levels up. And the monks. And the warriors in steel armor wielding giant two-handed swords. Marauding across the countryside in whatever setting we played in, or conniving their way through whatever city hosted them.

Nostalgia, it’s a hell of a drug.

If the above text seems like it could have been about just about any game, that’s because it could have been. I love Rolemaster because it was my gateway into this fantastic hobby. I love Rolemaster because it has allowed me and my group to tell fantastic, ridiculous, amazing, entertaining, frustrating stories. We made it our own, we made it our thing, and we enjoyed it.