This is a thread about the old Rolemaster take on J.R.R. Tolkien's setting.
I've heard that, while MERP is not the best system in existence (especially for Middle-Earth), its modules are some of the best TTRPG material ever released for Tolkien's world.
What are your favourite? Did you ever use MERP material for your campaigns, or played the system for a long time?
I've ran the game a couple of times and I can safely say the system is even more hardcore and brutal than old school D&D. You need to have a cleric (called an animist) to be able to cure bleeding otherwise you will bleed to death. It's fun to play I guess it's kind of in the middle of low and high magic. I don't get a shit about low magic ME.
Tell me about your campaigns, anons!
Heh, i have a very obfuscated memory about. My character was a pregen made by another player for me, a fighter from Gondor named Iorlas (a name took from the legendarium, he's the uncle of a gondorian kid pippin joked with) that i remember was extremely ugly (had a score of 39 in appearance) and he was engaged by an headmerchant from a community in the north (i do remember the GM roleplaying him as disgusted at my sight, that's why the appearance score struck with me after more that 23+ years) to excort a caravan through Milkwood, i had also the secondary quest to retrieve a girl from the village the was lost near the woods (which i don't remember how was tied to the main quest).
Fragments of memories about the game follows with a wolves/wargs attack in the middle of the night in where my character was made permanently lame at leg for an injury while fending the beasts, one of the PC (a dwarf) dying for a snake bite while examining an old stone circle and me finding a piece of fabric on a tree branch (which i assumed was from the girl i was looking for). I don't remember anything more about, the game then ended abruptly by the GM for work reasons.
It struck to me how dark and perilous the world was, yet so captivating (the GM was extremely good). I always loved how emergent Rolemaster made the story feel, a thing that strongly influenced my bias towards simulationist systems.
Picrel is Iorlas character sheet, extremely worn out by time (it's in italian btw).
What made your GM so good? Anything you learned from him that you still use today?
Also, damn, that character sheet looks like an antique
>What made your GM so good?
Nostalgia mostly, he was well read, articulate and very good at descriptions but also kind of railroady. I'm fond of his memory because it was the first and kind of "grandiose" in its way.
>Anything you learned from him that you still use today?
Being callous but fair and to read a lot i guess. I couldn't assess much being that i was young and impressionable at the time.
Who was the animist in LotR?
Nta, but if i remember my merp correctly Radaghast was statted as an animist, also Elrond.
>system is even more hardcore and brutal than old school D&D
Didn't MERP have a random city encounter table where there was a tiny chance of a falling roof tile to just outright kill you unless you were wearing a helmet? And the crit system made it possible (albeit extremely unlikely) for a starting character to shoot a nazgul out of the sky with bow.
I think I've seen that from a module somewhere but the second part is too true, in one of my games we spent 4 stinking hours making characters and teaching the basics of the systems to the players only for the first combat where the party was basically camping in the wilderness and chose to sleep in a cave, the ranger offered to sit and a tree and do a watch over the party. A group of wild men wearing soft leather and clubs (basically an easy peasy fight I put together to teach combat) wandered past the camp and noticed people in there. One of the wild man spots the ranger in tree and I kid you not picks up a rock and throws at him. I penalized the attack roll because it was an improvised weapon, at night time and at long range (for a thrown weapon) then I proceed to roll 95 on a d100 and since it has exploding die if you roll anywhere between 95-100 you roll again and keep on going. I then rolled again got something like 80, meaning 80+95-30=145. Maximum hit possible. Roll for crit get a natural 70+high bonus for rolling well on the attack which make it so the rock made his head to splatter in all directions into hundreds of tiny pieces just like a watermelon dropped from a ten story building.
Seems obviously moronic. In his place as GM i would have ruled for a roll to hit with the rock that if successful would have dealt damage with a set ceiling and trigger the risk for falling from the tree. With that specific roll i would have adjudicated that the ranger, other than taking max allowed damage, would automatically lose balance (as a critical effect) from the three branch he was on.
yeah thats kinda silly. when extreme things like that happen a *good* would mention just how ridiculous the dice rolls were and explain whats the dice are saying is happening and find a middle ground with the player that doesnt ruin the fun. its not the most *realistic* but RPGs are meant to put the players in the spotlight at least a bit, the players are the ones meant to have fun not the NPCs.
im not saying that PCs should be invulnerable to silly shit happening but for the sake of fun things like this should be mitigated in interesting ways rather than 'yeah the dice say you die before you get to do anything meaningful, roll a new character and sit aside for this session'
that aside, the situation sounds hilarious those dice need a kill mark added
>A group of wild men wearing soft leather and clubs (basically an easy peasy fight I put together to teach combat)
no such thing at first levels, fricking goat can fatally skewer you; at least crit system works both way, got situation players got attacked by 3 trolls, guard threw hand axes at two, hitting first one's eye, stunning him for 20 turns and crippling arm of second troll; alarmed group dispatched them then easy peasy
MERPS crits and fumbles were the way characters died. I don't think I ever saw a PC die from blunt trauma aka HP loss. It was always some pithy crit like "Shot through eye, instantly killed. A real eye full."
>tiny chance of a falling roof tile to just outright kill
I bet it was Pyrrhus fate inspired
My first real experience with TTRPGs in my flgs (i was around 15) and i fricking loved any moment of it. MERP took my ttrpg virginity and molded my insides in its shape making me a simulationist onahole prostitute.
Can I fill you anon? I run nothing but post apoc simulationism. Get ready to die of dysentery.
Gomen, i'm already running two games and attending a third one as a player so really i can't squeeze my schedule more than that. But thanks for the offer anyway, what are you running?
It probably would have been twilight 2E with the 3E social and team mechanics.
Could MERP be used for a first age game? I've spent years trying to find a good RPG for running it and closest I have gotten is HeroQuest 2e but it feels to rules light for what I like.
It's certainly more high magic than how third age should be but, conversely, the high lethality would be kinda in disfavour of the more mythical tone of first age, so depends on where you lean mostly.
My group would never have the cajones to let me run merp for them in current year but I steal from it all the time for my one ring sessions.
Has anyone run/played Against the Darkmaster? Also ICE in the past did a setting agnostic Rolemaster Lite: HARP (High Adventure RolePlaying), has anyone here ever tried it?
I'm pretty interested in Against the Darkmaster, but I haven't had a chance to buy it yet.
I wonder if it's really worth getting if I have the PDFs for MERP
>I wonder if it's really worth getting if I have the PDFs for MERP
Not worth for what i can infer. AtDM is just MERP with the copyright (both from rolemaster and lotr) filed off. Basically you have all the game terms rewritten.
has anyone played the gamebooks?
yes, they are more complex than usual gamebooks since they have a very light RPG system baked in (three stats, some 10 skills) and some of them use an open hex map (note that it is missing in some scanned gamebooks), so you can move freely but have perhaps other constraints (e.g. time).
>MERP/Rolemaster thread
Time to shill BG&G again, formerly Darker Dungeons
Rangers of the North, Lorien, and Dol Amroth are among the best. Isengard and Angmar also. All are chock full of campaign and adventure ideas. I prefer 1st ed., but 2nd was acceptable and had even more material.
The rest of the books are generally good. At worst,they are useful for regional data and the looting of ideas.
Why do you prefer 1st ed anon?
With 2nd ed, the gameline and publisher were dying. The desperation crept in. Still lots of interesting ideas, but not up to 1st ed's par. General quality dropped, but word count went up.
2nd ed might have been prettier and slicker, but the meat was thinner.
Is it normal that I get sad when I think about the death of such a beautiful passion project, and so many others before or since?
Great game!
No where near as difficult as people make it out to be. Very fun.
I haven't played it but I can skim the Merp wiki for hours, the fan-material for Middle-Earth are some of the best fancreations for a setting I have ever seen. Very respectful of Tolkiens idea of middle-earth, and always linguisticaly apropriate. As far as I know fans , still publish fan modules for Merp and theres the Other Mind's magazine which goes into deep Tolkien lore to give the DM ideas or anthropological material for the setting. For example in one article talking about the population demographics of Eriador which in my mind made Middle-Earth much more of a living and breathing entity, rather than just a backdrop for the fellowship.
Overall Merp + One Ring are very good community, with almost little to none of the usual oc fanfiction cringe.
Do you have a link to your favourite fan material anon? Now I'm very interested
There's a bit of fanfic creeping into One Ring, what with the direct intercession of Oromë in the Third Age, and the existence of Hobbit Ghosts. The worst MERP got, IIRC, was having an Avari cult that worshipped Melkor, and even that is at least compliant with the setting. (Morgoth's israeliteels pg. 409) If you take the Campaign Guide's advice and go very low magic, MERP is honestly the best for Tolkien-esque lore, with even some stuff building off of what little we know about The New Shadow.
>The New Shadow
It's the israelites
>The worst MERP we got was an Avari cult worshipping Melkor
And also the fact that there are human spellcasters and magic items at every turn?
Most of that was optional, and the campaign guide recommends that if you want a lore-friendly campaign, you should have magic be extremely rare.
Middle Earth Adventure game = Basic D&D (B/X)
MERP = Advanced D&D (1e)
right?
No.
doesnt Middle-Earth Adventure Game serve as an introducton to MERP?
Thought you were asking if the systems were based on D&D. Yes, MEAG is a stripdown version of MERP.
My first real RPG. I still have my photocopied book.
recently finally finished GMs MERP rulebook scenarios, my clueless players had to be railroaded into visiting that ruined castle by quest to rescue noble girl taken hostage for some sacrificial ritual in 3 weeks time at new moon time
frickers waited out to the last moment and got surprised discovering she was taken to other place week earlier (Yfelwood splat book adventure)
had bad feeling about system when I started, but it worked out quite well; players especially liked crits, random encounters and exping from basically everything
players should avoid going solo looking for herbs, extremely easy to get disabled/unconscious alone in fight; also each enemy can be nemesis of PC, 3 young wolves nearly killed 6 PC group; frickin single jackal nearly rekt 2 beginner players in 3 on 1 fight when was defensivly fighting, plate armored knight got rekt by arrow in the eye crit by low level orc