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Here we have three of the moments we remember most fondly...
First our friend, had problems with rolls, either bad luck , karma (he tended to fake rolls), not developing all the skills you need to survive (stunned maneuvering), choosing a really bad flaw (he chose blind in one eye, not realizing he had to develop some spatial awareness so that everyone on that side wouldn't get a flank bonus) ,or whatever his warriors were not living long. Our second GM ,being kind and tossing the group a bone, allowed this player to be a Half Giant. Now , this race was not allowed for the rest of us, and there was the usual whining about that is a super character etc, etc. But our GM defused the whining and got the game going.
So the group had it's new Half-Giant warrior. We had met up with him and I believe in a role-playing moment duped a Half-Giant near a town we were traveling through to join us. I mean he obviously had a great intimidation factor going on, he wasn't too bright so we could maybe give him less of a share, he could carry a whole bunch of our extra gear and he could wield a sword as well as the last fighter we had ,who died ( something about being blind in one eye, mobs getting on that side getting huge bonuses, and no stun maneuvering skill to speak of). On the way to our next mission we had to travel through a mountainous region and then through some caves. It was quite humorous to see the super character struggling to duck through the small cave and crawling on his knees to get around. So after a little fighting with the native goblin or so on the way (forget what exactly) we came to a bridge. For some reason we didn't trust the rope bridge's reliability so we got a rope tied off and were getting ready to go across. Someone came up with a great idea that we tie some rope to each person, so that if someone fell, the rest of us could brace up and help stop them from falling. And of course my character ,being only a healer and of average strength saw the Half-Giant and told him to tie the rope to him and brace himself (I figured this had to be some kind of bonus ,as he was huge and ready for the person to fall). So we started across and sure enough the bridge fell. We were clinging desperately for our lives and because of the bridge swaying to and fro, we had to make maneuver rolls. Of course the first person falls. The second person makes their roll and they fall. The third person rolls and they fall (talk about some bad luck), during this time the Half-Giant sees this and is supposed to be getting better braced. Then the fourth person falls, we are all hanging by the rope that is tied around the waste of our new Half-Giant hero. So the Gm turns to the Half-Giant , tells the rest of the group to stop giving advice and asks him what he does. He looks at the Gm and ask him what is happening. The Gm tells him how the rest of the group has fallen, the rope is stressed from all the weight on it. He can hear us trying to struggle to climb up. So he looks at the Gm and tells him , he gets the rope and cuts us lose. Of course the rest of the group is going crazy at this time ( I mean that must be some kind of roll to see if he can get out his weapon and cut the rope off , right?). The Gm lets him roll , he makes it and we all take some serious fall criticals. We end up pulling one character out of a small stream, barely keeping them alive and despite our new big idiot we survive.
Needless to say ,this is one of those moments that becomes better ,when you remember it. Though so many of our Rolemasters are like that. The next Rolemaster Moment with our Half-Giant friend , yes we were too injured to kill him after the fall, happens after we get to a castle.
So,
we make it through the caves and to this castle, near the ocean.
We all painstakingly sneak up on the castle. The few men on watch
don't see
us. It is very important we sneak into this castle to rescue
someone. We obviously can not beat a whole castle down, and the kidnappers
might kill the person we are after, if things go to badly. Sooooooo...
We get
up on the castle walls and , our thief expertly disposes of
many
of the guards with his silent kill and ambush skills. We are
now down to, two
guards at an entrance way that leads into the interior of the
castle. We all get positions and hide so that we can back up our thief
if
something goes wrong. Unfortunately , our thief takes out one
of the guards but
fails to make the silent kill role. The other guard , hears
something. I ready my bow. I shoot, and I miss ( I am a healer). The caster
stands up to distract the guard and as the guard is talking
to him
, the caster
prepares a spell. The guard starts to run for the alarm. So
our warrior charges the guard, barely stopping him before the alarm gong.
The
we are all tense with the fear of getting caught, or that the
sounds of combat
may awaken the whole castle, and thus ruin our chances for a
surprise strike. So it is now the Half-Giant's turn. His brain starts
turning.
The mighty giant is obviously having a great thought or a brain
freeze. What is it. Oh NOOOO!!!! He remembers he has a talent, his favorite
talent, from Talent Law....Battlecry!!! He charges into the
fray
and starts to
attack the guard, complete with a very loud battlecry, overconfident,
that we shall eliminate this foe. The group pauses for a second
trying to gather their thoughts. The Gm turns to each one of us, in turn.
First the Warrior, and surprisingly the never run away warrior
chooses
to run
for the way we came in, he correctly reasons the surprise is
ruined and we have to retreat. Next is the Thief's turn, the thief follows
the warrior.
Then it is the magic users turn. He sees the rest of the group
is
fleeing and chooses to do so. In fact , the whole group now
decides to use the
Half-Giant as a distraction , maybe the castle will think it
is just some stupid Half-Giant randomly attacking (yeah, right). To our
great
surprise
as we hide in some woods near the castle the Half-Giant has
killed some guards and made his way back. After using up all of the Healers
power
points and some serious dodging of patrols we make it out of
another
Half-Giant moment with our lives.
2) And now for the most classic Half-Giant Rolemaster
Moment:
Now, we head back to a town to recoup , recover our thoughts and try to come up with some ingenious plan to free this hostage. So the GM asks us what we want to do. Of course, I head to an Inn and want to find a place for all of us to rest for the night. We need food , lodging, baths, etc.. Others in the group just want to sit in the Inn's tavern and get some food and drink, maybe hear some rumors or something. Others need to go shopping for gear. But what does the Half-Giant want to do? He wants to head to a house of ill-repute. Everyone tries to discourage this, but the Half-Giant has made up his mind. So he heads there, quite by himself. So he goes in and finally finds a lady of ill-repute to risk spending an hour or two with a Half-Giant. He goes up to the room with her. The Gm describes the room, as being on the second floor in one of the corner rooms. The house of ill-repute seems to be a popular stop as it is on a main street. We knew this but , it was advertised even more by the fact ,that the Half-Giant decided for some reason to check out all the windows below. He could see the busy urban hustle and bustle below. So the Half-Giant ,and the lady of ill-repute, get to doing whatever people do in a house of ill-repute. Now comes in another one of those bad moments for flaws. Our Half-Giant, decided there wouldn't be too much of a problem with having Uncontrollable strength as a flaw. Well, when the Gm asks him how he feels, he says excited, and goes into detail ,proudly so. So ,the Gm has him make a roll. The roll is a bad roll, he failed on his uncontrollable strength. Things get really bad now as the Gm , looks over the Half-Giants character sheet and muses over the stats the Half-Giant has ( did I mention he took blessed by a war god, as one of his only major talents, that and battlecry), Now, that he failed the first roll to control himself, the Gm makes him roll to see the damage. Oh, man is it bad. He has managed to kill the woman of ill-repute. Now the rest of the group sighs in disbelief. The Gm, slowly gathers his thoughts and asks the Half-Giant what he does, since he can't stay in the place all night. The Half-Giant thinks for a moment or two and comes up with a brilliant idea. The rest of the group sighs as he formulates his explanation of what he is about to do. He turns to the Gm and says , I get dressed, and pick up her body and throw it out the window. The rest of the group either starts laughing, or falling apart, as we listen to this as it continues. The Gm looks at him and says are you sure you want to do this. The Half-Giant says, yep, I throw her out the window. Then the Gm continues to explain how the people on the street see, this Enormous guy, throw a dead naked woman of ill-repute out on the dirt roads of two intersecting main roads. Of course, women start screaming, guys get the guards, and our hero the Half-Giant tries to slyly make his way out of the house of ill-repute. As the rest of the group and everyone in town gets wind of this, we try to make our way to the scene and pray this was not the work of our friend. Very shortly however as he comes out and people are chasing him, we realize it is him. Being a particularly stupid bunch, we actually try to help him make it out of the city (of course after a debate of whether we should help him or not).
To
no ones amazement shortly after surviving this, the Half-Giant became
a wanted man, and thus lead us into the wrong type of adventuring.
We were after all, guilty by association. It wasn't funny at the time,
but
man it is classic Rolemaster moments now, and reliving it often makes
us laugh for quite a while.
3) Our next Classic Rolemaster Moment has to
do with my Warrior. I like to call this one "A Gift From a God":
Our brave group was visiting a town. While in town a group of obviously evil leaning (Half-Giant guards ;) ) beings has a cage with people who are soon to be sold as slaves. Our group sees this and then comes the debate on how we should stop this evil thing from happening. I being a warrior but not totally stupid ask about local laws and find that this form of slavery is legal in this area of the world. And in fact the people seems confused about how we are debating about it. So , I put my vote in to ignore the slavers. Ahh but our rogue, and caster are sure we have to stop this injustice. We go to bed that night debating, the next morning the slavers are leaving. Our half out-raged and half not caring group decides to follow them. It is obvious that these guys are out of our league ( we are 5th level ), these guys are riding horses and are well organized. We follow them to a cave , after investigating what we can of the cave, we see it is practically a natural strong hold. So being the good souled types we come up with a plan, we scout out their caves , draw maps on the dirt and come up with a great plan. All the time, I'm saying how we are out classed. So at last we formulate our plan. We try to get their attention and slim down their numbers, we get their attention and draw them into our ambush. Unfortunately, the guy on the horse with a lance, or sword (was a lance to my character) , rolls his attack and runs his lance right through my chest, killing me almost instantly. Predictably the fight goes against us very quickly. The group, has no time to mourn it's great warrior and ends up fleeing ,after doing virtually no damage to the slavers. So, not wanting to roll up my character again, I ask the Gm if I can make a god call. Unfortunately my warrior isn't really religious so after scanning over the Channeling law rules on god calls ,the Gm says I can but at a negative. I fail my roll. However, the Rogue is very close to the warrior, we were raised in the same small village and have been friends for life and begs to make a god call. The Gm hums and hos and lets the Rogue make a god call at the same negative as my warrior. I realize it is a lost cause and start thinking up my next character. Others heckle the Rogue as he rolls to make a god call for the fallen warrior ( not many religious characters in this group). The Rogue makes a god call roll..it is a natural 100, the Gm is like wow, but it's not enough roll again. The Rogue rolls again, after praying over my character. The roll is another 100. The entire table is flabbergasted and in amazement. The Gm tells the Rogue to pray again over the fallen body and to see what happens. The Rogue prays and rolls again, this time an open ended 96, with a follow up roll of something like 50. The Gm rolls and it appears nothing has happened. The group consoles the rogue and they start making preparations to bury their friend. But as they are the Warrior stands up. They jump for joy, the rogue swears his allegiance to the god, as soon as he finds out who it is. The Warrior hugs his friend and tells him the name of the god. The rogue steps back and notices something very strange. The warrior notices something strange about his rogue friend. The warrior has pure white hair from this experience. He had long hair and a full beard and it is all white. The rogue has a white streak through the side of his hair from the experience. It appears a god got directly involved. My warrior had a new purpose, to stop those slavers at all costs, and he was now a Paladin. A Paladin, who up to level 5 learned warrior skills. He was ahead on his combat skills, but way behind on his Paladin skills. He instantly sketched up the sign of his god on his shield and off they went. Needless to say ,from this point on, this Paladin was a religious zealot, for a god that was head of a forgotten and illegal religion. It can go without saying that we restored this religion to some of it's former glory.
It seems in this adventure, I was a healer again. We had gone to some keep to talk to some Lord. He had a title but this keep was all he had left. It seems this Lord had a seriously bad attitude and it was getting tough to keep our manners around him. Well it became tough for the healer to keep his manners about him. This lead to the healer being kicked out of the keep. The rest of the group figured the healer would cool off and they would see why this Lord summoned us there in the morning. Well , the Healer who had found a place to rest ,was found by some wandering guards and given a sound beating and had most of his gear stolen, then dumped off in the woods (this is one nasty attitude Lord). Things get worse when the healer gets up and isn't very good at his direction sense. He gets lost in the woods, and has to rest the next night in the woods. The group starts looking for him, and it takes them a while to figure the guards had given the vagrant a beating and left him in the woods. So as the healer is wandering through the woods, he finds a bear, or should I say stumbles upon the bear. The bear proceeds to attack the hapless healer. It attacks and misses, it misses again , then attacks again, and again and again. This goes on for a couple of rounds, until I can't take it anymore. I'm like what the heck. This bear is getting like 5 attacks around, I can't survive at this rate very long. The Gm is like that is what the book says. I'm like I don't care what the book says a bear doesn't get all these attacks every round. The Gm after some serious laughter at my disturbance , agrees it doesn't seem right but that is what it says. So we read the rules and see the bear has to land hits in a certain way to get these hits. So it was all very funny afterwards, but whenever someone gets to serious about rules and is disturbing the game (can you say me) someone in the group always says ... Maul, Maul, Bite, Grapple, Claw. This gets us laughing and we get back on track.
We were going through some ruins and when our Demonologist wanna be couldn't identify this painted circle on the ground, I was like oh well let's just walk through. Sure enough this demon appears. Our Gm never uses demons and this freaked us all out. So the demon talked to us and told us we had to pay him back for disturbing his rest. The group (after calling the healer all kinds of names), has to agree with this demon as we have no other way of defeating him. So the demon has us do three tasks. The tasks seem silly, getting some low level spell book, robbing some place of some small amount of coin for raising some army (do demons need money for that kind of stuff) and then was the hard part, defeating some tough guy. We were on our way to do the third task and we realized we were being followed. We set up an ambush and caught the guy. It appears he was some low level caster and we let him join our group for his own protection. So as we are completing our last task, and things are going very much against us, the new guy says we should just give up and live to fight another day. The rest of the group then tells him , he ran into some bad luck as we (thanks to the healer) owe a demon 3 favors and this is our last one. We have to do it or we are gonna die anyways. The new guy then informs us that he is an illusionist and he did the demon trick and tricked us into getting him stuff. The group of course doesn't believe him and he then shows us the way he did it. Now the group is angry ,but we have to get out of the bad trouble we are in at the moment. We do so and then we decide how to deal with he illusionist. Because he tricked us so thoroughly we had him join the group. But man did we learn that Nothing is what it seems, and before you start going doing things for someone , you better make sure you know who it is.
I played in a five year RM campaign and primarily played a dervish named Miriya. She was the jack-of-all-trades character in the party as that class was fairly good with martial arts, had some decent spell lists and a variety of skills. For whatever reason she was a magnet for party rivalry and it had some disastrous results…for everyone else but her.
During the first third of the campaign our paladin was finally dead due to a particularly nasty fight our DM Dave threw at us while we were adventuring in a hostile desert. Miriya as one of the only religious oriented characters took it upon herself to perform last rights and pray for his soul. Perhaps the gods would be merciful and grant some favor. They didn’t, but other interesting events happened. Two of the party members decided she needed to go and paid a third to assassinate her.
While she was praying, aside the fallen paladin, in a ruined temple where the party was encamped, the assassin (dubbed The Doctor due to his surgical precision with bows) was sneaking through the ruins to quickly dispatch Miriya. Unfortunately he botched his rolls and she made her perception roll without issue. This turned out to be very bad news for The Doctor as she immediately cast a sleeping spell on him. Seems he forgot the mantra of the smart spell caster and that is to keep some power points in reserve. The Doctor collapsed where he stood as he continued having the dice gods frown upon him. Miriya and The Doctor had never seen eye-to-eye on many aspects of the party and his employers were of a similar mind. After seeing the Doctor and his cohorts earlier leave the party to go talk amongst themselves and the Doctor sneaking through ruins that only she was in…the math was simple.
But Miriya anguished on what to do. Unfortunately she was a good character, but also did not believe for a second that The Doctor would not continue to try and kill her. It might be after the spell was lifted or some point later. She bashed The Doctor’s head with a rock and then littered the area around him with more heavy debris. She called out to the party, including the two party members who were not man enough to attack her directly. Miriya told them tearfully that The Doctor had been hit by debris that had somehow come loose due to the activity the party had introduced to the temple.
Adam and Matt got the hint from my character’s actions and the GM docking everyone experience points for letting inner-party rivalry get out of hand. That was fine by me, it certainly got the message out…to most of us.
While Adam’s character wound up being a good contributor to the party, Matt kept getting into trouble. A couple of ill-conceived characters later he settled on a greatman bashkar. The GM had expressly forbidden greatmen from being a valid PC race as they were more than a little over-powering. But Matt did not care and the Dave folded like an origami swan…or so we thought. So the greatman bashkar was in and he was fearsome in a fight. Oddly enough the NPC’s and monsters knew this too…after all he was a greatman and obviously a threat. So Matt got a lion share of bad guys piling on him and the damage began to mount. Luckily we could patch him up or find a priest who could.
That is until one day our party was fighting off some very nasty assassins and the bashkar went into berserk mode to fend off the one’s attacking him. We managed to kill off the attackers without sustaining any major injuries. But Matt’s baskar would not get out of his frenzy and Dave rolled randomly to figure out which standing PC was closest. Unfortunately that was my poor dervish Miriya. We rolled for initiative and I lost, my luck was terrible that night as I did not do much to the assassins except to stave one off till a better fighter got free.
Matt rolled, his bashkar missed. My turn was up and I felt that luck and a good DB might hold him off till he came down or another party member reacted. I rolled the dice and got an open ended result so I piled on another roll which was more than enough to hit the bashkar and deal out a martial arts strikes critical. So I rolled percentiles again on the martial arts critical strikes table and it was a 99 on the E column. Bad news for Matt: “Double palm strike to foe's nose breaks cartilage and drives bone into brain. The effects are rapid. Foe dies after 6 rounds prone and immobile.”
Karma from Matt’s antics had truly come full circle. Dave, our long-time DM for the campaign awarded normal experience points without any disapproval.
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