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Rolemaster Moments for Aug 2003- page 1
I had just recently started a new Rolemaster campaign which contained four player characters: a human fighter named Ivan, an elementalist named Anza (of a self-created fishlike race called the Azurine), an elven healer named Azren, and a Felan (cat people) Dabbler named Terra. In this particular session, another friend of mine was about to begin playing as the Felan warrior mage Rina. Rina and her NPC servant, Cutrus the halfling, rode in as the party was preparing to camp. Now Terra is a very astute guy when it comes to spotting things (his General Perception bonus is well over 100), so he immediately saw someone coming, but he didn't see who. Turning invisible, he leapt at the intruder, trying to knock her off her horse and thus gain an advantage if she should be hostile. Perhaps too strong an initial reaction. When Terra appeared, Rina whipped out her crossbow and let fly with a bolt straight at his face. BOOM - critical roll of 99. Only through Azren's healing skills did Terra survive.
The moral? Take a second to find out who you're dealing with before you go jumping them in the dark.
When our party had a rest in friendly village they enjoyed all the comfort of homeliness and lost some of their hardened behaviour that you turn to when you are on the road for too long. After a night of relaxed drinking and fun games, the Rogue of the party, the most suspicious and secretive guy in the group, went to a small river to have a short wash. So he knelt down at the bank and started to wash his face, when suddenly a shadow moved over him and with a loud “SPLASH” and a huge wave he was turned into a totally wet Hobbit.
What had happened was this: The Warrior monk, usually a friendly but quiet person was thinking about taking a swim in the morning and when he saw the Rogue kneeling by the river, the player decided that his character would start running, tossing his clothes away and landing close to the Rogue butt first in the water.
After a moment of perplexity, everyone had thought that the monk was a totally serious man who would never do something that spontaneous and silly, we all burst into laughter. We couldn’t play for about an hour! The Rogue wasn’t even angry, he was just perplexed, and the monk’s player was just as perplexed as he had really acted without thinking about character play, he had just felt that this was the right thing to do in this situation. Sometimes it’s funny what characteristics a hero can show when in a peaceful environment.
When our party was out in the wilds, escaped from some evil dungeon, without their equipment, without weapons and tools, and without food and water, we were heading to a nearby village to gain some support in our quest. It, however, turned out that the village wasn’t that close and that the dungeon had cost us much of our energy. So, first things first, food and water were important. The water problem was solved by a generous GM who let us find a river…oh, this was in the old days, when we had little secondary skills and were not really able to survive in the wilderness on our own. The more difficult food problem was solved probably in the most evil way there could be.
Our Beorning ranger left the party, stalked into the forest, closed in on a group of little cute bunnies and using his natural ability with animals and his Befriend spell he managed to get amongst the group. He then started to play and cuddle with the small rabbits and then….snapped their necks…
We were young and didn’t know what we were doing...but it solved the food problem...
(This one was so hilarious I had to send it in too)
Corporal Keller Dyson of the Army of the Betrothed was one of our party members who had been assigned to search for and secure a magical Armory (see the June 2002 entry If I Had A Hammer). Yes, that nasty place. Now in this Armory we discovered a pair of Hydras which nearly made mincemeat out of our party, and when we escaped Keller was the only one conscious who had any knowledge of First Aid. And he really was not very good at it.
He had a good idea in theory - one of the party members had a blocked airway and could not breathe, so he searched around until he found a metal pipe from one of our former gnome ally's inventions, and he proceeded to ram this pipe down the soldier's throat. The trouble is, sometimes no matter how good your ideas are, your rolls still fumble, as did Keller's First Aid roll. To this day, whenever Keller wants to do First Aid on us, we shudder and think of that dead soldier, whose last memories could not have been pretty ones...
A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine was coming over for a visit and so we agreed that he would join in our Rolemaster campaign playing one of the NPCs for this one session. The party is currently in a kind of Oriental setting, with Samurai and the like. So my friend got to play the Samurai apprentices of one of the characters. (It has to be said here that the character playing the master samurai has real tough job staying true to his honour in our party! There are Gaijin travelling with him and a Wu Jen.) There were actually two of them, so he decided to play’em both. As they were NPCs they only had rough skill descriptions and were even rougher in design of characteristics. So all he knew was that one of them, Tseng, was kind of jovial and hot-tempered, while Ita was the calm and thoughtful one.
The party was invited into a stone garden – you know the things, with raked lines in the stones, giving you a harmonious feeling and calming you down – to investigate into some strange events that happened around it. It turned out that this stone garden was curséd by an evil witch and would not instil harmony but hatred and rage – if, that is, you fail you self control category manoeuvre (you know what’s coming next, don’t you)! All rolled quite acceptable until it was the apprentices’ turn.
Tseng, the one with the hot temper, the one who was almost always on the brink of drawing his sword and slicing anyone who he thought looked the wrong way….rolled an excellent 134 and passed his test of self discipline. Ita on the other hand wasn’t lucky at all. My friend had a kind of bad feeling about this roll beforehand and wasn’t disappointed: he rolled a straight minus 289 (including his self control category bonus) and it turned out that Ita must have had suppressed some deep frustration, hatred, and other bad feelings probably from his infancy onwards and wasn’t able to keep them in any longer. He focussed his thoughts one the most appropriate target: one of the Gaijin his master had sworn to protect, drew his Katana and charged.
A couple of nasty Monty-Python-like bleeding wounds later, he was disarmed and sent to his quarters in shame. The cool thing about this, however, was that the one who was really suffering from this event was our master samurai who had sworn to his honour to protect the Gaijin and had failed. And even more than that was responsible for deeds of his pupils. And all this in the garden of a highly respected magistrate of the Daimyo.
Dear oh dear, this day, with two NPCs turned into PCs for only a couple of hours, we saw our master samurai’s player nearly die of a heart attack when he saw the roll – brilliant!
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