The Masked Ones

Deep in the gnarled old forest, amid the glowing toadstools and the creeping slime molds, thrive wonderfully garish and cacophonous little things.

They are lithe and delicate little creatures, hardly a meter tall and two stones heavy. Each has fine, chitinous limbs peeking out of the ubiquitous, voluminous robes that give their kind an almost rotund and childlike appearance from afar. Their three-clawed hands are oddly shaped and jointed, but equally good for playing flutes as they are for scrabbling up the tree trunks into which they bore their hive-like homes. Their footless, sticklike legs seem like they should hardly keep them upright, yet they move with much grace.

The mischievous among them are known to play tricks on passersby, but most content themselves with their families, music, games, and gardens of bioluminescent mushrooms. They breed and raise many species of symbiotic of insects, favorite among them being giant glowing crickets whom they keep as beloved companions and pets.

When trouble finds them they are most likely to try and diffuse the situation. Failing that, they will misdirect the threat and run away into the forest deeps. But when their hollows are threatened they prove themselves capable with traps, slings, and bolas. Their familiarity with the bugs and critters of the deep woods affords them an impressive armamentarium of weapons, alchemical substances, and even armor made from bits of exoskeleton.

They are known by the outside world as the Masked Ones, for the diverse and colorful masks they all wear- at least, we think those are masks. No one has ever seen one without their mask. It is unclear if they are wood, or porcelain, or something else. Rumors persist that their young hatch with masks already affixed to them- a point at which the distinction between "mask" and "face" becomes moot.

They are no less remarkable, though.

Each Masked One has seemingly unlimited control over their mask, able to change its color, shape, and design on a whim to complement or conceal their moods and actions. Some accentuate the change with a dramatic wave and flourish, while others merely change in the blink of an eye without affectation. Despite their fondness for performing arts, theater does not exist among the Masked Ones per se. Acting, with all its subtleties and theatrics, is just a natural extension of being for them.

One's mask and the way they present it is thus an essential part of their self-expression and identity- so much so that if one's mask is damaged beyond repair, they may face discrimination and exclusion from the crueler elements of their communities.

These sh'khar or "broken" Masked Ones lose the ability to alter their masks without intense conscious effort, greatly reducing their ability to emote meaningfully among other Masked Ones. Some are even treated like they are less than the people they used to be. Of course the person behind that cracked visage is as full and feeling as ever, making the scorn and pity they receive all the more tragic.

Some sh'khar try to compensate for this, increasing the bombast of their voices, gestures, and performances. Others go to great lengths to repair their masks, tracking down rare and expensive resins and the legendary mask-menders who can use them. Still others don't seek to modify themselves at all- they live as best they can, to hell with what others say or think of them.

But a minority most commonly encountered by outsiders will eventually leave the forest entirely, to face the world of the maskless Naked Folk beyond- a place where having only one, more-or-less static face is the norm.

Sh'khar Masked One by Monsieur

Playing Masked Ones in a Few Different Systems, Because Why Not?

GLOG

| Race: Masked One | Reroll: CHA | Bonus: Can change your face at will | Weakness: Cannot change your face or emote at all if your mask has taken any damage |

TROIKA!

Possessions

• A Musical Instrument of your choice.
• Jar of Insect Resin.
• Deep & Raggedy Robes (Light Armour).
• Pet Glow-Cricket.

Advanced Skills

2 Climbing

1 Disguise
2 Etiquette
3 Perform
2 Sneak

Special

You can completely change the shape and appearance (but not the overall size) of your mask-face at will, potentially enhancing the delivery of performances or allowing you to masquerade as a different Masked One in the eyes of outsiders.

D&D 5E

Ability Score Increase. Your Charisma score increases by 2, and your Dexterity score increases by 1.

Age. Masked Ones age relatively quickly after they hatch. They reach adulthood around age 8, and rarely live longer than 40 years.

Alignment. Masked Ones are mostly neutral. Their fairly isolated society places a strong emphasis on kith and clutch, but also individual expression and whimsy.

Size. Masked Ones average just under 3 feet tall and average about 30 pounds. Your size is Small.

Speed. Your base walking speed is 25 feet.

Darkvision. Accustomed to deep forest hollows and the light of bioluminescent fungus, you have superior vision in dark and dim conditions. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can’t discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.

Masked. You can change the appearance and shape of your mask at will, as well as the way you emote. You gain proficiency in the Deception skill. You also have advantage on Deception checks to disguise yourself as a different Masked One around non-Masked Ones.

Artistically Inclined. You gain proficiency in one of the following: the Performance skill, artisan's tools of your choice, or a musical instrument of your choice.

Sticky Pads. Your extremities have smooth, adhesive pads that you can use to scale sheer surfaces. You have a climbing speed of 10 feet. You also have advantage on checks to resist being disarmed.

Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and Masked One. The spoken Masked One language includes many pops, hand gestures, and mask expressions.

GLOG Class Attempt: Ripple of the Primordial Chiming

Stock art attributed to Maksim-Manekin

In the beginning, as the Harmonies say, there was nothing but still and infinite water. For an eternity it stood crystalline and still, until the Chiming began. Its vibrations radiated outward across the water, forming ripples that disturbed the mirror of infinity and gave shape to space, time, and other forms of matter. The Chiming has never ended, and forever rings outward from the center of the ever-expanding universe.

Echoes of the Chiming can be heard everywhere- on the wind, in the background radiation of the earth, during a bad case of tinnitus, etc. But water is still regarded as the purest medium for the sound of creation, and it is through water that bell-priests, or Ripples, of the Primordial Chiming do their work. It is said that they both tap into and propagate that musica universalis to bring structure and harmony to the world. It is also said that they are nothing but a whole lot of noisy ritual.

You are one such Ripple, recently departed from your tocsinary on the Echoing- a pilgrimage to one of your faith's most far-flung holy sites.

Ripple of the Primordial Chiming
Starting Equipment: ball mace that doubles as a bell mallet, a set of 20 ritual bells & singing bowls, rope-belted brocade sarong.
Starting Skills: Perform (Bells, Chimes, Etc.) and Religion. Also, roll on the adjacent table.

A: Waves & Water
B: Unleash Cacophony
C: Quiet the Dissonant
D: Cleansing Crescendo

You gain +1 Save vs Fear (and any other extremes of emotion) for each Ripple of the Primordial Chiming template you possess. You get +1 Save if you possess 2 or more Ripple of the Primordial Chiming templates.

A: Waves & Waters

Ringing your bells allows you to divert and control the flow of water around you. You always move water slowly and gently, with limits- you can't reverse the flow of an entire river for example, but you can allow a boat you're riding to float upstream. Additionally, you may walk on the surface of water as long as you do nothing else but play a singing bowl with both hands.

B: Unleash Cacophony
The Chiming can be overwhelming and painful to the uninitiated, and you can use that to your advantage by subjecting your foes to loud, booming strikes. If you hit an enemy with a melee weapon, you can choose to deal 1 damage instead of rolling for damage. The target is befuddled for 1 round.

C: Quiet the Dissonant
You ring or throw a silver bell whose toll is the utter silence of water yet untouched by the Chiming. All creatures within 60' of the bell must Save or be deafened, then Save again or be silenced for 1 minute each. The bell is destroyed after use.

D: Cleansing Crescendo
You perform a ritual that takes 1 full day, in which you gradually ring more and more bells and bowls around a single target until they momentarily harmonize with the Chiming itself. At the end of the ritual your target is cleansed of one curse or disease. You can perform this ritual once per week.

1d6	Ripple of the Primordial Chiming Skills
1	Surviving a religious riot that targeted your tocsinary granted you the blasphemous knowledge that sometimes, being silent is best. Gain +1 Stealth.
2	An elemental spirit of water has taken a liking to your ritual music. Your singing bowls magically refill with water once per day if emptied.
3	You had very sensitive hearing as a child. Gain a set of heavy duty earplugs that make you immune to aural distractions, but deafen you to all sounds except ringing.
4	You were ordained as a bellfounder before going Echoing. Gain a repair kit usable on bells, chimes, and other small metallic objects.
5	A wealthy passerby was quite taken by your last bell ritual, and you haven’t found a tocsinary to pass their donation onto- yet. Gain 10sp and a sealed letter of conversion.
6	You are a true emanation of the Chiming. Gain the 1st Elf Wizard Cantrip. You can cast it once per day.

Dwarf-Hair Armor

I was searching around my hard drive and found this in my images. I barely remember making this, or frankly, why I did, but now it's the rest of the world's problem. I've included a transcription down below, but not much else.

I'm pretty sure I used the Homebrewery to make this piece. It's nice tool for simulating the D&D 5E style of formatting in general. I am garbage at basic text editing code, but they offer many premade templates to use.

Tomte cropped from a larger image by John Bauer

Dwarf-Hair Armor

Armor (hide), rare (requires attunement)

This pungent, shaggy grey mass resembles a gambeson and matching helmet made from braids of long, thickly matted hair. It was shaved off of the body of a rare type of dwarf whose beards and body hair grow so dense that they groom them into clothing and even body armor.

You gain a +1 bonus to AC while wearing this armor.

You also gain a healthy ecosystem of microscopic hair fauna.

Up to three times per day when a creature misses you with a weapon attack in melee, the weapon gets snagged and tangled in the hairs of the armor. The attacker must make a DC 16 Dexterity saving throw or drop their weapon. Nonmagical weapons are lost in the snarls of hair, while magical weapons drop to the ground in a random space within 5 feet of you. A weapon lost within the hair vanishes and cannot be retrieved.

It belongs to the Beard now.

New System, New Face: It's not Technically Cheating if the d20 System has a "True" in front of it

When I started this series, it was with the express purpose of exploring systems I've never really touched before, in light of my thus-far-brief lifetime of experience with d20 things. While I want to stick to that, I also kind of want to write about Blue Rose, the progenitor of the True20 system, a close but streamlined derivative by Green Ronin Publishing. And since this is my show, I'm going to exercise that agency my therapist keeps telling me about and do it anyway.

Romance and talking animals await!
Maybe not romance with the talking animals.
I dunno. The Kingdom of Aldis doesn't judge.

Game/Context

Blue Rose was first released in 2005. It was the debut of what would come to be named the True20 system, after its popularity caused Green Ronin to expand and republish the system for setting-agnostic use. Some of its DNA can be found in Green Ronin's current project, the 3d6-focused AGE (Adventure Game Engine) System.

Blue Rose is a Romantic Fantasy game, meaning it takes inspiration primarily from the literary genre of the same name. It is often said to have more in common with the stories of Mercedes Lackey than R. E. Howard, and in fact Lackey (alongside several other writers like Tamora Pierce) can be found in the core book's recommended reading section. Adventure and battle have their prominent place in Blue Rose, but complex interpersonal relationships, drama, and aforementioned romance are core elements.

The game is set in the world of Aldea, specifically in the Kingdom of Aldis. Aldis is unapologetically idealistic, though not without its own problems. The kingdom is ruled by a monarch who is selected by the Golden Hart, a divine being of Light that appears to select every heir, and has done so since it helped the world overthrow an empire of sorcerer-kings. The monarchy often runs down family lines, but can also transfer to another noble or to a commoner in this way. Nobles serve as part of a council of advisors to the crown, and may only become nobles after demonstrating their morality and purity of heart by being accepted by the eponymous Blue Rose scepter, a kind of divining rod of righteousness. And since it's all divine magic stemming from the Primordials, the gods of the world, it's hard to fake any of it.

It's an interesting mix of heavenly mandate and divine right of kings that is, once again, unapologetically idealistic.

Aldis is a pretty inclusive place, or at least more inclusive than many fantasy worlds of the mid-aughts were. Humans of a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds share the land with semiaquatic Sea People, psychic animal Rhydans (coming in dolphin, cat, wolf, and horse varieties), pseudo-half-elvish genocide survivor Vatas, and basically-orcs-except-fully-redeemed-and-also-conventionally-attractive Night People.

The book and the people within it make no fuss or assumptions about gender or sexual orientation, and creatively benevolent use of the Flesh Shaping sorcery found in-universe even allows for transgendered characters' bodies to more closely match who they are. People who take issue with any of the above are typically seen by Aldins as ignorant or bigoted.

This was apparently seen by some of the public as quite radical upon release, to the point that Google still offered the suggestion "blue rose rpg controversy" when I was researching the game recently. I want to say that's a funny artifact of a time since passed, but then again this is the same hobby where people made death threats over the existence of the Combat Wheelchair, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

Mechanics

Blue Rose's True20 system is essentially a streamlining of the more widely known d20 system. There are no other dice but the d20, which is used for all rolls including combat damage. The six classic ability scores are present, but their values are boiled down into modifiers between -5 and +5, so you never have to deal with calculating bonuses or having frustratingly useless odd numbered scores staring you right in the face until you finally burn an advancement just to make them nice and rounded.

There are only three classes or "roles" in True20- Adept, Expert, and Warrior. They approximate magic-users, skill specialists, and fighting types by themselves, but can be freely mixed and matched without multiclassing penalties. Aside from starting proficiencies, differing progression on roll bonuses, and role-locked feat lists, they don't have any class features, encouraging each player to build exactly what they want out of their character. It's an interesting take on a classed system that sometimes feels almost classless.

Skills are still present, in a form that presages later changes in many d20 systems. Instead of mucking about with assigning skill points every level, you are either trained or untrained in a skill, and you get a bonus to skill checks that scales with your level depending on if the skill is "known" or "favored". Favored and known skills receive your level +3, giving us the familiar 4 "ranks" at 1st level, while known but not favored skills received level +3 divided by 2. You can still make completely untrained skill checks, but your only bonus there is from the relevant ability score. Also, Diplomacy is still really really strong.

Feats are pretty much as featy as ever, except now you get them every level and they are your primary means of mechanical character growth. Skills, proficiencies, and combat tricks are gained through feats, as well as any and all magic abilities for adepts. There is a considerable range of power between feats, but I think there are fewer "newbie traps" than in D&D 3E, and the setting's less-than-total reliance on combat is always important to remember when developing a character.

And it's a good thing that Blue Rose doesn't demand huge amounts of combat, because it can get nasty. There are no hit points in True20- everyone has the same two-lane damage track for lethal and nonlethal damage. If you are struck by an attack, you must roll a Toughness check with a DC15 plus the attacker's damage bonus, which can include ability scores, weapon bonuses, and others. At 1st level an adventurer facing a random bandit with a short sword can easily be facing a steep DC18 roll to avoid damage.

When you do get damaged, you move down the damage track depending on how many increments of 5 you failed the Toughness save by. Each failed save gives a stacking penalty to future Toughness checks against that type of damage (lethal or nonlethal), and each level of the damage track offers a variety of other penalties to rolls. A few hits can debilitate you, and one botched roll that fails by 15 or more can leave you dying.

To escape the worst that bad dice rolls can throw at you, each PC (and any NPC with levels in a heroic role) has access to Conviction points. Conviction functions like a typical Luck or Hero Point mechanic, plus extra. You can spend a point to reroll and take the better of two die results, temporarily use a feat you don't possess (but can acquire normally), retain dodge bonus while surprised or flat-footed, take an extra action in a round, recover from damage or effects, or stabilize while dying. But characters have a set cap for Conviction that increases as they level, and they can only regain points passively at a slow rate (1/day) or by acting upon their Natures (described below).

One Sneaky Sphynx

To avoid some of combat's nastiness, I'm going to ignore the urge to make a Night Person earth elementalist and build someone a little more sneaky than usual. I will make a Rhy-cat expert who can easily prowl around while throwing up distractions and illusions and gleaning information with psychic powers. It's also going to be a wrinkly, hairless sphynx breed of Rhy-cat, because the last thing you want on a covert operation is for your team member's allergies to act up, or for the target to discover you thanks to a hairball. And besides, is there anything more demoralizing to the enemy than seeing this thing ambush them?

It can smell what you did last summer.

But first come ability scores.

Because they've been boiled down into modifiers, you don't need any point-buy system. The book just gives you 6 points to distribute among 6 attributes, with a starting max of +3 in each. Rhydans only get 4 points because of their other abilities. I decide on Strength -1, Dexterity +1, Constitution +1, Intelligence +1, Wisdom +1, Charisma +1. With Rhy-cat racial stats added on, that's +0/+3/+2/+1/+1/+1. I could have taken more negative modifiers and specialized further, but I don't enjoy having negative stat modifiers- playing a well-rounded individual without massive objective faults is one of the highs of escapist fantasy.

Since I've already picked Expert as this psykit's role, I next have to choose favored skills, known skills, and starting feats. I will make every choice I can while building, instead if just choosing one of the suggested starting Paths that get presented in the core book and then expanded as full 20-level builds in the Blue Rose Companion.

Remember when third-party d20 books would include "guides" to character types from their fluff that amounted to "just take this class or mix it 50/50 with this other class and that's pretty much it"? Don't get me wrong, I still like the novelty and own a lot of those, especially from the Conan d20 line, but looking back it feels like padding the catalogue.

Anyway.

Skills

Experts choose 12 skills plus one Crafting as their favored skills. Rhydans get a normally crippling -20 penalty to skills that require fine digital manipulation like sleight of hand, craft, disable device, etc. But with an arcanum to conjure a pair of arcane hands to do the manipulating for you, that penalty can get circumvented in favor of a mere -2, allowing them to still be valid choices for an animal adventurer.

In light of this, my Rhy-cat favors Acrobatics, Bluff, X, Concentration, Craft ( ), Disable Device, Escape Artist, Jump, Knowledge (Local), X, Search, Sense Motive, and Sleight of Hand. They also gain Climb, Notice, Sneak, and Survival thanks to their species and background.

Known skills are 6+Int to start off. I'll select Acrobatics, Climb, Disable Device, Escape Artist, Notice, Search, and Sneak. Rhy-cat bonuses grant +8 to Climb/Jump and +4 to Sneak, making our wrinkly friend a good prowler on tree limbs or on rooftops. I'm trying real hard not to make any cat burglar puns here.

Feats

Next come starting feats.

Rhydans receive Psychic Talent for free and Experts receive Armor Training (light), as well as my choice of 3 others. The armor training is a bit wasted on my cat at the moment, since Rhydans need specially fitted armor that raises the cost by +10 and my cat starts with 0 Wealth (more on that mechanic later).

I am dismayed that Rhy-cat natural claws and bites don't count as light weapons, or Weapon Finesse would be my first feat to get more out of my +3 Dex in combat. Alas they're not, so we'll keep going stealthy and avoidant with our feats. Arcane Training (Illusion & Sleep) will help, as will Shaping Talent (Manipulate Object) and Trapfinding.

Equipment

Now to figure what, if anything, my cat has in their possession. To do that, we're gonna have to consult the Wealth rules.

Instead of measuring every price, reward, or value in exact gold piece amounts, everything is given an abstract Wealth Score or Wealth DC. Wealth Score is a character's ability to buy things, represented by a modifier that sits at +0 minimum, but can increase infinitely, with +31 being extremely, lavishly rich. Whenever you want to purchase something for your character, you must roll a Wealth Check against the DC or Cost of the desired purchase.

You can Take 10 or 20 on the check with extra time spent shopping, and if your score naturally equals or exceeds an item's cost, you can get it for free. Succeeding on a check to buy a very expensive item, or one whose cost is higher than your modifier reduces your wealth by X amount, so you will eventually burn through your cash, even if the system seems more generous or more luck-based than gold and WBL in D&D.

Most characters start with +5 Wealth, but my cat starts at +0 since Rhydans don't have a lot of use for humanoid tools or comforts. Even so, a +0 doesn't disqualify you from affording anything- you can still roll for anything with a cost of 9 or lower, and you can't ever dip below +0.

Rhydan body shape means the cheapest armor my cat could wear costs 16, so that's not happening until later. Weapons are also useless, though I am somewhat surprised there are no special Rhydan weapon attachments like metal claws or hoof spikes or what have you. This leaves my sphynx free to focus on the little things... or it would have allowed them to focus on the little things, had I not rolled a Nat 1 trying to purchase a fricking backpack in which to hold anything.

You are allowed to retry wealth checks, but not before spending X hours shopping, which I can't really do during character creation. That would feel more than a little cheap- why not then just reroll until I get everything I want from an arbitrarily long shopping spree at some point in the nebulous Before Time?

Fortunately a sack costs 0, and I got a 9 on the DC 2 belt pouch check, so my cat will just carry one around in their mouth between missions and rely on a utility belt otherwise. Manipulate Object allows them to interact with all of their items as if they had humanoid hands, so they can benefit from small tools like a waterskin, flint and steel, paper for writing down notes (they can't physically speak, but presumably they are still literate in their known languages), and a whetstone to keep the claws sharp.

Characteristics

The last major part of character generation is one we're all familiar with by now- all the little questions that help round your character out as a person with thoughts and feelings. The standard name, gender, age, appearance, alignment, and personality apply, along with Blue rose's addition of romantic inclination and/or status. Tajid, for their part, is an unfathomable wrinkle who has no need for such things- or so they think.

More unique to the game are a hero's Calling and Natures.

Everyone gets a Calling, which is their primary motivation to adventure, and in life in general. They are selected by way of picking a Major Arcana card from a deck of the Royal Road, which just so happens to be functionally identical to the tarot deck in our world. Since I don't own a tarot deck and it's weird to roll a d22 for the list of choices, I'll just pick The Moon- it represents the learning of secrets, which fits well with their whole M.O. as long as they have the sense to avoid the wrong kinds of secrets. Something about curiosity and cats.

Alignment is a simple three-point axis that is like but decidedly unlike the Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic axis of old. Everyone is made of varying degrees of Light, Shadow, and Twilight, and all it takes for one to become dominant is to make a decisive change of heart- every hero has a threat of darkness and cynicism in them, every villain a spark of hope, etcetera and so on.

Light is the belief in community (in any form, not just what one might consider "civilization", and without an emphasis on law & order), harmonious coexistence, and promoting the general good for all. Shadow is petty and selfish at its core, sometimes entertaining the notion of cooperation or moral justification, but only so far as it serves one's own interest. Twilight is anyone in between the two extremes, whether that takes the form of careful balance between the two natures or fluctuating back and forth between them to a certain degree.

Tajiid is still figuring things out, so we'll go with Twilight.

Natures are specific manifestations of a character's Light and Shadow tendencies that act as positive and negative character motivators, respectively. They also act as extrinsic roleplay encouragement, thanks to their role in regaining Conviction points. When a character acts on their natures to regain Conviction, they really gotta sell it, live up to their nature, and live with their consequences.

There are 56 natures for each card in the deck, with each nature being two takes on a particular quality- sometimes they are simple inverses like generous vs greedy, but others are more subtle/subjective distinctions of a single idea like enthusiastic vs overzealous, or resourceful vs sneaky.

For these I will randomly roll just to see what I get. 27 on my Light nature gives me Devoted, and 35 on Shadow is Reckless. I can work with this. Tajiid is a workaholic as mentioned before, and this reflects their devotion to their goal. They prowl, spy, and occasionally steal in the interest of gathering intelligence and keeping Aldea and peoples beyond it safe. But they can go overboard at times, recklessly pursuing something or someone beyond their means to safely or stealthily handle.

With these finishing touches in place, our Rhy is finished.

Going Forward

Of course we're not done at level 1, especially not in a system that allows one to fully build out their concept up to the max level. I won't be going as far as making multiple sheets at different levels because strangely enough I never enjoyed that part of the process much, but I will give growth examples.

Only three ability increases come to you over the course of leveling, at 6th, 12th, and 18th. One will definitely be devoted to Dexterity, likely two so that it reaches the +5 max. The other might go into Constitution, or even Strength just because it looks sad sitting there at 0.

You gain a feat every level in True20, so they pile up fast. Early on, Tajiid will take a Skill Training or two to flesh out their array of known favored skills. Skills requiring training to use at all will be definite picks, but not right away. Later on in the lower mid-levels Brew Elixir gives us some use for the required Craft skill choice made during creation, though they aren't pure buffs like most potions in D&D- many Blue Rose elixirs hit you with levels of fatigue after their duration is finished, and if you ran yourself ragged during that time you might take lethal damage.

Arcana will be the bulk of Tajiid's feat choices, I feel. There are several powers that would benefit a spy like Mind Reading to detect surface-level thoughts. Our wrinkle will need to be careful not only for their targets but for themself if they ever want to try reading deeper thoughts using Mind Probe, however. Any magic that is overtly harmful, invasive, or violates an individual's body or free will is Sorcery, which risks Corruption points. A situation may present itself where it seems necessary, but executing on it all depends on how dim their Twilight becomes.

As Tajiid adventures with or without companions, they'll begin to yearn for a pack of their own, and to appreciate the responsibility of caring for and nurturing the future. They'll learn the Familiar feat to gain a small, magical cat friend as a sort of nonstandard adoption, and they will befriend the mundane strays of Aldis with judicious use of one or two Animism arcana. No street corner or alleyway will be without eyes and ears. Weavers of Shadow beware.

Presumably the animal vocalizations every Rhydan makes will be enough for Tajiid to "speak" to other cats without magic, so either Handle Animal or Diplomacy might work instead, depending on your interpretation of things.

Someday, still a speck on the horizon, Tajiid will be able to afford better gear. Maybe even one of those absurdly priced Rhydan-fitted suits of armor. A set of masterwork studded leather armor adds +13 to the price for a whopping DC of 25 however, so it will be a while and more than a few odd jobs before they can wriggle their folds into a suit like someone trying to stuff a gallon of prunes into an old boot.

Antiborea

Patrick Zgarrick

This is not the land of the South Wind. The South Wind lies dead and blameless beyond the Wall.

This is the wind that is beyond the South Wind. This is the wind that snakes down from the spiderwebbing cracks in the sky. And this land is its prison.

This land is cold and desolate, but not so cold and desolate as to grant the mercy of death to all that washes up on its ice-choked shores. It is a twisted and cruel place, dangling misbegotten hope before one's eyes until you are fully in the grip of the things that dwell there.

And yet its captives and castaways insist and persist.

The Land of Antiborea

A continent located on and around a world's South Pole. It is like Antarctica, but Weirder. The coasts and some sheltered inland areas have habitable subarctic climates where mostly recognizable flora and fauna are found. Beyond those refuges, things get progressively more inhospitable the farther south one goes.

The South Pole is located directly beneath a hole in the sky, where strange things bleed in from beyond and the laws of nature start to break down. The cosmic wind that pours down out of that nebula-studded wound scintillates and thrums with energy that can sicken or transform life, and even the land itself.

A few dozen leagues off the coast, a perfect circle of wind and waves forms a wall that hedges the entire continent in. They tower like roiling mountains over any vessel, and their undercurrents reach deep down into the shallows of the ocean, spitting everything back so that nothing can escape Antiborea. By that same token, anything from the outside world that strays too close to the Wall of Wind and Waves is inexorably pulled in and trapped in Antiborea.

Most such unfortunates wind up torn to pieces by the gale-force storm or are dashed upon the rocks, but over the centuries enough survivors have piled up and clung together to call the continent inhabited.

The Antiboreans

Descendants of castaways and exiles from a dozen different distant lands, all scattered across the shores and hinterlands. They tend to congregate in small towns or tribes located far apart from one another, because not even the most fertile coastal regions can support a fixed population much larger than that.

They aren't insular by any stretch, however. People survive in this land by cooperating. Every culture is a fusion of several, their languages patched together from dozens of tongues and dialects. Like rafts pieced together from driftwood, they float precariously on. Outlanders are readily embraced- hostility and suspicion are reserved for those from too far inland, where the wind sours.

A few examples of Antiborean communities:

    Utqaalit- Marine hunters and fishers extraordinaire. They ply the icy waters of the coast in long canoes and outrigger kayaks, casting nets or toggle-heads to bring home their livelihood. Bone is their favored medium for art and artifice, but they also work in shell, leather, and ivory. Their chilling overtone songs are known across Antiborea. Closest to the sea, they are often the first to find newcomers to Antiborea- and the sea monsters nipping at their heels.

    Nasvhas- Traders and travelers whose iconic houseboats are known all along the coast. Their family flotillas slowly bob over the waves and through the ice, bringing news and commerce to far-flung settlements like gluts of cold, sluggish lifeblood. Most are polyglots, and many are entertainers. Amber is sacred to them, and they will search far and wide for it. Their cuisine is infamously hot and bitter with herbs- a welcome contrast to the sodden cold they live in.

    Zawendi- Keepers and harvesters of the squat pine forests, and hunters of the beasts that take refuge in them. The wood they work can be made into things far beyond the capabilities of bone and sinew, but their justified concerns over conservation ensure that the driftwood industry remains lucrative. They are the continent's sole heirs to the secrets of horticulture, and their preserved crowberries are the delight of many a bland-palated child.

    Kherrig- Masters of the windswept tundra and steppe, who goad their herds of ornery, primeval, and oftentimes gamey-smelling animals in search of pasture. They are often seen as having an overly dour cast, but they counter that it is justified when you have nothing but some musky furs and a long spear to defend yourself from whatever evil comes slithering down out of the wastes. They tend to lighten up when the hide tents are pitched and the fermented cheese is cut, though.

The World Beyond

The people who survived passage through the Wall have not forgotten where they come from, at least in a broad sense. Every generation brings a handful more outsiders to them, bearing new skills or news from the outside. None in the wider world know Antiborea exists beyond the ring of devouring waves that many posit to be the edge of the world. Antiborea's denizens, meanwhile, are always hungry for stories of the world denied to them.

Scraps of events and history reach them in this way, vaguely outlining the rise and fall of peoples and places and creating a mélange of myths that frustrate and excite the Antiboreans. Not even their greatest diviners can pierce the Wall, and many have tried. To them, the outside world is a half-formed, murky dream out of which terrible, frozen reality crystallizes and rises like ice on the sea. Some hope that in the end, they will return to it.

Bargaining with Magic

The root word from which the word "magic" is derived in most languages on Antiborea means "deal" or "bargain". This reflects the nature of the supernatural rather well. Knowledge or faith won't carry you alone- one must also be charismatic in order to attract and influence the spirits that govern magic. It isn't clear if the spirits are natural, alien, or even sapient. Some choose to believe they are watchful ancestors, or capricious demons.

Every magical act incurs a cost that can either be paid on the spot, or carried as debt. The spirits often collect on their debts at random, and with appreciable interest added on. If a cost is too high, the offending shaman or magician risks psychic backlash, the opposite of the desired outcome, or even temporary bodily possession.

Possession causes the magic-user to obsess over acts or concepts in line with an exaggeration of the intent behind the spell they wanted to cast; possession by a spirit of lore makes one babble useless information, possession by an animal spirit forces appropriate behaviors and lack of manners, possession by spirits of healing turns one into an overprotective hypochondriac, etc. Possession by spirits of harm and domination tends to go especially poorly for everyone involved, adding to the already heinous reputation of what is deemed "sorcery"- though there is no objective difference between one practice or the other.

Navigation

This far south, cardinal directions are almost meaningless. In most languages, "seaward" is synonymous with the direction north, and has replaced it in common usage. Similarly, "inland" or "windward" take the place of south. Any languages that retain the original word for south often treat it as taboo and forbid it from being spoken aloud. East and west still exist among some people, but they are interchangeable with terms like upcoast or downcoast, or body-relative words like right and left (when facing the sea of course, for none willingly face inland).

The sun is dark and distant, but it has not completely forsaken this land. It can always be seen hanging heavy and orange in the northern sky as it circles the edges of Antiborea. There are long winter months of pitch blackness where it vanishes beneath the horizon completely. Strangely, its summer counterpart is not equally as long or as bright, even if the laws of physics in this world should dictate otherwise. Only a dull twilight sheds itself across the land in between partial sunsets then.

At sea and along the coast, the wind blows randomly in all directions as the Wind Beyond the South Wind and the air currents of the Wall battle one another for supremacy. This makes sailing unpredictable and difficult, which is why most maritime peoples prefer rowing close to the coast. Only inland is the wind ever consistent, and that is because it always blows north.

The stars are strange over Antiborea. Close to the sea they resemble the night sky elsewhere, albeit squished and distorted. Farther inland, they become wholly unrecognizable and are prone to changing from month to month. They do little to aid in navigation, though some sages insist that certain, obscure patterns can be observed in them over time.

Geography of Antiborea

The continent is approximately round and blobby, with few large peninsulas or gulfs disturbing its shape. Eons of uniform erosion and sediment deposition by the wind may have contributed to this. Its climate regions can be easily visualized as a series of concentric rings:

    The Encircling Sea- All of the water between the Wall and the shores of Antiborea. A few small archipelagos and lone islands dot the sea, but they are mostly uninhabited by people or animals because of the perpetual storms wracking it. Currents tend to rotate counterclockwise around the continent at the moment, but this has apparently not always been the case, and there are regional exceptions. The wind and rain are brutal, but the sea is also bountiful. The shallows are abundant with trapped seafood, both native and pulled in through the Wall.

        Encircling Sea Rumors

• Strange towers of stone and coral jut out from the Wall at intervals, shining watchfully in the right light.
• The competing winds are so fierce that localized storms and waterspouts often form. Sometimes they are strong enough to drag sea life into the air with them.
• Deep trenches are hidden surprisingly close to shore. Their depths are neither empty nor still.
• A ship passed through the Wall completely unharmed, and now prowls the shallows as if in search of something.
• A mountain of ice has calved off of one of the glaciers. It weeps strange, rusty liquid as it melts.
• Several landmark islets have suddenly vanished and reappeared far from where they are supposed to be, throwing local navigation into disarray.

    Coastland- The shore of Antiborea, as well as all the land within sight of the sea. Here, the endless flotsam of the wider world's ocean currents washes up on the continent's beaches. Even heavy wreckage that would normally sink to the bottom of the ocean is regularly brought to shore by the fury of the churning waves. This offers no shortage of resources, baubles, and curiosities to pick through, making the coastland the closest to wealthy that anything in Antiborea can get. The people here scavenge, fish or hunt marine life, and trade up and down the coast in skin boats. In winter the sea ice freezes thick, but the constant movement breaks it up into a million crashing, grinding pieces.

        Coastland Rumors

• Huge numbers of dead or deformed fish have been washing ashore lately. Their frequency is increasing, and they are being joined by larger and larger animals, all the way up to decaying whales.
• An entire tribe recently ran aground from the outside world. They walk about in the cold almost naked, and dive into the freezing waters wearing little more than animal fat. Theories abound how they do it- some of them grim and suspicious.
• Blooms of crimson algae choke a seal breeding colony, making them sick and disrupting the mating season. Things other than seals have been seen skulking between the rocks.
• Harvested mollusks have started giving huge pearls, but they come in unnatural colors, and the superstitious local traders refuse to deal in them for fear of taint from the south.
• A fishing village stands empty and abandoned downcoast. Only a pillar of whale bone was left behind, its scrimshaw depicting the destructive scene of a mountain falling from the sky.
• Someone has been going around cutting precise shapes out of fishing nets. They seem to be following a concerning pattern.

    Hinterlands- All of the habitable land beyond the coast, which in theory extends to about a week's journey inland. Forests of squat, gnarled trees are scattered across the sheltered parts of Antiborea here, bent away from the wind with leaves only on their northern faces. They provide the only native wood on the continent, and are precious and prized. Mammoth steppe sprawls elsewhere, supporting herds of hardy, cold-resistant animals. They may be megafauna previously thought extinct in the world, or entirely new and unusual creatures- it is difficult to say at this point. Nomadic tribes hunt or even herd these beasts, as well as provide the first line of defense against anything coming from farther inland, soured by the wind.

        Hinterland Rumors

• Several herds have taken ill and are in need of culling before the wind sickness spreads, but their caretakers are nowhere to be found.
• A bog recently caught fire, and has been ablaze for days. As bizarre and unlikely as this is, it spells very real doom for nearby inhabitants- bogs serve to trap much of the cosmic dust and other corruption blown in from the south.
• The coast has gotten a little too busy for one community, which has resolved to build a village farther inland. But the hard land is loathe to be homesteaded, especially by amateurs.
• The bent trees of a dwarf forest are suddenly straightening- and growing.
• One of the precious few freshwater lakes in the region has become the object of dispute between two clans, who both claim that the same person granted them the right to it.
• A young, brash nomad is rallying their fellows to go on a hunting expedition at a time when the south is dangerously active.

    Inner Wastes- The vast majority of the continent's interior, too dry and cold to sustain normal life with the exception of lichen, which can stretch in wide blankets over the rocky deserts. Beyond that lie vast glacial plateaus and high, jagged mountain ranges. The only living things out here tend to be creatures that have been turned by the wind, or those hunting them. The aroura australis common across much of the continent becomes especially intense here, and the faintest hints of the broken sky are rumored to be visible deep in the wastes.

        Wasteland Rumors

• The lichen grows huge in some areas, becoming alike to tall grass or shrubs. It doesn't always let you pass through it unscathed.
• Holes in the face of a glacier keen endlessly from the wind blowing across them. It sounds like someone playing a huge, discordant flute.
• Nomad scouts have spotted large numbers of shambling forms crossing the desert north.
• Freak weather brings showers of stardust down upon the wastes, irradiating anything caught in its path.
• That mountain range was not there last month.
• Someone is leisurely strolling through the wastes, claiming that they are on pilgrimage.

    The Uttermost South- Unknown and unexplored. The South Pole at the center of Antiborea would be lumped in with the rest of the Inner Wastes if not for the sheer, nerve-wracking mystique surrounding it. Surely something must be there at the heart of it all, forever bathed in the hellish wind and the lurid radiance of the splitting heavens?

        Southmost Rumors

• A city of clayed stardust stands at the South Pole. Shimmering waves of radiation rise up over its organic spires to obscure the step pyramid rising tall from its heart.
• The earth breathes here, rising and falling like huge lungs, or perhaps the slow beating of a titanic heart.
• The rip in the sky is only one of a mirrored pair, and the other ingress bores deep into the earth- maybe even deeper than the Wall can reach.
• No matter what direction one approaches the South Pole from, they eventually come to the shore of an impossibly wide sea, its gently lapping waters murky and warm like amniotic fluid.
• You've suddenly been turned back around to the exact spot where your excursion into the wastes started. Wait... how many years has it been...?
• An adventurer, heavily mutated by wind sickness, claims they carry knowledge vital to the safety of the coast and insists on safe passage north. This is a taboo the nomads will not allow broken if they find out.
• Space and physics begin to fall apart. Living things crumple under the weight of their own skin. Pebbles rocket into the sky at the slightest disturbance. Left is up, and backwards is inside-out.
• An ancient civilization of squamous, eldritch creatures once thrived here- and not even they stood a chance against the wind.
• A massive chasm yawns in all directions, and gravity contorts around its edges to allow easy passage into the hollow world beneath.
• The innermost mountain range is actually a huge caldera that contains a steaming, reeking jungle of writhing plants and fey animals.
• Nothing. There is nothing down here. Only a perfectly flat, featureless plain.
• The Perantique Ones have been sighted again.

History Excerpt: The Perantique Prisoners

Antiborea is in fact a prison, and the denizens of the Uttermost South are its prisoners. They sometimes refer to themselves as True or Old Antiboreans, for though they despise their cage and are loathe to consider it anything other than a temporary residence, they will take any opportunity to differentiate themselves from people whom they view as lesser- which is to say, everyone.

The prisoners are a small remnant of an ancient threat. Millennia ago, their people forged a sorcerous empire that stretched across much of the southern hemisphere. They were driven to conquest by an ideology of xenophobia and zero-sum thinking, mixed with a healthy dose of supernatural fearmongering and golden age hubris. At their height, they waged a war against the entire world.

In time, the empire crumbled. Awful logistics ground its military advances to a halt, then reversed them. At the first hint of blood in the water, its pernicious hierarchy tore itself apart- one cannot have a pyramid with an ever-expanding base and an ever-shrinking top for very long. Hounded by liberators and vengeance-seekers, their last remnants eventually retreated to Antiborea, once a worthless backwater in the empire.

There, they struck their bargain.

The barrier between this world and the next was always thin above Antiborea, but with a little applied occultism they punched a hole right through it. They entreated the denizens of the place beyond the broken sky to come down and serve them, to smite their enemies and help them reclaim their rightful place at the throne of the world.

The denizens did not take those demands lightly.

Instead of coming down to serve, they broke those would-be sorcerers in mind, body, and spirit. The Old Antiboreans became servants of the outer powers, physical instruments played to the tune of the wind that now howled down out of that tear in the sky. Generations of obsession with blood purity came to naught as they hypocritically took that otherworldly taint into themselves, becoming something eldritch and decidedly inhuman. The wind swept over the world, bringing unearthly horrors of light, sound, and thought with it. It threatened to overrun the world, and would have if not for the timely intervention of another.

The details of what transpired are as lost to time as the rest of this ancient war, but another entity drawn to the world by the rift chose to side with its peoples. Perhaps it pitied them, or perhaps it had some ulterior motive on a much larger scale than most can imagine. Whatever the reason, it lent its own wind to check the otherworldly advance. This was how the encircling Wall of Wind and Waves was formed, to make Antiborea the prison it is today.

Ages passed, history turned to myth and was lost, and now most of the world is blissfully unaware of what lies trapped and brooding at the heart of Antiborea. The old prisoners' impotence has only made them more cruel, and they often target the vibrant and diverse communities of the coast for no other reason than to vent their resentment and aggression. 

They are old and dwindling, but they are not content to die peacefully. They abide in their home below the pole, scheming almost in vain to undermine their prison. If they could just widen the rip, or perhaps make a hole in the Wall, the world would once again know their malice...

        Old Antiborean Rumors

• They steal away people suffering from advanced wind sickness and turn them to their cause.
• They make many more forays out across Antiborea than most believe, hidden by sorcery.
• If they leave the vicinity of the broken sky for too long, they lose their magic and die.
• All of them died long ago, and are now mindless puppets of the denizens above the sky.
• Even after all they've lost, they continue to compete and conspire against one another. A silent civil war threatens to spill over across the continent.
• They look...
• Tall, gaunt, and pale.
• Stocky, bent-backed, and fish-eyed.
• Like nebulae clad in old robes.
• Entirely alien and monstrous.
• Like human skins stretched over roiling masses of matter.
• Conventionally beautiful, and unnaturally symmetrical.
• One of them has recently misplaced their tome of eldritch lore. It would be disastrous for it to fall into the wrong hands- or anyone's hands, really.
• The spirits whom shamans and healers jockey with are deceased, or perhaps merely unfleshed, Old Antiboreans.
• One of them has looked past their blinding hate and begun to regard the other Antiboreans as coequals- or tried to, anyway. Their reanimated corpse has been sent by their former fellows to scour the wastelands of all life.
• They still possess that old world magic called metallurgy, and they use it to craft some of the deadliest weapons and arcane instruments on Antiborea.
• Some have decided to forsake what is left of their humanity entirely, and aspire to join their masters between the stars by building a mighty engine.
• The old emperor who struck the bargain still lives, if the form it currently exists in can be called living.

GLOG Class Attempt: Praying Mantisling

Mantis Monk, Creature Quest
I know the arms are wrong, but oh well.

Mantisling

Reroll: DEX
Bonus: Can blend into wooded terrain while standing perfectly still.
Weakness: Cannot wear armour on chest or limbs.

Industrious and self-reliant people. Rumors of post-coital cannibalism are greatly exaggerated.

The sight of these insectoid folk ambling down the roads or sitting in statue-like prayer is common along the edge of the woodlands. Most seem to pay no one any mind, for their respectful nods are usually indistinguishable from the way they constantly bow and sway. Occasionally they will beg for raw meat in return for prayers on the giver's behalf, or give odd good luck baubles in trade.

Few people ever notice how the mantisling mendicants molt into progressively stronger and tougher forms, or discover the deep forest shrines to the gods whom they emulate. Very rarely, a non-mantisling will take a keen interest in them and their unique fighting style. Such obsessives are taken in and trained as curiosities for however long they last. Ironically, they are the ones who popularized the monks in the wider world.

Only mantislings and people suffering from advanced mantomania may become Praying Mantislings.

Praying Mantisling

Starting Equipment: prayer beads, raptorial whetstone, chitin dye.
Starting Skills: Meditation and Religion.

A: Deific Arms

B: Praying & Swaying

C: Menacing Mendacity
D: Trickster God's Own

You gain +1 HP and Stealth for every Praying Mantisling template you possess.

A: Deific Arms

Your raptorial arms enlarge and grow sharp, scything blades or spikes along their insides. You can use them as Light weapons. If you grapple a target with your arms, you can make one free Attack roll to inflict damage on them.

B: Praying & Swaying

You master the defensive art of swaying back and forth as you stand with your chitinous arms held out, ready to deflect oncoming blows. Any round where you do not act, including surprise rounds, you gain +1 Defense per Level.

C: Menacing Mendacity

You can splay your arms, legs, and vestigial wings in a multicolored threat display while chanting mantras and harsh, grating mandibular clicks like some wrathful deity. This may force your enemies to take a Morale check or Save vs Fear. You also gain a +2 to Save vs Fear.

D: Trickster God's Own

Your devotion earns you the favor of a wily god. If you spend an hour applying new colors and designs to your exoskeleton, you can blend into any one type of terrain while standing perfectly still. Your wings also grow stronger, allowing you to fly for up to 1 minute every hour.

New System, New Face: Bumbling through Rolemaster's Geeky Little Sibling, Middle-Earth Role-Play

It finally occurred to me that I should
head these posts with an image of the
actual game.

Ye gods, I miss Warhammer- and not for the setting.

At least in WFRP I felt some intuitive grasp of the mechanics as I worked through making characters.

Here, I've written an entire post and I still don't know what to do for Middle-Earth Role-Play.

Fortunately its initials perfectly match the noise that flaps out of my mouth when my eyes glaze over at the fact that over half of this 270-page tome is made up of appendices needed to explain each part of the first half:

MERP!

Alright, that's my last awful joke for the moment. Let's dig in, shall we?

Game/Context/More Rambling

MERP was yet another d100 skills-based fantasy game spawned by the 80s, with the notable distinction of being licensed to use the world of Lord of the Rings as its setting. There have been several other Tolkien Enterprises-licensed TTRPGs over the past four decades, including Cubicle 7's current work on Adventures in Middle-Earth, but MERP was the first of the bunch, published by Iron Crown Enterprises in 1982 and updated with a second edition in 1993.

MERP runs on an apparently simplified/streamlined hack of the Rolemaster system, also designed by the people from I.C.E. Rolemaster is chunky. It's crunchy. It places emphasis on granular, lethal combat where weapon and armor types interact differently, crits and fumbles have pages of tables, and you can earn XP per injury taken. It's a weird thing to pair with LotR in terms of execution and tone.

Of course you don't need a perfect system to be able to tell the story you want, since story flows from the storytellers involved rather than the mechanics they're using, but it certainly seems more difficult to do when the two parts are tugging in opposite directions.

Characters progress via a leveling and class system unlike the other games I've looked at so far here. There are six classes or "professions" that are roughly analogous to both AD&D character classes and to the roles embodied by many of the famous characters from LotR- warrior, ranger, scout, bard, animist, and mage, arranged in descending order of combat ability and ascending order of spellcasting ability, though pretty much anyone can conjure a trick or swing a stick if direly needed.

Yes, magic is a thing PCs can acquire in this game. It's rarely anything as flashy as the few attack or utility spells Gandalf throws out there in the books, and there are mechanisms in place to restrain both rampant spellcasting and the intent behind it if you want to remain a non-corrupted protagonist. Different spell schools or "ways" are highly specialized and limited by class. There's one way dedicated to walking or running on different surfaces, and another strictly dealing with staunching blood loss. But limitations aside, it is still conspicuous supernatural power learned and wielded by mortals (and elves) that is not conflated with sorcery originating from darkness, as Tolkien tended to treat it.

Tolkien hated describing things as "magic", and anything that looked that way from the outside was generally explainable as being just really high skill, craftsmanship, or a gifted blessing from a higher power of some sort. In my experience Tolkien purists dislike it when games make that jump to accessible magic, but many more people enjoy it because using magic is something people commonly find appealing in fantasy. Despite how often I prattle on about the universe or hyperlink to Tolkien Gateway like an appeal to authority, I am decidedly not a purist, so I have no qualms with the stylistic choice.

The default setting for MERP is, well, Middle-Earth, but not in any time period extensively touched upon by the books. Most of the modules take place a few years after the Great Plague of T.A. 1635, or year 1635 of the Third Age for those of you who at least occasionally see the light of day. The War of the Ring isn't for another 1,400 years in this era, and the Shire is a brand new community, founded barely four decades ago.

It's a time when the profound emptiness of the lands of Middle-Earth that we see in the trilogy has just truly begun, thanks in part to that aforementioned plague that killed hundreds of thousands of people. The population will only dwindle further from here, until barely any towns or cities exist for Sauron to try and take in a millennium-and-a-half. Salty Dan made an amusing observation from atop his Throne a little while ago about how weak and unimpressive this makes Sauron and how wonky it makes Tolkien's sense of scale and history when you take any time to think about it, but I'm getting ahead of myself now.

For now, it's the last hurrah of party-based adventuring in Middle-Earth. Let's populate it with a fresh new face or two.

So. Many. Tables.

After slogging through the first 77 pages of the MERP rulebook, you finally come to Part V: Designing A Character. That should give you an idea of how dense the rules are, simplified ruleset or no. The ten steps of character generation, as given by the book are:

1. Decide in general what type of character to play.*
2. Roll and assign your character's stats.*
3. Choose a race for your character.*
4. Choose a profession for your character.*
5. Determine role traits and background.
6. Develop your character's adolescence skills.
7. Develop your character's apprenticeship skills.
8. Outfit your character.
9. Total your character's penalties and bonuses.
10. Develop a persona for your character.

The asterisks mean these steps are all interrelated with one another.

As I went through each step, it ended up being simpler or much less significant than it was presented above or throughout the rest of the book, and the whole list could easily be reordered and condensed into half the above steps. That long-windedness throughout the book is a thing I think I can attribute to it being a crunchy '80s RPG- short, efficient instructions weren't the norm yet, and my mindset needs time to readjust to the delivery of information.

And here I thought I was an expert on rambling, inefficient writing. Oh well.

Step 1 also knocks out steps 3, 4, and 10 in my case. I want to make a female dwarf scout of the Blacklocks clan who's had one hell of a trek west into Endor- a refugee turned survivor, far from her ancestral home in the Orocarni.

I do want to give a shout-out to the sheer number of cultures characters can come from in MERP. Every variety of elf is available, plus dwarves and hobbits, as well as every human culture from Dunlendings to Easterlings to the people of Far Harad- even the Variags of Khand, those one-line wonders from the Battle of Pelennor Fields, get fleshed out with licensed fanfiction into a playable background. And that's not even counting the optional orcs, and trolls of all groups!

I really appreciate this. If I ever get back to my On the Trail of the Blue Wizards campaign idea about peoples of "darkness" finding heroism, I will definitely use much of the fluff of MERP's culture entries.

Back to our girl, though.

Her name is Grid, derived from the Old Norse name Gríðr, which could mean vehemence or peace depending. I figured that would be appropriate for a Tolkien dwarf when virtually all of their names are Norse in origin, but I also thought it would be grimly amusing if the way the name was decided on was because her workaholic architect dad couldn't be bothered to look up from his workbench when she was born, and he just jammed on the first thing his eyes fell upon- the blueprint grid.

Next comes rolling the 7 stats; Strength, Agility, Constitution, Intelligence, Intuition, Presence, and also Appearance- yes, this game shows its considerable age by having an objective physical hotness stat, and yes the higher your stat is, the better your initial reactions from people are.

I wanted to say that also feels tonally inconsistent with the setting because initially deceiving appearances and "foul seeming fair" are recurring tropes in Tolkien, but then I thought about how 90% of the time the other Tolkienian trope of exterior matching the interior results in goodness being innately beautiful and evil being visibly ugly, so I guess a mechanical beauty stat is only inappropriate for the setting if the character is a total monster without a shred of magical glamour to their high beauty score, or the utterly heroic character is conventionally unattractive- and I don't mean just being a little scruffy and unbathed like Aragorn at the Prancing Pony. But I digress again.

For each stat you roll d100 and as long as it's a 20 or higher, you're keeping it. 10-24 gives a -5 penalty, 25-74 is a flat 0, 75-89 is a +5, and the ever-narrowing ranges above that eventually top out at a +25 from rolling a perfect 100, with 101 (+30) and 102+ (+35) being theoretical but hard to achieve. These modifiers are used for pretty much all rolls, skills and combat maneuvers included.

On my first roll I managed to smash it out of the park with a 99. Not so much when the second came up 23. Next came 88, 87, 66, and 77. I decided my dwarf lass would have the array 99 Strength, 23 Agility, 66 Constitution, 77 Intelligence, 87 Intuition, and 88 Presence. By itself this would give her the mods +20/-5/+0/+5/+5/+5, but thanks to a rule allowing you to raise your profession's primary stat to 90 if it's lower, my scout can raise her Agility up to an even 90 to turn that -5 into a +10.

All of this is before cultural modifiers, of course. Dwarvish stoutness and gruffness means that Strength gets a further +5 to the mod, Agility takes a -5 hit, Constitution gets a massive +15, and both Intuition and Presence take -5. Thus, our mod array looks like +20/+5/+15/+5/+0/+0 for the moment, and normally that would be the final tally.

Ah, but next we have Background traits...

Childhood? There's a table for that. Awkward teens? Table for that. Xenophobia? Table for that!

Background options are the specific bonuses available through your character's culture, including skill ranks, extra stat buffs on top of the above, randomly rolled special abilities, access to certain schools or "laws" of magic, and even starting with magic items in one's possession.

Since my dwarf ain't magic and has been roughing it a couple hundred miles now, I declined both magic and magic items. Maybe she still has a really nice hair ornament in her beard, but it's quite mundane. I decided to go all in on stat boosts, since you can't purchase those after character creation. The actual numbers we rolled for stats become almost worthless after creation outside of some dramatic occurrences or magic, after all- it's all about those incremental modifiers. You get 4 background options, so I put them into +2 to Strength and then three iterations of +1 Agility/Intuition/Presence, mostly just to raise the latter two up to a +10 base bonus.

Her almost!final stat array becomes +35/+5/+15/+5/+5/+5. Sure, the scout is meant to be about stealth and, if need be, ambush and thievery, but that doesn't mean she can't also be an absolute beast of a unit too. Besides, she needs every edge she can get in this shallow, superficial world after getting an Appearance of 32, bumped slightly by her Presence modifier to 37.

Role Traits are a fancy way of dressing up stuff like personality type, character motivation, and moral alignment. Instead of giving a few examples as a guide to coming to one's own conclusion for their character, you're instead encouraged to pick from the given lists in order to fill out a prescribed part of your character sheet.

Personality is exemplified by a long list of poles arranged in opposition to one another, like Meek vs. Proud or Optimistic vs. Cynical. It seems you can pick several if you wish, as long as they don't directly oppose one another.

Motivation is why your character adventures at all. A surprising number of the 20 motivations are either self-interested like wealth accumulation or doing it for fun, or negative motivations like hatred, fear, or a desire to destroy X. X can be expected targets like Darkness or specifically Sauron's forces, individuals you have a vendetta against, or some more problematic choices like entire countries, cultures, or species. Earlier on in the book, playing an orc or troll is explicitly discouraged, but it seems that choice wasn't intended to limit a PC's capacity to be evil.

Alignment is weird. It's another collection of supposedly opposed traits, of which Good vs. Evil is only one, but the way all of the other dichotomies are arranged underneath them seems to imply which are also kind of good or bad without making it clear. The book then proceeds to bring in real-life examples that further date it in a way I found damn uncomfortable.

As if it needed spelling out, Dear Burrowers,
real life religious communities are not
diametrically opposed to one another.
Also I don't think we use "Moslem" anymore.

Grid's just gonna be Neutral for now.

Next come adolescence and apprenticeship skills, which are similar to background options except they're unique to your character's growth and development as a person prior to taking up adventuring. Both of these steps have a full page of tables dedicated to them too, because when you merp, you merp hard.

Being a dwarf means Grid's childhood trained her 1 rank in Unarmored Movement & Maneuvers, 1 in Rigid Leather Armor, 3 in Chain, 4 in One-Handed Concussive Weapons, 1 Thrown, 1 Climb, 1 Pick Lock, 1 Disarm Trap, 2 Perception, 3 Body Development, and 3% chance of learning a free spell list- I rolled a 77 on that, so that's a hard and fast no. Grid also gains 4 extra ranks to spend on languages- probably evenly divided between a smattering of some Elvish and nearby Easterling dialects.

Apprenticeship implies she was formally instructed by a master scout, but fortunately there isn't any sort of table where you roll the master's effectiveness as a teacher to affect how much your character learned during their apprenticeship or some such- though I wouldn't be surprised if that's a thing in true Rolemaster. Instead, we'll just say Grid picked up her extra skill ranks by sneaking around the dwarf hold, observing others, and reading or practicing in her weirdly spacious subterranean bedroom.

With all of this sorted out, or nearly so, we finally begin to get a clearer picture of Grid- by which I mean I frantically make stuff up to accommodate what the dice tell me.

Grid spent most of her life indoors, since only about 1/3rd of dwarves are female and they tend to be cloistered as a result. She is also quiet and reserved among outsiders out of unfamiliarity. She was tacked onto a delegation sent west by the Blacklocks because her father no longer believed the house's home was safe for her, what with all the troubles brewing in the east. The delegation dwindled until only Grid remains.

She has been kept alive this long by her adaptiveness, and her ability to put into practice the wide range of topics she read about while utterly bored back home. She wishes to bring aid to her people, but she might leave out the part of the mission where she was to be handed over for safekeeping. Being constantly misgendered by non-dwarves was and still is a confusing annoyance, but if it allows her to travel freely without being badgered by overprotective menfolk, she will allow it to continue- or perhaps even consciously try to 'pass' if the situation requires it.

Wrapping Up.

The last major step of character generation that isn't just review is Outfitting. After spending minutes flipping back and forth between the Outfitting page where limits and stipulations are set in place, and the Dwarf page (147) where the actual list of stuff offered, and the Equipment table on 255 where the weights are offered, I was finally done with Grid.

For some reason MERP dwarves don't have any starting ranks in one-handed edged weapons so they can effectively use axes, one of their most culturally important weapons. But Grid has likely just scavenged whatever gear she can from her dead traveling companions, so I doubt she'll turn down a shortbow and club that happen to be handy. Weirdly enough, she's way more graceful in mail armor than leather, so she gets a set of chain. She gets a set of clothing, probably weathered and travel-stained, plus some personal effects like a grooming kit- the beard needs to stay looking good, regardless of circumstances.

She also gets 2 gold pieces to spend on other gear, but since there's an entire section on economics in Middle-Earth and there are five currency subdivisions that fluctuate in value depending on time in the Third Age, I'm just going to treat the basic utilities as met. Grid is also going to have a donkey saved from the last cart of the ill-fated expedition so that she can carry most of her things without being subjected to a weirdly discriminatory encumbrance rule.

Carrying limits are determined by height in this system, with strength serving to offset some of the penalties for going over the limit. While height varies quite a bit between species and cultures, women are consistently one height class shorter than their male counterparts, so female PCs can carry less across the board. Shockingly enough there're no random table for height and weight rolling, so the gender averages given in each species' writeup are pretty much what you're stuck with.

There is a rule meant to offset this, giving female characters a +3% to either Agility or Constitution (I ended up going with Agility), but it's buried deep in the optional materials section toward the back of the book, sandwiched right in between Martial Arts in Middle-Earth, and a percentile table for how a character's blood proximity to the royal family of Númenor affects their ability to use Athelas as a healing herb.

No, I am not making this up.

I know Aragorn's prowess in the Houses
of Healing was ambiguously supernatural,
but surely they didn't mean this.

The end result of this whole experiment was not what I was expecting, but then again I went into this whole thing not knowing what to expect. I hope I haven't (completely) trashed MERP for anyone out there, because it does seem to be a common consensus that character creation is the first boss of the game- once you get around to the actual playing part, it becomes much smoother, simpler, and more fun.

For those who would want to play without generating at all, I have very good news that the book comes with 16 premade characters with level-up tracks included.

Then again, if any old LotR game by I.C.E. is what you're interested in, consider trying LoR, their later product that was actually designed as a simplified introduction to MERP. The designers recognized at some point that their game was too daunting for beginners, but instead of finding a rules solution in the system itself, they wrote an entire transitionary game designed to be played for a few weeks or months before moving on to the big leagues of the d100.

LoR had its own following, surprisingly, and at least one fan wrote an expanded homebrew ruleset for it called the Middle-Earth Adventure Game. MEAG is set somewhere in between LoR and MERP in complexity, but it's packaged in a mercifully svelte 30-page PDF that you can download for free on the website, which was last updated back in 2010. Yes, it has been a while, but at least it was in this millennium.