“If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?”

 

Charlie Brown

We use Rolemaster as the game system. There are a few different versions, none of which we use in their entirety. The original version of Rolemaster is oft referred to as RM1. The Arms Law, Claw Law, and Spell Law tables came on a heavy duty parchment, and the Spell Law realms came in 3 separate books. RM2 was a relatively minor revision, but fixed some things and reorganized the books. That was the version that was popular during Rolemaster’s height in the late 80’s and into the 90’s. In the 90’s came RMSS, the Rolemaster Standard System (RMSS), which introduced a few major changes (the skill system), and many more minor changes. The lists in Spell Law were greatly revised. Several years later RMSS was essentially repackaged (with only a couple very minor changes) as Rolemaster Fantasy Roleplay (RMFRP). In 2007, ICE released a “new” line called Rolemaster Classic (RMC), which was a reorganized and re-edited version of the popular RM2.

The result now is that there are basically two major versions of Rolemaster. There is RM2/RMC, which are used interchangeably, and RMSS/RMFRP which can also be used interchangeably. We currently don’t use either game system exclusively and rather it is a combination of RMC with RMSS/FRP with a heavy dose of House Rules.

See What is Rolemaster? (pdf) from the ICE website for a brief introduction to Rolemaster. For a good article outlining the key differences between RMSS and RMFRP see Brent Knorr’s RMSS vs. RMFRP article.