Rolemaster Unified is too ugly for this Earth

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pawsplay

pawsplay

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I was excited about Rolemaster Unified, both as nostalgia, and also because I actually contemplated getting back into Rolemaster. A few months ago, I sold my hard copy. The main reason is that it's incredibly ugly. I feel a little silly saying it, but it's just not something I could treasure, being filled with weird and often bad art. There are some artists who turned in workable pieces. Other pieces of art are just shocking for a professional product. Especially for something that may not get played, I was just not happy with the overall appearance.
I find myself wondering, how did this happen? Did they set an unfathomably small art budget? Did they just hire friends? Does the person making the book just have little ability to discern what looks good? I have so many questions.
halfling.jpgweird paintover.jpg
 
As an ignorant pleb who knows nothing and barely thinks about art, the hobbit doesn't look great, but doesn't jump out at me as terrible.

The queen is a bit of a strange style (puts me in mind of early White Wolf art for some reason), but would be fine if not for the angry Elvis impersonator.

In any case, as far as I can tell, RMU was designed to appeal to the smallest possible range of people, so driving some people off with the art choices makes sense.
 
OP you are not the only one to feel that way.

I do not expect perfect art yet sometimes one can’t get past bad art. Champions at least in 5E had some bad art. I bought because I liked the setting yet man some art pieces for that line were jaw droppingly bad imo.

As for the art the first is decent though no one better try and take his Golden magical pomegranate seed vase the second not sure if he is pointing at the Queen, an wart on her wrist or getting ready for some Saturday Night Fantasy Fever

I have occasionally passed some rpgs with truly bad art it’s rare and most I can’t remember because the art was so terrible I scrubbed any mention of it immediately from my mind.
 
Well, I imagine they had to take what they could get. Let's face it, ICE was never the king of great art beyond the brilliant Angus McBride work. The current ICE is really just Nicholas Caldwell and the owner John Seal (I think that was it) and his brother. They all have real, full time jobs and most of the work is freelance. It's not something I'd hold against them. At one point I'd have been willing to contribute art for free, and while I'm not a pro, this is a league I believe I can play in. But really, that bridge was burned long ago and this edition does nothing that would bring me back and just about everything it could do to drive me away. I've meant to purchase copies to read, ICE sent me free ones but I insist on paying for it as my contribution was nonexistant.
 
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As well as Angus McBride they used to put out some great cover art for their boxed sets.

pic510196.jpg


DSC09805.jpg


I remember looking at these in the shop twenty years or more ago and thinking on the strength of these that Shadow World must be something special.

Enough to actually check the setting out decades after the fact.
 
pawsplay said:
I just feel shallow. But I just don't think I can be with a shelf RPG that is like, a 3 at best.
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I think they would have been better off with black and white art. If you can't afford good art than poor black and white art is, I find, less of an issue as it can just fade into the background.

(And a big part of the problem with those pieces in the OP is the use of colour).
 
Full color art is the industry standard. It makes printing off copies of pdfs harder and more expensive. The art's not great but unless it's REALLY offensive material art won't sell or unsell me on a game.

That said, at some point I picked up an important rule of web design and I believe it applies to rpgs and art. Avoid the appearance of ugliness. You might not be Michelangelo but you can look at something and say, this is ugly and I won't use it. That said, John Blanche and Ian MIller made ugliness their study and are brilliant but you're not them either.
 
pawsplay said:
I just feel shallow. But I just don't think I can be with a shelf RPG that is like, a 3 at best.
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...well, you did start a thread judging the RPG by its art, didn't you::honkhonk:?


I mean, when opening it, I expected the thread to be a joke on the famous Pendragon mechanic which allows your knight to die for being too ugly (APP=0) to live:grin:!
 
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David Johansen said:
Full color art is the industry standard. It makes printing off copies of pdfs harder and more expensive.
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It is the industry standard for certain types of books, particularly those trying to do mega Kickstarter campaigns. There are a lot of games that are still done with primarily black and white art, though, or in simpler styles with a more limited color palette.
 
It's a far cry from the Angus McBride's iconic MERP and RM2 cover art work that captured my imagination as a teen.
These days if I want a truly beautiful fantasy rpg book that uses a version of the ICE system, then Against The Dark Master is the only one that's worth reading and treasuring.
 
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Apart from cover art, I think the art in the old Rolemaster 2 books (I have the 1989 edition) isn't that great either (RMSS has more evocative art). The pen-and-ink illustrations of Jim Holloway (SL) are okay and sometimes even great (RM2 band of orcs hunting in a swamp). With Shawn Sharp things seem more detailed yet hastier (some good (RC2), some really sketchy (RM2)). The pencil art by Stephan Peregrine (C&T) suffers from poor reproduction. The art by Dan Smith (Alchemy Companion, a lot of GURPS) appear more abstract but not evocative — it is as if he's an efficient professional who delivers generic and consistent art with less subject-specific content. I find Keith Harrell-Stewards' illustrations era-consistent if underwhelming (At Rapier's Point).

The rendering style of Jacquays is impeccable, and while his art in general is good (esp. Mythic Greece and RC3), in Shadow World it's bit too comic-y. I would want to reimagine a lot of the species for Shadow World before running a campaign there. Emer boxset has a great cover — the kind you don't often see — but the interior art does not live up to that promise (art is not by Jacquays but Michael Alexander Hernandez et al.). It's kind of hard to tell what the people and cultures are like on the vast continent. Over all, one of the greatest weaknesses of Shadow World may be its art direction when it comes to the interior art.

I like the style Gerald Forton (Vikings) and especially that of Denis Loubet (RC1, Robin Hood). The anatomy of their characters is sound, and — at least to me — the art communicates a consistent sense of place. Granted, both had a real-world cultures to draw inspiration from, but at least Loubet does stray into the realm of fantasy with ease.

Of course, publishers and artists work within a set of constraints. What I like about RM2 rulebooks is the layout and the use of vignettes. Even the recycled or less glamorous illustrations work together with the page layout giving the air of proficiency.
 
Hautboy said:
The art by Dan Smith (Alchemy Companion, a lot of GURPS) appear more abstract but not evocative — it is as if he's an efficient professional who delivers generic and consistent art with less subject-specific content.
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His art can match specific content - his work in GURPS Vehicles is entirely in keeping with the book's theme and content. I remember hearing a take about Smif - Someone asked Steve Jackson why he had Smif do so much of the art for GURPS when a lot of fans didn't like it that much. Steve's response was that Smif worked for a reasonable rate, was easy to work with, and delivered on time.
 
The best RM artwork ever is this piece, because it accompanies a rules example where a drunk Argwinkle falls off his camel and suffers a fatal skull fracture.

IMG20240414200109.jpg

Had we ever been granted an image of the Malevolent Moose, that would surely be the highlight of RM art, but we were not, and thus we are left with Argwinkle's concerned camel in the number one spot. At least he was not alone in his final moments.
 
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Sable Wyvern said:
The best RM artwork ever is this piece, because it accompanies a rules example where a drunk Argwinkle falls of his camel and suffers a fatal skull fracture.

View attachment 80785

Had we ever been granted an image of the Malevolent Moose, that would surly be the highlight of RM art, but we were not, and thus we are left with Argwinkle's concerned camel in the number one spot. At least he was not alone in his final moments.
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I haven’t picked up the new books, do they continue the tradition of great narrative examples?
 
I'll admit it, bad art is often the reason why I either don't buy an RPG or get rid of it if I've already made the purchase. Even if everything else was fine about the game I'd still get rid - I have in the past. It would take a really good system and/or an amazing setting (because IMO a setting is very much realised by accompanying art) for me to keep a game with bad art as the visual stimulus of good (or better) art is the gateway for me to enjoy an RPG. I'd rather have no art in a book than bad art. I also love to see a consistent feel/style to art in a book too as find very different styles jarring but that's something I can tolerate to a degree if the art is of a good+ standard.
 
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pawsplay said:
I was excited about Rolemaster Unified, both as nostalgia, and also because I actually contemplated getting back into Rolemaster. A few months ago, I sold my hard copy. The main reason is that it's incredibly ugly. I feel a little silly saying it, but it's just not something I could treasure, being filled with weird and often bad art. There are some artists who turned in workable pieces. Other pieces of art are just shocking for a professional product. Especially for something that may not get played, I was just not happy with the overall appearance.
I find myself wondering, how did this happen? Did they set an unfathomably small art budget? Did they just hire friends? Does the person making the book just have little ability to discern what looks good? I have so many questions.
View attachment 80756View attachment 80757
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I've seen worse, but presentation matters.

Sure, there are a handful of people who can tolerate rpg rules presented in pure text files, or enjoy playing print and play board games made with the back of pizza boxes and sewing thimbles, but the vast majority of people care about how things in life, including games, are presented.

I don't think it makes you shallow. It just makes you human.
 
sharps54 said:
This thread may be an overreaction. I mean the art in the new Rolemaster isn’t great but it isn’t Blood of Heroes level bad either.

www.rpgpub.com

[Warning!] Blood of Heroes: Special Edition [Warning!]

DANGER! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! You have been warned. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
www.rpgpub.com www.rpgpub.com
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... I own Blood of Heroes. It's pretty bad, but I've never been tempted to turn BoH the other way so Beetleface Hobbit isn't looking at me.
 
I don't want art that belongs to the 1980's, or early 2000's, as most of it was just bad.

But I don't have a problem with AI art either, and think it can be a good tool.

Thing is, in modern rpg's I do expect at least decent art - and if they can't use that then don't bother putting crap art in.
 
Yeah I think I'll just stick to my Against The Darkmaster for my contemporary version of the ICE system.
At least the Against The Darkmaster book is a treasure to read, which sadly feels a far cry from all these reports about the latest edition of Rolemaster
 
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Mankcam said:
Yeah I think I'll just stick to my Against The Darkmaster for my contemporary version of the ICE system.
At least the Against The Darkmaster book is a treasure to read, which sadly feels a far cry from all these reports about the latest edition of Rolemaster
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I'm a big fan of Against the Darkmaster -- I'm running two campaigns using it these days! (see sig) -- so I obviously agree with this. :shade:
VsD is MERP reincarnated.

And I have to confess that the excellent art is a big reason for this! The colour covers are beautiful and interior black-and-white illustrations are (mostly) excellent as well.

In contrast, the new Rolemaster just looks hideous. Add to that the high price (even for just the PDFs) plus the greater complexity, and I'm happy sticking with VsD for my "d100-high" gaming (and Mythras for my "d100-low" gaming).

VsD cover.jpeg
 
Speaking of old ICE art, in addition to the amazing covers by Angus McBride, I always liked (most of) the art by Charles Peale. He provided a number of interior illustrations for early ICE products (Rolemaster, Shadow World, Middle-earth).
Saruman and Wormtongue - Isengard.pngAstrith - Green Asp - Isengard.png
Calime Halfelven - Cirith Ungol.pngKhelekar - Ardor.png
Treachery - Cirith Ungol.png
 
I think one should always bear in mind that HARP and HARP sf are nuICE's flagship favorites and really those are the games contending with Against the Dark Master while Rolemaster is more aimed at cranky old grognards like myself. It's no mistake that my avatar is Puddleglum.
 
Yeah HARP Fantasy was quite good. I played in a few campaigns, and we often return to it, it filled our ICE niche in the years after MERP and RM.

My GM loved RM, but most of my group preferred MERP, then later HARP, it just felt slightly less fiddily.

Against The Darkmaster draws from MERP, as well as HARP, and feels a bit more contemporary in some aspects, so it has superceeded HARP for me.

I'm happy to return to our pre-existing HARP Fantasy as a PC, but if I'm going to run an ICE system game these days then it'll definately be Against The Darkmaster
 
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Tim Dugger ("Rasyr"), the main author of HARP (who sometimes posts here), is a big fan of Against the Darkmaster and has produced his own variant of it (Fantasy Express). He posts regularly over at the VsD Discord site. (I loathe Discord and only visit it because it's the main place for the VsD community. I wish VsD just had a normal forum instead.)

I don't think he's involved any more with HARP (probably because relations with the current version of ICE are not friendly, to say the least -- I don't know the details, but that's what I've gathered from various things Rasyr has said publicly over the years).
 
Akrasia said:
Tim Dugger ("Rasyr"), the main author of HARP (who sometimes posts here), is a big fan of Against the Darkmaster and has produced his own variant of it (Fantasy Express). He posts regularly over at the VsD Discord site. (I loathe Discord and only visit it because it's the main place for the VsD community. I wish VsD just had a normal forum instead.)

I don't think he's involved any more with HARP (probably because relations with the current version of ICE are not friendly, to say the least -- I don't know the details, but that's what I've gathered from various things Rasyr has said publicly over the years).
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We're really on ICE 3.0 now. It might be 2.0 if you count the post Bankruptcy Bruce and Heike and Tim ICE as 1.5. I could see justification for that. But the new owner decided it was time for new management and pushed people who had put a lot of effort into stuff out. To my mind HARP was always a mistake that just created yet another fracture in the fan base.
 
David Johansen said:
We're really on ICE 3.0 now. It might be 2.0 if you count the post Bankruptcy Bruce and Heike and Tim ICE as 1.5. I could see justification for that. But the new owner decided it was time for new management and pushed people who had put a lot of effort into stuff out. To my mind HARP was always a mistake that just created yet another fracture in the fan base.
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To my mind, there were two paths forward:
  • Lean hard into RM2. Stick closely to the core three: Spell Law, Arms Law & Claw Law, Character & Campaign Lore. Keep the secondary skill list minimalist and under control. There is very little that needs to be changed, and you have a fundamentally straightforward and simple system, with all the cool attack and crit tables. Put effort into better balancing of the additional professions and spell lists for the companions, but don't add a million option rules the result in RMSS.
  • Lean hard into RMSS/FRP instead, but get the skill list under control. You don't need Special Attacks, Combat Manoeuvres and Martial Arts Combat Manoeuvres all as separate categories. You didn't need multiple variations on so many skills or a million types of perception. Unless you're planning to run an Art-based campaign, you don't need two Art categories -- combine them, and use a combined progression. Probably, this would involve doing something with training packages, even though I never had much to do with them.
My preferred RM is the second option, but option one seems equally valid and viable.
 
I think HARP was intended as the root of a new version entirely but it wasn't as well accepted as they hoped and it became clear that RM2 was where the most money was at the time. Since Tim was doing pretty much all of the writing it was hard to support all the game lines at once but it was pretty clear early on that once the books they had in the pipes before the bankruptcy brought in some much needed immediate revenue there was really no intention of supporting RMSS / SPAM. But the reality is they needed a whole new version going forward for copyright and ownership reasons. I'm not sure how soon this became apparent. It may be that Nicholas Caldwell figured it out as he scrambled to get rights to all the stuff ICE couldn't produce anymore, often because the and artists didn't get paid due to the financial issues that ended ICE 1.0. RMU pretty much ditched everything I liked about Rolemaster. I spent a year of my life arguing and defending and bending and eventually I snapped and flamed out. When I was first asked to be on the comittee I said no, and I said why and I should have stuck with it because I was right about how it would go and what would come out of it though even I didn't think it'd take ten years to get the damn thing out.
 
Yes, it's probably fair to say the actual situation is far more complex than my outsider summary suggests.

Still, even though I discovered that a cleaned up RMSS is what I wanted, I could have understood something more heavily rooted in RM2. I don't really understand what audience they're looking for with some of the stuff I've seen in RMU -- it seems to be built specifically to appeal to a small subset of the existing audience, and that's a bout it.

Of course, it's also true that I haven't looked all that closely -- I checked out some playtest documents a long time ago, and never looked closer or followed things after that.
 
Akrasia said:
Tim Dugger ("Rasyr"), the main author of HARP (who sometimes posts here), is a big fan of Against the Darkmaster and has produced his own variant of it (Fantasy Express). He posts regularly over at the VsD Discord site. (I loathe Discord and only visit it because it's the main place for the VsD community. I wish VsD just had a normal forum instead.)

I don't think he's involved any more with HARP (probably because relations with the current version of ICE are not friendly, to say the least -- I don't know the details, but that's what I've gathered from various things Rasyr has said publicly over the years).
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As far as the ICE system goes, VsD is definately more in the MERP/HARP space than RM space, so that makes sense for Tim Dugger to be doing stuff for VsD. I'll have to check out Fantasy Express, thanks for the heads up.

Sounds like too many dramas with the current incarnation of ICE these days, and I'm not sure if they can regain the sales with RM at present, despite the intial strong surge on DrivethruRPG.
MERP/HARP/VsD are reasonably crunchy by today's standards, and RM is just that bit more crunchier than them. I just can't see financially viable numbers of gamers digging all those specific charts and whatnot these days.

However RM really could be a great game to play by VTT, given all that detail would be under the hood - that's the future space for it I think.

It would be good if RM's setting Shadow World was revisited and further developed with good quality artwork and whatnot. It was a really decent Classic High Fantasy world to game in, I spent several years in my late teens inmersed in that setting which my mate was running. The more recent books had godawful CGI style art which looks really souless now. I would love to see that era plus the earlier era line revisited with rich artwork and good quality production standards, just to give it the love the setting deserves.

Personally I would love to see OpenEnded Games really prosper now, they have done such as good job with Against The Darkmaster
(Yeah it's a pity that the VsD crowd is mainly on Discord, I don't dig that platform so I tend to miss alot what's going on there)

Really hope Open Ended Games does well with this line

For anyone who is curious, here's their link:
Against The Darkmaster (Open Ended Games)
 
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Hello, Rolemaster Unified? I am a giant Las Vegas black velvet painting, and I'd like you to know that I want my Elvis Toreador back!

As relatively bad as the examples are shown here, they aren't as egregious to my eyes as some of the two-page chapter spreads in CoC 7e [Investigator's Handbook Chapter 5 may be among the worst offenders]. Especially for a company that has the likes of Loïc Muzy culled from the French edition(s) in their artist bullpen. Instead of bitching about how AI art puts artists out of work (not intending to open that can of maggots here), players and consumers of rpg material should raise their voices to the heavens and shake their fists at clouds about really Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Art.

But, of course, it's easier--and takes less research--to bitch about AI stuff instead of calling out the more subjective but this art isn't that bad.

Does Toreador Elvis show up elsewhere in Rolemaster Unified? I'm thinking he really needs to be a recurring character.
 
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