Serial DM and all-round good guy Paul was ending our disastrous run as mercenaries in Mechwarrior and starting up a new campaign of Rolemaster. My last experience of playing Rolemaster, which was possibly my first session at Dundee University Roleplay Society, saw my pregened monk bleed to death at the bottom of a well when ambushing a group of monsters.
So it was fair to say, despite four or so years elapsing since that fateful encounter, I was not expecting this character to last terribly long either.
I thought I might have fun though, and as the incredibly long character generation went on Paul told me that Paladins in Rolemaster don't have the whole Lawful Good restriction on their behaviour and that they got access to quite a large range of clerical spells.
So I figured that since my character would last fewer sessions than I had fingers on my hands I might as well have fun with this. I designed an ass-hole paladin. Not an evil paladin, but a Lawful Neutral paladin and since I was neutral that meant getting access to the Harm and Curse spells as well as the Healing.
So this monstrous character, Dasmius of the Blinding Light, stormed onto the table. Any obnoxious trait a paladin could have, this guy had. D&D Paladins had Detect Evil, Dasmius has Detect Good and Detect Enemy, and woe betide you if you didn't show up on the latter, or showed up on the former. And he cast these spells all the time. So he knew which of the party were dodgy.
Once I greeted a peasant as, "Ho there peasant!" and the rest of the table laughed, so it became a running gag that the party would say, "Ho there
."
The rest of the party thought he was a dick. And he was.
But both Paul and the Gods loved a bastard and he survived where many other characters died. Seriously, every other player went through at least 1-2 characters a year. Not me though and this just made Dasmius even more unbearable. My memory's a bit hazy, but things like this happened:-
He rolled a 66 on a piety roll when he foolishly woke up a dragon by yelling at "Demon horse! Demon horse!" at a horse that had come from seemingly nowhere. The Gods teleported the Dragon away, but if you ask him the Blinding Light smote the foul creature.
He, with his twin mage buddies, took out 3 powerful undead in a single epic game session.
He survived another PC's attempts to corrupt him to evil.
He acquired a squire, called Shamus, who started off as an NPC and convert to the Blinding Light, who later became a PC in his own right controlled by one of our new players, and when danger lurked would yell, "Bitches in the hold!"
He gained access to the Theocrat list of spells, which allow forceful conversion of PCs and NPCs to his religion (but sadly required a full day's worth of casting minimum).
He survived Two-Bradleys tower (in other words a romp that killed two of Bradley's characters in rapid succession. I think actually it was the same trap or monster).
He survived said tower, even after being abandoned by the rest of the party (including Shamus - never let someone else play your retainers!) near the end of it. Sheer bloody mindedness saw Dasmius descend to the lowest level alone and learn the secrets of the Unlife that was threatening the world... and despite the fact the entire party abandoned the tower and Dasmius, the DM made all of them roll up replacement characters, while I played a replacement character (much less successfully) with their main PCs on alternative weeks.
Then after realising he couldn't keep walking the fine line of neutrality without being corrupted by Unlife he chose the lightside, but wasn't much nicer, even if he did loose such tasty spells as Bleed III.
Then after about a year of play-time romping around with everyone's replacement PCs in disguise as a mercenary, stopping ritual after ritual, he and the rest of the group finally stopped the spread of the Unlife, but not forever...
5 sessions I thought, more like 2-3 years.
Man, I miss those guys and those Wednesday nights.
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