Welcome
To the one hundred-and-thirty-fourth Briefing and ninth scheduled Briefing of 2022.
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022)
On behalf of ICE, I offer our sincere condolences to the Royal Family following the death of Her Majesty the Queen. She served her country well and did her duty throughout her life and reign.
The Rings of Power
In fandom, one of the biggest events of the month has been the release of Amazon’s long awaited and hugely expensive Rings of Power series. This has caused all sorts of controversy, some of it becoming unpleasant. I know there have been arguments even on some ICE fora and discussion platforms about the series. As I don’t have an Amazon Prime Video subscription, I cannot comment on whether it is actually any good and I am avoiding the reviews and posts that Google wants to serve up to me in my news feed. What I do know is that many of us, myself included, have created or played in adventures and campaigns set in Middle-Earth on the basis of some obscure entry in the Tale of Years or the other Appendices of the Lord of the Rings. In one campaign I played in, our party time travelled briefly to the Second Age and were in Eregion while Sauron was beguiling the Elven-smiths. Although our Third Age characters tried to warn the Elves, the GM had read much more Tolkien lore and had Sauron use one of his other names, so our warnings were not heeded and the timeline was unharmed. While I can hope that the Rings of Power will indirectly help support the popularity of role-playing games, I certainly know that it is encouraging me to want to reread my Tolkien collection.
HARP
Rodd Kleinschmidt, the author of HARP Subterfuge, is determined that the print version be absolutely perfect. He is therefore compiling his own list of errata that got past both him in writing and myself at edit. Once we have these and those flagged on the forums, we will make the corrections and proceed to sending print masters to DriveThru. We will also update the pdf version at that point.
Rolemaster and RMU
I am in my “Columbo” mode. I am about half way through RMU Core Law. It is slow work because there are so few niggles remaining. It is really hard work when all the obvious errors have been caught by others, so only slow reading will catch the errors that our brains are all too happy to replace with what it should be. It also involves me fiddling with Adobe every so often when it looks like there’s been a rogue font change – it’s almost always been a rendering issue. I can confirm that the artwork and layout have really gelled together – and I am very pleased with our near-final version.
Until next time
Please stay safe.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Iron Crown Enterprises Ltd