After a couple of weeks with the RMU Core Law, the anticipation of getting Spell Law so we can play the game keeps building. Coming back to the Rolemaster after having played other games since the RMU beta, the wealth of tactical choices in RMU combat is incredible. I am glad to say that the majority of the issues found during the beta have been handled with a lot of grace, and very few issues remain. Way better than both RMC and RMFRP is no weak achievement for the new edition.
From another angle, I think the RMU might be tough to grasp for a new player. The many detailed rules make sense when you dig into the details, but the downside is that many rules are mentioned just once, and it takes quite some page flipping to find all relevant entries for things needed to run the game. In quite a few cases, critical aspects of the rule are not explicitly mentioned but can be understood only by carefully checking an example. It might be that the long time to develop RMU means the gaming groups of the designers have become so familiar with the rules they lost sight of the perspective of the newbie user. The rules would be much easier to use if the rules text was amended with the explanations given here on the forum. This is a criticism that would apply to the previous edition also.
For RM users that hesitate about if you should jump on the wagon and switch to RMU, I think you are missing something out if you don’t join. Everyone has their house rules at the gaming table built on the many options presented in RM2 and RMSS. Additionally, you might have plenty of material tuned for your gaming world. The good news is that RMU has built-in core mechanics for building balanced races, cultures and professions, so you can take your stuff and reapply it using those building tools. The balance of some elements might change a bit, but the advantages are obvious of getting your modifications tuned to the rest of the rules.
As for the pictures, I think the acquisition of art generally has been successful. Rolemaster has never been top of the pack when it comes to pictures, but in RMU, I, in most cases, feel inspired to use the scene as inspiration for an adventure. As a personal opinion, I think the pictures on pages 127, 135 and page 175 are in a much different art style, I don’t think fit with the others, but it is no biggie.
So why are the images in RMU getting such a negative reaction? I think the major reason is that the race pictures are among the weakest in the book. Every player will need to read those pages when they make a character, so it is safe to bet these pictures get more scrutiny than the rest of the pictures. Unfortunately, they are IMO not up to the task. The flat-looking Avinarc on page 22 is the first race people will see...probably the first picture a new player will look at since it is the first race, and it is IMO incredibly bad. The artist was obviously not up for the task of not using a profile picture, and the result is so bad that I have amateur friends making better attempts to draw something similar. Another very weak entry is the Idiyva on page 26 which is both tastelessly sexualized and also suffers from the flat look that makes it look very bad. The scale of the failure of the Idiyva picture becomes obvious if you think about the many RMFRP books that have a male Idiyva that looks a magnitude better. Many of the others, like the Nycamerith, are blander than outright bad, but a result is a number of pages that gives an impression of RMU having weak and uninspiring images that don’t fit with the general theme of showing scenes from an adventure that is used in the rest of the book.
Turning to the cover picture, it IMO is a bit old-fashioned for a modern roleplaying game, but with a mission statement of uniting old Rolemaster users, you can argue it is an honest cover. There is also a tradition of having an adventuring group on the cover of Rolemaster books with some nonhuman characters. On the other hand, there is also a tradition to show badass monsters on the cover page of RM books. The idea to instead use the Black Reaver as the cover picture is a cool idea, and I think it would help to attract interest in the game. The current cover could still be used on page 1 inside the book like it does today, and if there is any image that deserves to be featured an extra time, it would be the Black Reaver.