Director's Briefing - February 2025

[NicholasHMCaldwell]

Welcome

To the one hundred-and-sixty-third Briefing and second scheduled Briefing of 2025.

Website Upgrades and Unwanted Visitors

As you may be aware, we have been having "capacity" issues with the website, or more correctly with the forums. In updating the SSL certificate for the website, our hosting provider firmly prompted us to consider upgrading our configuration to an 8.x version of php. A perfectly sensible thing to do and a similar prompt to update all the forum software. I had hoped that these updates would cure the capacity issues. Unfortunately they didn't; we simply had improved the ability of the website to tolerate higher numbers of unwanted visitors. What we have been suffering from has been a plague of AI ingestion bots using Guest User status to crawl our forums. Indeed we apparently had 1712 online users on January 29th – I don't for a minute believe that we had 1712 human (registered) users, but am perfectly willing to believe that a swarm of bots was intent on finding new human created text. Our robots.txt now has a directive barring chatgpt. As Captain Hector Barbossa might say robot.txt "is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules", and chatgpt is not the only source of AI crawler. Guest Users are still in the hundreds. We are not finished with the updates to the site, but if the AI bots continue to act as an denial of service attack, then in extremis I will move most of the forums behind the registration wall.

DriveThru Printing Changes

Our partners at DriveThru have noticed that certain products (not ours) have had colour saturation issues reported. As a consequence, DriveThru have been upgrading all older standard colour printed books to use a heavier paper as a precaution. Our Shadow World and HARP SF Xtreme products have been reached in this process and have temporarily been removed from sale. As DriveThru makes their updates and confirms that all is well, the various printed products are returning back on sale.
 
Shadow World

The RMU conversion guide is almost complete – and many thanks to those on the Discord server who have contributed feedback. This means that we would welcome volunteers to produce the RMU stats appendices for the following products – Xa-ar, Emer III, Tales from the Green Gryphon Inn, Cloudlords of Tanara, Haalkitaine and Eidolon. Please make yourself known to either myself or Colin in the first instance.

I am also awaiting news of whether additional files from Terry's legacy have been located.

HARP

I have received a proposal for a one-off short adventure module for both HARP and RMU from Thomas Pugh whom we met at Dragonmeet in December. We hope to receive a first draft in April.

I have been working on HARP Something Wicked Something Wondrous. In particular as part of the rebalancing of the book and to support the Mentalist variant mage profession, I have been extracting chapters from Mentalism Companion to form a chapter covering the details of retrocognition (e.g. Past Visions spells), scrying and divination. I have been editing the material to be both in the spirit of HARP and to reflect HARP mechanics. This process is going extremely well. I expect to report more progress next month.

Software
David Klecker is preparing new datasets for AutoHARP. He has completed a first pass on HARP Folkways and HARP Beyond the Veil. He is currently working on HARP Subterfuge. More news on the release dates for these datasets when David declares that he is happy with them.

Ravi Bains has the second preview of Foundry for RMU with Bob Morris available at https://youtu.be/0lLT5t5uEUY?si=Qo_H8MlGDOYRzOc8

Rolemaster

If you have watched the Foundry preview, you will know that Bob, Brett and Max worked together with Aaron to thrash out oddities in the monster stat spreadsheets. Aaron is hoping to have a final set of stat block changes to incorporate into Nick's layout-in-progress document at the end of February/start of March.

Until next time

Please stay safe and keep gaming.
Best wishes,
Nicholas

[nash]

May I suggest people interested in the Shadow World project put their name here with what they are interested in working on.  That way we should not have 7 volunteers for Green Gryphon while Haalkitaine sits unloved.

It should be noted that some could easily be handled by multiple people. 

[Micael]

Hi Nash, Hi Nicholas,
For information: There is already a discussion for general conversion guidelines, creture conversions, NPC conversion etc. started in the RMU discord channel- lots of base infos must be provided first to get similar conversions and not having every interested person asking the same questions again and again- but I like the idea to have interested peoples apply here in this channel- problem though is, that no updates are possible here except for moderators and I assume they have other things to do, then deleting new or departed peoples entering/leaving the project.
Discord RMU channel
Above you find a link to the ICE Server, where to get advice from RMU specialists and general assumptions.
Following is a link to the ICE Shadow World discord server, where you could get advice how to understand Shadow World stuff:
Shadow World discord
Coming in this thread as soon as decided will be a link to the work channel...
Best regards
Micael 

[Malim]

Just to be clear?
Is RMU a fan based project or is that just the conversion part?
Im more eager to hear what the news about Shadow World and the legacy will be.

[NicholasHMCaldwell]

Just to be clear?
Is RMU a fan based project or is that just the conversion part?
Im more eager to hear what the news about Shadow World and the legacy will be.

The RMU appendices for existing books is a modest freelance task for fans. By having a group of fans do this, we can get all the books done in a shorter time frame. It is all part of the return of Shadow World

Best wishes,
Nicholas

[Malim]

Return of Shadow World sounds awesome!!!
Lining up all the cannon so it fits etc gonna be nice and maybe more about Jaiman and finishing up some of the kingdoms there!
Will the new stuff also be ready for RM2 and the older versions?

[Lazvon]

I just cleaned up 6 spam moderation reports, (one of which was on-topic but just a multipost, so I decided to leave it and close the report). I need to see how to have the forums email me again for mod reports since the upgrade. That way I can take action right away like I had been doing. Thought it had gotten quiet there for a little while.

I wish I had time to actually play Rolemaster/HARP and participate in the forums, alas work and family have other ideas for my free time. Happy to still moderate the spam though.

As for the high number of simultaneous user counts slowing the forums down, I have some ideas around that if needed before requiring login to browse. Feel free to reach out to me if needed.

[nash]

I just cleaned up 6 spam moderation reports, (one of which was on-topic but just a multipost, so I decided to leave it and close the report). I need to see how to have the forums email me again for mod reports since the upgrade. That way I can take action right away like I had been doing. Thought it had gotten quiet there for a little while.

I wish I had time to actually play Rolemaster/HARP and participate in the forums, alas work and family have other ideas for my free time. Happy to still moderate the spam though.

As for the high number of simultaneous user counts slowing the forums down, I have some ideas around that if needed before requiring login to browse. Feel free to reach out to me if needed.

Appreciate the work as always!  Spammers and scammers are the plague of the open internet.

And if you are looking for a game, I'm sure the community can help you find one!

[Malim]

I log into forum almost dayli, if you need help with removing spam, I can lend a few minutes a day!