Hello all - I am combing through the old PST files to see what I find. Started with the oldest one I found (97/98). I will try to post one thing a day for fun. :)



Nerdiest comment from today's reading, from a former GM: "We can use a quarternary bit count" accompanied by an ASCII illustration. :D



Funniest thing I did the week of 8/14/98 (and which I have no memory of): "Spent several hours trying to track down the bug preventing murder charges in the Landing and punishing abusers of the loophole (with marginal success, we think ambush is broken). If somebody reports and says they've been killed and the murderer didn't go to jail, they're probably telling the truth!" I WAS THE BRINGER OF JUSTICE. Apparently. If you were murdered in the Landing that week... sorry?



And lastly, some more dating information via a portion of the Premium Player Homes announcement. I do believe we made 9/1/98 date for the release of Player Homes, since I have my status logs about finishing shops for furniture that August and I see others' notes about finishing the neighborhoods (38 of them!). Below is a portion of the "official announcement" from the Premium Team, in summer of 1998. (I don't need to remind you that this was the plan at the time, before Homes release, in 1998, and *things are different now*, right? Not all of these features might have gone live. :) )

Although, I'm a 'lil creeped out by the peeping windows part... LOL! (I don't even know if that made it in, can you actually do that?)

---

Private Housing comes to GemStone, DragonRealms, and Hercules & Xena!
You've asked for it, and we've listened!
By September 1st, 1998, the first individual player-owned homes will become
available to our Premium customers!
* Choose where you want to live! Homes will range from shacks in crowded,
shanty-town slums to expensive standalone mansions in the wilderness!
* Create your own home description! Choose from hundreds of furniture
items to upgrade your home from a basic hovel to a den of luxury. The
furniture you purchase will be woven together into a room description based
on the style of your choice.
* Complete privacy for you and your guests! Control the access of
familiars and locating spells!
* Roleplaying opportunities! Peek into your friends' windows to see if
they are home. Light and maintain a fireplace. Eject unwanted guests.
Lie on your bed, lean on the wall, sit in a chair!

>>You wouldn't happen to still have any of the "Kobold Reasons" that were spread across the old webpages, trying to convince people to go Premium? Would you?

We had a dedicated Premium guru in St. Louis at the time, so it's not really something I would have known a lot about. I know that Housing was huge for them though. A lot of work went into it! I don't know what else was offered to Premium players at the time, though. If I run across any other official public announcements about it I will share them.

>>I'm having a blast reading all this old history (some of which I actually remember!).

I've been through a lot of, "I did that?" Followed by, "oh yeah!" then a flood of memories. Sadly my logs, and game directories (old PST files, etc.) never survived my multiple hard drive crashes, or I would have some goodies to share. Instead, I end up trying to get Elysia to clean out the cobwebs for me. Married life...

Krakii, I don't remember anything about "Kobold Reasons", so.. no idea.

>>"Storm-what? Honey? Didn't we used to play with, I don't know, keyboards? What's that thing you're using now, with a cord on it?"
>>"Yes, dear. That's StormFront. It uses this new creation, they call it a 'mouse'. It's all the rage this year with the younger crowd..."

LOL~ he's not THAT bad. It's just that I'm the cautious one, he's the "WOW THAT OVER THERE LOOKS COOL I'MMA RUN HEADLONG INTO THAT WHEEEE" one. ;) We balance each other out. I do the finances and the taxes, so I have backups of my backups, and he never backs up his hard drives. That's why I still have remnants of 20 year old files, though. :)

Today's fun bit:

I found email about Solhaven's release. I don't remember if there was the actual date theorized upthread or not, but this is pretty definite. Internal staff discussion, so I cannot share verbatim, but here's your summary -



On the evening of December 23, 1998, Solhaven was released. The Northern Caravansary was opened by one Lord Naerlessin, a Vornavian border lord, from the looks of things.

>>I know it's been said already but it is really nice to see both of you back. I'm having a blast reading all this old history (some of which I actually remember!).
>>~Mazreth

Glad to be back... it's been I guess 15 or so years since I left, and longer than that for Banthis. And 20+ since I was a player only, and probably like 24ish(?) since he was a player only. We are having a great time playing again, for sure. Our 17yo FPS player kiddo was chucking at us for playing "a text game", then we showed him the combat math and reminded him why he's taking AP Calc. <g>

It's been long enough that even though large parts of the game are familiar, because we played in them before joining the GM team, or had a hand creating/extending them somehow... there are so many other parts that are brand new to us. Our "mains" are only 60, and although that was pretty damn old back in 1995/96, it's not anymore... so we haven't ever really leveled through the upper reaches of critters as regular players. We're both excited about going to Duskruin next week, because we've never seen it and people seem to love it so much. I'm on a mission to get myself one of those fancy scripted dresses (so adorable) and I want to learn cobbling and maybe jewel cutting. And of course our mid 90s gear feels a bit out of date because of the enhancive systems and gem slots and new enchanting stuff etc., all new to us.

If you played through it all, it probably felt incremental, but if you come back after so long, it's a huge list of improvements/upgrades/fun. You have all done so much good stuff with it. :)



Me, our first night back, when I died because I hadn't retrained since GS3 and my poor bard was not viable with her GS3 allocations: "Honey, what in the heck is a chrism and why is this cleric asking for it?"

<Don't discount that old gear out of hand. :) Odds are excellent that the Enchant & Padding the two of you got, back then, are WAY ahead--and by "WAY ahead", yes, +25%-to-+42% extra [+50 versus +40 (moderately common), or even versus +35 (pretty standard, at the high end)] qualifies--of what most people consider "really good high-end items" now.>

Not to mention that a lot of old gear will be good conversation starters just due to nostalgia. I can always tell who the old school locksmiths are when I pull out my "good lockpick" and start tinkering with it (no I don't pick with it, I'd be too devastated if I fumbled and broke it).

Starchitin

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

>>* Old-school, he would have been 72nd level; you would have been 74th.

I totally do not remember being that old. :) Just that when I left I was hunting on Teras, pyros and stuff. If pryos are still the same level they were before... I am not sure why I would have been hunting them at 74? I can't remember. :)

>>Pyrothags used to be Level 72, and are Level 58 now. In terms of raw experience points, Level 72 in GSIII is Level 56 in GSIV (and 57 is almost 74 in GSIII).

Okay that gives me hope that I'm not completely senile - I knew that's where I was hunting (weird the minutia you recall a couple of decades later), didn't know the levels had changed. :)

I'm wandering the lands in some sort of alternate reality daze... it's the same... but not. <g>

This is a little off topic. But now I am trying to remember something obscure with the game mechanics in that 1996-2003 time period. There was no mentalism sphere of magic implemented, where bards would theoretically become mentalist eventually, but were elementalist in the mean time. However, there were mental sphere stats regardless, like the armor classes had spell hindrances for mentalism. More hindrance than spiritual, less hindrance than elemental, but more hindrance than both for armor groups involving head coverage. (I do not pretend to understand bards. They are listed as elemental/mental hybrid semis, which in itself is weird, without access to the minor mental list.)

What I am having difficulty tracking down at the moment is if there were any racial or profession bonuses for the non-existent mentalism. I very vaguely want to say there was something related to either dark elves or sorcerers, I cannot remember which or if something is mixed up in my head. The Sorcerer spell list was more overtly mind destruction oriented back then as a vestige of its weird mentalism overlap in Rolemaster. But maybe it was Dark Elves getting a mental TD bonus, like the Elves do with diseases.

I was looking at a log where this guy was saying he had read some document where dark elves had mental resistance from being warped by Rhoska-Tor, and my reaction was basically: "Not that I ever recall reading. The Drow in Dungeons & Dragons had serious magical resistance, but in GSIII... wait.. there was a useless mental stat back then, what was it? Were Dark Elves the only ones with like +5 to their mental TD or something? Dwarves and Halflings still have TD bonuses, but no one does for Mental TD now."

Yeah. I came across that FAQ trying to track this down. There was something, and it was irrelevantly non-functional related to the non-existent mentalism, I just can't remember what it was now. It can't have been those spell hindrances on the armor because whatever it was only applied to some single group.

<<I started ranting at Solli & Warden about the silliness of having a Semi who was also a Hybrid. (And it's still silly.)>>

Semi hybrids makes no sense. But then, pure hybrids makes no sense, either. Even the Arcane Companion had pures and semis only with access to Arcane spell lists. It looks like the Rolemaster rules only allowed pure spellcasters to have access to Evil spell lists and only the ones for that realm, so maybe the Sorcerer concept was you get to pick and choose from all three realms at the price of only being a hybrid spell caster, which gave you resistance roll penalties against foes with access to either realm.

No, three Realms was the ArchMage (??) or whatever the profession was, in RMC (pretty sure it was in the first one/no digit, but memory may be playing me false).
Semis & Hybrids absolutely were in basic Character Law, with access to Open/Minor lists, and typically their own profession list.
Remember that you trained lists in 'chunks', though, so you would get spells 1-10 in that list with a single training, then 11-15, 16-20, and then 'shoot gaps' to 25, 30, 50. So six (6) tokes at 'spell research' would grant you 'knowledge of the list to level 50', which was important for "# spells known effects" and such.

Pretty sure Archmage and Arcist came later.

Favorite pure profession - magus.

Doug

I took it too literal too, but I think I understand where you're going. The minus side of having so many base lists to populate for professions is that you run out of original material along the way. I agree with the core statements, but would expand to say just about 30% of any profession's base list can be found elsewhere in the 'books of lists' in Rolemaster. Which brings us to. . .

>> because we added a mentalist sphere to the game and why should sorcerers have mind spells not being mentalist?

I agree. This is the minus side of having too few base lists to populate for professions. I've said several times over the decades - if we want character differentiation, add spell lists. Several times the response was 'can't find enough unique fodder'. Doesn't really matter - let some overlap occur. Say. . . 30%?

Doug

Right. The Sorcerer base lists just stand out as weird because a third of them are dupes of lists in a third realm of power. The way I rationalize it is that these classical "specific destructions of animate and inanimate material" can be interpreted as "channeling to the target and turning its essence against itself", so when you are targeting the brain or soul/spirit of the target, purely destructive "mind" type attacks become fair game since it is effectively the same thing as a mentalist using an attack spell on himself.

Meanwhile the documentations for Arcane magic generally mention Sorcerers as using a form of magic closer to the time when the three realms of power had not been differentiated yet. Oddly enough, demonic summoning and necromancy are (mostly) not sorcery in Rolemaster, but are the central pillars of sorcery now in GemStone.

http://www.gsgryphons.net/GreatHall/Library/RoadtoSolhaven.php