Looking for information on Rolemaster: The Bladelands

Post by **rusty_shackleford** » October 31st, 2025, 01:10

Referring to the online game.
I can find references to it in magazines and such, but beyond that not much.
https://archive.org/details/cgw_museum_ ... 9/mode/2up

I don't know if it was developed by Mythic but I don't see it listed as one of theirs despite doing the other Rolemaster video games.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000817122 ... games.html

I see Mythic was in a Rolemaster IP dispute with Engage games which advertised it, so, Mythic probably weren't the developers.

Post by **Tweed** » October 31st, 2025, 01:35

https://www.rpg.net/news reviews/column ... nt00.phtml

How long has Bladelands been in development?

At last, an easy one. The Bladelands has been in development for over three years. At first, the world was to be launched as an online game. About a year's worth of design went into the basics of the story-lines and setting.

But as time went on it became clear that going online was taking too long. We shifted the focus back to a paper-product launch. This required some re-design of some issues, but mostly it was just on a faster track now.

Post by **Tweed** » October 31st, 2025, 01:37

CGW issue with the advertisement from 1997, interview from 2000.

Post by **Tweed** » October 31st, 2025, 01:42

I'm not even finding the core books. Did this ever actually go to print? I've found one website where a dude lamented that it never got published.

Post by **Valter** » October 31st, 2025, 01:50

It would appear the only playable copy there ever was came bundled in a... car owners' club's promotional CD which provided subscribers with free internet?

https://www.mobygames.com/game/170999/m ... b-freenet/

Other sources with info on Bladelands which I'm too tired to comb through right now:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/engag ... 0-2466673/
https://www.mobygames.com/company/1049/mythic/
https://ironcrown.co.uk/ICEforums/index ... ic=10190.0

Post by **Tweed** » October 31st, 2025, 02:09

2010 post quotes from an employee (taken at face value):

Bladestorm is the name of ICE's miniatures battle game.

When the old ICE revised RM into RMSS, the editor at the time decided to kill Shadow World both as a product line and as a setting.

He came up with the Bladelands, the continent of Folenn, reworked a bit. The basic idea was that Shadow World blew up, completely destroyed, and that some minor gods put Folenn into a magical bubble sending it looking for a new home.

There was a lot more to it, but the general gist of it was that it was so far from the normal rules that it was impossible to have any adventures for it that would be generic enough to be used in other settings and vice versa.

It was weird alright..

For example, there were no plans on letting anybody know about it traveling through space at least one or two years or so.

The days each had a "Hue", a color that amplified some attribute or another, and they occurred in random order (this was similar to the Sunbane from the 2nd Chronicles of Thomas Covenant).

There were gem pools (basically pools of liquid magic), from which the elves were born (yes, the elves were to be crystaline beings (but which had flesh that was identical to other races) -- another thing that wasn't going to be revealed for a long long time....

There was supposed to be underground city of warped dwarves ruled over by an undead dragon...

(I had signed up to be one of the developers, but this blatant rip from Forgotten Realms, along with it being completely unusable with normal RM products convinced me to step back and re-evaluate my participation).

A little before it - and then the editor left - and before he left, he got some sort of deal that allowed him to control development of the setting if ICE went forward with it, even with him no longer working for ICE at that time. After the old ICE died, and the new ICE formed, he decided he was going to move forward with it and publish it himself. Until he got told that he wasn't allowed to use Rolemaster with it (this being shortly after d20 was released along with the OGL - so he had another option). The new ICE didn't want to be associated with it (this was well before I became an employee of the new ICE).

As far as I know, it was never released in any form.

So that car CD could be the HOLY GRAIL of Bladelands lore! It makes me wonder if the game ever actually ran or if that was nonfunctional shovelware from the get-go.

Post by **Tweed** » October 31st, 2025, 02:14

Old I.C.E. filed chapter 7 in October 2000. The Gamespot blurb was from April. Maybe they were being really hopeful?