There was a second volume of races and cultures from ICE v2 that did races and cultures separately.

BTW, weren't they supposed to publish a new Rolemaster edition years ago? Whatever happened to that?

It's still in open beta.  There was an earlier attempt by Tim Duger that was supposedly mostly done but there was a power struggle and he and the former management were ousted by the owner and Guild Companion Publications who are currently in charge.

As I understand it, the issue was over unpaid royalties to authors but Tim maintains that the new owner had been deliberately undermining ICE's attempts to move forward and making unreasonable demands for a couple years.  I think there's some interesting points on both sides but the reality is that ICE had gotten a reputation for not paying freelancers over the bankruptcy years and with the same people in charge there weren't many people willing to put in the time and effort so they had trouble getting new stuff out of the gate.

Tim's version would have been closer to a cleaned up RM2.

Thanks for the info!
It would be sad to see the whole game disappear into obscurity. Though I am not sure I would be interested unless they addressed some of the things I have mentioned here. It depends on how it is done I suppose.

I remember asking a question to one of the old developers, asking them to include guidelines on how to use the levels, and make it easy to make, say, a 4th level character from scratch (not so much for myself, since I have worked around this, but for newer players the low power of 1st level looks weird and I agree). The answer was that "we always assumed players could figure out power levels themselves" or some such. That's not the way to do it if you ask me. Get rid of some of the nitpicky rules, and explain clearly how the rules make sense (sort of like Runequest 2 did). Or, if it doesn't make sense, change it.

I ended up not being a fan of either Rolemaster Office or the EAR. I've instead, possibly foolishly, decided to do my own character generation and maintenance spreadsheet.

I also realised that, contrary to my recollections, the point buy stat generation method from RMSS is actually pretty good. The issue with it is all the point breaks when it comes time to roll for Potentials. That problem is solved by using the old RM2 Potential generation method.