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<blockquote data-quote="Riley37" data-source="post: 7593096" data-attributes="member: 6786839">One difficulty in the transition is high technology and the relationship with the past. In JRRT's LotR, people generally don't increase in power by innovation. The Three Rings were powerful, Sauron learns from them and creates the One Ring, and then no one, in centuries, improves on the Three or on the One.It would be thematic for the BBEG to have made the One Thing for WWII, then it was captured by the Third Reich, then moved to the USA during Project Paperclip... but that's kinda incompatible with the One Thing as cutting edge technology in the 1970s or 1980s. It can't even have transistors (invented in 1947).See &quot;Cryptonomicon&quot; for WWII coding serving as a McGuffin in modern times.Perhaps the One Thing has a core built in the 1940s, a one-time pad or cipher wheel, and the BBEG used the same control code when he built the Orbital Mind Control Satellites, decades later. Then someone replaces the One Thing's vacuum tube radio with a modern transmitter-receiver, kicking off the plot.Who are the elves (makers of the Three) and dwarves (recipients of the Seven)? or do they get cut from the story, leaving only the One and the Nine?Is there a Gandalf-analogue?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Riley37, post: 7593096, member: 6786839"] One difficulty in the transition is high technology and the relationship with the past. In JRRT's LotR, people generally don't increase in power by innovation. The Three Rings were powerful, Sauron learns from them and creates the One Ring, and then no one, in centuries, improves on the Three or on the One. It would be thematic for the BBEG to have made the One Thing for WWII, then it was captured by the Third Reich, then moved to the USA during Project Paperclip... but that's kinda incompatible with the One Thing as cutting edge technology in the 1970s or 1980s. It can't even have transistors (invented in 1947). See "Cryptonomicon" for WWII coding serving as a McGuffin in modern times. Perhaps the One Thing has a core built in the 1940s, a one-time pad or cipher wheel, and the BBEG used the same control code when he built the Orbital Mind Control Satellites, decades later. Then someone replaces the One Thing's vacuum tube radio with a modern transmitter-receiver, kicking off the plot. Who are the elves (makers of the Three) and dwarves (recipients of the Seven)? or do they get cut from the story, leaving only the One and the Nine? Is there a Gandalf-analogue? [/QUOTE]

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