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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 490464" data-attributes="member: 7240">Colonel Hardisson saysActually, the best thing ICE ever produced for MERP was Palantir Quest, a module about recovering the palantir of Annuminas from the far north. Definitely, these are possible places to adventure. I just find that when people are adventuring in the fragments of a greater world, even if their own storyline has no hope of ever fixing the world, the hope that the world will be rebuilt to what it was is always there. Adventuring without such hope, I find, casts a pall over the game. Well, good luck with that. Sorry to have sounded so upset but for me, LOTR and Dr. Who were the stories which formed my consciousness between the ages of 7 and 12 and have guided my moral system for much of my life. Perhaps part of what makes the 4th age look so bleak to me is that the good guys are the servants of an expansionist imperial Gondor. Joshua, I'd be procrastinating excessively on my university alchemy project if I continued the citation pissing match. All I can do is thank you for pointing out that the only examples of kinetic magic you can find in LOTR are of magic done by a person in possession of one of the rings of power -- rings whose power is directly contingent upon that of Sauron. The only other textual evidence you have cited is that some Black Numenoreans were "sorcerors" -- unfortunately, the passage is a little too ambiguous to interpret effectively. I can't find the page right now but a Noldor Elf does explain to a Hobbit that they don't perceive their magical items as "magical," just well-made. In looking at Tolkien, I think that one of the most important things we have to recognize is that he was not simply writing about his Middle Earth. He was writing, as any good writer does, about the world in which he lived. LOTR is a work about Catholicism and about British history and the Celtic Twilight. I get upset when people appear to trample on these themes when discussing the work.</blockquote>

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