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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2115064" data-attributes="member: 2205">Thanks, mmadsen!  That's a pretty good summary.  Of course, being me, I've got a few minor nits to pick...That doesn't seem to address the fact that it would actually be contrary to the will of the Valar to be worshipped anyway.  They weren't "gods" in any sense, and they deferred to the authority of an actual One True God, Eru, and it was only he that should be worshipped.  Although we know very little about organized religion, UT does discuss a few details of semi-organized religious services to Eru in Numenor.His demonstrated spellcasting abilities are poor, but that doesn't mean that they actually were.  In fact, if anything, the disconnect with D&D comes more from the idea of flashy spells being the definition of magic, which is not very often what Tolkien apparently thought of.  Clearly other folks were also powerful wizards or whatnot, including all of the Istari and most of the elvish leaders.  Some rather oblique references are made (as stated earlier in this thread, I think) to other sorcerers and whatnot, though, so it's certainly kosher to accept them, although they should be very rare.  The big problem is, as nsruf says, Gandalf isn't really representative of those types of sorcerers, and we don't actually have anyone that is representative that we can turn to and say, "yeah, this is what magic in M-E is like."That seems a reasonable suggestion.  In my game, elves simply weren't PCs at all; they were plot devices.  Which is pretty consistent with the way they are in the book, for the most part, as well.  Legolas being a pseudo-exception -- he acts more like a PC, but then doesn't actually do very much.  My nitpick is that I don't know why we need to point to the Celtic Sidhe as Tolkien's inspiration, when the elves are already quite like the Germanic elves/alfs/alps/etc.  Sure, we don't know quite as much about them, but then again, that was part of Tolkien's specific area of study.  But practically speaking, I don't think there's much difference anyway.Well, that's not necessarily true depending on when you set the game.  My older game was prior to the Great Plague, so the population issue wouldn't have really come up in my game.  If I were to run another LotR game, I'd probably do an "alt.history" version of it, taking Tolkien's own description in the Foreward of what the plot would have looked like if it were allegorical of WWII, and running with that.  In an alt.version, naturally, I can change little details that bother me.Even in a non-alt.version, you can do that.  And there are hints that maybe there were a few more folks kicking around M-E than Tolkien says; especially in the Hobbit which refers to all kinds of little settlements of folks here and there.  But the Hobbit is difficult to take too seriously anyway; I'm quite sure it was never meant to be and that Tolkien tried to back-pedal as much as he could in LotR away from some of the details (and certainly the tone) of the Hobbit anyway, once he decided to take this seriously and really place this firmly in M-E after all instead of essentially just borrowing names and whatnot from his 1st age material, which is what he did in the Hobbit.</blockquote>

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