Roleplaying in Middle Earth

[Wolfspider]

And I'd suggest not getting the ICE material. Not only is the system completely incompatible with d20 (and with the whole Lord of the Rings atmosphere as well) but the ICE source material hasn't got the same feel at all as anything Tolkien wrote. It might as well be an all original campaign setting for how well it jives with Tolkien.

Then again, that doesn't necessarily make it bad, just not what I'd want for my LotR game.

Well, the system isn't completely incompatible with d20, since every MERP book includes conversion rules to a D&D-like system (originally AD&D, but now the conversions are even easier due to the changes made in D&D3 to the way attack bonuses and skills are handled).

While it's true that some of the books left the realm of what Tolkien and Tolkien-purists would have found palatable, there are still a lot of good, solidly faithful ideas in the old MERP material.

 

[VagabondDM]

While it's true that some of the books left the realm of what Tolkien and Tolkien-purists would have found palatable, there are still a lot of good, solidly faithful ideas in the old MERP material.

Thus my comment on the early releases. The first release of Middle Earth incorporating about the first year to year and a half of products were good. They were faithful to the setting for the most part and did their best to include flavour text from the books themselves.

After that it seemed more like ICE was trying to remake Middle Eartth to be more like ShadowWorld their Rolemaster campaign world. The later products are ok if for nothing more than the lovely maps they provided.

Itis important to remember that no RPG is ever going to be able to accurately capture a particular persons view of a novel or series. That's the great thing about books is so much of it is subjective to the reader. It's the main reason I avoid RPGs based on anything but purely original ideas and avoid reading novels based on my rpgs. It avoids the cross taint that will invariably come into being.

 

[Sulimo]

Thus my comment on the early releases. The first release of Middle Earth incorporating about the first year to year and a half of products were good. They were faithful to the setting for the most part and did their best to include flavour text from the books themselves.

After that it seemed more like ICE was trying to remake Middle Eartth to be more like ShadowWorld their Rolemaster campaign world. The later products are ok if for nothing more than the lovely maps they provided.

I dont think so. It was the products that covered areas not mentioned at all (or there was very little info at all) that may have been a bit wild. The Southern Middle Earth stuff for instance. Not that I minded even Court of Ardor...although it would be more suited being a 1st Age campaign - thats more like what it felt like.

Actually the later reworking of older material into the realms modules (like Arnor, The Shire and Souther Gondor) is probably among my fave material. And I doubt we'll ever see as much material from Decipher..

 

[sword-dancer]

I would have the party be something else altogether; soldiers of fortune, dwarves seeking new mines beneath the earth, elves guarding their woods, etc. but not directly involved in the Ring business.

It gets tricky when you want to have PC's in a "narrative" world. .

Why not, make the small quests not the grat one.
Fighting against the shadow of the east in smaller ways

This is a great question. I'm not sure how I'd answer it.

First, I think I'd take Tolkien's advice on Alternate Wars of the Ring and have Saruman craft his own Ruling Ring. But how that would play out. . .I'm not sure.

I have to be careful how I put this. . .but, let's *imagine* that some company got the LotR rights and were doing a game and were putting out a bunch of adventures. One of them *might* involve the PCs being sent to stop one of the Nazgul, who's gone to Esgaroth to gather the bones of Smaug from Lake Town and bring them back to Mordor for *reanimation.*

Some will think this is goofy. . .I think it's bad-ash!

This kind of undead i didn`t want to see in middleearth, the next what we will see is your average Zombie horde no thank you!

 

[Desdichado]

Why not, make the small quests not the grat one.
Fighting against the shadow of the east in smaller ways

I've played this kind of ME game. I like it a lot!

This kind of undead i didn`t want to see in middleearth, the next what we will see is your average Zombie horde no thank you!

I agree. Although alternate ME's can be fun. The more I think about it, the more I think I'd rather play alternate ME rather than ME as written. Change the history just a tad, keep the PCs on their toes. Tolkien even gave some great guidelines when he described what the story would look like if it were an allegory for WWII.

 

[JeffB]

Yep, I think MERP had it's ups and downs...

Certainly the Magic system didn't quite "work" for ME, but the 2nd edition of the game at least brought in the corruption point mechanic to keep players from going "D&D"...

And I do like the RM/MERP overall system..seemingly very complex..Character Creation especially w/ Rolemaster...the nice thing is that the subsystems past the character creation rules were very modular...you could strip away most of the detailed rules and get a very fast, playable system...This is precisely how I have run RM in the past, though most RM players buy the gazillions of supplements and try to utilize EVERYTHING which ICE even did not reccomend...RM/RM2 and MERP (both editions) were very fun games to run for me in thier basic forms...

Ahhh..back to ME products

I also agree that the first products were quite good...those from the original book in 1982 (not the game..the one that pre-dated MERP) till about the time they revised the 1st edition set (1986)...

then they got a bit wierd...in fact ICE did the same thing with RM..endless companions and other stuff...kind of like TSR circa early 90's...alot of crap and just a few gems...

Many of the 2E products such as Arnor, Moria,Valar & Maiar, the Campaign Guide and a few others were spectacular...

I think overall ICE did a great job with MERP..no it wasn't perfect..but the supplements were very,very useful...they were filled with lot's of "here's an idea..run with it" type info for the GM which I prefer to "this is how it is...you need to make sure you fit in A with B..blah, blah, blah" as most stuff is written... The Arnor book alone either in it's 400 page complete version or the Arnor:The Land version could keep a gaming group busy for a year if not two! In fact most of ICE's products were like that...Be it for MERP or RM...

Like an idiot though..I sold all my MERP and RM stuff but my 2E ME campaign guide, and NW M-E gaz, earlier in the year...That's one thing I've been kicking myself over in the past few months.....

Sure wish the Decipher game would get to my local FLGS soon!

 

[Desdichado]

I agree that a lot of the MERP stuff was good as an RPG supplement, but as a Tolkien supplement, it wasn't.

Then again, maybe I'm just too much of a stick-in-the-mud my-way-or-the-highway Tolkien "purist" of some kind to enjoy anything not written by the Professor himself.

I've also been tossing around lots of magic ideas for the game. Although I haven't done so yet, I've been prototyping lots of alternative magic stuff lately, and I think I've come to something that feels very ME, but I need to actually sit down and codify it, though.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Low-level LOTR

Here's a take on adventuring in Middle-Earth that requires neither major changes to the D&D ruleset nor uber-characters. I've posted it in the conversion thread, here:

http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=308756#post308756

 

[Desdichado]

Re: Low-level LOTR

Here's a take on adventuring in Middle-Earth that requires neither major changes to the D&D ruleset nor uber-characters. I've posted it in the conversion thread, here:

http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=308756#post308756

OS, I'll gladly check out this thread. I remember CH mentioning that he was going to start it, but I never got around to looking for it; thanks for pointing it out.

Frankly, though, and I know CH disagrees with me, I think some changes --some significant, especially magic-- are really a requirement of having d20 ME though.

 

[Corinth]

Starting with the banning of teleportation spells, I'd expect.