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<blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 4700279" data-attributes="member: 59082">Two crimes were committed here. First, and the less egregious one, is that you said &quot;Middle-earth exists solely to tell the stories of [hobbits]&quot;. Ack! I hear J.R.R. Tolkien muttering in his tomb. Actually, The Hobbit was a serial bed-time story that Tolkien told his kids that happened to be set in Middle-earth, the world of a much larger epic he had been working on for decades; the LotR started as a sequel to The Hobbit, requested by the publisher, but became something much larger, &quot;more serious and dark,&quot; as JRRT said. But the core of Tolkien's work was not The Hobbit or LotR but The Silmarillion, which focuses on the history of the elves and, to a lesser degree, humans. In other words, Tolkien did NOT create Middle-earth as a setting to write The Hobbit and LotR in; those stories grew out of it. I think this is one of the main reasons that the setting is so...alive. There is never the feeling of the &quot;cardboard set&quot; that you get in a lot of novels and RPG worlds: As if all that exists is what is needed to portray the scene at hand. The Hobbit and LotR have a sense of deep history, of myth and legend--because Tolkien had spent decades detailing that world's myth and history and languages.Certainly not every writer (or DM, for that matter) can put the same care and time into their world as Tolkien, but that is the ideal; second best would be to really disguise those cardboard set pieces well so that they don't feel like cardboard set pieces. It is hard to do.The second crime, you wonder? It is the worst: You mention Middle-earth and World of Warcraft in the same breath! Alas, alas! May the Great Eagles carry me away to distant Valinor, where only her golden woods may heal my blighted soul! <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/cry.png"&nbsp; class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":.-(" title="Cry&nbsp; &nbsp; :.-(" data-shortname=":.-(" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue&nbsp; &nbsp; :p"&nbsp; data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mercurius, post: 4700279, member: 59082"] Two crimes were committed here. First, and the less egregious one, is that you said "Middle-earth exists solely to tell the stories of [hobbits]". Ack! I hear J.R.R. Tolkien muttering in his tomb. Actually, [i]The Hobbit[/i] was a serial bed-time story that Tolkien told his kids that happened to be set in Middle-earth, the world of a much larger epic he had been working on for decades; the LotR started as a sequel to [i]The Hobbit[/i], requested by the publisher, but became something much larger, "more serious and dark," as JRRT said. But the core of Tolkien's work was not The Hobbit or LotR but [i]The Silmarillion[/i], which focuses on the history of the elves and, to a lesser degree, humans. In other words, Tolkien did NOT create Middle-earth as a setting to write The Hobbit and LotR in; those stories grew out of it. I think this is one of the main reasons that the setting is so...alive. There is never the feeling of the "cardboard set" that you get in a lot of novels and RPG worlds: As if all that exists is what is needed to portray the scene at hand. The Hobbit and LotR have a sense of deep history, of myth and legend--because Tolkien had spent decades detailing that world's myth and history and languages. Certainly not every writer (or DM, for that matter) can put the same care and time into their world as Tolkien, but that is the ideal; second best would be to really disguise those cardboard set pieces well so that they don't feel like cardboard set pieces. It is hard to do. The second crime, you wonder? It is the worst: You mention Middle-earth and World of Warcraft in the same breath! Alas, alas! May the Great Eagles carry me away to distant Valinor, where only her golden woods may heal my blighted soul! :.-( :p [/QUOTE]

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