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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 6764563" data-attributes="member: 6803643">The cool thing about Tolkien as a world builder was that he was a constant revisionist.Something new and interesting come into the stories he's telling? He'd then think about the ramifications of this new element upon the setting at large, and then ripple them out to a complete new vision for the world.Now, these new ideas were things he encountered as he was carrying out the exercise of writing. He was writing solo, and the ideas were his (though he has clear influences from mythology, earlier literature, etc). For the sake of the experiment, let's assume he LIKES D&D; he'd probably hate it by and large as per his essay "On Fairy-stories" where he eviscerates the modern fantasy genre as being all style and no substance, as taking the blueprints of fantasy with elves and dwarves and a Dark Lord but lacking the meaning that makes fantasy real. So, let's say he's cool with D&D as long as it's not just a carbon copy. Let's say even that Gygax and Arneson didn't make the game, Tolkien did, as a way of developing his world and stories.Putting that all past, I think Tolkien would be an excellent DM. Just like he takes in the random new ideas that "come walking out of the woods" to him when he's written himself into them, such as Faramir appearing as the brother of Boromir or Aragorn emerging from this character that was at one point a wooden-shoe wearing Hobbit (Trotter), Tolkien would also take the ideas of the players quite seriously and mold the world to fit their stories. He was hardly a top-down world-builder. While he revised the world to fix geographic issues and revised his stories to fit the new geographies, geography was primarily design to fit the needs of the story. He's a bottom-up world-builder, following the needs of the story as it unfolds. "Lord of the Rings" originally was supposed to end at the Necromancer's Tower in Dol Guldur in southern Mirkwood, and Tolkien thought he was half-way done when he got Frodo Baggins (or rather, Frodo's storyform predecessor, Bingo Baggins) to Rivendell. It was only as they faced more and more complications in the story as they travelled east and south that the story unfolded itself to be a much larger, more complicated issue. The campaign expanded. Boromir's appearance at the Council of Elrond was the origin point for the Land of Gondor. The whole story of Isildur and the Ring and the Last Alliance of Gondor and Elves was something that Tolkien revised later. When Boromir appeared at the Council to give it a Mannish representative who wasn't from Lake-town, his country of Gondor became an important plot point that Tolkien decided to follow – a siege of the City of [G]Ond, which would take place around the same time the heroes reached Dol Guldur in southern Mirkwood. Gondor was supposed to be built near the southern borders of Mirkwood at the time. But as Boromir joins the Fellowship, his character starts evolving to the point that he causes the Breaking of the Fellowship, and then the world starts developing into new forms. The story must be larger now that everyone's going in every which way. We're still not at Sauron's fortress or Gondor, so eventually we all have to get back together for these things. But the "tale grew in the telling," as Tolkien says. That's classic D&D storyforming, there. Let's also not forget that he was very particular about getting details right. He researched phases of the moon in order to get his timelines for different narratives aligned. He researched how to make rabbit stew so he could feature it in a scene. He painstakingly explored aspects of history and economy and culture for various elements of his world that never would see the light of day, just so that he could give a greater depth to the setting and could draw upon them when necessary. Tolkien would be an excellent DM, if he thought the medium was a good one to explore his languages and stories and worlds.</blockquote>

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