Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Retrospective: Bree and the Barrow-Downs

I started work on this week's Retrospective post under the misapprehension that I'd already written one, years ago, about Middle-earth Role Playing published by Iron Crown Enterprises. When I did a search of the archives, I discovered that the closest I'd ever come to doing so is this post on an advertisement for MERP and that must have been what I'd misremembered as a post about the game itself. Therefore, I briefly considered setting aside the work I'd done on this post and starting a new one on MERP, since I think it's a game well worth discussing here. In the end, though, I decided that, since I owned Bree and the Barrow-Downs before I owned Middle-earth Role Playing, it made more sense to talk about it first. I'll save MERP for next week's Retrospective. 

Published in 1984 and written by Heike Kubasch, this 32-page book describes Bree-land, a civilized area of central Eriador consisting of four settlements inhabited by both Men and Hobbits. Bree is, of course, the largest and most significant of these settlements and plays a role in The Fellowship of the Ring as the location of the The Prancing Pony inn, where Frodo and his companions first meet Aragorn. The book includes maps of Bree and the neighboring villages of Archet, Combe, and Staddle. The maps don't include a lot of detail but all four places are small and have relatively few buildings anyway. Still, I must confess I was disappointed, somehow thinking that Bree at least would receive more extensive detail. Indeed, I bought the book precisely because I was so interested in Bree after my reading of The Lord of the Rings.

This isn't to say there's no information on Bree and the surrounding villages. Rather, the information is mostly "high-level," which is to say, focusing on matters of history, agriculture, and economy, as well as the prominent people and families of the region rather than on each and every building in the town. It's an unusual approach, one I didn't expect at the time but that I've come to appreciate a little more in recent years. Having a good sense of the inhabitants of Bree, their relationships, and their place in the town is just as important to making good use of it as a detailed key. Still, it would have been nice if we got something more akin to The Village of Hommlet – at least that's what I wanted.

Much more interesting is the treatment of the Barrow-Downs, which is extensive. We get some history, in addition to an overview of their overall structure and the wights that inhabit some of them. Twenty-one of the barrows get not only individual descriptions but also maps, showing their layout for use in game. Their descriptions identify who is buried in the barrow and, where pertinent, who they were and their place in the history of Middle-earth. As a kid, I loved the Barrow-Downs section of The Lord of the Rings and so was glad to see the loving detail provided in this lengthy section of the book.

Bree and the Barrow-Downs is a strange product and clearly reflects the early days of Iron Crown's publication of Middle-earth materials, in that it seems to have been written with traditional RPG "adventuring" in mind. The amount of detail given to the Barrow-Downs when compared to Bree is, I think, evidence of this. The Barrows, after all, are full of monsters and buried treasure and are thus of more immediate interest to players used to dungeon delving and similar activities. Perhaps that's unfair but, having re-read the book for this post, I find that my youthful disappointment in this book remains. I had such high hopes for it and, when they were dashed, I became skeptical of the other books in the Middle-earth line of game products (though, as we shall see next week, I eventually overcame that skepticism). 

15 comments:

  1. It's probably not intentional, but spending pages describing the occupants of the burial mounds and their places in history, while skipping over the people living in the here and now, feels very Tolkienesque. So it's quite fitting in a way!

    ReplyDelete
  2. To be fair, your average adventuring party in MERP (which had a rather D&D-inspired playstyle IME) probably spent a lot more time looting barrows than they did in town, so maybe the detail was where it needed to be. If nothing else the work they put into explaining who was buried where and what they'd meant to the world when they were alive is a touch you don't see often enough in many "tomb" dungeoncrawls.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Absolutely true, though, at the time I first bought this, I didn't quite understand that. I had assumed that MERP would have a different "feel," much like Tolkien than proved to be the case.

      Delete
  3. The ICE MERPS maps were great, but outside of that their products were mediocre at best. I bought more than a few back in the day but unlike material for Ars Magica or Harn, they were of limit use.

    In contrast the material produced for The One Ring and especially Adventures in Middle Earth are among the best Middle Earth products ever produced.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I sort of think that the only way to judge Tolkien related RPG products is Moria. The One Ring never produced one. At GenCon I was told that something was coming out. It was cancelled last year. MERPS, in my opinion, has the best Moria ever made. And I'm including Lew Pulsipher's Khazad Dum! in issue #38 of White Dwarf. I remember buying MERP's Mirkwood and sort of shrugging. But its Moria advanced my knowledge about something I sorely wanted to know more about.

      Delete
  4. By a weird stroke of luck, while I gave away all AD&D and D&D books and modules at 23, I ended up keeping my MERP book and three scenarios. It remains a favourite game and setting, and the cartography and front covers still remain the best fantasy representations I've come across. However, the modules' content always seemed lacking and dull.

    As an aside MERP modules command crazy prices on E-bay.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have a friend who was trying to complete his library of MERP books and it was a very expensive endeavor. I believe he has nearly all of them now, but the last few cost him dearly.

      Delete
  5. James, I would be interested to hear your commentary on the 'default' setting of most of these materials, being T.A. 1640 or so. Almost 1400 years before the War of the Ring. A few things come to mind for me: everyone pretty much looks and acts the same and has the same tech as 1400 years later. And this is before the building of the White Tower, the Battle of the Plains, and other things that establish some places as recognizable. I'm a fan of MERP but it's an unusual choice in some respects.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'll try to touch on that question a bit next week, when I do my retrospective on MERP itself.

      Delete
  6. I also bought this module before l had anything else for MERP, and l also felt that sharp pang of disappointment. I own a fair number of MERP books, but I’ve never played or ran the game. It always felt very dry and lifeless to me as a system, and despite how much I really WANTED to like it, l could never get into it.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm looking forward to the broader discussion of MERP. We had quite a campaign, though we mostly focused on Mirkwood and environs, which were more interesting in this default setting than the barrow-downs. We quickly adopted the Rolemaster books and ended up with a much more high-fantasy version of Middle-Earth than intended by the main book or depicted by Tolkien.

    ReplyDelete
  8. We played many fantasy systems from D&D, Cthuhlhu, and MERS/RoleMaster, and I feel the modules from ICE had a level of believability and realism to them that way way above the Dungeon/D&D fare. Even very thin ones, with their approach of just describing sites and inhabitants and their motivations, not prescribing how the adventure would develop, gave you a lot of play and room for exploration and player-driven stories.

    ReplyDelete
  9. You actually did another MERP post:

    http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2010/10/retrospective-court-of-ardor.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, that's right. I simply never did one on MERP itself, which is something I will rectify next week.

      Delete
  10. One of my earliest MERP campaigns used Bree as the PCs' base (sort of like a Middle-earth version of the Keep on the Borderlands). The adventures were very "D&D-ish" but the PCs at least did try to focus on being heroes (taking on the bandits of Bar-en-Dindol and avoiding excessive looting of the barows).
    I quite like the art of Charles Peale. He did much of the internal art for this module, as well as for many other early ICE products.

    ReplyDelete