Retrospective: Southern Mirkwood

The series of Middle-earth sourcebooks published by Iron Crown Enterprises during the early 1980s occupy a strange place in my personal history as a roleplayer. Like nearly every other gamer I knew at the time, I had, of course, read the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and I liked them well enough, though I'm not sure I'd have called myself a huge fan of them. That would come later, thanks in no small part to I.C.E.'s products, whose advertisements in the pages of Dragon I can still vividly recall.

The reasons those advertisements still linger in my memory decades later is their artwork, which is wonderfully evocative. They made me want to know more about the region of Middle-earth detailed in the associated product, which, in turn, helped fuel my appreciation for Middle-earth as a setting. (It would still be a little while longer before I'd come to a similar appreciation for Tolkien's storytelling, much to my embarrassment.)

My very first I.C.E. Middle-earth purchase was Bree and the Barrow-Downs, primarily because the hobbits' visit to the Barrow-Downs is one of my favorite sections of The Lord of the Rings and I therefore assumed the book detailing it would be similarly great. Unfortunately, I was disappointed and this dampened the enthusiasm those Dragon ads had elicited in me. Despite this, I decided to give the series another try, this time selecting Southern Mirkwood as my next purchase. I did so for the flimsiest of reasons: I liked the cover. I might also have been influenced by the book's subtitle, "Haunt of the Necromancer," since I was keen to know more about Sauron's hideout in the region, Dol Guldur.

Written by Susan Taylor Hitchcock and first release in 1983, Southern Mirkwood is 60-page softcover book covering not just southern Mirkwood but also southern Rhovanion, the region of Middle-earth commonly called Wilderland. Much like Bree and the Barrow-Downs (and Moria, which I'd acquire later), the pages of Southern Mirkwood feature a dense, two-column layout using a very small typeface that is occasionally broken up with a piece of spot art or a map. The overall effect, even when I was younger and had more patience – and eyesight! – for such things was mildly intimidating. This effect was made even more potent by the dry way that information was conveyed. This was not a book that one read casually; it took real effort to make it through even a couple of pages.

I began to feel some of the same disappointment I had felt about Bree and the Barrow-Downs creep back in. When I bought the book, I had hoped it'd present some frightening and exciting things about this part of Middle-earth. I remembered Mirkwood well from Tolkien's tales, particularly Bilbo and the dwarves' encounter with its spiders, so I expected the book to contain all manner of similar nastiness. Likewise, the presence of Sauron, in his guise as the Necromancer, certainly piqued my interest, since I remember wondering what he might have been up to while hiding in the forest from the prying eyes of the White Council. By all rights, Southern Mirkwood should have been a really good sourcebook, one that commanded my attention for a long time – but it was not.

A large part of the problem lies with the presentation of the material it contains. As I alluded to above, the prose is dull and focuses too much on minutiae and trivia. There are thus pages of history, enumerations of flora and fauna, people and places of note – all good in principle and precisely the kind of stuff one you'd want and expect to find in a book like this. But rather than detail all of this with an eye toward how to use them in adventures or campaigns set in and around southern Mirkwood, we get encyclopedia-style entries that do little to inspire. Toward the end of the book, there are some short suggestions for scenarios but they're quite sketchy and, frankly, boring ("Acquire 5 crates of Dwarven nails for renovation of Tree-town," "Trap and cure or kill as need be a trained mountain lion which has gone wild," etc.).

The banality of it all is really evident in the sections relating to Dol Guldur, the Necromancer's lair within Mirkwood. The book provides eight maps of the place, along with keyed descriptions. One would imagine – or at least I did – that such a place of supreme evil would be compelling and frightening. Instead, it comes across as little more than a run-of-the-mill dungeon filled with traps and orcs and storage rooms. It's all so dull and predictable, with only a few hints that suggest it's located in Middle-earth rather than in some vanilla fantasy setting. 

It's a shame, because I still think there's great potential in this region of Middle-earth, especially during the time period in which I.C.E.'s books are set (Third Age 1640 – nearly 1500 years before the War of the Ring). I can easily imagine fun adventures or exciting campaigns dealing with the growing corruption of the area and the Necromancer's role in it all. That's not what Southern Mirkwood provides, sadly. 

At least the full-color poster maps by Peter Fenlon are terrific, as always.