Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Retrospective: Middle-earth Role Playing

While working on last week's entry in this series, I realized that I had never written a post about Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle-earth Role Playing, despite the fact that I had, long ago, written one about the notorious The Court of Ardor. This frankly surprised me, because I not only owned the game – having purchased it by mail order – but ran a short but intense campaign set in and around the Trollshaws (as I recall, though my memory is hazy). Having now been made aware of this oversight, I have no choice but to correct it by presenting my thoughts about MERP.

Originally published in 1982, Middle-earth Role Playing is an odd game. As the cover of the first edition proclaims, MERP is "a complete system for adventuring in J.R.R. Tolkien's world," that system being based on Iron Crown's Role Master system, with which I was already somewhat familiar. Had I been asked beforehand, it's not the system I'd have chosen for gaming in Middle-earth, but I doubt I could have explained why at the time. Role Master always struck me as much too complex and finnicky, especially in the area of combat, and this seemed at odds with the overall feel Tolkien's works evoked. Furthermore, it was supposedly set in the middle of the Third Age, some 1500 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, which is not what I had been expecting. I imagine the period was chosen for maximum freedom, since it's not as well documented as other periods of Middle-earth's history.

The cover image accompanying this post is quite instructive. Depicting a multi-racial adventuring party looting what appears to be a tomb, it looks more like a scene from a D&D game than something one would find in Tolkien. At the time, that didn't bother me very much, because I was much more a fan of Tolkien's world than I was of Tolkien's stories. In that respect, MERP did its job well enough: it provided all the things one would expect to find in Middle-earth – dwarves, elves, hobbits, orcs, etc. – and didn't worry too much about the tone. For example, MERP had extensive rules for magic, as well as allowing characters of every profession, including warriors, to learn spells. As Gary Gygax famously complained, Middle-earth is notably low-key in its magic, but not so MERP. It's a very peculiar decision on the part of the game's designers, if fidelity to Tolkien were one of the game's key principles. On the other hand, if their goal was to use Middle-earth as the backdrop for more typical fantasy RPG activities, it makes perfect sense.

Since my friends and I weren't overly concerned with fidelity to Tolkien's literary works, none of this bothered us in the slightest. Much more important was the fact that we could create hobbits and elves and Dúnadan rangers and visit Mirkwood and Moria and all the other amazing locations described in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. There were orcs and spiders to be fought and great treasures to be won, all against the backdrop of a rich setting for which ICE provided some truly inspiring maps. Sure, our adventures didn't materially differ all that much from what we'd done in our Dungeons & Dragons sessions, but what did it matter? At that point in our roleplaying development, we were simply enamored of being able to use Tolkien's words, names, and locales and any more sophisticated concerns would have to wait.

In that respect, Middle-earth Role Playing gave us just what we wanted at the time, even if, in retrospect, it seems clear to me that MERP wasn't particularly well suited to its source material. I know many gamers of a certain vintage have great fondness for the game, in part, I think, because of the aforementioned maps and the Angus McBride artwork that graced the covers of the second edition of the game (which I never owned). There are worse reasons to have affection for a RPG, honestly, but I can't help but feel that MERP was something of a missed opportunity. Middle-earth holds so much potential as a fantasy roleplaying setting and one day I'd love to play in or referee a campaign set in it. 

33 comments:

  1. This was the first RPG I owned! Same cover. I ended up playing B/X first , but in a couple of years I was running a game of merp that lasted all of highschool (y7-12)

    Those were the days :)

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  2. Second edition made a better effort at adapting the system to the setting, and MERP is a head above Decipher's rpg, but it's still very much "D&D with a thin paint of Middle Earth".

    Talking about games that could decently handle Middle Earth, I think Forbidden Lands could make a run for it.

    An ICE product I liked very much were the three early "Tolkienquest" gamebooks, they were better than most more celebrated gamebooks.

    Talking of other retro games, did you ever write a post about Talisman? I can't find anything.

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  3. MERP was my second rpg experience and my friends and I loved it. You are right, the artwork and the gorgeous supplements were a big selling point. We never thought twice about the oddities of having tolkienesque characters casting "Ice Bolt, III". Due to my insistence, we transitioned to Rolemaster, which made the campaign way too slow (all the time going back and forth reading attack tables in the name of some ill-advised "realism") and eventually killed it. I didn't realise it at the time, though... I wish we'd sticked to MERP. Oh well.

    Our Tolkien mania faded as we grew up and wanted to be edgy and started playing Vampire, never to come back.

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  4. There's a tendency to think that a game set in Middle Earth should feel like a Tolkien story, which is perfectly understandable and quite appropriate, but can be difficult to manage. Not impossible: The One Ring did a decent job of capturing the feel of JRRT's stories through game mechanics.

    But I do feel that this desire for an "accurate" simulation can be a bit of a fool's errand sometimes, because although he created the world, Tolkien's stories only show one viewpoint of it. There is more going on in Middle Earth than a couple of quests. There is a whole world out there full of people -- and things that aren't people! -- doing other activities, most of which won't be interesting -- does anyone want to play a game of hobbit apple farmers gathering their harvest? -- but some will be more adventuresome.

    I'm not sure if I've explained my point well, but what I'm getting at is that if Middle Earth is as rich a world as it seems, there should be room for all sorts of adventures other than "a wizard and his friends go on a long walk", and that includes dungeon crawling, or high level political intrigue, or whatever.

    All of which is easier said than done. I ran a Middle Earth campaign a few years ago and I struggled with the tension between doing new things in the setting, while catering to the players' expectations of what Middle Earth was about, so I don't have all the answers!

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    1. You've explained yourself well and your point is well taken. It's a problem for almost any game set in an established literary/cinematic world. I think there's always something of a tension between hewing too closely to the original material (risking boredom) and straying so far from it that it's almost unrecognizable from its origins.

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    2. Really good points, Kelvin! I think you got your point through, as I totally get what you mean.

      MERP was my first game, and we had glorious fun just inhabiting the same world as Frodo and his friends. It was enough for us, and I think that its perfectly valid.

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    3. I am actually not sure the game system is as weird a match as it's sometimes portrayed. While your Middle Earth inhabitants might not go around casting Ice Bolt II at each others, I feel much of the things they cast as "magic" is there in the books, but just described as elven heritage or "pure blood" or highly skilled abilities of some of the characters in the saga. Viewed that way I think the system is a better fit that its given credit for.

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    4. Quite so! The way I see it, we know there are all sorts of strange folk - Men, Dwarves, Wizards, and what have you - travelling through Bree-land and staying a night or two at the Prancing Pony. They're not all carrying Rings of Power, nor holding the fate of Middle-earth in their hands, but certainly some of them are having their own adventures, and those are ripe with roleplaying possibilities.

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  5. Thank you for the review. I never played MERPS but the ads in The Dragon were very enticing.

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  6. thekelvingreen: You are putting my thoughts into words. If I were to play/run a Middle-Earth campaign, I would be much more keen on, say, the political intrigue and military conflicts of the Kin-strife or the collapse of the Arnorian kingdoms than just trying to do another Rings/Hobbit-like trek, which is what The One Ring seems to want to do.

    I think also that this issue is bigger than just a matter for games based on cinematic/literary licenses. It feels like the trend nowadays is to produce role-playing games that very tightly aims to simulate very specific and defined themes (say, Forbidden Lands), making it very obvious to the players and referees how the game is supposed to feel and what sort of adventures can take place within the confines of the rules/setting in question. This as opposed to the games of yore (such as AD&D or MERP) that had more of a ”the sky is the limit” sort of approach, often even encouraging campaigns to go from dungeon crawls and wilderness trekking to large-scale conflicts and political maneuverings up in the higher levels.

    While I’m sure that this newer approach is quite helpful when it comes to helping new players understand how to play and what to expect, as well as aiding the referee regarding how to set up an appropriate campaign, I can’t help but think that something is lost along the way, that the undefined sky is the limit-mindset makes for a(n at least potentially) richer gaming experience.

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  7. I still strongly recommend getting copies of Adventures in Middle Earth and the Loremaster Guide for AiME. Before that I was skeptical that a D&D edition could capture the feel of adventuring in Middle Earth but AiME does it and then some.

    And it is far more approachable than the narrative driven design of The One Ring.

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    1. I have heard others say that too, so you're not alone in your judgment. Since I don't own or play 5e, this isn't really an option for me. When Free League's game comes out, I'll be giving it a serious look, since I've enjoyed most of their other games.

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    2. You do yourself a disservice in not obtaining a copy. It is perhaps the clearest example of how a RPG can be altered into supporting a setting with different assumptions like Middle Earth by focusing on changing the lists (class, creatures, treasure, etc) and adding a select handful of new subsystem (AiME Journeys and Shadow). Yet the result is a 5th edition RPG.

      The One Ring while an excellent Middle Earth RPG is not instructive compared than any other purpose built system designed to support a system. Even the forthcoming 2nd edition from Free League.

      Finally as for not owning 5e, the free basic rules from Wizards is all you need to supply the bits missing from AiME.

      https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules

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    3. ANother comment is that there is no reason that the general design principle of AiME can't be applied to another editions of D&D like OD&D or AD&D. That by altering the "lists" the result still is recognizable as a version of the parent edition but supplies a very different experience that successfully evokes the feel of a specific setting.

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    4. You make excellent points, but it's probably moot, since I don't think the AiME books are easy to get hold of anymore, at least not in my neck of the woods.

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    5. Sadly true. The only suggestion I have is to put out a call that you are interested in the two core books and see if any of your readers are willing to sell you their copies.

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    6. I found AiME to be attractive in appearance, but pretty awful as a game owing to the terrible mechanics that basically call for way too much rolling in place of actual roleplaying. And the classes were some of the lamest I've ever seen in an RPG. So I sold all my AiME stuff. Plus, I'll never touch anything connected to 5e or WoTC again owing to their ridiculous SJW stances. So I'll likely skip the new game as I still own pretty much the whole MERP run.

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    7. While I like ICE's Middle-earth material a lot more than Robert Conley does, I do agree with him that AiME does a rather good job in adapting D&D to Middle-earth. And the AiME adventures do feel more "Tolkien-ish" than most of ICE's products ever did.

      As for the availability of AiME, will the Free League not be revising and publishing them in the future (now that they have the Tolkien license)?

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  8. Bought it the day it showed up on shelves. Was nice to see a lite version of RM.

    I still run any ME games (using other systems- Fantasy Age works well) in a middle Third Age period. I loved that about MERP and ICE's work.

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  9. I'd wager that another reason for why it was wise to put MERP in the middle of the third age/right after the great plague, besides allowing for more freedom for the player characters to make their mark on the world, is that there were simply more people, and more stuff to do in general, back then. When reading Tolkien's trilogy, one gets the impression that the crossroads village of Bree is pretty much the largest human settlement in all of Eriador by the time of the War of the Ring. During the latter half of the 17th century TA, by contrast, you at least had Arthedain alive and kicking, Tharbad was yet to be deserted (even though the rest of the petty kingdom of Cardolan had pretty much fallen apart), etc etc.

    Not to mention that Angmar is a much more interesting seat of the Big Dark Enemy than dull, dreary Mordor.

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  10. Unless it requires the players to sings songs every couple of hours its not "Tolkien" enough for me.

    Never really wanted to play a game in Middle Earth during the events of the novels. Just like any other epic story set during a conflict say Starwars or (shuder) Dragonlance the war is won by someone else so sure you can have your own adventure but its always in the shadow of the settings true heroes. So yeah maybe moraly ambitious D&D style treasure hunters set in the aftermath of the war of the rings raiding orc lairs and such is the best approach for Middle Earth.

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  11. Never played the system, but have the Mines of Moria supplement that I have used for constructing Dwarf holds for 30 years. Nicely done and gave adventure seeds for different eras.of Middle Earth so you could avoid playing in the time of the Ring bearer.

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  12. My AD&D games set in Middle-earth consider only The Hobbit as canonical (with background flavor sprinkled in from 1930's Quenta). I set them several years after the end of The Hobbit, and they are unabashedly AD&D games. I consider only happenstance that The Hobbit tells of a halfling finding a ring of invisibility and encountering goblins on his way to steal a red dragon's hoard. It could just as well have been a gnome illusionist finding a cube of force on his way to slay some achaierai.

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    1. Interesting! Do you use the full map from the LOTR, or just use the Hobbit map and make up your own version of what is off the edges of the map?

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    2. I utterly ignore the LOTR map. I use The Hobbit map with completely different (non-Tolkien) stuff off the edges.

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    3. I love this approach. I’ve been wanting to run a Star Wars game along similar lines for a long time, treating only the very first film (Episode IV) as canonical.

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    4. I really like both The Hobbit idea and the Star Wars idea. I've read forum threads in various places riffing on both ideas.

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  13. Ever since hearing about the idea of using Holmes Basic as a complete game, I have thought that it would be perfect for Middle Earth in the 3rd / 4th age. You don't see much beyond 1st or 2nd level spells in the books; I'm assuming that you apply some interpretation to the text like "black dart" = magic missile and so on. Maybe some of the real heavies could have broken out a 3rd level spell or two, but PCs will not attain such heights of power.

    I like MERP, especially some of the supplements, but some stuff goes too far, particularly the "Lofty Bridge" Mage spell list that gives Fly and Teleport spells; I would have expected to see villains using those if not Gandalf (would have saved the eagles some trouble though).

    The 1642 setting is interesting since the war in the north is intriguing and lasts almost 600 years (about half of it left to go by this time). A lot of the rest of the setting doesn't look the way we would expect (no Rohan, Dagorlad, Rammas Echor, etc.) so that time period seems really tuned to Eriador. Nothing wrong with that though.

    If D&D 3rd / Pathfinder is "Tom Clancy's Lord of the Rings", MERP combat is definitely Tarantino. Lots of ears, noses, fingers, etc. going missing. I don't mind the implied realism; if you get bitten by a wolf the size of a horse, it probably should take your arm off if all you're wearing is leather.

    Were I to run it again, I would never allow access to the "Lofty Bridge" list and maybe forbid mages altogether (as PCs; plenty of evil scions of Numenor studying witchcraft to beat up). But I think it probably still holds up for OSR purposes.

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  14. With my group I recently started a game of Under Hill, By Water, a wonderful mini-game tailored around Hobbits and their way of life. Using MERP maps and some of the sourcebooks' material as background we're enjoying immensely the minimalist feel. We set it at the start of the Fourth Age, in the Shire, of course, and the focus will be on the rebuilding of Arthedain and its effect on Hobbits' lives. We could have used The One Ring, which we played before, but, while well made, it has too many interaction rules and complications that we felt unimportant, while MERP would have been decisively too complicated. Check the game here (I have no relation with the guy who made it):
    http://riseupcomus.blogspot.com/2017/01/under-hill-by-water.html

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    1. The Rise Up Comus blog also has a great blog post about using the 1937 version of The Hobbit as a setting.

      http://riseupcomus.blogspot.com/2017/09/1937-hobbit-as-setting.html

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  15. Love MERP despite its issues. It was our main game of choice in the mid to late 90s. But man, those criticals made it ridiculously lethal. We lost lots of PCs and several others were maimed in various ways, as healing magic wasn't all that widespread.

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  16. I played in a few MERP games in the '80s and enjoyed them well enough, but never fancied running it myself because I found the system too fiddly for my taste.

    A few years ago, I discovered Mike Davison's little supplement "Drums in the Deep: Dungeon Crawling in Middle-earth". I thought it very elegant and clever (especially the idea of the Ranger class as a variant of the Cleric) and I was inspired to dig out the old I.C.E. module Hillmen of the Trollshaws and adapt it to make an adventure I'd be happy to run. "Drums in the Deep" is written for Holmes Basic but I used Swords & Wizardry Core, which is pretty close. The floor plans in those I.C.E. modules are often praised, and I was struck while stocking my version of Cameth Brin (the Dúnedain fortress which is principal location in Hillmen of the Trollshaws) by the fact that it's a very good example of a "Jacquayed" dungeon, with multiple entrances/exits and complex connections between different levels, some obvious and others concealed or well-guarded. Anyway, it worked well. We had a good time and my players commented positively on the way the Middle-earth setting affected the "flavour" of the game sessions. In general nowadays I prefer to run campaigns set in worlds of my own creation, but I'm also cooking up at least one more adventure set in Middle-earth, because sometimes it's just fun to put one's own twist on a familiar dish.

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  17. I have very fond memories of MERP! After AD&D, it was the game that my group played the most in high-school. I ran an epic campaign set in the early Fourth Age, wherein the PCs journeyed to the far north to recover the lost palantiri of Arthedain (this was based on an adventure outline in the campaign module, "Rangers of the North," which later would be developed into a full-blown campaign, "Palantir Quest").

    Yes, the magic system did not match well with the way magic is portrayed in Tolkien's stories (although later editions tried to fix this somewhat by introducing both a "corruption" mechanic and a "detection" mechanic in order to render the use of "flashy" magic more dangerous). But it was a fun system. It had all the good things from Rolemanster in it (critical hits, an intuitive skill system, etc.) but avoided RM's complexity. (Indeed, I regretted moving from MERP to RM back in the day -- the costs far outweighed the benefits.)

    And of course the maps (by Peter Fenlon) and art (especially the covers by Angus McBride, although I like the work of Charles Peale and others as well) were amazing.

    There is a MERP retro-clone -- well, not quite, but a game that is clearly inspired by MERP and compatible with its gaming materials -- called "Against the Darkmaster." I missed the kickstarter for it (I learned about it too late) but hope to get a hardcover copy in 2021. I'm sure nostalgia is colouring my judgement, but I still love the system!

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