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There Are Games Afoot!

© Michael Martinez

Chris Seeman, the editor of Other Hands, recently mentioned in an email to his subscribers that New Line Cinema has been talking to a couple of gaming companies about producing a new role-playing game based on the "Lord of the Rings" movies. Tolkien afficionados may tremble at the prospect of yet another role-playing game, with all its modules and histories, being unleashed on an unsuspecting fandom. Iron Crown Enterprises did a good job in producing a game, but through the years they made many departures from Tolkien. Some of the departures were dictated by lack of access to the original material. But some of the departures were also necessary in order to remain consistent with previously published materials. I think my first introduction to the Middle-earth Role-playing Game was an exquisite map a friend of mine showed me back when we were playing Rolemaster. I.C.E. produced Rolemaster, too, and MERP's rules were very similar to Rolemaster's. A lot of the sourcebooks allowed players and Gamemasters to carry ideas over from one game system to the other. The map in question was game designer Peter Fenlon's interpretation of the details of the entire continent (which most people inappropriately call "Middle-earth", though that name refers to the entire world) on which The Lord of the Rings is set. As maps go it's an impressive work, and I'm sure I still have a copy buried in a box somewhere. Unfortunately, it wasn't all that long before Christopher Tolkien published The Shaping of Middle-earth, and all of Fenlon's hard work was immediately invalidated. Many gamers insisted the Fenlon map was the "official" map because it was "authorized", whereas the Tolkien purists insisted that only JRRT's maps were "official", even if they only depicted a world from an earlier phase of Tolkien's writing career. Karen Wynn Fonstad provided us with her interpretation of the early Tolkien maps, ignoring the gaming system's map completely. And many people today regard Fonstad's book as authoritative, even though its geography is in some cases deplorable (for example, she trimmed about 100 miles off the width of Eriador). And as far as internal consistency goes, Fonstad gives us two locations for Rhosgobel (Radagast's home in southern Mirkwood). Nonetheless, maps are vital to extended role-playing adventures. A good game can last for years, and the players don't like being cooped up in the same dungeon (or old castle or cave) for too long. Eventually they want to take all their treasure and cash out, buying magical items, weapons, armor, slave girls, whatever. So the game master has to give the players a landscape for their imaginary world. If a game is set in Middle-earth, it's hard to explain that the players can't go past the Sea of Rhun because the map ends there. They'll quickly point to the histories Tolkien published and say, "Yeah, but the Easterlings came from off the map, so there must be something there."