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There Are Games Afoot! - Page 7

© Michael Martinez

A role-playing game needs monsters for the player-characters to combat. Tolkien seems to have left plenty of them wandering through Eriador, the Misty Mountains, and Mirkwood. But a role-playing game also needs new horizons and vistas. If the players have plumbed the depths of the dungeon, they need a new dungeon. If they have visited every nook and cranny on The Map, they need a new map. But a Tolkien-based role-playing game also needs a credible villain. In the Third Age that villain was Sauron. He was not overthrown until the end of the age. But he was also remote and distant. It should not be plausible for player-characters to invade Sauron's fortress, kill him, and get away. In fact, they can't (technically) even know that the master bad guy is Sauron until near the end of the Third Age. If the role-playing game is going to allow people to run adventures in, say, the 15th century, then there are two apparent dark powers the Witch-king of Angmar and the Necromancer of Dol Guldur. And no one knows much about the Necromancer. If the player-characters have to take out a major bad guy, then he should still be an underling of one of these two established characters. For example, why did Angmar destroy Rhudaur in the war of 1409? The hill-men who had taken control of the kingdom were supposedly in league with Angmar. Unless they had proved to be disloyal, getting rid of them wouldn't make much strategic sense. But if an adventuring party had taken out the chief sorceror of the hill-men, rendering them ineffective, then maybe there would be no further need for Rhudaur. It would serve better as just another wasteland. An inevitable consequence of letting people run adventures in a documented world (or historical period) is that they can second-guess the outcomes of their decisions. They know how the actual events transpired. What can they do to change matters, to balance the game in their favor? Players will look at a role-playing game in this fashion. On the one hand, everyone knows that Sauron is the bad guy and that he posed as the Necromancer in Dol Guldur. On the other hand, why was the Necromancer so unassailable? We know that Sauron was vulnerable. He died twice in the Second Age. He died at the end of the Third Age. And if he was slowly recovering his strength throughout the Third Age, it must follow that he was considerably weaker earlier in the age. Hence, he should have been easier to kill before he had gotten most of his power back. Logic like that is hard to oppose. You can't just say, "Well, your characters haven't heard enough about the Necromancer to think he's a worthy target"; the players can just say their characters are curious about him.

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