New System, New Face: Giving A Child Crippling Anxiety With The One Ring Roleplaying Game 2E

The One Ring has been on my radar for years, but I never really bothered to learn any part of the system until recently. This is because I'm a hack and a fraud, and learning new stuff scares me. I also greatly overestimated how important it was to have a physical copy of the game's proprietary symbol-and-tengwar dice in front of you.

Turns out both clauses were (mostly) untrue, so let's dive in shall we?

The Game Itself

TOR is a d12 + xd6 roll-over system in which you perform tasks by trying to beat a target number (usually 14, can go higher or lower) by rolling the Feat die. That's the d12 with Sauron and Gandalf runes for 11 and 12 respectively. To this you add a number of Success dice (d6 with a thinly outlined 1-3, bolded 4 and 5, and a 6 accompanied by the Tengwar letter Lambë, which means "tongue" for some reason) equal to your number of ranks in the skill being used. It's pretty simple, and beneath all the fancy presentation, generic sets of dice are perfectly usable.

TOR is set in the Third Age of jurt's Middle-Earth, although the exact time and place differs between editions. The 1st edition released by Cubicle 7 approximately five hundred years ago back in 2011 is set in Rhovanion in between the events of The Hobbit and The Fellowship. The 2nd edition published by Fria Ligans AKA Free League Publishing in 2020 is set back west in Eriador in the Third Age 2965, a year that had nothing canonical going for it other than the birth of Samwise's older brother Hamson.

The editions differ in a few ways that are mostly minor, meaning that the majority of the content published for one edition can be used for the other with a little bit of fiddling. Which is perfect for me, because as soon as I started to explore the game in earnest I wanted to use the setting and supplements for 1E combined with the mechanics and options of 2E.

Mixing & Matching

I settled on 2E because it had solo rules called Strider Mode written for it a few years ago, and I've been slowly pushing myself to explore that avenue of gaming for a while. But the character I wanted to make would have to be located in Rhovanion, so I took the liberty of ransacking several 1E books to build up the lore and backstory.

The 1E sourcebook The Heart of the Wild details much of Mirkwood and the Vales of Anduin and their inhabitants, including a people of mixed Northmen and Easterling heritage called the Erringmen. Though descended from the Balchoth who once warred with Gondor at the Dark Lord's behest, they've largely given up their past ways and live in peace with their Woodmen neighbors as they meander back and forth through the Vales, herding oxen and generally living as pastoral nomads.

The Erringmen, as inventions of TOR, are less yikes than the depictions of other Easterlings from jurt's canon, although they aren't without one or two problematic implications in this book that I'd be remiss not to touch on. For example, an Erringman NPC named Valderic (they seem to favor the same Gothic-inspired names as the Northmen) is "strong" in his Easterling heritage, being squat, wide, and of sallow complexion.

Being coded with east Eurasian features wouldn't be a problem by itself, except he's also the one named Erringman singled out as reverting to the forbidden old ways; hanging trophy skulls from his war-chariot, dabbling in witchcraft, and even visiting the abandoned ruins of Dol Guldur more than once. Wickedness reasserting itself from deep in someone's family tree is a trope that exists in the Legendarium, but combining that with Valderic's physical traits makes it feel like the kind of negative racial essentialism that TOR generally avoids. (The game embraces "positive" essentialism pretty heavily meanwhile, what with heroic cultures and how closely a character hews to their virtues being one of the primary expressions of character growth and advancement in the game.)

That all said, I love the Erringmen. They are much more than one shady character writeup. They're shown as resourceful and tough, at home in their new home regardless of the grumbling of their Woodmen neighbors. They provide a fun opportunity to interact with a type of culture you hardly ever see fleshed out in the source material. They raise so many roleplaying and worldbuilding possibilities for Rhovanion and beyond. And, they're the subjects of an illustration in the book that I just find endlessly charming:

Wanderers by merlkir, for like the dozenth time on this blog,
but actually used for its intended subject this time around.

Of course I can't have all the nice things I want, so the Erringmen are purely an NPC culture with no opportunity provided to play as them in the book. Which is fine by me, because that just provides me with the opportunity to get creative.

Jumping ahead to 2E and the digital exclusive Peoples of Wilderland, we get updates to most of the player cultures from the 1st edition who were moved away from when the 2nd moved its focus west to Eriador. Included are the Woodmen of Wilderland, who have lived next to and within Mirkwood for ages despite all the dark and vile things emerging from the forest nowadays. They're slightly insular and unfriendly people as a result, but constant foes of the Shadow.

Perhaps they'd hate to know that their cultural characteristics and virtues are easily bent toward building a character of Erringman ancestry: they're good with axes and bows which both cultures love, they have a virtue to gain a loyal hunting dog, they're doughty warriors skilled at skirmish tactics, and they have ranks in Explore, Hunting, and other things the Erringmen likely also rely upon as they travel the Anduin.

Shortly before having this idea I had been reading a list of leaders of the Hunnic empire on Wikipedia. You know, like a normal person does. And I was struck by how many of them have Latinized or Germanicized names by which they're known in most European sources, while their original Hunnic names are little-attested or only guessed at via linguistic reconstruction. This too, I folded into my little homebrew here alongside the nomads and standoffish neighbors.

I didn't use it at all below because by the time I found it I'd already gotten going, but if you're the type who enjoys lifepath generators, they released one of those in this same line of e-books.

The Character Concept, Finally

Soon I hatched the idea of a Woodman and an Erringwoman who met for what was supposed to be a solitary and surreptitious fling one night when her clan encamped outside his village beneath the eaves of Mirkwood so their peoples could trade and share news. It didn't work out that way however, so when the woman's clan rolled back into the clearing before the forest a year later, the Woodman was very surprised to find his brief flame holding their son.

Thus was born Balambyr, as his mother named him, or Balamer as his father's people chose to render it.

Until he weaned he stayed with his mother, but as soon as he could bear to be away, his two families divided his time between them according to the migratory pattern of the Erringmen. He wintered in his father's cabin (for he was forced out of his family's lodge by the scandal of his unmarried dalliance with an outsider), and summered in his mother's wain, which could be anywhere from the western bank of the Celduin to the near side of Rhûn, depending.

It wasn't easy growing up split between two worlds like this. Though his father's family insisted he acknowledge and care for his son (which he probably would have done regardless), no love was lost between them and Balamer the Bastard, as he was sometimes called by Woodmen when they thought him out of earshot. His mother's kin were more accepting but far more demanding, expecting him to pull his weight every migration and thinking him soft for the the six months he spent "just sitting around" each year.

But he survived, even if he did not thrive. From his father he learned forestry and woodworking, and from his mother herding and pathfinding. Both peoples favored the long-hafted axe and the bow, so Balambyr received training in both year-round. They were also the occasion for the few, fond moments where both his parents were together with him in the spring and autumn.

His thirteenth birthday saw him gifted the runt of a litter, much like himself, whom he named Tomyr- or Tom, depending on where they happened to be at the moment. They bonded quickly, and before long were seen everywhere together. And together they stayed safe, as darkness began to billow once again out of the depths of Mirkwood like a cloud.

It didn't come as a surprise when, at the portentous age of sixteen years, a certain glint entered Balambyr's eyes. The reluctant acceptance of his mother's people was gradually won through year after year of hard nomadizing, but he was still desperate to prove himself to the Woodmen at large, or else prove to himself that he was better than all their misgivings. So with a heavy heart and his mother's begrudging blessings, Balambyr's father took him deep into a part of the forest he had never ventured before.

There, in a little village named Rhos, he was introduced to an odd old bearded fellow in a brown robe who often patronized the exploits of the young and daring folk of Wilderland.

Basic Stats

Strider Mode mostly changes how the flow of gameplay works in order to make things less insurmountable for a single character, but it also modifies the character creation process somewhat.

The first step is unchanged: choose your character's Heroic Culture and a set of attributes to use. Since I'm using the Woodmen of Wilderland as a base for Balambyr I picked them and went with the safe, boring choice of 4 Strength (might, dexterity, physical presence), 5 Heart (emotional intelligence, empathy, passion), and 5 Wits (cleverness, attention, ingenuity).

Because I picked Woodmen, Balambyr also gets their Cultural Blessing, a passive ability every member of that culture gets as a baseline. For Woodmen, it's Wood-Goer, the ability to add +2 to Parry rating while fighting in forested environments. It's more circumstantial than I would like, but not bad for someone likely to skulk around Mirkwood for a few adventures.

More juicy than that is my choice of 1 Favoured skill. Favoured skills basically give you advantage, letting you keep the better of 2 Feat dice rolls. Woodmen favor Hunting and Healing, so I went with Healing. Losing a monster's tracks is bad, but failing to staunch a bleeding wound is just death.

Next I subtract my attribute scores from 20 to get the Target Number for each. This is the default difficulty I have beat for most rolls in the game. 16, 15, and 15 aren't the easiest numbers to beat, but there will be ways around that in the future.

From the attribute scores I also derive Endurance, Hope, and Parry; basically hit points, a pool of points to spend to overcome one's limits, and the number enemies need to beat to hit the PC in combat.

Spending Experience

The next step is the first real opportunity for characterization and player choice, because I get to spend 15 (10 in the non-solo base game) experience points from previous adventures on skill and combat proficiency ranks. I left the default axe and bow ranks from Woodmen alone, and spent my points on skills to improve the skills not boosted by Woodmen background, especially putting 3 ranks in Travel to make those long, solitary journeys a little less dangerous.

I ended up with at least 1 rank in everything, because the prospect of solo play amplifies my fear that if I don't bring at least a little bit of everything to the table I will be punished for it; it's like jack of all trades, but the universe is probing me for weaknesses. But Balambyr is still decidedly an outdoorsy type with good starting ranks in Awareness, Hunting, Explore, etc.

Distinctive Features

Balambyr's Distinctive Features come next. Distinctive Features are major aspects of a character's personality or bearing, used to aid roleplaying and inform how they might go about a given situation. They can also be used mechanically, by making a roll Inspired if one of a character's Features is particularly useful for a skill check.

Inspired rolls gain +2d6 instead of +1d6 for every point of Hope you choose to spend, which can be huge if you're in a pinch.

Of course, Strider Mode players get the Strider feature by default, which makes all of your skill rolls Inspired by virtue of their lonesome self-reliance and grit, so the 2 features I chose to give Balambyr came down to roleplaying entirely. He is both True-Hearted for his sometimes inconvenient sincerity, and Wary because a childhood spent without a meaningful sense of belonging in every-shifting circumstances has given him anxious hypervigilance superpowers.

Calling

After that comes Calling, which you could compare to character background packages in other games. These are your Captains, Champions, Scholars, and Treasure Hunters, among other professions that lend themselves well to creating adventurers.

I dithered about on this for a while because I couldn't decide between Messenger and Warden. I honestly might have preferred going with the 1E Wanderer calling instead because it's thematically more appropriate to Balambyr's background of travel. Obviously nomadism ≠ itineracy or romanticized ideas of vagrancy in real life, but in a fantasy game I take what I can get.

Ultimately I fell on the side of Messenger because it inherited most of the Wanderer's mechanics, even if they've been reoriented around an implicitly interpersonal role, acting as ambassador and uniter of far-flung communities. Also because the more I think about it, Wardens and the Rangers they're modeled on just feel a little too much like vigilante border patrol agents and nooo thank you.

Messenger gives me another choice of Favoured skills, which ended up being Courtesy and Travel. I don't see Balambyr actually being all that magnetic in terms of personality, he's just very attentively polite and patient with strangers.

Balambyr also gets a new feature from Messenger: Folk-Lore. His travels have furnished him with knowledge of a scattered assortment of local customs, beliefs, languages, and other things that help him get along wherever he finds himself. This feels very appropriate for Balambyr's time with the Erringmen. Who knows how many other communities besides his father's they pass by each year on their long arc from east to west?

One's Calling also comes with a downside, however. Each has a unique Shadow Path, the shape and texture of a character's corruption which plays out in the event that the Shadow overtakes them and twists their ideals or amplifies unhealthy and harmful traits.

For Balambyr this would be Wandering-Madness: a self-destructive wanderlust that leaves one bereft of home and belonging as they lose the ability to put down roots and form the connections necessary to want to defend the good things of the world. Travel stops being a joy or even a means, and becomes a ruinous coping mechanism. Always moving, never resting, chained to a road that goes ever on and on.

So basically he gets Avoidant Personality Disorder with a side of Dromomania if I fail too many saving throws.

I swear, I was trying to be lighthearted when I started this one.

Gear

Our poor Bastard isn't going to face the winding road all alone and illequipped, at least.

Starting adventurers get a selection of war gear and trinkets to choose from, including 1 weapon in each proficiency they have a rating in, as well as your choice of armor, limited by your character's starting social class.

Naturally Balambyr takes a short bow and a long-hafted axe with him. I also picked up a leather corslet for him, because it's the heaviest "light" armor available, it's the fanciest his social class can afford, and I just really like saying the word "corslet". It's one of those armor words you don't read all that often nowadays, mostly displaced by close-enough terms like hauberk or cuirass. I think the last time I saw it was during one of my brief stints trying to read the original Conan short stories?

Anyway, mercifully for Balambyr's back and his bookkeeping, all mundane items of travel are presumed to be accounted for in TOR, so no need to keep track of nor weigh individual sets of clothing, packs, rations, etc.

The last thing to note is my choice of Useful Item. Useful Items add +1d to noncombat checks with their designated skill as determined upon item acquisition, like a hunting knife for +1d Hunting, or a soothing balm for +1d Healing. There's no real limit to what you pick so long as it's a thing that can be possessed and potentially lost.

Balambyr has a lot of options to choose from for useful items if I draw upon his background. It could be the whittling knife his father gave him, or the thumb ring he received when he started practicing archery. It could be a really nice pair of boots he was gifted before going off to meet his mysterious patron. But since I don't see any prohibitions against useful items being living things, I decided to make it Tomyr. She's not an accomplished hunting hound just yet (I can add that utility to her later on in Balamyr's adventuring career), but her nose has helped keep her two-legged companion on the right trail more than once, so I figure she's worth +1d Travel.

Adventurers technically also start with mounts, but only if they're from backgrounds of Common or higher standard of living, so no pony for our Frugal woodboy.

Finally, each adventurer gets a starting Reward and Virtue from a modest pool of each. Rewards and virtues are your main forms of character advancement in the game, representing gifts granted to you by your friends and allies among the Free Peoples and your own personal growth and ability, respectively.

I had no idea what reward to pick so I went with making my corslet of Cunning Make, which reduced the armor's Load rating by 2 to make for lighter travel. I also bent to the urge to generalize once again and picked Prowess as my virtue, reducing Balambyr's Strength Target Number by 1 to give him flat 15s across the board.

The Sheet

And that's a wrap. Unless I made any grave errors, my sheet is complete. Or it will be once I put everything in a nice form-fillable PDF. Fortunately I happened upon this dang pretty one when I started this post way too many months ago. Its small space for rewards and virtues leaves something to be desired for any but the greenest of adventurers, but the style goes a long way toward making up for it.

The Future

One flaw in pretty much all of my New System, New Face posts up to this point that I've noticed has been that they just peter out after the sheet's done and I don't close it with anything especially noteworthy other than a recap of my feelings toward the system. I think my writing all this shows I'm into TOR, so I figured I'll keep the focus on Balambyr and imagine a bit of a future for him instead.

There's no shortage of danger around Mirkwood for Radagast to send him to deal with or keep tabs on, so I suspect that will occupy him for the first year or two of his career. In that time, with luck, he may strengthen his relationship with the woodmen in general, and his father in particular. But if they fail to fully appreciate him, so be it; he'll learn his worth. From there he may begin to travel farther afield as the situation calls for it, perhaps running into fellow adventurers along the way, perhaps not.

Balambyr's second virtue will be the Hound of Mirkwood cultural virtue for woodmen, so that he and Tomyr can properly adventure together at last. I'll just have a very hard time allowing myself to use the option where Tomyr can take a wound instead of him.

(Don't worry, The Dog Doesn't Die! The rules stipulate that you can bring them back next session with a successful Heal, or after the next Adventuring Phase otherwise.)

Ultimately, the shadowy eaves of Mirkwood will prove to have been shelter for Balambyr rather than a prison. For when he has proven himself capable and steadfast of heart, Radagast will charge him with a mission he would grant to no other, for no one else in his employ has ever seen the places he once visited yearly. The old man would very much like to hear news from a pair of friends he has not spoken to in a very long time.

The next time Balambyr joins his mother's caravan into the east (a journey already fraught with danger as Darkness expands its reach), he must keep an eye out for a pair of equally strange fellows in blue...

The Blue Wizards by TurnerMohan

An Alternate Universe of Dwarvish Art & Architecture as Glimpsed in MERP's Mines of Moria

Or, a Manifestation of Furt's Guilt Over not Doing More with the Art History Courses He Took in College

I've tangled with Rolemaster's little sibling in the past and thought I was done with it for good, but a recent interest in megadungeons led me to crack open Middle-Earth Role Play's take on the Mines of Moria, particularly with an eye toward what the book does with the deepest depths of the dwarf hold and the Nameless Things known to lurk therein.

I was disappointed by a lack of support for the latter, outside of a handful of paragraphs gesturing at the dark mysteries and scary campaigns one could place down there. But I soon found myself thoroughly distracted by something else that I decided to spin into a whole blog post: the book's art direction, or rather, directions.

If you know MERP, you probably know the MERP art MO: slap an Angus McBride painting on the cover and then fill the pages with black-and-white illustrations by the omnipresent Liz Danforth. Danforth's style features both action scenes and still life portraiture, often very naturalistic with a bit of art nouveau throughout, but still possessing a clear place in the timeline of LotR art with inspirations going back decades, all the way back to the first doodles penned by jurt¹ himself. It is no different in Moria for MERP 2E, except there's far more art deco in keeping with how most Tolkien dwarves are presented.

As far as I'm concerned she is MERP's visual identity, with very few exceptions. But it just so happens that we're talking about one of those exceptions today, rather than Liz's work, except where comparing and contrasting feels appropriate. She will come back at the end though.

The second interior artist in Moria is one Kent Buries, a name I'm unfamiliar with but which is apparently closely tied to a whole lot of Palladium books. Right from his first piece on page 18, his take on dwarves is... different.

Initially I mistook the helmet for a bird face headdress or some kind of weirdly floppy hood, since they're out in some nasty weather. But then I saw how the ridges sit and I realized that they were actually rock, or something emulating it. That, plus the incredibly chunky-looking mace at the dwarf's side confused me.

I'd only been skimming the text up to this point and thought, maybe these aren't dwarves? Maybe they're hide-wearing Umli, the culture of half-dwarves invented for the game, who live in the wastes between Forodwaith and the northernmost mountains. But with my second look at these dwarves a few pages later, I quickly abandoned that theory.

Facing toward the viewer rather than away, we can see the unmitigated lumpy glory of this dwarf's weirdly organic and bulbous armor and weaponry. The knobs and protrusions aren't random despite how they first looked to me, and care was taken in making each piece symmetrical. His helmet reminds me of something a one-off villain from a sentai series would wear. I was confused and perplexed.

Yet another face-to-face with a dwarf in strange armor. This one lacks the winter weather furs the previous dwarves wore, and that causes an odd effect where it almost seems like there's no distinction between armor and exposed skin, like he grew this out of himself rather than putting it on. Combined with those thick cords like pieces of tubing that keep appearing as part of their gear, he almost looks sci-fi.

Here are some standard Danforth dwarves a few pages later for contrast:

Notice the radically different—by which I mean very traditional—armor and clothing they wear, obviously inspired by real life human material culture from various parts of medieval Europe. Notice also the noncanonical lack of facial hair on that one dwarf woman; at least get some sideburns going, girl!

By now the book had moved indoors from the historical timelines and overviews on the geography and climate of the Misty Mountains, to move toward the domestic. The books in this series love going over every facet of their subjects in grueling detail, to the point that we're treated to some Khuzdul vocabulary constructed specifically for the game. We're also treated to this... excitable fellow.

Five minutes into Smith, Flux & Chill
and he gives you this look.

By now the text had clearly established that this book is about the regular dwarves of Moria, from the time before Khazad-dûm was abandoned. These are just two artists' very different depictions of the same community, presented side-by-side without explanation or comment on the part of the book. But the textual descriptions of specific parts of Moria lean far closer to Liz Danforth's illustrations, so Kent's stuff is just kinda... there. The readers are left to deal with these incongruities by themselves, and at least for me, it bugged the hell out of me.

Then I got to the first Kent Buries depiction of Morian(?) architecture, and the wheels finally started to spin.

While there are some clear signs of artifice like the squared column bases and that carved archway in the back, the number of lumpy and organic features in this hall of lamps and light stones is unmissable. These dwarves deliberately sculpted the room with these rounded features in mind, a far cry from the clean lines and sharp angles of traditional dwarvish art deco.

An armory receives the same treatment later in the book, although I couldn't readily describe it as one if the marginalia didn't describe it as such:

Those might be shields hanging on more of those chunky cords they like so much, but the shapes along the wall and column more closely resemble teardrop-shaped eyes to me. The weapons held aloft by the procession of dwarves are fairly mundane-looking, though once again their helmets are very ridged and rocky-looking, as is the knife or short sword carried by the one in the foreground.

I can't quite tell if that axe up top is just an illustration separate from the scene or a gigantic capstone decoration, but it's possibly the most raw and nature brut thing (a term which I've made up unless it's actually a real thing) in this whole series of images in either case, with a head made of slapped-together rocks that feels like it belongs in the hands of a Gruul Clan barbarian from Magic: the Gathering or something.

This next image was seemingly drawn by Kent by himself, yet within it the Kentish and Danforthian dwarf styles clash almost comically:

This incredibly normal-looking Chamber of Mazarbul with recognizable furnishings and fixtures nonetheless hosts a group of very lumpy dwarves, whose material culture apparently didn't develop so far in that aesthetic direction as to create books made out of boulders, or lecterns shaped like an outcropping of flowstone. The pattern on the wall, though difficult to see through the shaft of sunlight, even resembles the Danforth image of "axehead" pattern stonework described elsewhere in the book.

I don't know how to address this clash, and it's kind of the exception that proves my hypothesis later, but it's weird and amusing all the same.

A "freestanding" Kentish dwarf building appears elsewhere, this one a rare glimpse at the dwarves' surface level architecture.

Unlike the armory, this building's function as a watchtower is very much evident, but it arrived at that functionality by being grown and carved out of an existing rock formation, rather than creating something with blocks and mortar. This is the closest dwarvish equivalent I can think of to the broader fantasy trope of elves or other woodland beings living inside still-living trees that have been nurtured and grown around their homes.

I had been sharing these pictures with a Discord server, and one person pointed out how similar the hall of lamps and armory look to those old "Net of Being" paintings by Alex Grey, which you might know better as the thing where they got the face for that one TOOL album cover.

It would actually be pretty easy to explain all of this as dwarves listening to TOOL and taking a bunch of shrooms and call it a day, and I'm only half-joking. I think dwarves would be fairly likely to cultivate weird forms of mushrooms given their limited forays into agriculture seem to focus on underground-friendly crops and root vegetables like earth-bread.

But instead I choose to ascribe a deeper, albeit probably accidental meaning to this art style.

Do you all remember the Glittering Caves, where Éowyn and the civilians at Helm's Deep took refuge? 

Like a handful of other locations in Middle-Earth, they were directly inspired by a real-life place jurt had visited in his life, in this case the caves of Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. Both Cheddar Gorge and the Glittering Caves' depiction in the live-action Two Towers film (which I think was just a set constructed for the scene rather than any existing cave where it'd be a nightmare to safely navigate dozens of extras and equipment around?) are dissolved limestone caverns struck through with stalactites, stalagmites, bands of minerals, columnar rock formations, etc. and as a result have an overall extremely lumpy character.

Early in the Fourth Age it was the site of one of the last new dwarf colonies, where Legolas' and Gimli's bromance really started burning after the former listened to the latter's breathless adoration for the natural beauty of the caves and how his people would work to emphasize it rather than just use it to extract precious minerals. To quote Gimli's reply to Legolas warning him not to tell all dwarves about that pretty little place:

‘No, you do not understand,’ said Gimli. ‘No dwarf could be unmoved by

such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore,

not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of

blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of

flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap – a small chip of

rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day – so we could work, and as

the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that

are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights,

Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazad-dûm; and

when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills

were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return.’ ²

Gimli's fantasy, which eventually becomes policy enacted by him as lord of the Glittering Caves, is one of gentle stewardship of nature and its beauty. It fits comfortably within jurt's quasi-nationalistic, anthropocentric (or in this case, Khazâdocentric?) style of environmentalism in which conservation of nature's utility and beauty by and for the benefit of people is emphasized higher than raw as-is preservation. And in the distant future of the Fourth Age, I could easily see parts of the caves resembling that hall of lamps, or that craggy tower.

It's never emphasized nearly as much as with those caves, but dwarvish appreciation of their rocky homes is present throughout the universe. So I think it's reasonable to believe many more examples of naturalistic architecture could be found throughout the many dwarf-holds of the world, their history stretching as far back as the days when Aulë was finally permitted to wake his children up.

And if that style of building, mimicking the lumpiness and organic shapes of natural caverns, has been present for so long, isn't it also reasonable to think it would go on to influence other areas of dwarvish art, artifice, and aesthetics? Wouldn't those motifs and stylized landforms eventually find their way into smaller creations, weapons, armor, and even clothing? It's a little like how many real-life settled, agricultural societies adopt vegetal motifs which get so widely used and abstracted that eventually they cease to clearly resemble plants.

The Kent Buries illustrations, then, can be read almost like glimpses into an alternate universe where dwarf art and architecture was informed from the ground up (heheh) by that adherence to the forms of nature, rather than by the mastery of intricate stonework and yawning volumes shown in most dwarf depictions.

The images don't culminate in anything, and as I said before it's likely they aren't really "saying" anything at all, it was just one artist's personal style placed in an unusual context. In all likelihood I bet the reason for the two illustrators being present side-by-side at all was because of some long-ago contract, schedule, or budgeting reasons. But all meaning is fabricated out of nerve impulses and the consequences of random chance, so I guess why not read a little extra into it?

I consider the Buries illustrations the star of this book for that reason, as well as the reason that later in the book Liz Danforth sins against the entirety of Eä and all its creatures with this absolute nightmare of a Frodo face:

Delayed Happy Halloween, here's your dose of horror for the year.

At least we got that Absolute Twunk of a Samwise coming to the rescue like a snack back there.

¹ Jurt being my way of verbalizing the letters J.R.R.T., in typical Furtive fashion. Similar to how in the rare circumstances where I have to talk about him, George R. R. Martin is rendered down to gurm. I like how simultaneously "cute" and diminishing it sounds.

²  The Two Towers, "The Road to Isengard".

New System, New Face: Bumbling through Rolemaster's Geeky Little Sibling, Middle-Earth Role-Play

It finally occurred to me that I should
head these posts with an image of the
actual game.

Ye gods, I miss Warhammer- and not for the setting.

At least in WFRP I felt some intuitive grasp of the mechanics as I worked through making characters.

Here, I've written an entire post and I still don't know what to do for Middle-Earth Role-Play.

Fortunately its initials perfectly match the noise that flaps out of my mouth when my eyes glaze over at the fact that over half of this 270-page tome is made up of appendices needed to explain each part of the first half:

MERP!

Alright, that's my last awful joke for the moment. Let's dig in, shall we?

Game/Context/More Rambling

MERP was yet another d100 skills-based fantasy game spawned by the 80s, with the notable distinction of being licensed to use the world of Lord of the Rings as its setting. There have been several other Tolkien Enterprises-licensed TTRPGs over the past four decades, including Cubicle 7's current work on Adventures in Middle-Earth, but MERP was the first of the bunch, published by Iron Crown Enterprises in 1982 and updated with a second edition in 1993.

MERP runs on an apparently simplified/streamlined hack of the Rolemaster system, also designed by the people from I.C.E. Rolemaster is chunky. It's crunchy. It places emphasis on granular, lethal combat where weapon and armor types interact differently, crits and fumbles have pages of tables, and you can earn XP per injury taken. It's a weird thing to pair with LotR in terms of execution and tone.

Of course you don't need a perfect system to be able to tell the story you want, since story flows from the storytellers involved rather than the mechanics they're using, but it certainly seems more difficult to do when the two parts are tugging in opposite directions.

Characters progress via a leveling and class system unlike the other games I've looked at so far here. There are six classes or "professions" that are roughly analogous to both AD&D character classes and to the roles embodied by many of the famous characters from LotR- warrior, ranger, scout, bard, animist, and mage, arranged in descending order of combat ability and ascending order of spellcasting ability, though pretty much anyone can conjure a trick or swing a stick if direly needed.

Yes, magic is a thing PCs can acquire in this game. It's rarely anything as flashy as the few attack or utility spells Gandalf throws out there in the books, and there are mechanisms in place to restrain both rampant spellcasting and the intent behind it if you want to remain a non-corrupted protagonist. Different spell schools or "ways" are highly specialized and limited by class. There's one way dedicated to walking or running on different surfaces, and another strictly dealing with staunching blood loss. But limitations aside, it is still conspicuous supernatural power learned and wielded by mortals (and elves) that is not conflated with sorcery originating from darkness, as Tolkien tended to treat it.

Tolkien hated describing things as "magic", and anything that looked that way from the outside was generally explainable as being just really high skill, craftsmanship, or a gifted blessing from a higher power of some sort. In my experience Tolkien purists dislike it when games make that jump to accessible magic, but many more people enjoy it because using magic is something people commonly find appealing in fantasy. Despite how often I prattle on about the universe or hyperlink to Tolkien Gateway like an appeal to authority, I am decidedly not a purist, so I have no qualms with the stylistic choice.

The default setting for MERP is, well, Middle-Earth, but not in any time period extensively touched upon by the books. Most of the modules take place a few years after the Great Plague of T.A. 1635, or year 1635 of the Third Age for those of you who at least occasionally see the light of day. The War of the Ring isn't for another 1,400 years in this era, and the Shire is a brand new community, founded barely four decades ago.

It's a time when the profound emptiness of the lands of Middle-Earth that we see in the trilogy has just truly begun, thanks in part to that aforementioned plague that killed hundreds of thousands of people. The population will only dwindle further from here, until barely any towns or cities exist for Sauron to try and take in a millennium-and-a-half. Salty Dan made an amusing observation from atop his Throne a little while ago about how weak and unimpressive this makes Sauron and how wonky it makes Tolkien's sense of scale and history when you take any time to think about it, but I'm getting ahead of myself now.

For now, it's the last hurrah of party-based adventuring in Middle-Earth. Let's populate it with a fresh new face or two.

So. Many. Tables.

After slogging through the first 77 pages of the MERP rulebook, you finally come to Part V: Designing A Character. That should give you an idea of how dense the rules are, simplified ruleset or no. The ten steps of character generation, as given by the book are:

1. Decide in general what type of character to play.*
2. Roll and assign your character's stats.*
3. Choose a race for your character.*
4. Choose a profession for your character.*
5. Determine role traits and background.
6. Develop your character's adolescence skills.
7. Develop your character's apprenticeship skills.
8. Outfit your character.
9. Total your character's penalties and bonuses.
10. Develop a persona for your character.

The asterisks mean these steps are all interrelated with one another.

As I went through each step, it ended up being simpler or much less significant than it was presented above or throughout the rest of the book, and the whole list could easily be reordered and condensed into half the above steps. That long-windedness throughout the book is a thing I think I can attribute to it being a crunchy '80s RPG- short, efficient instructions weren't the norm yet, and my mindset needs time to readjust to the delivery of information.

And here I thought I was an expert on rambling, inefficient writing. Oh well.

Step 1 also knocks out steps 3, 4, and 10 in my case. I want to make a female dwarf scout of the Blacklocks clan who's had one hell of a trek west into Endor- a refugee turned survivor, far from her ancestral home in the Orocarni.

I do want to give a shout-out to the sheer number of cultures characters can come from in MERP. Every variety of elf is available, plus dwarves and hobbits, as well as every human culture from Dunlendings to Easterlings to the people of Far Harad- even the Variags of Khand, those one-line wonders from the Battle of Pelennor Fields, get fleshed out with licensed fanfiction into a playable background. And that's not even counting the optional orcs, and trolls of all groups!

I really appreciate this. If I ever get back to my On the Trail of the Blue Wizards campaign idea about peoples of "darkness" finding heroism, I will definitely use much of the fluff of MERP's culture entries.

Back to our girl, though.

Her name is Grid, derived from the Old Norse name Gríðr, which could mean vehemence or peace depending. I figured that would be appropriate for a Tolkien dwarf when virtually all of their names are Norse in origin, but I also thought it would be grimly amusing if the way the name was decided on was because her workaholic architect dad couldn't be bothered to look up from his workbench when she was born, and he just jammed on the first thing his eyes fell upon- the blueprint grid.

Next comes rolling the 7 stats; Strength, Agility, Constitution, Intelligence, Intuition, Presence, and also Appearance- yes, this game shows its considerable age by having an objective physical hotness stat, and yes the higher your stat is, the better your initial reactions from people are.

I wanted to say that also feels tonally inconsistent with the setting because initially deceiving appearances and "foul seeming fair" are recurring tropes in Tolkien, but then I thought about how 90% of the time the other Tolkienian trope of exterior matching the interior results in goodness being innately beautiful and evil being visibly ugly, so I guess a mechanical beauty stat is only inappropriate for the setting if the character is a total monster without a shred of magical glamour to their high beauty score, or the utterly heroic character is conventionally unattractive- and I don't mean just being a little scruffy and unbathed like Aragorn at the Prancing Pony. But I digress again.

For each stat you roll d100 and as long as it's a 20 or higher, you're keeping it. 10-24 gives a -5 penalty, 25-74 is a flat 0, 75-89 is a +5, and the ever-narrowing ranges above that eventually top out at a +25 from rolling a perfect 100, with 101 (+30) and 102+ (+35) being theoretical but hard to achieve. These modifiers are used for pretty much all rolls, skills and combat maneuvers included.

On my first roll I managed to smash it out of the park with a 99. Not so much when the second came up 23. Next came 88, 87, 66, and 77. I decided my dwarf lass would have the array 99 Strength, 23 Agility, 66 Constitution, 77 Intelligence, 87 Intuition, and 88 Presence. By itself this would give her the mods +20/-5/+0/+5/+5/+5, but thanks to a rule allowing you to raise your profession's primary stat to 90 if it's lower, my scout can raise her Agility up to an even 90 to turn that -5 into a +10.

All of this is before cultural modifiers, of course. Dwarvish stoutness and gruffness means that Strength gets a further +5 to the mod, Agility takes a -5 hit, Constitution gets a massive +15, and both Intuition and Presence take -5. Thus, our mod array looks like +20/+5/+15/+5/+0/+0 for the moment, and normally that would be the final tally.

Ah, but next we have Background traits...

Childhood? There's a table for that. Awkward teens? Table for that. Xenophobia? Table for that!

Background options are the specific bonuses available through your character's culture, including skill ranks, extra stat buffs on top of the above, randomly rolled special abilities, access to certain schools or "laws" of magic, and even starting with magic items in one's possession.

Since my dwarf ain't magic and has been roughing it a couple hundred miles now, I declined both magic and magic items. Maybe she still has a really nice hair ornament in her beard, but it's quite mundane. I decided to go all in on stat boosts, since you can't purchase those after character creation. The actual numbers we rolled for stats become almost worthless after creation outside of some dramatic occurrences or magic, after all- it's all about those incremental modifiers. You get 4 background options, so I put them into +2 to Strength and then three iterations of +1 Agility/Intuition/Presence, mostly just to raise the latter two up to a +10 base bonus.

Her almost!final stat array becomes +35/+5/+15/+5/+5/+5. Sure, the scout is meant to be about stealth and, if need be, ambush and thievery, but that doesn't mean she can't also be an absolute beast of a unit too. Besides, she needs every edge she can get in this shallow, superficial world after getting an Appearance of 32, bumped slightly by her Presence modifier to 37.

Role Traits are a fancy way of dressing up stuff like personality type, character motivation, and moral alignment. Instead of giving a few examples as a guide to coming to one's own conclusion for their character, you're instead encouraged to pick from the given lists in order to fill out a prescribed part of your character sheet.

Personality is exemplified by a long list of poles arranged in opposition to one another, like Meek vs. Proud or Optimistic vs. Cynical. It seems you can pick several if you wish, as long as they don't directly oppose one another.

Motivation is why your character adventures at all. A surprising number of the 20 motivations are either self-interested like wealth accumulation or doing it for fun, or negative motivations like hatred, fear, or a desire to destroy X. X can be expected targets like Darkness or specifically Sauron's forces, individuals you have a vendetta against, or some more problematic choices like entire countries, cultures, or species. Earlier on in the book, playing an orc or troll is explicitly discouraged, but it seems that choice wasn't intended to limit a PC's capacity to be evil.

Alignment is weird. It's another collection of supposedly opposed traits, of which Good vs. Evil is only one, but the way all of the other dichotomies are arranged underneath them seems to imply which are also kind of good or bad without making it clear. The book then proceeds to bring in real-life examples that further date it in a way I found damn uncomfortable.

As if it needed spelling out, Dear Burrowers,
real life religious communities are not
diametrically opposed to one another.
Also I don't think we use "Moslem" anymore.

Grid's just gonna be Neutral for now.

Next come adolescence and apprenticeship skills, which are similar to background options except they're unique to your character's growth and development as a person prior to taking up adventuring. Both of these steps have a full page of tables dedicated to them too, because when you merp, you merp hard.

Being a dwarf means Grid's childhood trained her 1 rank in Unarmored Movement & Maneuvers, 1 in Rigid Leather Armor, 3 in Chain, 4 in One-Handed Concussive Weapons, 1 Thrown, 1 Climb, 1 Pick Lock, 1 Disarm Trap, 2 Perception, 3 Body Development, and 3% chance of learning a free spell list- I rolled a 77 on that, so that's a hard and fast no. Grid also gains 4 extra ranks to spend on languages- probably evenly divided between a smattering of some Elvish and nearby Easterling dialects.

Apprenticeship implies she was formally instructed by a master scout, but fortunately there isn't any sort of table where you roll the master's effectiveness as a teacher to affect how much your character learned during their apprenticeship or some such- though I wouldn't be surprised if that's a thing in true Rolemaster. Instead, we'll just say Grid picked up her extra skill ranks by sneaking around the dwarf hold, observing others, and reading or practicing in her weirdly spacious subterranean bedroom.

With all of this sorted out, or nearly so, we finally begin to get a clearer picture of Grid- by which I mean I frantically make stuff up to accommodate what the dice tell me.

Grid spent most of her life indoors, since only about 1/3rd of dwarves are female and they tend to be cloistered as a result. She is also quiet and reserved among outsiders out of unfamiliarity. She was tacked onto a delegation sent west by the Blacklocks because her father no longer believed the house's home was safe for her, what with all the troubles brewing in the east. The delegation dwindled until only Grid remains.

She has been kept alive this long by her adaptiveness, and her ability to put into practice the wide range of topics she read about while utterly bored back home. She wishes to bring aid to her people, but she might leave out the part of the mission where she was to be handed over for safekeeping. Being constantly misgendered by non-dwarves was and still is a confusing annoyance, but if it allows her to travel freely without being badgered by overprotective menfolk, she will allow it to continue- or perhaps even consciously try to 'pass' if the situation requires it.

Wrapping Up.

The last major step of character generation that isn't just review is Outfitting. After spending minutes flipping back and forth between the Outfitting page where limits and stipulations are set in place, and the Dwarf page (147) where the actual list of stuff offered, and the Equipment table on 255 where the weights are offered, I was finally done with Grid.

For some reason MERP dwarves don't have any starting ranks in one-handed edged weapons so they can effectively use axes, one of their most culturally important weapons. But Grid has likely just scavenged whatever gear she can from her dead traveling companions, so I doubt she'll turn down a shortbow and club that happen to be handy. Weirdly enough, she's way more graceful in mail armor than leather, so she gets a set of chain. She gets a set of clothing, probably weathered and travel-stained, plus some personal effects like a grooming kit- the beard needs to stay looking good, regardless of circumstances.

She also gets 2 gold pieces to spend on other gear, but since there's an entire section on economics in Middle-Earth and there are five currency subdivisions that fluctuate in value depending on time in the Third Age, I'm just going to treat the basic utilities as met. Grid is also going to have a donkey saved from the last cart of the ill-fated expedition so that she can carry most of her things without being subjected to a weirdly discriminatory encumbrance rule.

Carrying limits are determined by height in this system, with strength serving to offset some of the penalties for going over the limit. While height varies quite a bit between species and cultures, women are consistently one height class shorter than their male counterparts, so female PCs can carry less across the board. Shockingly enough there're no random table for height and weight rolling, so the gender averages given in each species' writeup are pretty much what you're stuck with.

There is a rule meant to offset this, giving female characters a +3% to either Agility or Constitution (I ended up going with Agility), but it's buried deep in the optional materials section toward the back of the book, sandwiched right in between Martial Arts in Middle-Earth, and a percentile table for how a character's blood proximity to the royal family of Númenor affects their ability to use Athelas as a healing herb.

No, I am not making this up.

I know Aragorn's prowess in the Houses
of Healing was ambiguously supernatural,
but surely they didn't mean this.

The end result of this whole experiment was not what I was expecting, but then again I went into this whole thing not knowing what to expect. I hope I haven't (completely) trashed MERP for anyone out there, because it does seem to be a common consensus that character creation is the first boss of the game- once you get around to the actual playing part, it becomes much smoother, simpler, and more fun.

For those who would want to play without generating at all, I have very good news that the book comes with 16 premade characters with level-up tracks included.

Then again, if any old LotR game by I.C.E. is what you're interested in, consider trying LoR, their later product that was actually designed as a simplified introduction to MERP. The designers recognized at some point that their game was too daunting for beginners, but instead of finding a rules solution in the system itself, they wrote an entire transitionary game designed to be played for a few weeks or months before moving on to the big leagues of the d100.

LoR had its own following, surprisingly, and at least one fan wrote an expanded homebrew ruleset for it called the Middle-Earth Adventure Game. MEAG is set somewhere in between LoR and MERP in complexity, but it's packaged in a mercifully svelte 30-page PDF that you can download for free on the website, which was last updated back in 2010. Yes, it has been a while, but at least it was in this millennium.

On the Trail of the Blue Wizards: An Amateur Campaign Idea

(By now, my readers will know that I have a faint grasp of tabletop mechanics at best. But I've had this idea knocking around in my head for at least two or three years now, and I figure I can communicate most of it without worrying about the gameplay part- that will be left for the viewer to fill in with what works best for their hypothetical tabletop group that takes long-term campaign advice from itchy goblins living behind a Burger King.

So, let's lay out everything I can think of to help a DM run a Lord of the Rings point-crawl drowned in gritty fanfiction cruft!)

The attention-grabber before the long plod

The world has been bent.

Numenor drowns, and the spirit of the Dark Lord has flown screaming back to the heights of Barad-dûr. A war is coming that will shake the foundations of an already fractured world.

But it is not coming yet. Armies are still building in Mordor and the West. Desperate alliances and clandestine deals are being struck. The world is taking a deep breath before the plunge.

And rumors are coming in on the desert wind that a man in blue has a job for someone like you.

You. A wretch. A scoundrel. Someone who's been all but chewed up and spat out upon the salt-sprayed stones of Umbar. Someone that no one should care about. Yet you've been called upon by name. Whatever the work, it will probably be better than waiting around to be found out, or knifed in the street, or dragged before one of the black altars of Melkor.

There may be hope for you yet.

In-Depth Premise

The premise of this campaign is to delve into a less touched-upon time and area of JRR Tolkien's Middle-Earth. As much lore can be drawn upon as you want, but you aren't beholden to following a thorough or even existing history.

Specifically, my idea takes place in the Second Age shortly after the Changing of the World, but before the War of the Last Alliance. Events focus on Harad and Rhûn, and the shenanigans that two of Tolkien's least talked-about wizards might have gotten up to therein.

Beyond that, little about this story has to be solid. I just offer a guiding list of suggestions. Want to dump a whole slew of MERP splatbooks into this instead? Go for it. Want to cleave close to the impressions of Christopher and other Tolkienists in realizing something that almost could have been canon? Try your best. Want to give a new home to those OCs of yours from that one Grelvish AIM chat room you hid from your friends since 1998? I won't tell.

Custom map of Middle-Earth by Peter C. Fenlon for Iron Crown Enterprises,
publishers of Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP) from 1984-1999.

The wizards in question--the Blue Wizards--are difficult to pin down as any one thing, because they virtually never enter the narrative of the books, and what little was written about them was rewritten several times. In some versions they failed in their task and died, or were corrupted, or formed secretive cults of exotic and blue-robed magic users that no one did anything with until the makers of Lord of the Rings Online seized upon for Update 6. But for the purposes of this campaign premise, the last revision made before Tolkien's death is considered to be canon. That is to say:

"Their task was to circumvent Sauron: to bring help to the few tribes of Men that had rebelled from Melkor-worship, to stir up rebellion ... and after his first fall to search out his hiding (in which they failed) and to cause [?dissension and disarray] among the dark East ... They must have had very great influence on the history of the Second Age and Third Age in weakening and disarraying the forces of East ... who would both in the Second Age and Third Age otherwise have ... outnumbered the West."

 - JRR Tolkien, "Last Writings" written sometime in 1973, pp 384-85 of The Peoples of Middle-Earth, 1996.

What this actually means is nicely summarized by Tolkien Gateway.

• The two Blue Wizards were sent to Middle-earth at roughly the same time as Glorfindel in c. S.A. 1600 (and similarly at the behest of the Valar), the Year of Dread, when Sauron forged the One Ring and completed the building of Barad-dûr.
• The Blue Wizards journeyed into the East of Middle-earth, where they remained; they were not heard or seen of west of Mordor.
• There they became known as Morinehtar and Rómestámo, Darkness-slayer and East-helper.
• The Blue Wizards were able to hinder Sauron's operations in the East, aiding the defeat of Sauron in the War of the Last Alliance.
• During the early Third Age and until the end of the Watchful Peace, they were tasked with finding where Sauron dwelt. They failed.
• Morinehtar and Rómestámo ensured that the forces of the East did not outnumber the West, thus helping secure victory for the Free peoples in War of the Ring.

Of course it's impossible to think that the wizards did this all on their own and didn't get help along the way- even Gandalf needed aid and took a backseat role in his mission, which might have been the most important quest any of the Istari were even tasked with.

The Heroes

Given how secretive a mission this must have been, traveling beyond enemy lines into the depths of a Dark Lord's realms, the Blue Wizards might have had to be very clandestine. Moving from place to place looking like little more than wanderers, they must have worked through agents and elevated many an unsung hero to fight against the darkness far from the Westlands. Maybe most of them never knew the scope of what they were fighting for.

The story of the Blue Wizards thus becomes a story of ordinary, perhaps even deeply flawed people. Subjects of the Shadow showing their humanity and fighting tyranny even in the most hopeless of places. The thousand little rebellions that make up a single Resistance. In a world whose main protagonists have been criticized as being almost uniformly male, aristocratic, and white, this also gives the opportunity for so many more rich stories to be told.

Naturally, the PCs don't know anything about the wizards when they start to work for them.

All they know, as a motley assortment of exiles, escaped slaves, cutthroats, mercenaries, or any other unfortunates kicking around in the Corsair Haven of Umbar, is that they need a job that will pay, and protection. And this mysterious employer in azure from beyond the desert seems to be offering both.

Instead of coming from the ranks of (almost) always virtuous elves, dwarves, hobbits, and the free Men of the West, player characters come from cultures typically found in villainous roles. They are Near or Far Haradrim, Easterlings from distant lands, Khandish mercenaries, and Black Númenóreans fresh off the sinking shores of their drowned island home. Even people with orkish blood lurking somewhere in their ancestry can find a place in Umbar.

"Redemption" is a strong word with a lot of connotations, but it is appropriate for a story set in Tolkien's universe. It might be a motivation for some characters, or it might just be something for them to stumble into after spending long enough in the company of a being that you'd be forgiven for mistaking for a literal angel.

Or, the characters might never stop being a bit rotten, in which case the campaign takes on the dual nature of the Blue Wizards trying their best to babysit some very dangerous individuals out of turning into full-fledged villains who would add to their headaches.

Some enlightened foreigner from the north could be allowed as a PC, such as a Ranger acting as a suicidally deep spy on the Enemy, but too many characters like this would deviate from the flavor of the campaign.

And no elves!

Starting Location

Umbar isn't actively malevolent toward the rest of the world- at least not yet. Umbar simply wants what it wants and doesn't care care about the rest. Umbar knows only money, power, and lip-service to Sauron, whom the city might still remember as Tar-Mairon, erstwhile adviser and high priest to King Ar-Pharazôn. So long as one can satisfy the appetites of the wretched hive, one can survive.

Survival in those dusty streets is the first order of business before the PCs can even think about tackling the challenges that lie beyond the desolate horizon.

Umbar is located in the south of the Bay of Belfalas. It is the name of the city, as well as the natural harbor of enclosed rock in which it is situated. Near Harad lies to the south, and the Westlands can be accessed by sea to the north, though the fleets of Umbar have little reason to travel north except to raid hated Arnor and Gondor. The eastern land of Khand is also accessible by sailing upstream along the river Harnen and then turning east at the dreaded Ephel Dúath.

The city is rarely at peace, whether with its neighbors or itself.

Since the fall of Numenor and the "death" of Sauron's physical body, the Haradrim tribes have tried to throw off the yoke of Umbar with some success. Tribute is extracted from them mostly by force, and many a Black Númenórean adventurer is drawn to the Sunlands by the prospect of wealth and power in that unstable region. Most meet death at the hands of fiercely independent natives, but enough contenders like Herumor and Fuinur find success for the allure to persist. Open war between Umbar and the northern realms of their "Faithful" kin is unlikely at this moment, as all parties are still recovering from the shattering of their kingdom. But the Dark Lord survives, and conflict is almost inevitable. Already, small raiding expeditions push and prod at borders and defenses.

Within the high old walls of the city itself rages a quiet war between visceral lawlessness and slow, grinding oppression. The city is typically ruled by a pair of lords forming a duumvirate. There is perpetual competition between all members of their decadent court, and a lord doesn't last long in this city without being cunning and ruthless. Still, they and the powerful families of the city keep the peace and protect trade by any means necessary. Silver, salt, and slaves flood into the hazy, aromatic bazaars of Umbar every day, and the altars atop the city's highest ziggurats remain perpetually slick with the blood of sacrifices fruitlessly slain in the name of Morgoth.

But cruelty breeds resentment, and it could boil over into open revolt before long.

When it happens, hopefully it can be steered.

"Umbar" by Turner Mohan

Going Beyond

The bulk of this plot will unfold as I actually figure it out in later posts, but right now I am at least certain of its scope and direction.

If the party succeeds in coming together and surviving the dangers of Umbar, they are to set off across the vast desert of northern Harad, heading southward. After finally meeting with their mysterious employer in person, they trek deep into the south where savanna turns to jungle. The first major chapter of the story is completed when they do something that foils the Enemy's plans. Perhaps they rally several tribes together, or wrest some precious artifact of Elder Days from a hostile group.

After that, as the veil is peeled back from the true story and motivations, the party makes its way northeast. They must brave Khand, which now lies deep beneath the long shadow of Mordor. Finally, they might reach Rhûn for a very unexpected meeting. There, the last two-thirds of the plot will unfold.

The game is intended to be a point-crawl, with defined sites to eventually reach. But the vagueness of the map south and east of known Middle-Earth is to be used to one's advantage. Make up whatever you like to fill the huge, trackless gaps between each.