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".

I Wrote a Book Called Sooty Beards! Check it Out!

My first ever book written as lead project designer is finished and out for presale now!

Sooty Beards is a mostly system-agnostic micro-setting that combines the earthy majesty of an ancient dwarf-hold with the hopeless decay of a dying North American coal town.

Among other things, it contains 8 diverse regions, 8 weird new critters for your simple d20 or TROIKA! game, a host of statless narrative items like screaming lanterns and steampowered sportballs, and a set of tables to ask What Used to Be Here? and What's Here Now? The city of Vesallberg is an old place, not haunted but marked down to the very bones by the memory of what's come before.

Also, there are drunk canaries who curse a bunch. I feel like that part can't be emphasized enough.

The zine can be bought standalone or bundled with a booklet of appropriate TROIKA! backgrounds, a print of the map (with art by our excellent Charlie AF), beard & skin oil by PlusOneXP, and even a felted dwarf figurine by my dear friend and cowriter The Lawful Neutral.

The book is 100% finished and there's no crowdfunding necessary. Presale goes until March 15th, at which point we start shipping. Digital copies will deliver instantly at that point.

I really hope you enjoy the book and its grim whimsy (grimsy, if you will). Heading this project was a big step in my what's-starting-to-look-like-a-real-career as a TTRPG creator.

Dwarf-Hair Armor

I was searching around my hard drive and found this in my images. I barely remember making this, or frankly, why I did, but now it's the rest of the world's problem. I've included a transcription down below, but not much else.

I'm pretty sure I used the Homebrewery to make this piece. It's nice tool for simulating the D&D 5E style of formatting in general. I am garbage at basic text editing code, but they offer many premade templates to use.

Tomte cropped from a larger image by John Bauer

Dwarf-Hair Armor

Armor (hide), rare (requires attunement)

This pungent, shaggy grey mass resembles a gambeson and matching helmet made from braids of long, thickly matted hair. It was shaved off of the body of a rare type of dwarf whose beards and body hair grow so dense that they groom them into clothing and even body armor.

You gain a +1 bonus to AC while wearing this armor.

You also gain a healthy ecosystem of microscopic hair fauna.

Up to three times per day when a creature misses you with a weapon attack in melee, the weapon gets snagged and tangled in the hairs of the armor. The attacker must make a DC 16 Dexterity saving throw or drop their weapon. Nonmagical weapons are lost in the snarls of hair, while magical weapons drop to the ground in a random space within 5 feet of you. A weapon lost within the hair vanishes and cannot be retrieved.

It belongs to the Beard now.

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.