Been reading
Against the Darkmaster--odd name, but a neat RPG based on the old ICE
Middle-Earth Roleplaying--and thinking of it lately. Yesterday I
read a blog post about what Middle-Earth looks like if you ignore everything after
The Hobbit and how it's a much more fairy-tale, magical place. For example:
- "Burglar" is a known social role, and you can hire them to help your wandering adventurer party
- Animals can talk, and people can learn animal languages.
- Bloodlines have idiosyncratic magical powers. Bilbo can't understand the thrush, but Bard--of the old blood of Dale--can. Beorn can turn into a bear, and while this is treated as wild and a bit dangerous, it isn't something totally unique that the dwarves have never heard of.
- Magical items are common. The dwarves find Gondolin-forged swords in a random troll den and one of the trolls has a magical wallet that screams when Bilbo lifts it. There are rings of invisibility and glowing gemstones. Bard has an arrow that kills anything it hits. None of these have glorious, thousand-year storied histories, they're just there.
- There's no indication that humans can't be wizards. Gandalf, Radagast, and the Necromancer are all just old men who know magic.
- Everyone sings. The dwarves sing a silly song while eating and then a grim and melancholy song of their lost home. The elves sing "Tra-la-la lally, here down in the valley, ha ha!" Can you imagine the seven sons of Fëanor singing that? Even the goblins sing! "And down down to Goblin-town / You go, my lad!"
- There's a note that some goblins and dwarves work together! Can you imagine that in The Lord of the Rings?
- Most of the land is wilderness, with the occasionally small kingdom or settlement. Dale is gone but Laketown remains, and Dorwinion is off somewhere but close enough for the elves to trade with. There are enough scattered settlements in Eriador for the trolls to have eaten "a village and a half" after coming down from the mountains.
- The wilderness is wild but not expected to be dangerous. Proof? The dwarves do not bring weapons on their quest--until they loot the troll-hole they have no weapons at all. The wilderness is very dangerous but this is implied to be a recent thing.
- The elves are much more like Fair Folk. They hold hidden revels in the woods that outsiders cannot approach, love getting drunk and singing silly songs, and are happy to lock up visitors for a hundred years if they get annoyed with them. They'll leave their woods to go treasure-hunting but otherwise just want to hang out in a magical forest.
- Dwarves are on the decline but dragons are on the rise. There are a lot of empty dwarf-holds in the north that are now dragon lairs.
- Troll are smart enough to argue about nonsense until the sun comes up and they turn to stone. They're not living siege weapons. They have names like "Bert" and "William"
- Possibly most important--there's no Dark Lord. There are a lot of evil overlords out there, like the Necromancer or the Goblin King, but there's no "Free Peoples vs. Evil" great struggle.
In summary, it's much more
gameable than a world descended from
The Silmarillion, which is great for epic storytelling but not particularly good to have adventurers doing their thing.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
