A long time ago (1995, I think) I wrote an adaptation of Middle Earth for the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. It was pretty popular, but eventually I changed servers, and for one reason and another, I never reposted it to my web site. Yet, there's still some good material in those old pages, I think, and so I have distilled them down into two documents, removing all references to particular roleplaying systems. I have also added some of my more recent thoughts on Tolkien's corpus, such as a syllabus for a course I taught this summer
Decipher's The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game.
Middle Earth Roleplaying (MERP) now out of print and licesnse, were published by Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE). MERP was a midget version of ICE's Rolemaster (RM) system, an insanely complex yet strangely charming roleplaying system. Did you sneeze? Roll on the A sneeze critical chart.....Amber Diceless Roleplaying is published by Phage Press and is based on Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber.
Quotes from The Lord of the Rings are from the HarperCollins one volume paperback edition. I have included the volume names to aid users of other editions.
Quotes from The Hobbit are from the HarperCollins paperback edition.
Quotes from The Silmarillion are from the Ballantine Books paperback edition.
T. A. Shippey's Road to Middle Earth is still the best guide to Tolkien ever written, and was an enormous influence on me, on these docs, and on the Tolkien courses I have taught.
Naturally, these books and game-systems are properties of their respective owners, publishers, or whatever. I have used them without permission.
Last Modified 10-16-03