Documents About Tolkien and Middle Earth

Introduction

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 

Table of contents

• Magic in Tolkien:  This is the distilled essence of my old analysis of how magic worked in Middle Earth, as based on my own guesswork and quotations from the books themselves.  It's hardly scholarly, but does, I think, identify many of the most pertinent quotations and examples.  It is no longer related to role-playing in any way, but might offer gamers some insights into the Middle Earth's metaphysics.
• Running a Campaign: This is a document I wrote to do with my old rules.  It offers my advice for a GM on how to represent Tolkien's world and his authorial voice in a table-top environment.  It also rants about the differences between Middle-Earth and a standard fantasy world.  It doesn't talk about game mechanics at all.
• History 407A Syllabus:  This is a word document version of the Syllabus for a course I taught last summer on Tolkien's relationship to Medieval history and Literature.  (I'm a doctoral student in history at the University of Arizona.)  It's a course I've wanted to teach since I first read Shippey's The Road to Middle Earth.  And now I have. Whee!

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Other Stuff

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.

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Last Modified 10-16-03