LOTR Campaign Ideas

[Greg Davis]

Tonight, on the way home from "The One", my gaming group and I were talking about potential future gaming scenarios. Eventually, the discussion turned to Middle-earth, and the upcoming LOTR system.

As the de facto Tolkien scholar for our group, it falls on me to run any Tolkien games. Mind, that I take this responsibility gladly, as I really like the Middle-earth setting, and have ran Middle-earth before, using the MERP and Rolemaster rules.

This brings me to my point: When the LOTR system becomes available, what sort of campaign will you run, or what sort of campaign would you like to play in?

Out of my group of three, I'm (as I mentioned) the only one who is really familiar with Middle-earth. One of the other players has read the books a couple of times, but not recently, and the other player has never read them (Oh, the horror!!! )

I think, then, that my two options are thus: Either I'll run a campaign set during the Fourth Age, so that they don't have to worry about having a lot of knowledge about the novels, or I'll run a campaign where they aren't from Middle-earth, but rather transported from someplace else.

At this point, adventure ideas are starting to formulate, mainly from previously played adventures from my MERP/Rolemaster days, since this group never played those adventures.

Fortunately, my group enjoys "epic" style campaigns, with heavy emphasis on character interaction and story development, which is, to my mind, what Middle-earth is all about.

So, what about the rest of you? I know that a lot of you are interested in the LOTR game...so what are you going to do with it?



Greg

[calguard66]

I'll probably buy the books for the material. Even if the system is good I may not change over from MERP.

However, I set all my games during the War of the Ring or early Fourth Age because you have lots of history to build on, but don't have to worry about keeping canon events straight.

Incidentally, if anybody with any conenction to LOTR:RPG is reading this (STEVE??) I would really like to see sourcebooks similar to the Minas Trith and other city/ area books giving the history thru the Ages, and condition of the area at the end of the War.

[Marcus D Samson]

I'm gonna do what I did in the past with MERP. That is, plough through the History of Middle Earth books (all of em), and pull out a few interesting historical settings. Then run a campaign in each, which are all linked by one item/person/place.

Last time around it was a fortress which I had designed as the focal point of the campaigns, starting as a single hut, then in the next campaign (set a few hundred years after the first) a new group of adventurers encountered the community there. Next campaign, it was a fortress. The final campaign was the downfall of the fortress.

I prefer this history style of campaigning as it prevents you getting bogged down in one setting for too long (how many times have games ended up as just fight fests because the story seeds have worn thin). It also adds a sense of completion to the whole saga, and the players feel that they have played a major part in the History of Middle Earth (particularly if you tie their quests in with the official stuff).

[Greg Davis]

My longest running Middle-earth campaign, in which I played but didn't run, was basically a historical campaign.

In essence, the way it worked was thus: We started early in the Second Age (since most of the characters were Elves and Half-Elves). We would then play through various "important" elements of the overall campaign, with several adventures set in each time period. For those characters that were human, they had the options of either trying to find ways to extend their lives (using rings, etc) or they could play their offspring, if the other character had died of old age, or something like that.

As in most of my groups, we weren't concerned with things like level differences, power differences, and so on, but rather we were just playing to have fun (which was a good thing, because, by the time we ended the campaign, the Elves and Half-Elves were quite a bit more powerful than the Human characters).

All in all, though, it was a lot of fun, and it's probably how I'll run my new campaign, since my current group of players didn't play in that group.




Greg