Selections from a panel discussion on role-playing and Tolkien’s World

Participants: Chris Seeman, Brian T. Murphy, Eric Rauscher, Glenn Kuring, Andrew Butler — Held at the Tolkien Centenary Conference — Keble College, Oxford: 22 August, 1992.

Chris Seeman: I would like to open this discussion with a leading question which I think is of central importance to the whole matter of role-playing in Tolkien’s world. As a gamemaster one must always consider the elements that make up a good game. Let us, then, begin by asking ourselves: what goes into making a good Middle-earth game — or, alternatively, what in a game evokes the feel of Middle-earth rather than some other fantasy setting? What is it about Tolkien’s world that attracts us as role-players?
Brian T. Murphy: Most obvious, I think, is the fact that so many of the so-called “sword and sorcery” or pseudo-Medieval role-playing games are, in a sense, based in Middle-earth, Take, for example, Dungeons & Dragons, the first and most popular of the kind of games I am referring to. Gary Gygax disclaims any great debt to Tolkien (Fritz Lieber is, of course, a much stronger influence for him), and yet Hobbits are running around in his game. Quite often there is a crossover from Tolkien fans to gaming and vice versa so, in fact, he owes a huge debt. Essentially, then, there is a connection to Tolkien in these games.
Eric Rauscher: What originally drew me into D&D was my interest in the Mythopoeic Society; in fact, the very first role-playing games I ever played took place at Mythcon years ago. Since then I don’t do much roleplaying because I got bored with this mishmash of semi-Medieval “I’m a ninja, you’re a flying turtle.” Without a strict genre to set it in the game became a free-for-all, which turned me off to it.
Chris Seeman: I think that Dungeons &Dragons and its successor games do (at least in practice) constitute their own “genre” in the sense that they share an implied style of play — which, as you rightly point out, is characterized precisely by this homogenizing of discontinuous genres or settings into what we might call a multiverse. By way of contrast, Tolkien’s world represents the exact opposite of the multiverse. As we all know, Tolkien’s ideal was what he called the creation of a secondary world — a unified and coherent universe possessing “the inner consistency of reality.” This is, of course, part of what makes Tolkien a great writer; but the notion of a secondary world is, I think, also very attractive to role-players (and, in particular, to gamemasters like myself). More than any other fantasy world that I know, Middle-earth contains (ready-made) all the necessary elements for a richly textured game setting. Tolkien spent his entire life creating this imaginary world in its most minute detail. For the gamemaster who would rather run a game than spend all his or her time laboring over a world to set it in, Middle-earth offers an attractive alternative to reinventing the wheel. One of the reasons why there never was a Middle-earth role-playing game in the seventies is I think because of the predominance of this multiverse paradigm as the taken-for-granted frame of reference for gaming. From the early eighties onward, however, a shift in this paradigm took place which made it possible to imagine Tolkien’s world as a viable fantasy setting. With the birth of such games as Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, or Pendragon you finally had visible examples of how the literary genre of a particular author’s works could be successfully translated into a game medium. It’s just ironic that when Iron Crown Enterprises acquired the license to publish and market a role-playing game based on Tolkien’s writings they ended up orienting it towards the old multiverse paradigm.
Glenn Kuring: The beauty of Middle-earth as a fantasy setting is that it’s already set up (with its history, geography, languages, and so on) so that those who have read Tolkien’s books can pinpoint their relation to that world during the course of the game and say “Yes, I’m in Middle-earth.” I have players who know the works very well, and they find a lot of fulfillment in exploring Middle-earth through the game. However, in order to achieve this the game has got to be run in such a way that it lends itself to that kind of response. This is not difficult so long as the game remains fairly true to the spirit of Tolkien’s works, but it can become a major problem if the setting is only superficially linked to Middle-earth.
Eric Rauscher: It’s easy to say: “Hey, this is taking place in Middle-earth; I have a Colt .45 and an Uzi.” But how do you make a game that smells and tastes like Middle-earth? That’s the real challenge.
Andrew Butler: The problem is in trying to come up with rules that fit the way the stories go rather than fitting the way other role-playing games go; because with games like Dungeons & Dragons you’ve got set types of adventure that most players are used to. And I’m guilty of this as well — I’m sticking these sorts of adventures into parts of Middle-earth and trying to make them fit, and in some cases they will. But in others it’s trying to get the square peg into a round hole, and you end up distorting Middle-earth to fit the game rather than the other way around. Certainly in quite a lot of publications that have come out, because of the way their audience does things, the game designers have made modifications which don’t necessarily fit in order to do what they want to do in that setting.
Glenn Kuring: In order to make their products financially viable, I think that Iron Crown has tried to market Middle-earth Role Playing for more than one audience. On the one hand, they are targeting D&D players with hopes of getting them interested in Tolkien; on the other hand, they want to get people who have read The Lord of the Rings (and who may not have any experience with role-playing) to buy their games. But at best this effort has only been partly successful with the modules and rules they have published so far.
Chris Seeman: I agree with Glenn that for a gaming company this dilemma of having to “make the world fit the game” derives in part from these marketing considerations; but I think the gamemaster faces a similar problem in attempting to create adventures out of what is in some respects a closed world. By this I mean that the basic history of Middle-earth has already been written and, as a consequence, certain limitations are imposed upon the players as to what extent the gamemaster can allow their characters to affect that pre-existing history without altering it beyond recognition.
Audience: I think there is a particular form of the problem in the case of Middle-earth where, at the worst, you get the hack-and-slay style of game backed up by a Monty Haul philosophy. Those two things are entirely contrary not only to the spirit, but to the letter of the basic narrative of Middle-earth. You cannot have a naive embrace of power and still say “This is really Middle-earth.” Because if it were you’d find yourself laying waste to the Shire and trying to take over Mordor. I don’t believe it’s very easy to set a role-playing game in Middle-earth because Tolkien’s mythology is about not excepting such power.
Brian T. Murphy: I think I’d like to distinguish between the standard hack-and-slay scenario where a party of adventurers go in, clear the dungeon, kill everything they see, haul out anything they can carry, and go up a level; and real role-playing which, as the word suggests, has to do with playing a role and developing a character. I don’t think that this distinction is made often enough. Tolkien’s world is fundamentally character based — not treasure based, not murder based — but character-based. The idea is not to go in, kill everyone, haul everything out. It is to fulfill some grander goal in terms of your character.
Eric Rauscher: The style of play is also affected by the game mechanics themselves. The rule system you use lends itself more or less to the type of role-playing you prefer. If you play the type of game where you are trying to get points to go up levels, then you are going to kill things— that’s what the game system is designed to encourage.
Chris Seeman: What is fundamentally at issue here is the more general problem of how one is to translate the themes or values expressed by a given author into the language of game mechanics. While we should remind ourselves that it is the gamemaster and players who, in the last analysis, determine the quality and style of a game, we must also recognize that unless the desired actions and motives of characters are somehow grounded in and encouraged by the rule system itself, they cannot be sustained indefinitely. The real question then becomes how a game mechanics could be devised such that Tolkien’s theme of “the dethronement of power” (to take just one example) would be imaginable. Also, to Brian’s distinction between hack-and-slay and character-based role-playing ought to be added a distinction between the style of play adopted by this or that group of gamers on the one hand, and the implied style of play promoted by a game company on the other. It’s one thing for a gamemaster and players to turn the Middle-earth setting into a simple “dungeon expedition” type of adventure — that’s their affair; it’s quite another matter when an exclusively licensed company like Iron Crown publishes material which is predisposed to this rather limited focus. Even the purportedly “neutral” area description modules are written with a certain bias towards that style, which often renders them of limited value to the kind of game which involves situations more complex than penetrating an enemy stronghold or stumbling upon a lair of orcs. This is not to depreciate the latter sort of scenario as a valid element in any role-playing game, but it would be refreshing if Iron Crown were to publish something that we could point to and say: “Now that is what a good Middle-earth scenario ought to look like,” rather than find in module after module the standard fare that could be gotten from any other fantasy setting.
Audience: I have two things to say. First of all, I think a role-playing game is never good when it’s hack-and-slay, no matter what kind of game it is. And second of all, for me it’s really difficult to get into a Middle-earth setting because I have the stories in mind (which I’ve read a couple of times), and I can’t really take on a character which has so much in common with those I’m used to in the book. It seems to me that there is a problem in trying to replay scenes from books.
Brian T. Murphy: If you happen to find a group of players who have never read Tolkien (and, believe it or not, they are out there) then it is possible to re-enact portions of the books. But in this case you as game-master don’t take on the role of sub-creator, and I think the whole attraction of role-playing games is that they make it possible for us to do just that. But beyond Tolkien’s map you have other areas of the world that are left completely undescribed, and I think that exploring these through role-playing is one of the most fruitful ways of developing a Middle-earth campaign.
Chris Seeman: One of Tolkien’s greatest strengths as a storyteller is his skill in giving the illusion of historicity and concreteness to his imagined world through the use of lacunae. These might take the form of off-handed references to the blank portions of his map, as Brian has pointed out, but they can also involve allusions to other historical events or far-off times only glimpsed at in the narrative. As a gamemaster, I find this sort of lacunae the most engaging point of departure for a role-playing game. Ultimately, what draws us most as gamers are those aspects of Tolkien’s narrative which awaken our desire the most. In my case, I enjoy contriving situations, plotlines and so forth which make it possible for the players to contribute in some way to the events or outcomes already narrated by Tolkien. This strategy of making the player-characters the “unsung heroes” of Middle-earth tends to eradicate the problem of a closed world. This sort of thing often requires some delicate maneuvering on the gamemaster’s part, but it is one of the jobs of any good sub-creator. Regardless of what your style of play or point of departure may be, the most important thing in running a Middle-earth game is that your players not feel that their characters are simply walking through a cardboard world, but one in which their actions and choices will make a difference. In this kind of usage of Middle-earth as a role-playing setting we ourselves become participants in the ongoing process of subcreation which Tolkien has begun.

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