I have had Tolkien on the brain lately.  It started with re-watching the uncut movies and for the first time, watching the making of features.  Then Cubicle 7 dropped their news.

Before going to bed tonight, I was peeking around at the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Here are the juicy, game-able bits:

256 From a letter to Colin Bailey 13 May 1964

[An account of Tolkien’s unfinished story ‘The New Shadow’. (See also no. 338.)]

I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor], but it proved both sinister and depressing.  Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good.  So that people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – whiel the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse.  I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage.  I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would be just that.  Not worth doing.

Not worth doing?  Oh man, what is wrong with thrillers?

Let’s get to letter 338:

…there would be secret societies practicing dark cults, and ‘orc-cults’ among adolescents.

Every once in a while there is a thread on RPG.net, in which someone complains about how their group has wedged itself into a really difficult and complicated moral situation that will make the world an entirely different place from what was initially envisioned and planned for.  They are looking for an answer, a way to set the campaign back to rights and to my eye, the campaign seems to be just getting good.

This is how I feel reading these letters.  Since this era untouched and unfinished, it feels ripe for gaming.

Descendants of Agaron and Arwen, struggling to live up to their ancestors’ legends, punk noble kids in Gondor who have taken their grand-parents’ artifacts from Mordor, dusted it off and made Sauron as suddenly hip.  Yeah, cool kids taking out their eyes, replacing it with dwarf-wrought clockwork glass so their parents do not know that they are worshiping the long dead Lord of the Rings, putting on tusked masks and going out orcing during moonless nights.

More?

Dig this answer to a letter asking about the other two colors of wizards:

I have not named the colours, because I do not know them.  I doubt if they had distinctive colours.  Distinction was only required in the case of the three who remained in the relatively small area of the North-west.  I really do not know anything clearly about the other two – since they do not concern the history of the N.W.  I think they went as emissaries to distance regions, East and South, far out of Numenorean range: missionaries to ‘enemy-occupied’ lands, as it were.  What success they had I do not know; but I fear that they failed, as Saruman did, though doubtless in different ways; and I suspect they were founders or beginners of secret cults and ‘magic’ traditions that outlasted the Fall of Sauron.

Now we’re talking.  As the governors of Gondor struggle to govern among the flawed and prideful spawn of Aragorn, Satanic cults start up among the Gondorian noble kids, and apprentices of failed angels arrive from distant lands.  Lands that are bankrupt now that their patron, the Lord Eye has fallen silent have come to the Men of the West in order to start trade and learn the fate of the other Istari (wizards).

What a glorious mess.

Now we’re gaming.

Settings fascinate me and you can’t really admire settings without turning your eyes towards Tolkien’s quaint little home for all of his fictional elf languages. I always wondered how to get my game on in Middle-earth. The Rangers hack of Mouse Guard comes really close to hitting the nail on the head for me.

In an old Sons of Kryos episode, I talked with Jeff about how I’d game Middle-Earth, changing it to Middle-earths. The players would be charged with going to alternate Middle-Earths and seeking out various bearers of the One Ring. It is like a Tolkien issue of What if? in campaign form.

It is fun to think about the various characters who cam into contact with the ring and what a Middle-earth would look like with the One Ring in their clutches:

• Bilbo
• Gandalf
• Elrond
• The Beast Outside Moriah
• Bill the Pony
• The Balrog
• Galadriel
• Boromir
• Faramir
• Shelob

What wonderful villains each of them could be (all except Bill the Pony; we know that Bill is above the Ring’s lure).

Then I came across this, from the forward of the Lord of the Rings:

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated by enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed by occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

Man, that is a setting I’d play a campaign in. Flesh out the wizards of different colors. Play out some wizarding politics. Suss out some more about the Southrons and ride us some oliphants.

I love the bittersweet end of the Lord of the Rings with the ring-bearers diminishing into the west and magic fading from Middle-earth but it would be nice to game in a place where the Shire doesn’t turn into strip malls and parking lots quite so fast.

EDIT: This is kind of embarassing. I have blogged about this before. Huh.