Running a Tolkien Game that Does Not Exist

The Lord of the Rings Adventure Game is one of my favorite licensed Tolkien games. It was released in 1991, and was largely the work of long-time ICE designer Jessica Ney (credited variously as Jessica Ney and J. M. Ney in different parts of the credits). It is a "starter RPG," designed to ease new and younger players into the hobby. To this end, they stripped the game down to a super simple, super streamlined system. The eventual goal was to get these new players to eventually graduate to the "advanced" MERP products, of which there was now a significant backlog. 

A lot of modern OSR folks prefer Basic to Expert because, well, you can do more with the simpler version. Similarly, I prefer Lord of the Rings Adventure Game (curiously shortened to "LOR" in the book). There are so many rules in LOR that feel like cutting-edge OSR innovations: slot-based inventory, HP-powered spellcasting, starting equipment packages. It has an early iteration of D&D4E's skill challenges (called "action sequences" in the book). The rules were even called "Guidelines," as the author demurred from putting too much emphasis on their own intention and wanting each GM to make their own rulings (guidings not guidelines, anyone?).

LOR was supposed to be released as sort of an "adventure path" of five books, two adventures per book. However, only three made it to print.

• (1991) Lord of the Rings Adventure Game, Dawn Comes Early (Boxed Set)
• (1991) Darker than the Darkness
• (1993) Over the Misty Mountains Cold

Two more sequel books were promised to be available (Before the Goblins in 1993 and Greatest of the Forests in 1994), but never reached publication. Why? Well, at the same time period, ICE was also publishing a series of choose your own adventure books called Middle-earth Quest. Tolkien Estate claimed this violated their license, since they were only allowed to publish games based on the license, not books. The fourth Middle-earth Quest book was actually recalled and destroyed en masse. Are CYOA books games or books? Regardless of the epistemological answer, ICE went bankrupt with the suit, and the LOR series was scrapped.

Let me be clear: The LOR adventures are not good. They are pure railroads. Every roll behind the screen is made to be fudged. Designed for parents to run for their children, there are no consequences. Every failed roll by the players culminates in a rescue by a named NPC like Gandalf with a finger wag telling them to get back onto the railroad.

But the writing! The writing is good! You just need to deconstruct the railroad and repurpose it into an antique iron sculpture. All the guts are worth reusing. Decouple it from the idea of faux rolls and intended outcomes, let it be an open-ended sandbox, and I think the game is absolutely worth playing.

Anyway, this weekend, I'm running a game based on my Wilderland series and the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game. It's sort of a retroclone and reinterpretation of a flawed text, in true OSR tradition. I'm calling it "LORE." 

Here is a picture of me prepping the game.

And here are the character sheets I'm handing to my players. You can download them all here, if you were interested in doing so. (The background color is on a non-printing layer, so don't worry about your ink.)

I hope my little experiment will be fun!