Curse you Peter Jackson, Curse you James Ronald Ruhl Tolkien, curse you Decipher.... Well curse you Decipher anyway. You had the perfect license the hot gaming commodity of the last 5 years and what did you do,... well nothing apparently for quite a long while. I was disgusted with you for many months after watching RTK, and then I just sold all your books to a used book shop. The books are still there, while copies of 3.5 and Forgotten realms, (forgotten realms for gods sake) moved in and out in a steady stream. So I moved on, found other games, did other things. Tolkien I've discovered through my long love affair with writing loves to wait. He waits unused, dust gathering on the book-jacket until he is eventually found, magic things have a way of being found. It was Jackson in the end that lead me back to the bookshelf, to my dog-eared copies of Tolkien. To my copy of Heroquest a few feet away and to my scribbled notes I was making before some Lieutenant put me on the mid-watch. To the epic conversion I was making to change LOTR to Heroquest, a system that effortlessly changes between short quick takes, and long extended contest. A game where the trait, Loyalty to Frodo can actually be used for something. A game where magic, and myth are easy, and hard because the story and the character are so important and so inseparable. So Lord of the Rings/ Heroquest is back on my front burner, and anyone who wants to come along for the ride, can hop on the conversion train. I have to be very careful, because the Tolkein estate has a nasty habit of suing people who use Tolkein's intellectual property, even if they arent making money off of it. I already know Jams gonna get a copy of my manuscript in the mail soon, because he likes Heroquest.
Key ideas I have in mind...
No Evil player characters...
That means
No Orcs, no Black Numenoreans, No trolls, no Corsairs, no Hardrim, no easterlings, no Uruk Hai.
-Dunlandings are ambiguous because they arent always in the sway of Saruman and will most likely be included.
Of course I have to make up Keywords for them (something I had forgotten to do in the first attempt) but I have to keep them seperate.
Nothing kills a good LOTR setting more than a party of Corsairs and Numenorean and that one good orc, because its completely against the spirit of Tolkiens writing.
So they're out, sort of.
No Woses either, or ultra alien cultures. Beornings exist, but only Beorn can transform Im going to get my buddy Mike to help out with the Tolkein Religion aspect (Valar, Maiar etc) and Each major homeland will get a nice writeup. I may even help setting up a first age, second age, third age set of campaigns.
