Middle Earth LARP

And you even play D&D!!! :stuck_out_tongue:

Sounds like what happened to me when I admitted I hadnā€™t seen ā€œThe Labyrinthā€ right before Endgame. I swear, I thought I was gonna be chucked out of Mordavia :open_mouth:

Only for the last few months. :blush:

:open_mouth:[/quote]

Secondedā€¦ :open_mouth:[/quote]

sad ā€¦

I would stay completely silent about not knowing of that giga-something :laughing:
The fact about Tolkienā€™s stuff is that what is well-known to many people would be really different to represent, especially in terms of combat. And what can be easily played need special knowledge. Being Tolkien fan, Iā€™m still not that confident in this area.
There are things in Silmarillion that could be played with not necessarily having big armies, there could be few fighters or no armies at all.
The question is: would people want play stuff which is determined to happen as it was in book, or would they prefer to play something happenning at the same time but with not that significant characters (in terms of worldā€™s fate), and how they would feel about how much combat there should be?
Valinor is one of the options, there can be Valar, Maiar and Elves, and you donā€™t need to have all the 14 Valar, can just have several, and some Maiar and Elves who were in Silm, for those who wanna play them, while others can make their own characters. Well, this kind of things IS specific, so Iā€™m not gonna inflict it all around.
I know that in Russia there are lots of tolkienistic games, but well, the have much more people - just for the reason of country size :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:
Iā€™m not gonna inflict it all around.

Iā€™m quite proud that a lot of folks havneā€™t heard of famous roleplaying grognards, it means that our efforts to recruit people from outside the roelplaying community have worked.

Out of curiosity, how many of the tabletoppers donā€™t know who Mark Rein-Hagen is without Googling him? I mean, thereā€™s isnā€™t just a tabletop/larp gap but also a generation gap within tabletoppers.

Alista - whatā€™s worse than NERO? I guess NERO is probably consistent in its rules, and a lot of homebrew systems lack even that and are just as complex. But NERO has a special place in my hate because it has effected all of fantasy larp in the states and spawned so many awful copies. Itā€™s like the AD&D Fantasy Heartbreakerā€™s syndrome. People try to write a new larp to ā€œfixā€ the problems in NERO rather than just start from scratch.

Gary Gygax (Born 1938)
Released Dungeons and Dragons
Released Advanced Dungeons and Dragons
Founded TSR
Founded Dragon (Magazine)
Founded Gencon
Named the biggest Nerd of all Time
Please note, he was playing LRP before he released D&D

Respect!

Now back to the real issue, Middle Earth Role Playing.
Any MERPs game is going to have the same problem as the film, namely everyone knows how Middle Earth is. Therefore one will get complaints that there are to many pointy eared bow twangers, or not enough pointy eared bow twangers, or that giant spiders should be slightly darker in shade or why canā€™t they play Sauron. While it is possible to put a campaign in such a world the organiser is on a hiding to nothing. Good luck. You will need it.

[quote=ā€œAlistaā€]Now back to the real issue, Middle Earth Role Playing.
Any MERPs game is going to have the same problem as the film, namely everyone knows how Middle Earth is. Therefore one will get complaints that there are to many pointy eared bow twangers, or not enough pointy eared bow twangers, or that giant spiders should be slightly darker in shade or why canā€™t they play Sauron. While it is possible to put a campaign in such a world the organiser is on a hiding to nothing. Good luck. You will need it.[/quote]

Thatā€™s why Mordavia is so popular. Itā€™s made from scratch using elements of myths, fantasy, whatever else. Nobody can say ā€œthis is wrong because itā€™s not like it was in the book/movie/boardgameā€. There is no book or anything else.

However, that refers to any game based on book or moview or whatever. Not only Tolkien stuff, but Star Wars, Star Gate, Piratesā€¦ whatever. Still, people play.
And those who hate having pointy eared bow twangers around would possibly not be interested in Tolkien games - because pointy eared bow twangers are pretty much the base of Tolkienā€™s writings. Even with Third Age stuff you canā€™t get rid of them.

Iā€™ve never heard of Mark Rein-Hagen or Gary Gynax.

Er, Mordavia was based on a computer game. Given, large quantities of us havenā€™t actually played it, but still.

Yay!

On Tolkien - Iā€™d be happy to play in a larp set in Middle Earth with good players (i.e. ones that arenā€™t going to stop to argue canon) but then Iā€™d be just as happy in a lot of other settings, including original ones.

After reading LotR or watching the movie itā€™s easy to get a burst of inspiration to doing something larp-ish with it, but getting a bunch of like-minded people together might the harder part. Especially when they have the option of doing something original that is designed to be more easily adapted to larp instead.

Yup, Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness, it was written by Lori Ann Cole. Fantastic game at that. I was a fanatic of the Quest for Glory series in my day.

Yup, Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness, it was written by Lori Ann Cole. Fantastic game at that. I was a fanatic of the Quest for Glory series in my day.[/quote]

I beg forgiveness for my ignorance. :blush:

In this case it DOES MAKE SENSE to make Tolkienā€™s game happening in First Age. How many people know what actually was going on there?

On the other hand, they would still be complaining about First Age being different from what they could read in ā€œHobbitā€. Geek.

[quote=ā€œRyan Paddyā€]
Out of curiosity, how many of the tabletoppers donā€™t know who Mark Rein-Hagen is without Googling him? I mean, thereā€™s isnā€™t just a tabletop/larp gap but also a generation gap within tabletoppers.[/quote]

Differnet league than Gygax though, Its like comparing Elton John and Kajagoogoo

One person helped create roleplaying and created the most famous RPG, and the other person created the second-most-famous RPG which is also the only famous LARP (where famous = recognised by non-gamers).

From all that Iā€™ve read about Gygax, heā€™s done as much to attempt to hold roleplay back as heā€™s done to promote it. David Arneson probably has more to be proud of in terms of creating D&D, but doesnā€™t seem to have promoted himself as successfully as Gygax. Personally, Iā€™ve got more respect for a lot of other designers than for Gygax or Rein-Hagen but they are both roleplay ā€œfoundersā€ of a sort.

And with that, I admit defeat on discussing Middle Earth larp here. My heart clearly wasnā€™t in it.

Every once and a while I make the mistake of going back and playing a tabletop RPG. Then I remember why I stopped playing.

I hate waiting for my turn. Life is too short to sit around listening to other people role play pitching a tent or having lunch.

Ok, sorry to bring this back up again, butā€¦

I would be really interested in Middle-earth LARP. I have fairly good knowledge of the world, the peoples and the history, but have absoloutely no knowledge of how LARPs are put together and rules etc.
Iā€™m also organising the Auckland Uni Tolkien Society this year, so there would probably be a few people interested through there.

As a suggestion, have you considered the possibility of having it set at the beginning of the fourth age? People who havnā€™t read the books could use the movies for some idea of what has happened, and the history could be used or not depending on your knowledge. You wouldnā€™t have to worry about having a plot that may or may not correspond with events in the future like you would if you set it before LotR. Races wise, there would be mainly humans as the others are beginning to hide themselves more, but they would still be there, even a few elves for a while. The only thing would be that it might be too peaceful, but Tolkien envisaged that at some point after Aragorn has died, the people of Gondor beginning to worship Sauron and the children playing as orcs in the streets (I may not have this exactly correct as I read it a long time ago) but the dark powers can never be completely overthrown and the cycle will always continue.

What do you think?

What kind of game were you envisaging ? Would this be staged as a weekend event, or a series of one-off events ?

One of features of the Middle Earth setting is the relative scarcity of magik, which would be a point of different to other fantasy larps.

Are you a member of nzLARPS ? If so, you could approach the committee with respect to starting a project for this game idea. AJ (Dr Varteron) is the Projects Officer, and you could private message him for details on how to do this.

In terms of rules, I think the community here would be happy to assist you in a rules development process. You could always start with reviewing the Skirmish and Mordavia rules, cherrypicking the aspects you like best.

There are a number of other middle earth larps to be found on the net.
You might want to have a look, some I quickly found are:
elfstonelarp.org/ (this looks quite good)
dagorhir.com/
links:
seegras.discordia.ch/Roleplay/BRP/MiddleEarth/
darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/lor ā€¦ links.html

that does look good. Go the ENTS in the first two episodes. That ROCKS! :slight_smile: Gotta get me some stilts and practice. hehe. :wink: