Brian's Middle-Earth Role Playing Pages

"This is the Master-Ring, the One Ring to rule them all. This is the One Ring that he lost many ages ago, to the great weakening of his power. He greatly desires it - but he must not get it!" Gandalf the Grey, The Lord of the Rings: The Shadow of the Past.

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What is Middle-Earth Role Playing?

Similar to Dungeons and Dragons, Middle-Earth Role Playing (commonly known as MERP) is a game where people play the roles of various characters. The game is run by a person called the GameMaster, who sets up the situations, plays characters that the players interact with, and resolves movement and spell casting actions by the players. The players take on the role of one or two characters of varying races - Human, Dwarf, Elf, and others - and interact with each other and the GameMaster. The outcome of major actions is decided by dice rolls.

MERP is set in Middle-Earth, the realm of J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Typically adventures take place in about the year 1640 of the Third Age. This is before Sauron had re-established himself at Dol Guldur in Mirkwood and the Dwarves had awakened the Balrog in Moria. The One Ring is still being kept in dark solitude by Gollum; it will be another thirteen hundred before the free peoples of Middle-Earth fight the Dark Lord for it.

MERP offers some advantages over traditional Dungeons and Dragons ®: there is a cohesive world with well-known background and history, better defined characters, and a more comprehensive battle resolution system. For example, in D&D characters take overall damage, dying when their hit points are reduced to zero. In MERP, characters not only take general damage, but can suffer injury or loss in limbs and organs. So a fighter may survive a battle but lose use of his sword arm, forcing him to use a different weapon or fight at a significant disadvantage until his arm is healed.

A well-run MERP campaign is fascinating to participate in, as well as an enormous amount of fun!

A Middle-Earth Role-Playing Campaign

I have been involved with a couple of Middle-Earth Role Playing campaigns since August 1995. Four or five of us meet once a week whenever possible to spend the evening munching on pizza and playing the game. I am not the Game Master; I play a couple of characters in the game.

This campaign has now ended. I started these pages on game day 53, so there is a lot of catching up to do. My approach to catching up on the backlog is to write the opening scenes first, add new days as they are played, then start working backwards from day 53 until the entire set is completed. This may take some time, for I spend most of my time keeping up with the second adventure!

Index of Campaign 1

Another Middle-Earth Role-Playing Campaign

This campaign started in April 1997. For this one, I adopted a different approach to capturing it. Armed with a microcassette recorder instead of pen and paper, I tape each week's session. Then, as time permits, I sit down with the tape at my computer and write out the adventure. This approach allows for a more vivid rendering, for I am able to capture many conversations as they were actually spoken.

The game master for this campaign, a different person from the last campaign, is an experienced MERP player and game master. He played a couple of the characters in the last campaign and plays a character in this one. The game master from the previous campaign is also in this one, playing two of the characters.

Index of Campaign 2

Paul's Middle-Earth Role Playing Campaign

During the summer of 1997, the son of a friend of mine became interested in running a MERP campaign after reading my chronicle of the second campaign. I spent the summer showing Paul and his friends the MERP system and helping them generate characters. They started paying in the late fall that year, then Paul asked me to join the campaign, primarily to act as Game Master's assistant. This has been a bit of a learning experience for me, too, since up to now I have only been playing as a character and not as a game master.

Paul had intended all along to chronicle the campaign and put it up on the World Wide Web as part of my MERP site. I was willing to host it, but requested he supply the text ... writing the chronicle of the other adventure I'm participating in takes up the lion's share of my time! So I suggested the "diary" approach, recording the campaign as though it were written down in a diary kept by one of the participants. He now supplies me with diary entries, and I do some minor editing on them for spelling and style, then include them in my own MERP web site.

Paul's Middle-Earth Role Playing Campaign

Middle-Earth Role Playing, MERP, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, and all characters and places therein, are registered trademarks of TOLKIEN ENTERPRISES, a division of ELAN MERCHANDISING, Inc, Berkely, CA. MERP is produced by Iron Crown Enterprises of Charlottesville, VA.

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Paul's Middle-Earth Campaign
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Brian Lowe / Winnipeg PC User Group / blowe@wpcusrgrp.org
Last updated on June 17, 1998. Accesses since September 30, 1998: (Counter image not available)