Relatedly, whilst Rolemaster-style critical hits might be awesome, I don’t remember Tolkien making a habit of using precisely described maimings and injuries to spice up combat scenes, though I guess I could see Peter Jackson drawing on the critical hit tables here. Conversely, because all of its character classes are inherited from Rolemaster, everyone in MERP can learn magic, and magic a good deal flashier and easier than what Gandalf pulls out of his hat in the books. In Middle Earth magic is rare and always getting rarer, with explicit magic use basically being limited to the Valar and Maiar and mmmmmmaybe elves and dwarves if you count their exceptional craftsmanship as quasi-magical. The big problem with this drive to encourage people to take up the advanced game is that even the lower-powered characters of MERP don’t really seem to fit the Middle Earth setting. On top of that, ICE must have realised that the Middle Earth licence had the potential to reach an audience beyond the existing roleplaying fandom, so an entry-level rules set aimed squarely at them could be a big hit – and if they played their cards right, it could drive sales of both their MERP setting material and their existing RPG rules.ĭebuting in 1984, MERP is famously based on a scaled-back version of Rolemaster, and it seems to have been designed with the assumption that people would graduate to using Rolemaster in place of the MERP system when they were good and ready the text directly encourages this and goes out of its way to mention that you are only getting a fraction of the magic and rules for characters of 1st-10th level and so on and so forth if you stick with just the MERP rules. However, as the 1980s went on such cross-industry collaboration and permissiveness would go out of style, particularly once TSR and Palladium Books started to flex their legal muscles as a matter of course. This strikes me as a smart move -after all, when you’ve landed what is arguably the biggest IP licence in fantasy literature, why limit yourself to just selling it to customers of your house system? – and it was in keeping with the commercial trends of the time, Chaosium having given Thieves World the multi-system treatment the previous year. Having landed the Middle-Earth licence, they had put out a world guide to the setting in 1982, but they went system neutral with it, providing guidelines for adapting a range of different popular fantasy systems of the time to the needs of a Middle-Earth campaign. MERP was produced by ICE, producers of Rolemaster. The two games – MERP and The One Ring – both represent very distinct and different takes on the same setting, but only one of them captures the weird mixture of comfortable fairytale and doom-laden epic that is the hallmark of Lord of the Rings… Middle Earth Role-Playing
#Middle earth role playing cracked
Recently I had a chance to acquire two of the three second hand for a good rate – and the two with a better fan reputation, at that – so I thought I’d dip in to see whether they were what they were cracked up to be. Over the years we’ve seen the licensing rights for such things pass from company to company, resulting in three different official RPGs over the years – MERP, the Decipher-published Lord of the Rings range that tied in with the Peter Jackson movies, and the latest official RPG incarnation of Middle Earth, The One Ring. People like to express doubts as to whether Tolkien’s legendarium is really suited for adapting to tabletop RPGs, but people keep doing it anyway.
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