Merpcon IV Guest Speaker John D. Rateliff addendum to speech.

http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2008/11/brief-history-of-tolkien-rpgs.html

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Part 1

A Brief History of Tolkien roleplaying games

When deciding on an appropriate topic for this talk, I considered various possibilities from my seventeen years in the industry, twenty-eight years as a gamer, and thirty-five years as a Tolkien scholar, and ultimately decided that it would be fun to combine all of these and share with you some stories from an insider's point of view about the long, sad history of various Tolkien roleplaying games, including some I worked on that never saw the light of day. So here goes.

I. First off, the history of Tolkien roleplaying games begins not with the publication of the first licensed Tolkienian rpg, Middle-Earth Role Playing ('MERP'), but a decade earlier with the origins of roleplaying gaming itself. At about the time of Tolkien's death in September 1973, a little start-up company with the unpromising name of Tactical Studies Rules ('TSR') was putting the finishing touches on their new game, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. Dave Arneson had come up with the idea a year or two earlier, and Gary Gygax had figured out how to make a game out of it (in the sense of writing rules so others could learn how to play), making them the Founding Fathers of our hobby.

The original D&D was clearly based in equal parts on JRRT & on Rbt E. Howard's Conan stories,Nt1 with a magic system inspired by Jack Vance (The Dying Earth) and John Bellairs (The Face in the Frost) and an attitude copped from Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser series, w. bits of Pratt & de Camp's Incomplete Enchanter, Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, and various pulp stalwarts thrown in. Most of these influences were openly acknowledged, both then and later—see, for example, the final appendix in the 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide, 'Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading' (DMG page 224)—which makes it odd that the profound influence of Tolkien on D&D is generally overlooked and downplayed. This was certainly not the case in the dawn of roleplaying, as we'll see in a minute.

The reasons for this disparagement of Tolkien's influence on D&D, and thus ALL roleplaying games, are I think twofold. First, there's the simple fact that Tolkien's innovations are so great that they have, ironically, come to be considered "generic". In fact, they only appear that way because the genre of Modern Fantasy is something Tolkien himself largely created: he is the exemplar that defines the category. The very idea of a player character party—a group of diverse individuals of differing races with differing talents and specialties who set off on an adventure together—is a uniquely Tolkienian innovation, unprecedented in earlier fantasy, where we either have a hero, or a hero & a sidekick.Nt2 In other words, Tolkien influenced fantasy and gaming so profoundly that we take his imprint on other authors for granted. His impact has become invisible—just look how many people spell "elves" and "dwarves" with a 'v' rather than elfs and dwarfs: elves may be partly due to Dunsany, though I doubt this, but dwarves is Tolkien's invention, which others use without even recognizing their indebtedness.

Second, there was a deliberate attempt in later years by Gygax and others, continuing to the present day, to play down Tolkien's influence, most notoriously in Gygax's famous editorial from the March 1985 issue of Dragon magazine (issue #95, pages 12¬–13). Titled "The influence of J. R. R. Tolkien on the D&D® and AD&D® games: Why Middle Earth is not part of the game world", it argues that Tolkien had NO discernable influence on the development of D&D, aside from a few surface similarities based on Gygax's drawing on the same sort of sources as Tolkien himself had used.

Now, there are three theories regarding this claim, which was met with incredulity at the time and more or less universally dismissed ever since, being belied by the evidence both past and present. The first is what we might call the cocaine theory, the widespread belief that years of rumored drug abuse during E. Gary Gygax's time heading up TSR's Hollywood branch had addled his brain. The second is that Gygax simply forgot by the mid-eighties how he'd created the game in the early seventies; certainly his story changed a number of times over the years, and the general trend of those changes is to shift credit away from others (e.g., Arneson) and onto himself. So maybe he simply resented sharing credit with JRRT. The third is, in a word, lawyers, and a salutary fear of lawsuits if any good case could be made for D&D's debt to Tolkien's work. And, as we'll see, he had excellent reason based on personal experience to believe this was a very real threat, which might explain why he was so adamant about denying any Tolkien influence in his 1985 piece, which freely admits to influence from a number of other lesser writers.

For, no matter how much Gygax might have later denied it, Tolkien's fingerprints are all over original D&D. Look at the four player-character races in the original three-booklet boxed set from 1973/74: Men, Dwarves, Elves, and Hobbits (Vol. I: Men & Magic, pages 6–8)—all found in Tolkien, and three out of the four directly derived from his work. And, to break chronology for a moment, a similar dominance is shown in the 1st edition AD&D's Player's Handbook [1978], which adds half-elves, half-orcs, and gnomes; two out of three come directly, unambiguously, from Tolkien, while the single nonTolkien race proved the most unpopular player character race throughout AD&D's thirty-year history, finally being deleted with this year's release of Fourth Edition [2008]. Or, going back to 1973/74, look at the monsters these earliest adventurers were to encounter: of the sixty or so creatures listed in the Monsters & Treasures booklet (Vol II), a dozen come directly from Tolkien's work—that is, about a fifth of the whole, with the rest deriving from classical mythology (dryads, medusae, centaurs, minotaurs), medieval legend (wyverns, manticores, unicorns), folk lore (pixies), and horror stories (the undead); contributions from other modern fantasy writers (with the sole exception of Dunsany's gnolls—Vol.II page 8) are notably absent. Furthermore, the monster descriptions that follow repeatedly cite Tolkien as the source for that monster (mispelling it 'Tolkein' each time): Orcs (page 7: "the number of different tribes of Orcs can be varied as desired, basing the decision on Tolkein or random chance"), wights (page 9: 'Barrow Wights (per Tolkein) are nasty critters . . ."), spectres (ibid: "The Nazgul of Tolkein now fall into this category rather than as Wraiths as stated in CHAINMAIL"),Nt3 and even Rocs (page 17: "This term has been used to encompass large and fierce birds such as the 'Eagles' of Tolkein . . ." [emphasis mine]). And of course the book is marked with the presence not just of Tolkienian spellings (dwarves, elves) but of names the Professor invented: not just Hobbit but also Orcs, Balrogs, and Nazgul—this last was even featured, so labelled, on the title page. And I shd note that this usage continued in the early D&D supplements, such as Supplement I: Greyhawk [Febuary 1975; cf. page 5], and Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry [April 1976; cf. page 3], and even into the earliest printings of the D&D Basic Set [i.e., D&D 2nd edition] by J. Eric Homes [1977]. Even the piece of artwork that appeared on the very first page of the original 'Fantasy Supplement' that preceded the stand-alone D&D rules was obviously based directly on an illustration from a Tolkien book.Nt4

II. Not only was D&D in its first incarnation riddled with Tolkien borrowings, but TSR even put out a Battle of Five Armies boardgame in 1976, wherein Dwarves, Elves, Men, Goblins, Wargs, Giant Eagles, and Beorn fought various permutations of the great battle from The Hobbit. Since this year's theme for MERPcon is dwarves, I should note that my favorite variation listed in the rules is the all-dwarven one where the dwarves attempt to fight off Smaug's original attack on the Kingdom Under the Mountain, which includes the special rule "For this scenario Smaug may only be killed by Bowfire. Note: In this scenario the Dwarves have no Bows." Think about that for a minute. The only thing missing seems to be The Hobbit himself, since there is no counter representing Bilbo nor any mention of him within the game; he seems to have turned invisible & missed the battle, and game, altogether.

So, we see that in the years immediately following D&D's creation, TSR products borrowed heavily, and openly, from Tolkien. Sometime in 1977/78, however, Things Changed. Words like "hobbit" and "ent" and "balrog" suddenly disappear from reprintings of the D&D digests, replaced by "halfling" and "treant" and "Type VI Demon" [Eldritch Wizardry page 3]; we hear no more of "Nazgul" but only of "spectres" and "wraiths"; no more Tolkien boardgames like Battle of Five Armies appear from TSR. That these changes were only on the surface is shown by the AD&D Monster Manual—the first hardcover rpg book, released in late 1977—describing 'Halflings' as falling into three subgroups: Hairfeet, Stouts, and Tallfellows, which correspond exactly to Tolkien's Harfoot, Stour, and Fallohide.

III. So, what happened? The answer can be found, albeit obliquely, in Kristen Thompson's excellent book The Frodo Franchise [2007], a history of the making of the Peter Jackson movies. In her account of the way film rights to Tolkien's book got sold and resold to various filmmakers and studios, she describes how finally Saul Zaentz bought both the film and film merchandising rights in 1976, and by 1978 had set up Tolkien Enterprises to handle all licensing based on the Bakshi film (everything from Lord of the Nazgul piggybanks to puzzles that when assembled made photo-portraits of JRRT himself). This is important, because while conventional wisdom ascribes to the Tolkien Estate a reputation for laying down the law and descending like a hammer on people who use Tolkien names and characters without approval, in almost all cases I've been able to trace this is in fact not the Tolkien ESTATE—that is, the Tolkien family—but Tolkien ENTERPRISES, or Saul Zaentz. Given the uncertain state of the Tolkien copyrights in the 1970s (which is another story I can come back to later it you like), it's almost certain that it was NOT the Tolkien Estate, but rather Zaentz's Tolkien Enterprises, that sent TSR their cease & desist back sometime in late 1977. Whereupon Gygax and Company at once filed the serial numbers off, except in a few odd cases such as "orc" (which they ludicrously began to claim came not from Tolkien but from an Irish word for pig, leading to the silly-looking pig-snouted orcs of the Monster Manual [page 76]) and 'mithral' (which they simply decided to misspell) and otherwise went on their merry way.

PART TWO

IV. The advent of Tolkien Enterprises into our story complicates things: most people do not realize that almost all the Tolkien-related items they see aside from books and (some) calendars are not approved by the Tolkien Estate but instead are part of "film licensing", over which the Estate has almost no control, due to the poorly defined licensing rights in the original contract Tolkien signed back in the 1960s. Among the things that fall under Tolkien Enterprises' control are not just the Peter Jackson movies (and the older Bakshi film), and obvious movie tie-in products such as posters, chess sets, and replica swords, but the entire MERP product line. That is, all officially approved Tolkien roleplaying games, collectable card games, boardgames, and computer games for the last thirty years have been licensed not from the Tolkien Estate but from Saul Zaentz as examples of "film merchandising".

V. One effect of TSR's transparent (but legally successful) attempt to genericize D&D and get it away from its Tolkien roots meant that after about 1977 there was no longer even an unofficial Tolkien roleplaying game on the market. The abject failure of the Bakshi film, financially and creatively, seems to have forestalled any attempt to officially license a Tolkien rpg for some five years, but by 1982 Iron Crown Enterprises had acquired the Tolkien license, launching MERP (Middle Earth Role Playing) in 1984.

However, while a long-running rpg line, MERP never won over the majority of Tolkien fans who were gamers, who continued to run D&D varients; despite a core of devotees it remained a game more collected than played. I think the reasons for this were threefold. First off, D&D's unofficial motto has always been "plagiarism is our friend"—that is, it has always stolen so widely, and been such a flexible system, that it's easier for most folks to tweak the game they already knew (which in any case originated as a pseudo-Tolkienian game in the first place, and still remained close to those roots) into a Tolkienian system than to learn a new game in order to play out Tolkienian scenarios within Tolkienian settings. Second, once they got the license Iron Crown did not create a new rules system from the ground up designed to capture Tolkienian roleplaying, but simply adapted their house system, ROLEMASTER (itself evolved from a D&D varient), to Tolkien's world—as may be seen from the fact that ICE began releasing Tolkien modules as early as 1982 (e.g., ANGMAR) while the actual MERP rules did not follow until two years later, in 1984. The decision to use a preexisting system rather than create a new Tolkien-centric game led to some disconnects—the most serious of which was the presence of Animist (Clerics) as one of the core player-character classes, when Tolkien's works are so resolutely devoid of clergy, spell-casting or otherwise (a problem that has bedeviled most Tolkien rpgs to date). Third, since this was an official license, its modules and sourcebooks could use names & places taken directly from Tolkien's books (no 'halflings' and 'mithral' here). But Iron Crown's decision, no doubt dictated by the terms of their license, to stringently avoid the actual story & time of Tolkien's familiar story, meant we got no adventures w. Aragorn, no epic boxed sets allowing us to play through Bilbo's journey or the various component quests that make up The Lord of the Ring. Instead, we get detailed sourcebooks set (for the most part) a milennium and a half before—which is interesting for die-hard Tolkien fans like myself, but lacks the mass appeal of, say, a 'Fellowship in Moria' adventure might have. (It's rather like having a Columbus-discovers-the-New-World game which focuses exclusively on Christopher C.'s early life and never touches on any of his four history-making voyages.)

Nevertheless, as I said, it was a fairly successful line, lasting for a full decade while other games came and went. But by 1991/92 it was at a low ebb, and when the license came up for renewal Tolkien Enterprises let it be known they were interested in negotiating with other companies to publish some all-new Tolkien rpg to replace MERP.

PART FOUR

IX. And so, after WotC took a pass, the Tolkien license went to Decipher, who in 2002 produced their own LORD OF THE RINGS ROLEPLAYING GAME. Then in June/July 2001 I was caught up in the latest round of layoffs and left Wizards of the Coast. Before the day was out, I had a verbal agreement with the folks at Decipher, where most of Christian's Last Unicorn team had gone after leaving WotC at the time of the previous layoff, to work on their Tolkien rpg. My contribution was to write descriptions of the game world; hence the first section of the main rulebook, "There and Back Again: The Realms of Middle-Earth" is mainly my work (material which was re-used in booklet form as the text in the MAPS OF MIDDLE-EARTH boxed set [2002]).

Once again rather than create a rules system to match Tolkien's world, Decipher decided to use their pre-existing house system (the CODA System), created for their Star Trek game, for their new LotR game. Given that their license came directly through New Line, they were not only able to use the era and characters from The Lord of the Rings (i.e., the end of the Third Age), but their books were chock-full of movie art, most illustrations being stills from the films. Unfortunately, since they were dependent on the films and, like many media licensing deals, had an onorous approval process to go through, their releases sadly lagged behind the films themselves: for example, their MORIA boxed set, which shd ideally have come out around the end of 2001 or early 2002, didn't see release until 2003; their Rohan sourcebook, which I wrote roughly half of, never came out at all. It soon became clear that Decipher's main interest lay, not unreasonably, in the real money-maker, their LotR collectable card game, and the roleplaying game languished. Eventually (June 30th 2007, according to Wikipedia, the Source of All Knowledge) their license expired, with the result that currently there is NO Tolkien roleplaying game being published, a situation unprecedented since the early 1980s.


X. And so, here we are. The license is currently in abeyance, awaiting re-licensing for the forthcoming HOBBIT movie(s). There will no doubt be yet another Tolkien rpg in a few years' time, but if history is any guide it will probably appear from a second-tier publisher and make a relatively minor splash, being more collected and read than played. Most Tolkien fans will continue to get their gaming fix through homebrew campaigns or tweaks to their favorite game system --most recently d20/3.5/Open Gaming, now no doubt soon to shift towards 4th edition D&D/GSL, given its solution to the longstanding 'cleric-less adventuring' problem. Just as attention has shifted over time from Tolkien boardgames (SPI in the late '70s) to rpgs (ICE in the '80s and '90s, Decipher in the new century) to collectable card games (ibid), so now MMOs rule the roost, like Turbine's The Lord of the Rings Online [2007ff]), and it is here that the bulk of attention will focus next time around.Nt6 It also seems likely that such efforts will be tied more closely to the films than Tolkien's books; certainly THE SILMARILLION, UNFINISHED TALES, et al. will play no significant role.

But, just as Decipher released a roleplaying game as well as a ccg, we will almost certainly get not just new LotR computer games but also yet another new rpg (with yet another new rules system), a new ccg, a new collectable miniatures game, &c. In the meantime, we have fan-based efforts such as Other Hands, Other Minds, and, more recently, MERPCon's EÄ Project, whereby those who combine a love for JRR Tolkien's work with a love for gaming create their own rules in order to enjoy their own versions of Tolkien gaming.

--John D. Rateliff, July/August 2008.


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NOTES

Note 1. As collaborating evidence of this obvious fact, cf. the second sentence of the first paragraph of the 'Fantasy Supplement' to CHAINMAIL, the miniatures rules system that preceded Dungeons & Dragons and directly gave rise to it:

"Most of the fantastic battles related in novels more closely resemble medieval warfare than they do earlier or later forms of combat. Because of this we are including a brief set of rules [i.e., the 'Fantasy Supplement'] which will allow the medieval miniatures wargamer to add a new facet to his hobby, and either refight the epic struggles related by J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers; or you can devise your own 'world,' and conduct fantastic campaigns and conflicts based on it. (emphasis mine*)

*my citation comes from page 28 of the third edition of CHAINMAIL [1979]; my thanks to Scott Riddick and all at www.acaeum.com for confirmation of the fact that this sentence reads the same in the earliest printings.


Note 2. Or, in the special case of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar tales, a double-hero who can trade off taking center stage and act as each other's sidekicks at need.


Note 3. This is a reference to the Nazgul being the original wraiths in CHAINMAIL; in the first and second editions of that work, the entry on Wraiths read "WRAITHS (Nazgul, etc.):". I am grateful to Scott Riddick at The Acaeum, the D&D game collector's site, for helping me confirm this information.

Note 4. Compare the unattributed illustration of a dragon pursued by a knight in the CHAINMAIL booklet with Pauline Baynes' illustration of Farmer Giles pursuing Chrysophylax Dives in Farmer Giles of Ham (page 44, third edition [1975]). The CHAINMAIL illustration† is clearly redrawn, almost traced, from Baynes' work, the main difference being the farmer's replacement by an armored knight.

†This appears on page 37 of the third edition of CHAINMAIL, but I am told it appeared on the first page (page 33) of the Fantasy Supplement in CHAINMAIL 's first edition. My thanks to Allan Grohe, Scott Riddick, and all at the acaeum D&D collectors' forum for this information.


Note 5. They released a new entry-level game every year from 1991 to 1996, only the first of which could be considered a success.


Note 6. Kristen Thompson reports that the computer games based on the three Jackson films made about a billion dollars per film. (THE FRODO FRANCHISE, page 9).

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My thanks to the many who helped me in my research of specific details for this piece, including Bruce Leonard, Allan Grohe, Scott Riddick and all at acaeum.com (cf. www.acaeum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7342), Wayne Hammond & Christina Scull, Shelly Baur, Angus Abranson, Jeremy Edmonds, David Pulver, Roderick Robertson, and Dave Watry of www.freeweb.com/tolkienboardgamecollecting. And my thanks to Hawke Robinson, the organizer of MERPcon, for inviting me to give this year's Guest of Honor speech.
--JDR