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pyatI realize that admitting to being a fan of Knights of the Dinner Table probably makes me a bit of a Cro-Magnon in the eyes of some gamers on my friend’s list. While I acknowledge that most of the storylines and jokes are simply in-bred, mean-spirted lame gamer humor, I have to say that some of the plotlines the fictional characters experience do stir my imagination somewhat.
In recent months, for example, the characters in the comic book have been waging a war with each other, over the fate of their fictional game world. Two of the players have been dominated by intelligent, evil swords of the Stormbringer type, and the action has revolved around their attempts to destroy one another. They’ve been raising armies and fighting running battles, and have even found guest players to run the roles of the respective “swords” themselves.
The storyline reminds me of what was perhaps my first really, really good RPG campaign.
This, by the way, is the magic phrase that will cause several of you to skip this entry, and wait for me to post more baby pictures. Go ahead – but be aware that this entry features imprisoned elfin slave-chicks, huge battles, and guys standing on piles of bodies while waving big-ass axes.
The name of the game was MERPS, the “Middle-Earth Role Play System”, the cranky, magnificently chart-heavy precursor to the current Lord of the Rings RPG. MERPS, as a system, did not capture the flavor of the LoTR trilogy all that well, but it contributed to some of the more memorable moments at the game table when I GMed it through high-school.
About a decade ago, my regular game group had shrunk to two good friends, Bill and Dan. Our weekly sessions were… lacking something. We played listless games of Champions, generating new characters almost every week. It was at this point I picked up a used copy of the Lands of the Witch-King supplement for MERPS, a book that detailed the realm of Angmar, “where of old the Witch-King reigned." LoTR fanatics will recall Angmar as the land ruled by the leader of the Názgul about a thousand years before The Hobbit. (For everyone else, the Witch-King was the huge dude killed in the last movie by the girl dressed as a guy.)
Something in the book clicked with me, and I started planning a campaign based in Angmar during the reign of the Witch-King. I described the setting to my players, and they too seemed enthused by it. Dan created Goethe, a disenfranchised Dunédain knight, who was actually of Black Numénor blood. Bill created Amon Gra, an Uruk-Hai (Half-Troll) barbarian. They met at a cross-road, and decided to journey together.
As my old campaign log puts it:
In year 1349 of the Third Age two misanthropic wanderers met in the Angmarian wastes and called an uneasy truce. One was an outcast from all races - an angry half-troll, the product of rape, fleeing from the hated world of men. His name was Amon Gra. The other was a young man of noble lineage, of the blood of Numénor and Dunédain. His family’s lands had been lost in the fire of war. This was Goethe, landless, homeless, but burning with ambition.
Over the course of the next year, the game single-handedly rekindled our interest in RPGs, and probably marks the first really good campaign I’ve run. I think part of the reason things clicked was the whole fin de école mood of uncertainty we were in.
High school was over. None of us had serious job prospects or significant others (though I was corresponding regularly with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
velvetpage, who was in France at the time), and the unknowns of post-secondary education loomed large in our sights. The real world seemed pretty grim, and large, and instilled a frame of mind in each of us that was conducive to a game of uncertain moralities and glorious, grim deeds.
Perhaps more importantly, the superficial reasons for friendship (shared hobby and interest in TV shows with lasers in ‘em) were being stripped away, and we were discovering that we actually had much more in common than dice-slingin' and nerdishness.
For one thing, we found that we all shared an appreciation (in a literary and cinematic sense) for, well... lost causes, last stands, glorious martyrdom and clash of arms. We all loved the Elric novels, for example, and had been very impressed by the powerful battle scenes and soliloquies in Ran and Henry V. We’d just rediscovered Conan (stories and film), and had also been watching a lot of black and white movies that featured Amoral Tough Guys Who Go Down Fightin’ – I’m looking at you, Mr. Cagney!
If I may sound pretentious (too late!) for a moment, the sprit of Mars was very much upon us, that year. It should not, therefore, have been surprising that the game quickly took on a martial (and sometimes frighteningly amoral) tone. Plots were hatched, challenges issued, armies raised and lost, mead quaffed, fortunes won, limbs rent, ancient gods challenged, and Pillars of Heaven shaken with gusto… if not intelligence.
I threw out the book on this one. Screw levels. My players wanted epic, and I handed it to them - with a side-order of Ancient Unspeakable Evil and Artifacts the Likes of Which Man Was Not Meant to Tamper. Dan’s character Goethe became the leader of an orc tribe, and immediately started plotting against the throne of Angmar, and launched a long term plan to raise sunken Numénor and invade the Undying Lands. Bill’s character, Amon Gra, decided to found a homeland for Orcs, where they could live free from any foreign overlord.
We just clicked. The level of role-play was higher than I’d ever seen it before. Bill and Dan were enthused about this game. They wallowed in their characters, and transcended the old bean-counting practice of gaming for XP and gold that MERPS had partially inherited from D&D. Their characters succeeded brilliantly, and failed miserably. It was everything an RPG SHOULD be, and I’ve never quite been able to recapture it.
Various memorable scenes stand out.
- Their arrival at the wind-swept Ravda stockade.
- Amon Gra running through the side of a smashed mountain, leading an army of orcs.
- Goethe attempting, over the course of a month, to pull a “Richard III,” and seduce a captured elf ranger whose companions he had slain. “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?” (He pulled it off, too... for a time.)
- Amon Gra and Goethe wading through a literal river of blood, deep under the earth, in order to make a deal with a Vampire who had been slumbering there since the First Age.
- Goethe betraying his own orc warriors, once it became clear that they would be a liability, and then desperately chasing a fleeing orc through a frozen marsh, and getting stuck on a muddy hillside in his plate armor. (MERP had some very nasty “maneuvering” tables.)
- The two of them - wounded, feverish, starving, and alone - tromping down a path on the Rhudaur frontier. They were reduced to boiling twigs for food.
- Goethe’s return to power, and grand processional through Rhudaur, gathering an army with every town-square oration.
- The two of them fleeing alone across a barren plain, their army in tatters, and the hunting horns of the Orcs on the wind.
- Having tea with a double-dealing Angmarian wizard, in a silk tent, on the side of a frozen mountain.
I remember particularly the ill-fated decision the players made to face the legions of Angmar head-on, which quite lead to the aforementioned flight across a snowy plain…
The Witch King supplement had a very complete list of the war bands and units available to Angmar, as well as write-ups of the commanders in charge of them. This enabled me to be very precise when it came to the response given to the players efforts to become leaders of men – or orcs, as the case more commonly was.
Goethe had recruited about 30 young knights of the northern Dunédain kingdom of Rhudaur. These worthies brought with them 800 or so trained foot soldiers and archers, and Goethe’s speeches in the various villages and thorps along the route had attracted a large number of commoners to his cause. I believe the total was 1500 peasants, mostly farmers, equipped largely with farm implements. Many of them brought their families on the march. The stated intention of this army was to liberate the castle and town of Barad-Eldanar, a former settlement of Rhudaur, captured by the Witch King just a decade or so before.
The players succeeded brilliantly in this initial assault – the siege lasted barely a day. They infiltrated the castle, opened the gates, and swarmed over the 200 or so orcs and men that held the place. After, they imprisoned the commander of the garrison, while Goethe attempted to convince the survivors to join him. They had a celebratory feast in the castle’s great hall, and handed out honors. Unfortunately, the victory placed their army just a week’s march from the gates of Angbad, seat of the Witch King’s power.
Wiser heads might have secured the castle and sent for reinforcements. However, Goethe’s personal philosophy was that wiser heads seldom win glory. He decided to ride north, and capture another small fortress on the road to Angbad. He sent a message to "his" tribe of orcs, the Uruk-Lugat, in the hopes that their war bands would be enough to turn his peasant army into an impressive force. 600 spear-carrying orcs answered the call, and arrived within days.
He and Amon Gra spent two weeks preparing their army – two weeks in which the Witch King’s lieutenants were also preparing. To avoid alarming the Rhudaurian knights and solidery, Amon Gra instructed the Uruk-Lugat warbands to camp a few miles away. When the army marches, they are to remain two miles to the rear. This decision had unfortunate side-effects when battle was finally joined.
After two weeks, the army marched north. Goethe left behind a tiny defending force at Barad Eldanar, and personally led the way on a black stallion. (Outriders and scouts are for sissies.) Two days later, they found about 3000 Angmarian soldiers (humans, mostly) blocking the road in front of them. Goethe’s forces were stopped on a portion of the road between two large hills - giving them limited visibility east and west. (Ambush country!)
Goethe ordered his army into battle formation. In accordance with the rules of Glorious Last Stands, Goethe started by ordering a mounted charge (covered by archers) with pikemen marching stolidly behind. The young knights of Rhudaur were cut up fairly quickly. Goethe ordered the peasant militia to join the advance, the two lines met, and battle was joined in earnest.
In the meantime, Amon Gra was still plodding along with his orcs, unaware of the battle ahead. He crested a hill, and saw the battle in progress. From his vantage point, he ALSO saw about 200 Warg riders and 150 elite Uruk-Hai warriors (like the ones Saruman grows in his basement in the films) charging the rear of Goethe’s army, cutting through the camp followers and peasants guarding the supply wagons.
Bill made a credible attempt to quote Henry V at this point (Kill the boys and the luggage! ‘Tis expressly against the law of arms!), and led his force in a running charge…
Into the rear of Goethe’s army…
Which was just coming to grips with an orc attack to the rear….
The commanders of which were largely unaware that there were other orcs, fighting on their side...
Orcs are hardly renowned for their fire discipline, and as soon as a few of Goethe’s men fired an arrow (or ten) in direction, Amon Gra’s war bands started attacking humans willy-nilly. Amon Gra managed to keep his own, hand-picked, followers in line, and fought his way towards the Goethe’s tent. Chaos reigned.
Pressed on both sides, Goethe’s battle lines dissolved, and he soon found himself fighting hand-to-hand with elite Uruk-Hai rangers, each of whom was (in game terms) a higher level than he was. Only the timely arrival of Amon Gra allowed him to escape, more or less unharmed. The two of them quickly decided that a decisive retrograde advance was called for. Unfortunately, they did not have much of an army left, and the road back to Barad Eldanar was blocked by Warg Riders.
Goethe’s sense of battle-glory was quickly overwhelmed by his sense of self-preservation. He sent his remaining warriors and standard bearer west – while he and Amon Gra hared off to the east. The warriors or Rhudaur were slain and imprisoned, and Amon Gra’s orcs either died to changed sides.
Which, of course, ended in the scene mentioned above – Goethe and Amon Gra running north-east into the barrens of Angmar, pursued by orcs, towards the secret lair of the Witch-King himself...
Like I said… damn fine campaign.
In recent months, for example, the characters in the comic book have been waging a war with each other, over the fate of their fictional game world. Two of the players have been dominated by intelligent, evil swords of the Stormbringer type, and the action has revolved around their attempts to destroy one another. They’ve been raising armies and fighting running battles, and have even found guest players to run the roles of the respective “swords” themselves.
The storyline reminds me of what was perhaps my first really, really good RPG campaign.
This, by the way, is the magic phrase that will cause several of you to skip this entry, and wait for me to post more baby pictures. Go ahead – but be aware that this entry features imprisoned elfin slave-chicks, huge battles, and guys standing on piles of bodies while waving big-ass axes.
The name of the game was MERPS, the “Middle-Earth Role Play System”, the cranky, magnificently chart-heavy precursor to the current Lord of the Rings RPG. MERPS, as a system, did not capture the flavor of the LoTR trilogy all that well, but it contributed to some of the more memorable moments at the game table when I GMed it through high-school.
About a decade ago, my regular game group had shrunk to two good friends, Bill and Dan. Our weekly sessions were… lacking something. We played listless games of Champions, generating new characters almost every week. It was at this point I picked up a used copy of the Lands of the Witch-King supplement for MERPS, a book that detailed the realm of Angmar, “where of old the Witch-King reigned." LoTR fanatics will recall Angmar as the land ruled by the leader of the Názgul about a thousand years before The Hobbit. (For everyone else, the Witch-King was the huge dude killed in the last movie by the girl dressed as a guy.)
Something in the book clicked with me, and I started planning a campaign based in Angmar during the reign of the Witch-King. I described the setting to my players, and they too seemed enthused by it. Dan created Goethe, a disenfranchised Dunédain knight, who was actually of Black Numénor blood. Bill created Amon Gra, an Uruk-Hai (Half-Troll) barbarian. They met at a cross-road, and decided to journey together.
As my old campaign log puts it:
In year 1349 of the Third Age two misanthropic wanderers met in the Angmarian wastes and called an uneasy truce. One was an outcast from all races - an angry half-troll, the product of rape, fleeing from the hated world of men. His name was Amon Gra. The other was a young man of noble lineage, of the blood of Numénor and Dunédain. His family’s lands had been lost in the fire of war. This was Goethe, landless, homeless, but burning with ambition.
Over the course of the next year, the game single-handedly rekindled our interest in RPGs, and probably marks the first really good campaign I’ve run. I think part of the reason things clicked was the whole fin de école mood of uncertainty we were in.
High school was over. None of us had serious job prospects or significant others (though I was corresponding regularly with
velvetpage, who was in France at the time), and the unknowns of post-secondary education loomed large in our sights. The real world seemed pretty grim, and large, and instilled a frame of mind in each of us that was conducive to a game of uncertain moralities and glorious, grim deeds. Perhaps more importantly, the superficial reasons for friendship (shared hobby and interest in TV shows with lasers in ‘em) were being stripped away, and we were discovering that we actually had much more in common than dice-slingin' and nerdishness.
For one thing, we found that we all shared an appreciation (in a literary and cinematic sense) for, well... lost causes, last stands, glorious martyrdom and clash of arms. We all loved the Elric novels, for example, and had been very impressed by the powerful battle scenes and soliloquies in Ran and Henry V. We’d just rediscovered Conan (stories and film), and had also been watching a lot of black and white movies that featured Amoral Tough Guys Who Go Down Fightin’ – I’m looking at you, Mr. Cagney!
If I may sound pretentious (too late!) for a moment, the sprit of Mars was very much upon us, that year. It should not, therefore, have been surprising that the game quickly took on a martial (and sometimes frighteningly amoral) tone. Plots were hatched, challenges issued, armies raised and lost, mead quaffed, fortunes won, limbs rent, ancient gods challenged, and Pillars of Heaven shaken with gusto… if not intelligence.
I threw out the book on this one. Screw levels. My players wanted epic, and I handed it to them - with a side-order of Ancient Unspeakable Evil and Artifacts the Likes of Which Man Was Not Meant to Tamper. Dan’s character Goethe became the leader of an orc tribe, and immediately started plotting against the throne of Angmar, and launched a long term plan to raise sunken Numénor and invade the Undying Lands. Bill’s character, Amon Gra, decided to found a homeland for Orcs, where they could live free from any foreign overlord.
We just clicked. The level of role-play was higher than I’d ever seen it before. Bill and Dan were enthused about this game. They wallowed in their characters, and transcended the old bean-counting practice of gaming for XP and gold that MERPS had partially inherited from D&D. Their characters succeeded brilliantly, and failed miserably. It was everything an RPG SHOULD be, and I’ve never quite been able to recapture it.
Various memorable scenes stand out.
- Their arrival at the wind-swept Ravda stockade.
- Amon Gra running through the side of a smashed mountain, leading an army of orcs.
- Goethe attempting, over the course of a month, to pull a “Richard III,” and seduce a captured elf ranger whose companions he had slain. “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?” (He pulled it off, too... for a time.)
- Amon Gra and Goethe wading through a literal river of blood, deep under the earth, in order to make a deal with a Vampire who had been slumbering there since the First Age.
- Goethe betraying his own orc warriors, once it became clear that they would be a liability, and then desperately chasing a fleeing orc through a frozen marsh, and getting stuck on a muddy hillside in his plate armor. (MERP had some very nasty “maneuvering” tables.)
- The two of them - wounded, feverish, starving, and alone - tromping down a path on the Rhudaur frontier. They were reduced to boiling twigs for food.
- Goethe’s return to power, and grand processional through Rhudaur, gathering an army with every town-square oration.
- The two of them fleeing alone across a barren plain, their army in tatters, and the hunting horns of the Orcs on the wind.
- Having tea with a double-dealing Angmarian wizard, in a silk tent, on the side of a frozen mountain.
I remember particularly the ill-fated decision the players made to face the legions of Angmar head-on, which quite lead to the aforementioned flight across a snowy plain…
The Witch King supplement had a very complete list of the war bands and units available to Angmar, as well as write-ups of the commanders in charge of them. This enabled me to be very precise when it came to the response given to the players efforts to become leaders of men – or orcs, as the case more commonly was.
Goethe had recruited about 30 young knights of the northern Dunédain kingdom of Rhudaur. These worthies brought with them 800 or so trained foot soldiers and archers, and Goethe’s speeches in the various villages and thorps along the route had attracted a large number of commoners to his cause. I believe the total was 1500 peasants, mostly farmers, equipped largely with farm implements. Many of them brought their families on the march. The stated intention of this army was to liberate the castle and town of Barad-Eldanar, a former settlement of Rhudaur, captured by the Witch King just a decade or so before.
The players succeeded brilliantly in this initial assault – the siege lasted barely a day. They infiltrated the castle, opened the gates, and swarmed over the 200 or so orcs and men that held the place. After, they imprisoned the commander of the garrison, while Goethe attempted to convince the survivors to join him. They had a celebratory feast in the castle’s great hall, and handed out honors. Unfortunately, the victory placed their army just a week’s march from the gates of Angbad, seat of the Witch King’s power.
Wiser heads might have secured the castle and sent for reinforcements. However, Goethe’s personal philosophy was that wiser heads seldom win glory. He decided to ride north, and capture another small fortress on the road to Angbad. He sent a message to "his" tribe of orcs, the Uruk-Lugat, in the hopes that their war bands would be enough to turn his peasant army into an impressive force. 600 spear-carrying orcs answered the call, and arrived within days.
He and Amon Gra spent two weeks preparing their army – two weeks in which the Witch King’s lieutenants were also preparing. To avoid alarming the Rhudaurian knights and solidery, Amon Gra instructed the Uruk-Lugat warbands to camp a few miles away. When the army marches, they are to remain two miles to the rear. This decision had unfortunate side-effects when battle was finally joined.
After two weeks, the army marched north. Goethe left behind a tiny defending force at Barad Eldanar, and personally led the way on a black stallion. (Outriders and scouts are for sissies.) Two days later, they found about 3000 Angmarian soldiers (humans, mostly) blocking the road in front of them. Goethe’s forces were stopped on a portion of the road between two large hills - giving them limited visibility east and west. (Ambush country!)
Goethe ordered his army into battle formation. In accordance with the rules of Glorious Last Stands, Goethe started by ordering a mounted charge (covered by archers) with pikemen marching stolidly behind. The young knights of Rhudaur were cut up fairly quickly. Goethe ordered the peasant militia to join the advance, the two lines met, and battle was joined in earnest.
In the meantime, Amon Gra was still plodding along with his orcs, unaware of the battle ahead. He crested a hill, and saw the battle in progress. From his vantage point, he ALSO saw about 200 Warg riders and 150 elite Uruk-Hai warriors (like the ones Saruman grows in his basement in the films) charging the rear of Goethe’s army, cutting through the camp followers and peasants guarding the supply wagons.
Bill made a credible attempt to quote Henry V at this point (Kill the boys and the luggage! ‘Tis expressly against the law of arms!), and led his force in a running charge…
Into the rear of Goethe’s army…
Which was just coming to grips with an orc attack to the rear….
The commanders of which were largely unaware that there were other orcs, fighting on their side...
Orcs are hardly renowned for their fire discipline, and as soon as a few of Goethe’s men fired an arrow (or ten) in direction, Amon Gra’s war bands started attacking humans willy-nilly. Amon Gra managed to keep his own, hand-picked, followers in line, and fought his way towards the Goethe’s tent. Chaos reigned.
Pressed on both sides, Goethe’s battle lines dissolved, and he soon found himself fighting hand-to-hand with elite Uruk-Hai rangers, each of whom was (in game terms) a higher level than he was. Only the timely arrival of Amon Gra allowed him to escape, more or less unharmed. The two of them quickly decided that a decisive retrograde advance was called for. Unfortunately, they did not have much of an army left, and the road back to Barad Eldanar was blocked by Warg Riders.
Goethe’s sense of battle-glory was quickly overwhelmed by his sense of self-preservation. He sent his remaining warriors and standard bearer west – while he and Amon Gra hared off to the east. The warriors or Rhudaur were slain and imprisoned, and Amon Gra’s orcs either died to changed sides.
Which, of course, ended in the scene mentioned above – Goethe and Amon Gra running north-east into the barrens of Angmar, pursued by orcs, towards the secret lair of the Witch-King himself...
Like I said… damn fine campaign.
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no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 12:02 pm (UTC)Actually, I think that was the period of life in which I played one of my most memorable campaigns too. I wonder if there's some kind of life rhythms thing at work there...
no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 12:49 pm (UTC)But to be fair, I also think there's something to your theory about discovering things like character arc and pathos and nifty stuff like that.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 12:52 pm (UTC)Partly, too, I think it was a matter of finally not being afraid to lose our "dignity," which previously had reduced games to rounds of "My character tells the king to give me the gold."
no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 07:56 pm (UTC)I wonder how the Tolkein estate feels about "Missing Adventure" novels. "The Secret History of Angmar!"
no subject
Date: 2005-05-12 03:05 pm (UTC)Besides, this is SO much more Frazetta than Hildebrandt that nobody will twig that it was once supposedly set in "Middle-Earth".
no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 06:01 pm (UTC)Thus, it's often argued that your "first campaign" was more fun, because you didn't know what you were doing. Or, more correctly, you didn't know how to game your game yet. I'd have to agree.
Of course, I've been pushing that the next-generation RPGs should be narrative-driven... :^)
no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-12 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-24 07:15 pm (UTC)