To continue from last week, as I met again with the participants in my local library’s Dungeons & Dragons program, I asked if any of the participants who had expressed interest in running one-shot games had any narrative ideas for me to review, collecting those present so that I could look over them. Details of what I got, I’ll not give here, both because I do not want the other participants to have a leg up and because the content is not mine to disseminate. Even my own gets glossed here, and I’ll not expose more of the participants’ work than I do my own, not at this point and not with this group. What I will say, however, is that what I received has potential, although there will be some work to develop that potential.
Math rocks go clatter clatter clatter. Photo by Stephen Hardy on Pexels.com
As I have written and continue to write gaming materials for the group (and some is still in flux, matters having changed since the beginning of play), I find that I am running a more complex game than I had originally intended. I suppose this is a good thing; using more mechanics not only pushes me to know more about the game I am administering, but it also exposes the participants (of whom several are playing their first game) to more of the mechanics so that they learn them, as well. I will admit that it does make for some challenges, however; having to come up to speed on things as I draft materials from them takes some doing, and I’ve not done that particular kind of doing in a while.
So much said, doing so puts me back into the tradition of TTRPG play, knowing that many of the early game-runners did so as their players learned alongside them; it was not as if, going back to 1974 or thereabouts, DMs had decades of experience with TTRPGs upon which to rely as they put together materials for their tables. They did well enough, if with some fits and starts along the way, but their work still went ahead, and I take some comfort from that as my own game work goes ahead, in Hanlon and in other games where I play and which I may soon start to run again. After all, one of the effects of gaming is…more gaming, and I look forward to doing some of that more, from both sides of the table.
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Continuing from last week, as I met again with the participants in my local library’s Dungeons & Dragons program, I presented the group with an opportunity for the aspiring Girl Scout to take command of the in-game party as they faced a challenge I’ve had prepared for them for some months, now. (I had had it set on something of a randomizing countdown, a mechanic to make it certain to occur but that allowed for it to happen earlier than might be expected; it is a device I might use in other games, although probably at the table, proper, rather than in a play-by-post game…but who knows?) It was her first time doing so, so there were some snags, but nothing major and fewer than expected, so I consider the exercise a success. I’ll be working with the aspiring Girl Scout on the next phase of her project, developing a one-shot to run with the group, which I look forward to doing, both because it will help her and because it will help me refine some of what I need to do to help others in the program come up to being able to run their own games–part of the point of the library program, as it happens.
I think it is a good pattern to follow in training up potential game-runners, the one we’re following at my local library: work the candidate through a series of games before gauging interest before having the candidate take on in-game leadership for an encounter or event. The expected next step, and the one I have more or less assigned to other participants at the local library who have expressed interest in running games, is to solicit narrative ideas; I take the approach that mechanics should flow from story, rather than the other way around, and I’ve had a fair amount of success in that with multiple groups across some years, now, so I think I’ll stick with the approach. (“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” comes to mind as a useful principle, and changing for the sake of changing annoys me immensely in both my personal and professional capacities.) I’ll review those narrative ideas with the candidates, and then we can work out what mechanics need to emerge from them, helping the candidate compose a brief and coherent narrative arc that they can then try out with the existing group.
Such is the path on which the aspiring Girl Scout currently walks, anyway; I am still testing and refining things, which she accepts as part of the process of development in which we are all engaged. And I do mean all; despite my decades of experience on both sides of the GM screen, I have things to learn as a player and as someone who runs games. A play-by-post I’m currently in is helping me with the former at the moment; the middle schoolers continue to help me with the latter. I am grateful for both, as the better I get at both, the more I enjoy them, and it is nice to have something to enjoy in this world we occupy.
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Continuing from last week, as I met again with the participants in my local library’s Dungeons & Dragons program, I followed up with them about moving towards running their own games. One of the participants, I know, is working on a leadership program (the Program Aide Award) with the local Girl Scout troop, and it made sense to me that the library gaming group would offer a laboratory through which to accomplish the tasks required for that award. I asked the group if they would be amenable to helping one of their own with that task; the response was favorable, so I will be working with said aspiring Girl Scout to see about how to address the required tasks.
Yes, those Girl Scouts, although it’s not the right season for this yet. Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV on Pexels.com
This is not the first time I’ve had thoughts about other ways than as a good game to play that the TTRPG is useful. The genre informs some scholarship I’ve done (see this for a recently released example), and it serves as an impetus to the generation of more art than itself (see this for comments to that end, as well as what might pass for an example of art, broadly defined). It also suggested itself to me as a useful teaching tool, back when I had students; it has helped me to generate assessment items such as this, and it seemed to me to be a good fit for particular classes, as witness this and this. I’m sure there’s other utility to it, just as I’m sure that utility is not the only or even the primary measure of a thing’s value to me or to the world I inhabit.
For the Program Aide Award, the library game suggested itself as an available means of accomplishment due first to the fact that the aspiring Girl Scout already knows the group with which she would work. She also is in position to confer with the group’s leader and to assist with a meeting; I know few DMs or GMs who couldn’t use a hand keeping track of some of the paperwork involved in administering a game. Further, the aspiring Girl Scout could easily lead a single group activity; TTRPGs, being collaborative, do invite some rotating leadership, and any given player’s character can easily take point on any particular activity. (Indeed, administering games well necessitates presenting a variety of scenarios so that every player character can have a chance to be at the front of things.) And there would be opportunities to reflect upon and build upon that single-activity leadership to so something that serves as a useful step on the path towards running lasting games: running a one-shot game, which would be a full meeting (at least) of the local library game group. That one-shot would complete the award’s requirements, which I recognized and which the aspiring Girl Scout recognized, hence the request to the group for their assistance with it.
After the request was made, play proceeded. The party was able to enjoy a little bit of down-time, a layover that coincided with a local festival, which the players enjoyed. It is something of a breather for them, honestly; the harder part of the adventure is yet to come for them, with political entanglements that will need addressing and that will set things up for future games–because I do anticipate that the game will continue, at least for a time, and as the players develop, their challenges will also need to.
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Continuing from last week, as I met with the participants in my local library’s Dungeons & Dragons program, I asked them their thoughts about running games in the future. After all, the library’s program has as one of its explicit goals the cultivation of participants who can run games of their own, so querying the present participants for who would like to undertake that work seemed fitting. I expect that future sessions will work to articulate not only concerns of narrative–since such games as Dungeons & Dragons are storytelling, narrative concerns matter–but also of effective administration.
I didn’t choose the life; the life chose me… Photo by u041au0430u0442u0435u0440u0438u043du0430 u0416u043eu0441u0443u043b on Pexels.com
Following the more formal discussion, play resumed. Because I had an understrength group, I adjusted some of the cumulative-result roll thresholds downward, and things seemed to go generally well. Not all of the dice agreed with all of the players at the table, to be sure, but that’s only to be expected; dice lent from the library won’t answer as well as those that have been lovingly trained over time. And even with the dicing setbacks, the kids had fun facing the challeneges posed to them–including in some inventive ways I’d not considered when I posed them.
I look forward, still, to continuing this expedition of herding a gaze of jimothies from a rural village to the trade center. I think that next week’s session will take the group to and through the regional capital. There, they’ll have the chance to seek new supplies and information, and they’ve learned that the information I make available is material they can use, moving forward. For me, it’s an easy enough thing to make happen; for them, it’s a new and exciting concept, or a lived-life iteration of something they’ve gotten to learn about in their English classes, and seeing them make the connection and have the realization is a large part my enjoyment of the game.
We’ll see if the same is true for them when they start to run things.
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Following up from last week, as I met with the participants in my local library’s Dungeons & Dragons program, I asked them about what the term “medieval” means for them. In doing so, I addressed some of the overtly educational goals of the program; one of its framing questions is “Why do tabletop roleplaying games, and Dungeons & Dragons in particular, make so much use of the (pseudo-)medieval(ist) as they do?” so having an idea about what the medieval is matters for discussion. And I found that the participants, ranging from sixth- through ninth-grade-aged, collectively understand it as being old Europe and strongly associated with fantasy, although some of that is because several are returning from earlier games with me in which I talked about that kind of thing. (One of them is my daughter, poor girl.) I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it, moving forward.
The question of what the medieval is is one with which I have been concerned for a while, now, as might be expected. Some of my earlier pieces in another webspace (see this, this, this, this, and this for examples; there are others) speak to questions about how to identify the medieval; any number of things I’ve posted in this webspace treat such questions, as well. Issues of definition are always…squishy; there is always some uncertainty at the boundaries of categories, much to the frustration of many. Yet they are also important to address, if only because none of us can do all of what needs to be done, and having some framework for understanding can help a person to focus attention to better effect.
Such things can, of course, be misused. They often are, in practice. But so much is true of everything that gets done, including something so seemingly banal as a game like Dungeons & Dragons.
In any event, last night’s session of play went well. The dice treated the players decently, allowing them to move ahead with their primary objective. They also got to take a useful little side-excursion in which they showed some excellent lateral thinking. It’s the kind of thing that motivates deeper player engagement, and seeing it happen is the kind of thing that makes running games eminently enjoyable for me. I delight in seeing my players think their way around issues, which I know is not always the case. Still, it gives me hope that some of them will be able to take on the work of running games of their own, and that will have a number of effects I will be glad to see arise.
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On a number of occasions, I have commented about going back into my own archives,* pulling up materials I’d developed for one purpose or another across what I had intended to be an academic career. In many cases, that pulling has had to do with teaching materials, and I do remain available to generate that kind of thing, moving forward. Less explicitly, that pulling takes the occasional form of my posting the texts of papers I’ve delivered; the present example is in that line. A recent post to this webspace, “Harping on Hanlon,” reminded me that I had this in my records, and a review of those places where I put my academic records up for public view showed me that it hadn’t yet gotten out to where other people can look at it. The time seemed right to address that deficit.
The piece below is abstracted here. What is not noted in my comments there is that this piece emerged from some 2021 continuing education I did, noted here. (Sourcing shows the age of the piece, I know.) Emerging from it is a conference talk, the remarks for which are repeated here. As with previous re-presentations, I have only lightly edited the text as I originally have it, mostly to suit concerns of medium.**
The fifth edition of Greg Stafford’s Pendragon1 is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game (RPG) published in 2005 by Arthaus, a subsidiary of White Wolf Games2–a publisher most notable for Vampire: The Masquerade and the related World of Darkness games.3 RPGs are generally neomedievalist; the ur-example of the genre is Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), which Lawrence Schick notes has its origins in historical miniatures wargaming and “rules for monsters and nonhuman races drawn mainly from Tolkien,”4 so that it looks to interpretations of the medieval for its materials, just as other RPGs look to D&D. Pendragon is more avowedly directly medievalist, purporting to look back to “Facts (or at least what are widely considered facts) drawn from [chronicles such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s]” and “parts from all literary versions” of Arthuriana5–or, at least English / Malorian, French, Welsh, and more modern and radical takes, eschewing such visions of Arthur as the German and the Spenserian.
The cover of said fifth edition of the game, from my copy. It is no longer the current edition of the game. The image is used for purposes of commentary.
Even in that grounding, though, the game begins to run into commonplaces of treatments of the premodern: a focus on upper social strata and time-compression.6 The game flatly announces itself as focusing on knights, describing them as the chosen elite;7 while it makes some sense to do so–as I’ve noted elsewhere, “Peasant life is unattractive, particularly to those whom depictions of it might point up their own equivalent status”8 and many others have attested far more eloquently to the same–to set as of little importance the deeds and doings of a majority of people is no boon to understanding or getting things right. For a game that purports to encapsulate “brutal reality,”9 it is hardly a commendation. Nor yet is the collapsing of the Middle Ages into a short span–“fifteen years of game time approximate a hundred years of real-world medieval history,” so that the noted game-span of 485-565CE subsumes the late fifth through late fifteenth centuries,10 roughly Gildas to Malory.
Of course, it is to be expected that RPGs like Pendragon, as simulations, will necessarily reduce and compress their sources in the interests of treating them conveniently and in allowing players, most often not specialists in the source materials,11 entry into the narrative milieus in which Mackay notes the extemporaneous, collaborative, rules-assisted storytelling of RPGs operates.12 Similarly, the comment that “the rules and laws of Pendragon are generally based on the considerably more well-known laws of Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries, not those of 6th-century Britain”13 makes some sense in context; making a game accessible, and therefore playable and more likely to be fun, usually means going with what players can find. While there is substantial overlap between RPG players and people with institutional access (and the time to enjoy it!), the two groups are far from congruent; many players, perhaps even most, cannot get into the deeper details of setting that breed more accuracy and richness. In effect, they have to take what they can get.
Despite the note that “Knights are sheriff, judge, and jury for all matters of Low Justice on their own domains,”14 a comment (inaccurate as it is) that would suggest there be some substantive representation of the reams upon reams of parchment and paper that detail early English law, in Pendragon, law, as such, is reduced to some six two-column pages.15 Among that all-too-brief treatment is a short call-out that purports to present an image of Arthurian central legal dicta; it appears below as Figure 1.
Figure 1. The Laws of Arthur16
The note regarding the source from which the text is modified gives every indication of being accurate; a glance at The Statutes of William the Conqueror shows that the putative laws of Arthur do seem to emerge from it.17 But there are clear changes. For one, “Saxon” in the game-text replaces what a translation from the original calls “English,” while “Briton” replaces “Norman” or “Frenchman,” although such changes make sense in the Arthurian context. Less sensible are such omissions as the religious thrust in the first clause and the nod to the laws of Edward. The latter may perhaps be excused in the same way as the shifts in demonym, although a shift in nomenclature to something like Lex Molmutina might have been a way to preserve some sense of the thing. The former, though, is confusing, given the assertion of Christianity’s dominance within the game world,18 unless it lies perhaps in the unease with which RPGs generally regard real-world religion.19
A few other comments about law attract attention, as well. One is that “Anyone who commits violence upon the roads commits treason and incurs penalty as if having violated the sanctity of the king’s own feast hall,”20 which comment seems to place the roads under the king’s own jurisdiction–an attitude that seems to be at work in WoBT,21 among others. While not rising to the force of legal dicta, the Chaucerian Arthurian parallel does at least ground the comment in the documentary representation of medieval England; if the detail is wrong, it is wrong for the right reason. And more specifically grounded is the comment that, as in concerns of early English law, “reputation is critical in the game.”22 Indeed, the accumulation of Glory is a central mechanic, and what gets mechanical attention necessarily becomes a focus of play; “worship” is a central concern of Malory’s knights, of course, and the preoccupation with reputation evidenced in a variety of early English legal documents indicates that the game gets at least some of the general sense of its sources right–which is better than might be said of other neo/medievalist work.
There are other implications to trace, of course, but it seems on an initial glance that the things Pendragon gets right(ish) and wrong are in place to facilitate player access to the kind of agglutinated, accumulated Arthurian setting demonstrated in Malory and followed upon by no few later authors. Enough detail is “correct” to satisfy at least some desire for “accuracy” among players; certainly, enough detail is “correct” to offer the kind of verisimilitude that aids in fostering Coleridgean willingness to suspend disbelief and allow the immersive narrative performance of the RPG to occur. What is glossed seems to be glossed for conformity with context, for the simplification of simulation, for minimization of distraction, and from concerns of limited access to information. This is not to say the errors should be passed over; the game continues to be played, and more information allows for a deeper, richer immersion. Too, while “it’s just a game,” Sturtevant notes that such popular cultural products as Pendragon, as other RPGs, as the medievalist sources from which they stake out their neomedievalist positions, do much to shape public understandings of what the medieval is.23 Given the rampant misuse of the medieval by execrable groups, fixing those understandings is more and more important–and any avenue for such correction has to be pursued.
** As a piece originally meant only for spoken delivery, the work has citations and notes to allow for response to anticipated questions and for potential future development. The accuracy of those citations to any particular style manual is not guaranteed; the accuracy as to sourcing and location, however, is as I had it at the time I wrote the remarks. Most of the links still work, or did when I checked.
Although not “correct,” the convention of italicizing the game’s title is one the game itself uses; I follow it in reference to Pendragon in this document.
Note, however, that there are no few people who get into their areas of study in part because they started studying to be able to play their RPGs better.
Daniel Mackay, The Fantasy Role-playing Game: A New Performing Art (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2001), 4-5.
Following up from two weeks ago, comments about last Friday’s observance needing to be made, there are things to say about last week and about yesterday. For the first, I came into the session expecting to start actual play with the participants at the table, characters have mostly been built across the initial two 90-minute sessions (with some “homework” assigned); anything that hadn’t been built yet, I thought, could be compiled during play, and it seemed to me to be important to get things moving in earnest. That more or less seemed to be the case, albeit with some stubmbling along the way, but the players at the table gave every sign of enjoying what was presented to them and looking forward to what was to come.
They see me rollin’… Photo by DS stories on Pexels.com
For the second, yesterday, the adventure got underway in earnest. I can now (because the game is going, so this is not a spoiler) report that the primary plot for the game (tabletop roleplaying games generally being narratives means that such terms apply) has the players’ characters herding a group of jimothies* from a rural village to a regional trade center. I’ve got procedures and events set up for the group; they’ve made a start on them, already having some success and encountering some challenge. The latter was not concluded by the end of the brief session (I’ve only got an hour and a half with the group each week), but that’s not such a bad thing; there is a clear and engaging beginning point waiting for the next session, for which I and my players are eager.
Something that stood me in good stead in my preparations for the event was my development of some in-milieu lore at both the local and regional levels. Character creation had assumed that the characters were all from the same region; characters had the opportunity to select specific districts of origin within that region. This had some in-game effects, allowing characters who selected the district of origin in which they found themselves to bypass certain rolls. As the game develops, it will also allow them to face particular challenges; I’ve not yet worked out all the details, and, out of concerns about metagaming, I’d not give many of them if I had. Still, the players at the table seemed to appreciate being able to learn things, and the returning players were able to explain some of the jokes to the new ones, helping to bring them into the game, as it were. I consider it a success.
As I continue to develop game materials, I keep falling back on my experience playing in and running play-by-post games.** I know I’ve commented as much in the last several entries in this series of posts, but it remains true, and there is some delight in my bringing something back around; play-by-post gaming emerges from tabletop gaming, and bringing its practices back to the table is a nice little cohesive progression for it.
* I use the term as a genericized reference to Seattle’s Jimothy, for which in-game statistics are available here. Hanlon is a fictional milieu; Jimothy need not be a unique thing within it, and it makes sense to me that jimothies in Hanlon would be a species related to but distinct from raccoons. That there are implications of such a distinction, I am aware (such as situating a setting at some removal from the Tolkienian fantasy tradition from which D&D emerges [see here], as witness this, this, and this, among others); some of them are apt to come up in the game.
** In addition to brief references throughout my Hanlon posts, I discuss play-by-post games here, here, here, here, and here, among others. And I’m reminded that I probably ought to get another existing piece up onto this blog at some point that currently lives in my notes.
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Following up on last week, I continued to work with the students taking part in the Dungeons & Dragons game at my local public library o get their characters built for the game, moving forward; it was, in effect, Session Zero and a Half. With as many as were at the table, and as relatively few sets of materials as were present, it took some doing, but I feel like good progress was made. It helped that one of the stated goals of the program is to develop players who can run games of their own; since dealing with building characters is part of running games, having one or two of the more senior participants work to help others build their own characters seemed a useful part of training.
It’s a good result. Photo by Lucius PK on Pexels.com
I’ve had my own building to do, as well. While I was able to get a lot of information put together in advance of the previous session, there was still more I needed to have ready to go for the players; that is now completed, to my great comfort. It helped that I was able to leverage a fair amount of my expertise participating in online play-by-post games, something I think I noted, and I’m minded that the kind of adventure I have planned for the young players at my table is one that would work, with some adjustment, for a more mature group (and a larger one, although I had nine people at my table last week, which is a pretty damned big group, all told). It is something of an escort mission, one resonant with local history and that makes use of silly internet memes–so a good kind of thing. For another group, a less-memed such mission might work; similarly, one that faces multiple challenges of the sort I have planned for the kids, and on a more predetermined than dice-driven schedule, might well work. (And, honestly, for a play-by-post game, it would be better to have things scheduled out; there is an expectation of scheduling rather than spontaneity in such a setting.)
I know that escort missions often annoy in video games. The escorted often have poor pathfinding and action trees, making them unwieldy to play around. That’s part of why I’m working with the memes at my youth table*; my thought is that the silly nature of what the players and their characters have to address will offset at least some of the annoyance, given how often people are willing to put up with vexations if there’s a laugh to be found (or something cute, which I think is the case for what I’m having the youths treat). In the case of what I’m offering to my current players, the common patterns of escort missions make sense; I can’t give too much detail here against the possibility that one or more of my players will do the work of looking up what I write,** but silly things of limited wisdom and some intelligence can be expected to act in…odd ways. And that can work with adult groups no less well than with younger ones, honestly.
Too, the escort mission does allow for a particular narrative focus. While railroading remains problematic at best, as I’ve noted, younger groups often do need a bit more overt direction than older ones. More open-ended things, while rewarding player initiative and creativity, offer ample opportunity for distraction and, in my experience, character and player conflict. Older goups tend to handle such conflicts better, in addition to being more willing than younger ones to let stories form around them. For larger groups–and I have a larger group at present–it’s more helpful, as well, to have the greater focus; with many people working together, things can go well, while having them work at cross-purposes means things don’t go much at all. And having them go really does make for a better time for all involved.
It is a game, after all, and even if it, like all works of art,† does other things, it has as its purpose working toward making a good time for all involved.
* Another part is to amuse myself. I get to have fun at the table, too, after all.
** Given that one of the players is my daughter, I know at least one of them is aware of my blogging in this webspace. I would not be surprised to learn she’d mentioned as much to her friends at the table, and I’d honestly welcome it if one of them tried to do the kind of metagaming that looking at what I write here would entail; it would show engagement with the game and its materials. I would have to address the matter, of course, for reasons I’ve discussed previously, but I can appreciate the initiative and investment. To avoid the need to address, then, I keep things somewhat obscure here. Perhaps sometime I will post the narrative materials here. Maybe.
† I follow Daniel Mackay’s The Fantasy Role-playing Game: A New Performing Art for this. I’ve referenced him more than once before, as witness this, this, this, this, and this.
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I‘m pleased to report that the expectation I noted a while back has come to pass: yesterday, I returned to work at my local public library, administering a game of Dungeons & Dragons for students of such age as to attend middle school. I also returned with them to the narrative milieu in which I had worked with the previous game: Hanlon. I did so in part because it would allow me to use materials I’d already developed in the course of administering games here (helping me to have more planned and scripted, thus helping me keep things running well). There is thus some sense of continuity available to the returning participants (of which there are some, including my daughter). I did advance the in-game time past when the previous game had ended, so while there is much that is or may be familiar to those returning (including a few inside jokes that I am inserting specifically so they can get them), there is also much that will be new to them, and new players at the table will not be alone in casting about for what’s going on.
We’re back, baby! Image remains mine from here, for what it’s worth
Yesterday’s session was an extended Session Zero, laying out a number of standards and expectations for play; the hosting library wanted me to make sure to make those expectations more explicit this time around than previously. Part of that was talking about the kind of narrative on offer at present, both contextually and in specific, and I returned again to the framing question suggested before: why the neo/medieval(ist) is a dominant setting for Dungeons & Dragons and for tabletop roleplaying games, more generally. Character building also took some time; rather than arriving with pregenerated characters, as I had last time around, I walked participants through building their own, which building followed from the discussion of the kind of game being offered. Character builds should complete soon (I’ve got many participants and short sessions), with play to begin in earnest thereafter.
I’m honestly looking forward to the coming games. It’s been a pleasure to do the writing I’ve been doing in their support, and the participants seem eager to get into things. (That’s always a good sign.) I’ve been plying the skills I’ve developed in years of putting together play-by-post games, setting up structures that should allow for a variety of approaches and some dynamism of response while still nto putting me in the position of having to wing everything. And as I’ve been going along, more and more parts of the narrative have been slotting themselves into place on the page; while the main thrust of what is facing my players is admittedly somewhat silly, it is taking place amid surroundings that both call back to earlier games (as noted above) and gesture towards deeper concerns that permit of yet further future work, as well as offering fertile ground for the next set of people to administer games in. After all, one of the program’s objectives is to cultivate players who can run games of their own, both helping the local library’s programs to grow and helping the hobby itself endure for decades more than it has already enjoyed.
One other note: special thanks to Paul Murphy for his kind support of this webspace!
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In a paper presented at the 2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies,[1] I began a discussion of how Free League’s The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying–a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) set in Tolkien’s Middle-earth in the period between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and with rules compatible with the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons–adapts Tolkien, his sources, and his methods principally to facilitate play and in ways that themselves reflect medievalist and neomedievalist practices. That is, the TTRPG does with Tolkien and the medieval much the same kind of thing that Tolkien himself does with the medieval, which serves among others as an indication of how popular audiences continue to construct, use, and misuse the medieval. In that paper, I noted that there is more to be done in that line of inquiry, partly in looking at other TTRPG materials. One such piece of material, Free League’s supplement The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying: Tales from Eriador,[2] offers some materials to further that discussion.
The supplement itself offers what might well be regarded as a campaign setting–that is, a series of interlinked but independently playable narrative adventures–within the broader Legendarium that features in a period not amply attested in Tolkien’s own works; it also focuses on locations that are not, themselves, amply attested. In doing so, the supplement continues what the main TTRPG does, expanding on Tolkien’s works in ways that are, to be fair, reasonably consistent with what is canonical to the Legendarium (or at least do not contradict it) while still permitting players to portray characters acting in such capacities as not to be overshadowed by the canonical events of Tolkien’s writing.
Tales from Eriador, like the broader game to which it is a supplement, makes much of being Tolkienian. Of note is the introduction to the first of the interlinked narrative adventures it presents, which begins
In a hole in the ground there lives a Troll.
Not a nice cosy Hobbit-hole, full of comforts and a well-stocked pantry. No, this is a Troll-hole, awash in noisome things and bones crunching underfoot wherever you step. If there is a pantry in this Troll-hole, it is a prison cell.[3]
As a mimickry of the opening of The Hobbit, the supplement offers a small bit of humor, playing with expectations and tropes, as well as situating itself as the product of people familiar with the Legendarium. That is, it renders itself usefully authentic to its antecedents, which gives it greater adherence to the “inner consistency of reality” Tolkien asserts is necessary for effective fiction,[4] if with some nuancing of “reality.”
The supplement also introduces into the broader game the idea of “the Heir,” the assignment in game terms of “a possible heroic lineage, an ancestry harkening back to a line of heroes and champions.”[5] The Heir, in the supplement, is a focal character for the overall narrative arc, and the presence of that character as a focus does tend to bring the supplement more closely in line with its medieval and medievalist antecedents; there is a tendency, of course, to focus on one character, or one character at a time, in narrative works, and not without cause. Aragorn is Aragorn in large part because of his ancestry, and much is made of it; Frodo is Frodo in large part because he is kin to Bilbo; and much of the distinction between Boromir and Faramir comes from who inherits what from which of their forebears.
Although so much is the case, the heirship frustrates concerns of play. TTRPGs are, by their nature, collaborative narrative constructions,[6] so making one character, by rule, more important than the others is a concern. To be fair, the supplement does address the issue, and directly, not least by evoking “Hobbitish” practice,[7] but the fact of the inclusion and narrative privileging of heirship introduces the possibility for intra-party conflict at a systemic level. That is, the existence of the rule creates an area of potential conflict between players, themselves at once the narrators and the audience for the game, rather than between their characters. It is an instance of greater adherence to source materials proving an impediment to play, pointing to concerns of necessary adjustments for medium as well as towards some pragmatic limits as to authenticity, however desirable authenticity may generally be.[8] Even aside from the ultimate inability to fully reconstruct antecedent conditions, it is not always good to attempt it.
Not to conclude, but to wrap up for the present: there remains, as before, still more to do. Free League has produced a number of supplements for The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying, and its line is not the only line of TTRPG products that has taken up the Legendarium as its subject matter. It is even less the only one to have taken up the Legendarium’s own antecedents, and it remains the case that how such things are used points towards the users’ understandings of themselves and their pasts.
[2] Gareth Hanrahan et al., The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying: Tales from Eriador (Free League, 2023). Note, too, the particular medieval resonances of the principal author’s name: Gareth was one of Arthur’s nephews in Malory and elsewhere, known as Beaumains, and his death leads to much of the calamity at the end of Le Morte d’Arthur.
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