Post
by Cawdorthane » Sun Oct 26, 2014 12:40 pm
Funnily enough this is a deeply thought provoking thred. What is the tone your group feels "right" for TOR? Indeed, why do we play TOR if not to play a rpg system which resonates with the books which we have all evidently loved so much?
And so I started off doing some online researching of Anglo-Saxon or Norse insults (where I found a quite few in the various surviving Sagas). But to be honest, a lot of them were quite inappropriate to 21st Century tastes and struck me as just wrong for TOR. Given Tolkein's scholarly speciality I do not for a minute think he was ignorant of them but he steered quite clear, partly for taste and I suspect partly because it would not add to the grandeur to the would be mythology of his text. So with me equally steering well clear of what would now be condemned as homo-phobic, most of what I found as "faintly acceptable" (to me at least) focussed on the target's parentage and the species or sexual proclivities of same. But even use of these types of insult were heavily toned down by the Professor's less grating word play. such as his "descendents of rats" line, and so mostly such insults just struck me as feeling "wrong". The one I most liked, and will definitely use, was an insult of "dung beard" from one saga, but it was not referring to the shape of the target's beard, but its absence - i.e. (bearing in mind that almost all Norse were farmers of sorts) the poor fellow was struggling so hard without success to sprout a manly beard that the insult implied he was so desperate that he had to apply fertiliser to his face.
Every group will have its own comfort zones of taste and protocols of behavior, and far be it for me or anyone else to dictate such to others. But for me at least much of the charm of TOR lies in its success in capturing the feel of Tolkein's works. I fear a group might miss out on much richness of TOR if they do not try to emulate that in their games, at least in part.
But I am no prude and nor are my players. When my group played "Conan" and "Songs of Fire and Ice" some years ago, there was a great deal of grit and grime (in every respect) which added to the fun and hilarity of what we did. But nothing like that happened for us with TOR. And I for one as LM was really glad of its absence.
So as I say, this topic was great for redirecting me to what I most like about TOR and what I can do as LM at least to encourage the right "feel" for my game.
cheers
Mark
