Captives, Shadow Points, and You

[Stormcrow]

If you kill orc prisoners, that's a misdeed. Period. If you don't want the orc to go back to making trouble, don't set it free. Don't want to deal with a barn full of orc prisoners you've captured over the years? Better be prepared to let them go once the trouble is over.

Nothing wrong with Awing them into behaving themselves once they've left, of course. In fact, you'd be irresponsible not to try.

[shipwreck]

What do we make of that? Shadow Points for Beorn? And if so, what for - 'forcing' information from his captives, killing them afterwards, or mutilating their corpses?

I'm not going to get behind this just yet, I should think on it some more, but I will propose that Beorn might be considered an 'other'. Here's what I mean: the Tolkien Professor did a whole chapter on The Wild in his Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and how wild creatures (he includes both eagles and wargs and Beorn in this category) exist on a spectrum outside the society of the Free Peoples (my words). So even though eagles are good they are still wild, that is unpredictable and free. They aren't a part of whatever moral code Men, Dwarves, and Elves are subject to. If Beorn is in this category, and being very mysterious anyway, and applying the Shadow Point system to the world of the text itself, I'm not sure that Shadow Points are very applicable to him. He's outside the system.

I know that's a lot, and without much support, but there you have it.

[Yusei]

So, in my opinion, it depends on how you depict orcs, and/or what they have done.

I agree, but I think it also depends on how the players depict their characters. You get shadow points for doing things that go against your morals, so it all depends on your morals. Do you value mercy? If so, then killing a prisoner taints your soul.

In the Hobbit, we are led to think that Beorn would kill any trespassers, even if they were dwarves or hobbits. He doesn't seem to follow a code of conduct that would prevent him from killing prisoners, so I don't think he gains any shadow for killing an orc.

Now, Beorn is no ordinary hero, and PCs are not Beorn. He's a pretty scary guy, in the Hobbit. In a similar situation, the first time it occurs, I'll just ask the player: "how do you feel about killing prisoners?" If he answers anything like "it's bad, but not if it's an orc", then he gets shadow points.

[Otaku-sempai]

Prisoners of the Wood-elves: Even the Elves of Mirkwood apparently would not slaughter captured Orcs indiscriminantly, according to this passage from The Hobbit about the imprisonment of Thorin:

Then the elves put thongs on him, and shut him in one of the inmost caves with strong wooden doors, and left him. They gave him food and drink, plenty of both, if not very fine: for Wood-elves are not goblins, and were reasonably well-behaved even to their worst enemies, when they captured them. The giant spiders were the only living things that they had no mercy upon.

[Woodclaw]

What do we make of that? Shadow Points for Beorn? And if so, what for - 'forcing' information from his captives, killing them afterwards, or mutilating their corpses?

I'm not going to get behind this just yet, I should think on it some more, but I will propose that Beorn might be considered an 'other'. Here's what I mean: the Tolkien Professor did a whole chapter on The Wild in his Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and how wild creatures (he includes both eagles and wargs and Beorn in this category) exist on a spectrum outside the society of the Free Peoples (my words). So even though eagles are good they are still wild, that is unpredictable and free. They aren't a part of whatever moral code Men, Dwarves, and Elves are subject to. If Beorn is in this category, and being very mysterious anyway, and applying the Shadow Point system to the world of the text itself, I'm not sure that Shadow Points are very applicable to him. He's outside the system.

I know that's a lot, and without much support, but there you have it.

To support shipwreck's argument, Beorn has always been a problematic character for many scholars of Tolkien's work. He's clearly something very different from any other character in the Middle Earth, not just because of his -- apparently -- unique ability to change shape. While it's a given factor that animals are highly intelligent and have their own languages in the Middle Earth, Beorn seem to be the only human (or humanoid) who has such a deep understanding of them. Combine these factors with his hermit-like lifestyle and it's not completely out of question that his morality was very different from the rest of the Free People's.
Given that, it's also entirely possible that he had given up to his most bloodthirsty side there. We know that Beorn lived a secluded life for some reason, until the Battle of the Five Armies, but we didn't know why. Maybe it was because he could control himself and feared his own bloodlust.

[Glorelendil]

Yikes. I didn't mean to re-open the debate about killing captives. This has been amply treated in other threads, and however many shades of grey we define or how much we rationalize for the sake of game play, I thought we were (mostly) in consensus that it's troubling.

I was just sharing a new* solution to the problem.

*In before "Actually, Dave Arneson talked about this in 1971" "No, there is Egyptian papyrus that mentions single combat..." etc.

[Doc Martin]

This does seem to touch on a tension inherent in Tolkien's work - the very different morality of his own Christianity and the tales of early-medieval Germanic/Scandinavian culture - deeply rooted in paganism - that he studied. Whether this is a bug or a feature, particularly in a gaming context, is largely a matter of personal taste.

It does strike me that the unleashing of merciless violence on one's opponents - arguably a 'pagan' feature - seems to often crop up as a feature of certain Northmen in Tolkien's writing. Apart from Beorn the other example that springs to mind is that of Helm Hammerhand the 9th king of Rohan. As described in Appendix A of Lotr he kills his difficult subject Freca with his bare hands for presumptuously suggesting the king's daughter should marry his son. This action, and Helm's rather dry wit toward Freca - "You have grown big since you were last here; but it is mostly fat, I guess" - sounds to me as being straight out of a norse saga. It could be argued that Tolkien shows his disapproval of such brutality in the subsequent history he gives to Helm - he and all his sons dying four years later at the hands of Dunlendings led by Wulf, Freca's son, and their corsair allies (plus terrible weather). Perhaps Helm's habit of stalking his enemies alone and unarmed at night could be seen as bouts of madness brought on by his accumulated Shadow and lack of hope following his violent actions and the loss of his sons?

[Angelalex242]

Well, Beorn's not the only being in Middle Earth that communicates with animals. Elves have the Speakers Virtue, and Istari (Gandalf and especially Radagast) do it all the time.

So is he really outside the moral code? He clearly knows right from wrong. Maybe he's just under 'Curse of Vengeance', but instead of going insane, he goes animalistic.

[doctheweasel]

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety.” (emphasis mine)

Life is hard places you into situations where you are forced to choose between the expedient thing or the merciful thing. That doesn't make the expedient thing less wrong or weigh less on the soul.

I say hand out the Shadow, not as a punishment, but as an acknowledgment of the toll of making these hard choices has on the character.

[Falenthal]

I say hand out the Shadow, not as a punishment, but as an acknowledgment of the toll of making these hard choices has on the character.

Exactly!!

Shadow is not a way for saying "you, the player, are playing the game the wrong way", but of saying "you, the hero, have done something that feels wrong."