It's Call of the Rings...

[zedturtle]

Incorporating the Cthulhu Mythos into a one-off game of TOR could be fun. I just wouldn't want to combine the two in a long-running campaign!

I seem to recall someone (maybe you?) had done an adventure outline, crossing Innsmouth with Middle Earth.

[Otaku-sempai]

I seem to recall someone (maybe you?) had done an adventure outline, crossing Innsmouth with Middle Earth.

Yes, I did. Not that I've actually used it in a game. Anyone who wants to borrow the idea and tweak it for their own purposes, feel free!

[T.S. Luikart]

I should think if you wish to invoke Lovecraft in Tolkien, you certainly need to bring in the "Nameless Things that Gnaw at the World".

[Majestic]

Gandalf did say there were older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world!

BTW, welcome to the forums, T.S. I look forward to tackling your adventure in Ruins someday!

[J3W1]

I was't aware until just now that T.S. Luikart was working with Cubicle 7, or that he did work on Ruins in the North.

My group had an absolute blast with Purge the Unclean when we were playing Dark Heresy, and I enjoyed all your contributions to the WFRP line.

This is great news.

[Otaku-sempai]

I was't aware until just now that T.S. Luikart was working with Cubicle 7, or that he did work on Ruins in the North.

I had misremembered that Mr.Luikart had written the adventure "Nightmares of Angmar," which has a wonderfully pulpish feel to it; however, I was mistaken. James R. Brown authored that particular adventure. Luikart penned both "Harder than Stone" and "Shadows over Tyrn Gorthad."

[T.S. Luikart]

Thanks for the kind words everybody. I thought about this topic a bit more last night, fun exercise really. So here's my more expanded take, if you will.

The similarities between Lovecraft's work and Tolkien's are very superficial, at best. Sauron (and Morgoth before him) is at least part way comprehensible to us. We may loathe his methods, but what Sauron wants is clear: Order, Control, Dominion. Fear eventually became his tool of choice, but if Love (or anything else) had worked better, he likely would've employed different tactics.

Lovecraft's entities "want" nothing that we can truly comprehend. They barely register Humanity at all, they are, essentially, alien and un-knowable. I actually find August Derleth's additions to Lovecraft's work far more "Tolkienesque". Derleth believed in the struggle between Good and Evil, frequently rejecting Lovecraft's underlying nihilistic viewpoint to overlay his own conceptions on what the Mythos "should be".

So that said... there's definitely some mileage in noting that when the excesses of the Westernesse grew too great, the Valar (Elder Gods) lay down their stewarship of Middle-earth, allowing "Those from Outside" e.g. (Azathoth or perhaps Dread Cthulhu himself) to level Númenor. Afterwards, the world was bent (by the Gatekeeper Yog-sothoth) so there was no longer any straight road to Valinor.

Another passing thought: we often take the Fall of Khazad-dûm to be literal, e.g. the Dwarves delved too deep, releasing Durin's Bane from its prison and suffered the consequences. What if this is a metaphor to shield the other races from what actually happened? The Dwarves "delved to deep" because, in their greed for mithril, they turned to dangerous and mystical practices to keep extracting the precious ore... they awoke the "Nameless Fear" because they breached the dimensional prison / sanctuary in which the Balrog resided.

At any rate, its best to be careful with the Mythos. Once those tentacles get a hold, they tend to creep into everything.