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Otaku-sempai wrote:

Ernst-Jan wrote:A tip - as far as I remember it was not Beorn who was chieftain during the War of the Ring, but his son Grimbeorn. Which may imply that Beorn had died or departed in the preceding years. Or retired. There is some material there, surely.

Yes, in Tolkien's collected letters, he asserted that Beorn would have been dead by the time of the War of the Ring. He suggested that Beorn might have been a bit of a magician, but he was still a mortal man.

Yep! I am using Grimbeorn as the Chieftain of the Beornings.

Bumping this again, as I continue to devise this campaign. With the recent of arrival of the Erebor sourcebook, I'm thinking of including a dragon as an antagonist. Perhaps some long-thought dead creation of Morgoth who awakes in the north after thousands of years.

But, dragons are a tricky thing. Any thoughts? Suggestions?

A dragon as old as you posit, who has been sleeping for such a long time, would be much diminished upon awakening and would probably keep a low profile until it has regained much of its old strength and power. Nonetheless it would be a repository of a great deal of wisdom (tempered by its biases and weaknesses) and cunning. Perhaps its lair is in the mountains near the inland Sea of Rhûn; its presence might be first announced with an attack on Dorwinion. Or, if it is more subtle, maybe it attempts to found a dragon-cult to establish a power-base in the region.

Otaku-sempai wrote:A dragon as old as you posit, who has been sleeping for such a long time, would be much diminished upon awakening and would probably keep a low profile until it has regained much of its old strength and power. Nonetheless it would be a repository of a great deal of wisdom (tempered by its biases and weaknesses) and cunning. Perhaps its lair is in the mountains near the inland Sea of Rhûn; its presence might be first announced with an attack on Dorwinion. Or, if it is more subtle, maybe it attempts to found a dragon-cult to establish a power-base in the region.

Yeah, that's a good idea and I was leaning towards a slow build-up - since the campaign spans many years, the dragon's subtle influence could be felt. Perhaps it begins unaligned with Sauron and his lieutenant in the North, and slowly is drawn to him as it remembers once serving Morgoth.

The MERP supplements, though they were set in the middle of the Third Age, often included a section for using them in other times. They sometimes included adventures set around the time of the War of the Ring or even the Fourth Age.