A Quest for You

[Glorelendil]

In the thread about schedule concerns I suggested that a potential big market for TOR is non-gaming Tolkien fans. (Although possibly fans of the books, not just of the movies.) It's in all of our interest to expand demand for TOR; the more books C7 sells the more resources and incentive they'll have to crank out new material.

(Although it's worth noting that too much success is also likely to attract additional scrutiny from certain IP holders. Not unlike increasing Eye Awareness.)

I hardly have any time to play RPGs any more...I'm participating in one of zedturtle's PbP games and that's it...but I still love reading the TOR books. Doing so brings to life additional nooks and crannies of Middle Earth, increases my understanding of its history, and just generally hits my Tolkien-junkie neural receptors.

I truly believe that legions of Tolkien fans who have no interest in RPGs would enjoy reading TOR materials for the same reason they love books like Tolkien Bestiary or the Atlas of Middle Earth.

And if one in a hundred of them thought, "This game looks fun...I'd like to try it"....double-win.

So, what can we...TOR fans who aren't up to our eyeballs editing new supplements and trying to resist the urge to impale corporate attorneys...do to encourage this?

Well, how about hanging out in other Tolkien fan sites and sprinkling suggestions in forums to this effect? Only appropriately, of course. No spamming, but when somebody wishes for more Beorn stories, for example, I think it would be genuinely helpful to offer, "The One Ring has a really great treatment of him. You should check out..."

Or what about participating in the various Wikis? Do some of them cite non-canon sources for potential reading?

I don't see why TOR can't be a legitimate source of "additional information" for fans hungry for such, potentially benefitting them, us, C7, and the health of the gaming community in general.

Thoughts?

[Stormcrow]

I would never point Tolkien-but-not-gaming fans at The One Ring, except if they wanted to play a Tolkien game. The One Ring is not a source of real Tolkien writing, and there's so much of that out there now Tolkien fans aren't hurting for something to read. And the experience of reading The One Ring books is nothing like the experience of reading Tolkien. They try to mimic his style, but it's very clearly a mimicry.

Non-gaming fans can be pointed to The One Ring as a game they might want to play, and the first edition of the game was marketed that way; it was written for people who had never played a role-playing game before. This is less true of the second edition, which seems to have been created partly in response to criticism that gamers had, and partly in keeping with an apparent change in policy at Cubicle7—their Doctor Who game was also consolidated into a single book without additional components and renamed "The Roleplaying Game."

If Tolkien fans really want to immerse themselves in Tolkien studies, I point them to The Tolkien Professor's website.

[Glorelendil]

I would never point Tolkien-but-not-gaming fans at The One Ring, except if they wanted to play a Tolkien game. The One Ring is not a source of real Tolkien writing, and there's so much of that out there now Tolkien fans aren't hurting for something to read. And the experience of reading The One Ring books is nothing like the experience of reading Tolkien. They try to mimic his style, but it's very clearly a mimicry.

Non-gaming fans can be pointed to The One Ring as a game they might want to play, and the first edition of the game was marketed that way; it was written for people who had never played a role-playing game before. This is less true of the second edition, which seems to have been created partly in response to criticism that gamers had, and partly in keeping with an apparent change in policy at Cubicle7—their Doctor Who game was also consolidated into a single book without additional components and renamed "The Roleplaying Game."

If Tolkien fans really want to immerse themselves in Tolkien studies, I point them to The Tolkien Professor's website.

Interesting. I'd do the opposite. I figure only a tiny fraction of fans...let's call them "purists"...are interested in the scholarship, or care whether the stories are canonical. Just look at all the (millions) people who loved the movies.

When somebody says "I really love the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings! I wish there were more of that!" I usually tell them they should read The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales next. But, let's face it, for the vast, overwhelming majority of everyday fans, those books just don't hit the same neural receptors. I'd never send them to a The Tolkien Professor, however much I like stuff like that, unless they specifically expressed an interest in the behind-the-scenes minutiae. You and I are exceptions.

I could still be wrong about the premise that TOR would hit those receptors, but I suspect it might. More so than any other RPG I've ever read, as it reads more like prose than it does a phone book. (Which can't be said for many, many RPGs)

[aramis]

Even many fans of LOTR and The Hobbit as novels (not just the various movie adaptations, each with their own issues) cannot stomach the Silmarillion, let alone HoME nor UT...

[zedturtle]

While I understand that the TOR books are not scholarly works, they do often make use of the wider lore in clever ways (c.f. Trotter as an iconic character). So I don't think that they're incompatible with Glorelendil's idea, as long as it's made clear... a lot of fans (of various properties) like to engage in "what-ifs?" and TOR might provide a framework for such idle speculation.

Now I know that Prof. Olsen has at least some RPG experience (you don't say "it doesn't matter how many hit dice the Nazgûl have" without knowing what hit dice are), and I'd be tickled pink if he'd talk about The One Ring (maybe he does, I'm not anywhere near caught up with all his podcasts and etc.). While I'm fantasizing... here's one Wil Wheaton plays Hobbit Tales on Tabletop and has Stephen Colbert as a guest. It'd be legendary.

My hope is that we use this thread as ways to brainstorm other ways to spread our love of the game... to grow the player base and thus help C7 continue to expand the game.

[aramis]

While I understand that the TOR books are not scholarly works, they do often make use of the wider lore in clever ways (c.f. Trotter as an iconic character). So I don't think that they're incompatible with Glorelendil's idea, as long as it's made clear... a lot of fans (of various properties) like to engage in "what-ifs?" and TOR might provide a framework for such idle speculation.

Now I know that Prof. Olsen has at least some RPG experience (you don't say "it doesn't matter how many hit dice the Nazgûl have" without knowing what hit dice are), and I'd be tickled pink if he'd talk about The One Ring (maybe he does, I'm not anywhere near caught up with all his podcasts and etc.). While I'm fantasizing... here's one Wil Wheaton plays Hobbit Tales on Tabletop and has Stephen Colbert as a guest. It'd be legendary.

My hope is that we use this thread as ways to brainstorm other ways to spread our love of the game... to grow the player base and thus help C7 continue to expand the game.

Suggest that to Colbert. He's enough of a geek to find it enticing.
See... http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/dungeons-drago ... 989p1.html

[Majestic]

I don't know if any of you caught his recent interview with Olivia Munn. He had a "Tolkien-off" with her as well, but she had him go first, and after he quoted entire sections of text, she feigned ignorance and acted like she thought the Lord of the Rings was Goonies (her acting for this was pretty bad, actually). Unfortunately, all the media clips for that recent interview focused on her "engagement" to Aaron Rodgers and Colbert texting Munn's mom.

[Falenthal]

Recently Jon Hodgson has been sharing groups of his TOR pictures in facebook. As for now we have Mirwood and Elves pictures. I decided to re-share them in the spanish Tokien Society, with a short description naming Jon, Cubicle 7 and The One Ring RPG, of course. They`re getting lots of likes and I'm pretty sure many people didn't know Jon's drawings because they're not RPG players. But because everyone loves pretty drawings, there's now a chance that some of them might be interested in taking a look at the game itself.