New guy questions!

[!NotTheWitcher]

Hello, first time poster and new owner of the game and many of the supplements.

The biggest question I have is where can I get a crash course on the lore? I'm not very knowledgeable of Tolkien lore but I got all this stuff to run a game for my girlfriend and our friends because they're all super fans, but I'm usually the gamemaster no matter what alas. I don't want to make major canon offenses, but I'm sure some pushing it a tad won't be too bad.

Monsters! Does anybody have a decent set of vague guidelines for statting up monsters that aren't in any of the supplements yet?

Thanks for any and all help.

[Otaku-sempai]

Besides the books themselves (mainly: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings plus The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, the HOME volumes, etc.), there are some other tomes I can point you towards.

- A Tolkien Treasury edited by Alida Becker. Stories, poems, essays, and illustrations celebrating the author and his world.
- A Tolkien Bestiary by David Day
- The Complete Guide to Middle-earth by Robert Foster
- The Complete Tolkien Companion by J.E.A. Tyler
- The Atlas of Middle-earth by Karen Wynn Fonstad

I'm sure someone can advise you on additional monsters. The Adventures in Middle-earth Loremaster's Guide now available in PDF, to be published in hardcover in the Spring, has some monsters and guidelines for adding/adapting more of them. But of course that is orientated towards D&D 5e.

[zedturtle]

Hello, first time poster and new owner of the game and many of the supplements.

The biggest question I have is where can I get a crash course on the lore? I'm not very knowledgeable of Tolkien lore but I got all this stuff to run a game for my girlfriend and our friends because they're all super fans, but I'm usually the gamemaster no matter what alas. I don't want to make major canon offenses, but I'm sure some pushing it a tad won't be too bad.

Monsters! Does anybody have a decent set of vague guidelines for statting up monsters that aren't in any of the supplements yet?

Thanks for any and all help.

Hey Not-NotTheWitcher {does that mean you are The Witcher?}, I'm Zed.

All the stuff OS mentioned is good stuff. I spend a good bit of my work days driving, so I tend to also listen to podcasts and other audio recordings. Corey Olsen (aka The Tolkien Professor) is a good accessible resource (here's a link for some stuff and there's other stuff out there).

But my biggest piece of advice is not to be intimidated. Pick a particular area or timeframe and spend a bit of time looking into that (in the primary sources, the game's info, the secondary stuff OS mentioned, and even googling the wikis). Then go for it. The framing story of the primary sources is that what we're reading is a story written down after the fact, and there's every chance that things went a little bit differently than the story says. Y'all get to figure out the "truth".

— • —

As for monsters, there's a lot of them these days, spread between the various game materials. There are some fan-made compilations of where to find all of them, and Rivendell has some great options for tweaking existing monsters and putting your own spin on them.

[Falenthal]

Hi and welcome to the forums, !NotTheWitcher!

I can't add any more sources to what my comrades here have offered.
I'd only say that, if you already have that many rulebooks, and also the perspective of doing a lot of reading for the canon itself, you might get overwhelmed.

My advice would be to start small:
1) Read The Hobbit. Even if you read it at some point in your life, read it again. I't's short, engaging, and will give you lots of info on the region of the Wilderland, its inhabitants and, mainly, the themes and spirit of a Tolkien based adventure.

1.a) If you want to read a bit more, or wonder "what happened to all those guys I met in The Hobbit?", simply read the chapter "Many Meetings" from Lord of the Rings. There, Glóin tells Frodo about what happened to the characters and places of The Hobbit years after.

2) Then, read only the Core Rulebook of TOR. It has all the info you need to gamemaster a game set in the region of Wilderland, the one that appears in The Hobbit. There are more than enough rules there to run a perfect game. Also, all the thematic descriptions and playable options are centered in the Wilderland region.
You'll also find a whole chapter (The Campaign) with a Tale of the Years chronography of what happened in the region before, during and after the events of The Hobbit. You really don't need anything else to run a game.

Leave the Lord of the Rings for when you have time and are in the mood of knowing more. The same goes for The Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales. And, also, don't start reading all other TOR sourcebooks. They are magnificent, but they also hold tons of new information that you don't need at first. Better to pay attention to the Core Rulebook, get it right (ask as much as you want in these forums!!), and only then expand and deepen your knowledge and the mechanics of the game.

And have fun. Lots of it.

[!NotTheWitcher]

Thanks everyone, you've been very helpful. I'll go through all these sources as I find them.

[Majestic]

All good advice, but I'd like to strongly second Falenthal's advice, especially about the Core Rules. That, along with closely absorbing the information of any adventure you run (be it The Marsh-Bell, The Theft of the Moon, Tales from Wilderland, etc.) will suffice to immerse you enough in the proper 'Tolkien feel' that it will seem as if you are as much an expert on his works as any of your players!

[Earendil]

Welcome!

In addition to what the others have said, I've found Tolkien Gateway to be an extremely valuable resource if you come across a Tolkien reference in the books that you don't get, or want to expand on something while staying "in canon".

[Halbarad]

http://www.henneth-annun.net is an exceptionally useful resource.