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Falenthal wrote:By the way, I read somewhere in this or the old forum an idea about the Marsh-Bell adventure where the reason why Balin was lost in the mashes related to him trying to reopen the Old Forest Road a.k.a. The Dwarven Way (Men-i-Naugrim) through Mirkwood to connect Erebor with the future kingdom of Moria.

I think it's a brilliant idea, in case you decide to use it.

Whether others shared it as well, this is definitely one of the long term goals that I had for my campaign and why currently the PCs are accompanying Balin, Gimli, and a force of dwarves to the sunken city from the Marsh Bell adventure in an attempt to establish a camp to operate from. From this base of operations they plan to extend along the Men-I-Naugrim, opening it from the east side.

Yes, the expanding the road theme is very clever & leads the players into Wilderland in a plausible plot line.

BTW, I would double the vote for Decipher's Moria for your game. The MERP module is fine, but IMHO, Decipher did a better job on their boxed set.

Two more obscure gaming references:

1. White Dwarf, 38 has a D&D adventure through there. Yes, it's a bit of a dungeon crawl, but it's intriguing seeing how Lew Pulsipher envisioned the Fellowship of the Ring in those days.

2. Wargamer's Digest, Nov 1975, has an article about the War of the Dwarves & Orcs & the Battle of Azanulbizar that I prefer over Games Workshop's interpretations (pre-films & all that).

Mim wrote: BTW, I would double the vote for Decipher's Moria for your game. The MERP module is fine, but IMHO, Decipher did a better job on their boxed set.

Yeah, I'm reading through it. It's pretty good. Some of their rules are even similar to TOR rules. My goal is still to create a new adventure from scratch, but it's good to see what others have done.

Two more obscure gaming references:

1. White Dwarf, 38 has a D&D adventure through there. Yes, it's a bit of a dungeon crawl, but it's intriguing seeing how Lew Pulsipher envisioned the Fellowship of the Ring in those days.

2. Wargamer's Digest, Nov 1975, has an article about the War of the Dwarves & Orcs & the Battle of Azanulbizar that I prefer over Games Workshop's interpretations (pre-films & all that).

Great! Thank you! Tracking them down now...

I played in Lew's Moria game back in the day. It was his intro to D&D and he'd adjusted the character types to match the books. Gandalf was IIRC a 8th level Cleric. Much fun was had exploring the caverns and tunnels but I can't remember (it's nearly 40 years ago) how the game ended. Later on seeing it in WD brought back fond memories as did this mention.

You must have had a blast playing with Lew in his original game. That's RPG history! I've often appreciated his articles & work, & use to point out his interpretations of the Fellowship stats to power-hungry gamers. I'd say something to the effect of this:

"See? Aragorn is already rather powerful as an 7th level ranger, one of the most powerful in all the realms, & Gandalf has reached the astounding heights of a 8th level cleric!"

Well, for anyone reading this who wonders, you have to remember the time & how gaming developed. We simply didn't have 20th or 30th level characters back then, & even Gygax once addressed his surprise at meeting gamers at cons who had such characters, since most of his had reached 'only' to the 10th - 14th level range

It was at the end of a long weekend and we'd run out of everything anyone had prepared so Lew offered up his intro game so we shelved our characters and played with his pregens. At that time there was still a lot of the wonder in rpging and we were a lot less jaded back then

What happened with your Moria campaign?

Stallheim wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 07, 2017 8:26 pm

What happened with your Moria campaign?

I got mired in creating a subsystem for exploring underground TotT-style, without mapping it out. Went through about 8 versions of it, some of which I posted here.

Version 9 is going to be awesome. Really.

Glorelendil wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 07, 2017 11:56 pm

I got mired in creating a subsystem for exploring underground TotT-style, without mapping it out. Went through about 8 versions of it, some of which I posted here.

Version 9 is going to be awesome. Really.

Oh. Good to hear. I feared you had dug to deep into the source material.

Everybody has is own Balrog.