Re-start

 Well it looks like my old blogspace got out of date, or something. On to the new.

No, its working again, so back to the old....

So I was playing an AiME (Adventures in Middle Earth rpg) game over a year ago, and it was very good.  We stopped that because I was waiting for a specific book in the series to come out (Moria) and also I was excited about a new campaign book I had purchased thru a Kickstarter - Odyssey of the DragonLords. This was a classical greek setting, which is a subject area I really like (along with Egyptian). By the end of last year (2020) I was growing tired of that game, so it was great that christmas and new year gave us a break.

During the break I had a great idea. Lets return to AiME and lets run the game as if the players were the Fellowship of the Ring, or at least a parallel copy of them. Then I watched The Hobbit movies and wanted to include that story in the sequence as well. Sadly there is a gap of over 50 years between the two stories, but what's the point of fantasy role playing if you can't shove in a bit of fantasy in there. Besides all the races except humans live quite long lives, and even the humans (dunedain) can live to be quite old. Also, the AiME game system itself is sort of supportive of longer styles of game time passage, suggesting one major adventure per game year.

So I got into it. I have six players, and can play a character of my own, which makes 7, the fellowship was 9. So we demote Merry and Pippin to npcs (non-player characters). That works. And the character I play (as the GM), can be the wizard (Gandalf) equivalent, and can pop in and out, just like Gandalf does.  To that end I came up with:

Gandalf - Loremaster.

Aragorn - Warden/Herald.

Legolas - Wanderer/Hunter of Shadows

Gimli - Slayer/Foe Hammer

Frodo - Burgler

Samwise - Warrior/Knight

Boromir - Warrior/WeaponMaster

To a small degree there is some contriving in these choices. I wanted to use as many of the AiME character classes as possible, and I wanted them to sort of fit the role of the story characters as much as possible. The choice of Knight for Samwise for example fits the devoted follower and friend of Frodo, which a lot of the Knight abilities sync to. It will mean that Sam will end up running around in heavy armour, and that lead to an extra layer.

Instead of the characters being the exact Fellowship, they will mirror them. Not exactly, but the same similar events will occur, plus some extra ones. So if this group of players are not the band of dwarves/fellowship, but they are going to do most everything they did and be in most of the same places... then obviously they are a decoy group!  Which explains why the Fellowship had it so easy (sic), because the decoy group were taking on all the nasty stuff.

Even the parts that a locked into the cannon of the story, that 13 dwarves could defeat Smaug, that's because it was actually 13 dwarves and 7 others.

The opening scene of this new adventure will be the 7 players running into a battle scene where 13 dwarves have been slain (yet another decoy group, but a less successful one). A Nazgul (weak early version) demands they hand over The Map (what map? the one they found on the dead dwarf), the players resist and chase the nazgul off but are then attacked by some orcs... etc.They now have a map, actually a copy, and will need guidance on what has happened, so off the Rivendell they go.

And so it begins, they Journey to Rivendell. Along the way they run into a band of Trolls, a different band, then some wargs and goblins. At Rivendell they are asked to take on the decoy role formally by Elrond, and then head off for Erebor.

The gap between The Hobbit and the LotR can easily be filled with a few other major adventures, like the Green Dragon of Mirkwood, or a journey north into the Grey Mountains etc.

TBC...