board77

I'm talking Iron Crown Enterprises now, not Decipher. These guys had the rights for Tolkien based roleplaying back in the 80's and produced a huge volume of material. To the best of my knowledge, none of it contradicts canon, except in a couple of cases where they had to make a judgement call. The only think I can think of was whether the Glorfindel of the Silmarillion and the Glorfindel of LotR were the same person.

Much of the artwork was by Angus McBride and of a very high quality. The material was highly detailed and extremely interesting. When they lost the rights from Tolkien Enterprises a huge effort went into scanning, proofing and OCRing the material (with the writers support and encouragement) before Decipher bought the rights and produced "Lord of the Rings RPG". The scanning effort was shut down eventually by the Tolkien Estate and Decipher.

The big difference between the two is that the Decipher version is very much aimed at the Movie fan and is a "lite" RPG. MERP was much more detailed and layered.

I have a selection of the original source material from those days, despite never having had the chance to actually play it. I have a boxed version of the core rules plus a hardback version of the Collectors Edition. I also have a selection of Ready-to-run adventures, campaigns and sourcebooks.

There was an aborted attempt to simplify MERP into an introductory game called "Lord of the Rings Adventure Game" which I also own.

Finally, there was series of Gamebooks in the Fighting Fantasy style called Middle Earth Quests of which I have the first three.

So, are there any other fans of this material out there? Is anyone interested in learning more?

Alatar

Alatar, I love MERP and do have a fair old collection of material for it.

It is some of the best source material for Middle Earth ever produced, fills in all the gaps. It is very close to Tolkien canon, and many folks see it as such. It is not, but you can't see the gaps

We do use a fair bit if it in the There and Back Again forum. Seekers is based largely on 'The Norther Wastes' suppliment for 2nd edition, and Bree uses a lot from 'Rangers of the North', 'The Lost Realm of Cardolan', 'Hillmen of the Trollshaws' and 'Bree' (obviously).

You should try to play MERP. If you ever make it to the London area, I can try and run a game for you (and others like Leoba, Alandriel, Terian etc etc). It is an overly complex system, very numbers heavy, but it works in a much more realistic way than say D&D.

Oh, and if you ever see 'The Kin Strife' on sale, I would be forever in your debt if you picked it up.

This sounds interesting. Is any of this material still available anywhere?

You can still pick it up in hobby shops or on Ebay. The more rare stuff goes for serious money though.

I have some PDF's but I'm not sure of the legal standing anymore. PM me if you want to know more.

Alatar

Or you could try looking at.....

http://www.merp.com/

Official site, not very good and signing up is a nightmear.

I also have various PDF's, as do a few others, but the site they were taken from has a really bad habbit of crashing or only allowing only part of the supliments to be downloaded.

I'm soooooo looking forward to the day I'll actually get to play MERP - and you know it Din

Alatar, my RP group is using some MERP material (Northern Waste to be precise) as a background to our RP story over at 'There and back again'.

I absolutely the MERP stuff, the maps, the detail. It's just awesome!
And yes... *cough* here be some pdf's also if someone wants to PM

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Resident witchâ„¢

I've never actually had the opportunity to be involved in a MERP campaign, but I do have a couple of the sourcebooks (Creatures of Middle Earth, Treasures of Middle Earth). These are quite well done, I agree, and while there's a certain (unavoidable) amount of extrapolation, they seem to have a pretty firm grounding in canon. I've used the 'Treasures' book quite frequently as a resource in AD&D gaming.

I played a little MERP years ago, it was only my brother and me, one GM and one player is not an ideal setting, but we still had some fun. - The hardest part about roleplaying has always been to find players.

I have the core rules and two scenarios. It's a great game, and very true to the books, as true as possible actually.

In the end we switched back to D&D as we found the rules too complicated, but if I had the opportunity I would like to try it out again. - That's not likely to happen here in Copenhagen though.