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?
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