8. Middle-Earth Role Playing (1984)
Star Wars wasn’t the only intellectual property to get an expanded universe thanks to an RPG. Tolkien’s Middle-earth got one too, and boy is it strange. Unlike Star Wars, which was developed under the watchful eye of Lucasfilm, the designers of Middle-Earth Role Playing were left to their own devices. Their development of their Middle-earth was fascinating and detailed and, in many ways, felt entirely unlike anything Tolkien himself would have come up with. There’s a whole expanded continent! There’s gorgeous artwork by Liz Danforth and Angus McBride! There are names and elaborate histories for all of the Nazgul! The world feels lived in and plausible and it did indeed sort of trick a younger me into thinking that this was the product of some labored research into Tolkien’s notes.
There are plenty of drawbacks. The system is clunky and the magic doesn’t feel right. They never really settled on a time period for play, presenting several eras both before and after the War Of The Ring, willy-nilly. It’s a mess, honestly, but a glorious one, and rather like having artifacts from a parallel universe and constructed with the boundless enthusiasm of fanfic. I had accumulated a big stack of these over the years, not so much to play, but mostly to read and enjoy the illustrations. In a pinch for money or space in my 20s, I sold most of them off and almost immediately regretted the move. Hunting down replacements is one of the things that got me started collecting RPGs in earnest, which in turn led to the Vintage RPG Instagram account, which led to my book, Monsters, Aliens, And Holes In The Ground, the promotion of which led to this very article. Funny how life works sometimes.
