OSSR MERP
Appendix 2: Electric Boogaloo
Something like that.
AncientH:
This is one of Tolkien's dragons, as illustrated by Ian Miller, the guy who illustrated
A Tolkien Bestiary. If you are a Tolkien fan, and you want to please other Tolkien fans, you pay Ian Miller some monies and use his artwork. That's the thing about a Tolkien RPG: most of the heavy lifting as far as worldbuilding, art, etc. is
already there. You just have to have the will and vision to use it. MERP did not.
FrankT:
This isn't a Monster Manual. First of all because obviously the game stats (such as they are) are earlier in the book in the giant tables portion of the gibberish. So here you get just some narrative text, and that text often not in any way
descriptive. For example, here's literally the entire description of Vampires:
MERP wrote:Vampires are another of the ancient beasts from the pits of Morgoth. Mony of his and Sauron's chief servants took the form of Vampires. All Vampires can fly and are armed with both weapons and talons on their leading wing edges. They are spirits and affect weapons much like Nazgûl, but with only a third level effect. The most famous Vampire was Thuringwethil in the First Age. After she lost her magic cloak and vanished the cloak was used by Lúthien, who along with Beren, infiltrated Angband and stole the Silmarils.
Oh dear. Where to fucking start? How about the fact that other than implying that Vampires are humanoid enough to use swords and cloaks despite having
wings with
talons on them, that it provides absolutely zero information about what a Vampire is, looks like, can do, eats, or cares about? Like, are these Vampires ten feet tall? Can they fold their wings up under their cloaks and pass for human? Do they drink blood?
I don't fucking know! The book just sort of trails off and starts talking about the adventures of Lúthien, who I think quite critically for this piece
is not a fucking Vampire. But what about that weird ass throwaway line about Vampires having weapon resistance? I fucking love that because it's in the middle of a chapter that is primarily fluff, not rules, and there's no reason for you to look it up there. And I
also love it because it references another rule (Nazgûl weapon resistance) with no page citation, and
that rule is also not where you'd expect it to be. And because the rule being referenced is itself a rule that references still another arcane procedure with no page citation.
MERP Vampires may or may not look like this.
This is an equally valid interpretation.
What this means is that there is in total insufficient information to
play with Vampires, insufficient information to
describe Vampires, insufficient information to
tell stories about Vampires, and what information that does exist is not where you expect to find it. It's a perfect storm.
AncientH:
There's a huge honking fucking table in the previous appendix with basic stats for common animals. So 9.0 - Appendix 2 - Creature Descriptions really only covers like...ents, undead, and various creatures of Sauron and Melkoth. Apparently, this didn't get through to the design team, because while they hit most of the major points - Ents, Dragons, Balrogs - and a couple of the minor ones (Flies of Mordor, Faistitycelyn, etc.) - they don't really...extrapolate, any. I mean, they both don't cover everything, and they don't add anything actually
new. I mean sure, when you think about it, there just aren't that many dragons in Tolkien's fiction, there's more than just Smaug the Cumberbatch.
O-face or war-face?
FrankT:
Probably the biggest reason this appendix ain't a monster manual is that there are only 25 entries. And that includes the fact that there are three entrees blown on nothing but reminding you that Orcs, Olog-hai, and Trolls are in the immediately preceding chapter you presumably just read. Why those three in particular? Why not Beornlings or whatever? I don't know. Look, I just don't know.
But the broader problem here is that this book is just failing to be a thing. Like, I can read some Tolkien stuff and notice that he
namechecks Werewolves (who are giant wolves with the souls of orcs or lesser demons, not people who turn into wolves). But an RPG book is supposed to give me enough information to do cooperative storytelling with. It's supposed to settle disputes. It's supposed to tell everyone
how giant the Werewolves are, and what exactly it is about them that make people care that they are facing something other than a Warg with a few levels under its belt. And then there's the expansion of the frame – Tolkien clearly implied that there were all kinds of fucking weird ass fantasy creatures all over the place. The ones encountered in the books were just literally the ones some POV characters happened to run into over the course of two journeys. Clearly there were supposed to be
some kind of monsters in the Iron Hills. That means that if the RPG is supposed to let your characters go to the fucking Iron Hills,
it has to fill in that part of the monster canvas. MERP does not do that. At all.
Fill your fucking canvas. Happy trees and all.
You're looking at a book report rather than a serious set of story creation tools.
AncientH:
And it's a book report being copied from somebody that was writing on the 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide. The whole fucking section pretty much assumes that you already know what's going to be in it. You don't need pictures of dragons because of course you know what a dragon looks like, much less an ent or a huorn.
Nailed it.
The problem is
there are already entire books on the critters in Tolkien, and if you're going to make a Tolkien-based RPG, you should at least cover all of those...if not more. That doesn't mean you have to make shit up out of whole cloth, but you could toss out a Lesser Balrog or maybe a tribe of orcs that are part of the spider-cult of Ungoliant or something.
I'm not saying you have to do this, but let's leave it on the table, hmm?
Hell, stat out some lesser Maiar. Shit got crazy during the War of the Ring, much less the battles of the First and Second Ages. Sauron wasn't the only servant of Morgoth and all that.
Appendix Unlabeled: Expanding MERP with Rolemaster
Kinda like that.
FrankT:
Despite, or perhaps because of being made by the same people, Rolemaster and MERP are not really exactly the same. It's kinda like how all the different White Wolf titles used very
similar mechanics, but were in fact written at different times by people in different head spaces and shit just sort of changed as attitudes changed and no one kept a changelog fucking anywhere for anything. So the rules for bringing Rolemaster shit into MERP or vice versa are kinda like those conversion documents at the end of World of Darkness books. Telling you how many dots some fairy power is worth of vampiric disciplines or vice versa without ever getting around to telling you how to wrap your mind around the fact that the underlying assumptions of what a specific roll on a lockpicking check means are not the same in the two products.
AncientH:
Not much to add here, except that if MERP is based on oD&D, Rolemaster is based on AD&D, and has
lots more
classes professions available, so trying to port your RM material to MERP generally requires some...right-sizing.
By contrast, going from MERP to RM is a lot more...direct. You're just going to suck harder because you couldn't choose one of the sexier classes.
tl;dr:
RM -> MERP == "Your 3e character was Lord Kickarse, Paladin of Shorn, so your 1e equivalent is a Fighter named Angorass."
MERP -> RM == "Your 1e character was Angorass the Fighter, so your 3e equivalent character is Angrybutt the Fighter."
Appendix Unlabeled: Converting MERP and Fantasy Hero Statistics
FrankT:
You do not want to convert Fantasy Hero characters to MERP characters or backwards and forwards. If you were going to do that, you would always be converting to Fantasy Hero because it is a better game, but also you would not use any kind of formula and instead just make a character in Fantasy Hero that was thematically based on whatever the MERP character was supposed to do. Because
fucking obviously.
AncientH:
I don't have anything to add to that; it's true. I mean, it's like how you could technically make a Vampire using Vampire: the Masquerade rules and then convert them into GURPS to play the Coloning, but
why?
FrankT:
And that's the book.
AncientH:
Well, almost. I want to rant about one last thing: the Selected Readings list at the end of the index. This includes all of the then-published Tolkien stuff, plus a lot of the popular secondary works like
A Guide to Middle Earth,
A Tolkien Bestiary,
The Atlas of Middle-Earth, and
Tolkien: A Biography. It also includes a bizarre list of otherwise interesting useful historical materials, geography books, and
Fundamentals of Linguistic Analysis, which I will say without a fucking doubt has
never been on any other Selected Reading list for any other RPG ever.
The question is...did
they actually read any of these fucking books? Because there's no evidence for it. They don't go into great detail about geography and map-making; they don't go into huge detail about medieval-style warfare or armor and weapons; they don't even go into fucking
Tolkien in anything like sufficient detail. I'm not saying that MERP should be a 600-page monster book that includes 500-word glossaries in various Mannish, Elvish, and Dwarf languages, but I don't seriously understand why it
isn't...except, of course, that I do:
The writers couldn't hack it.
Maybe they were Tolkien fans, but it doesn't show. This is a joyless fuckbox of an RPG. This is when you don't want to jerk off at home but opt for the economy option instead of a live whore, and you check in to a booth. It is being able to
see something real and warm and vibrant on the other side of the glass, and you knowing you will never ever touch it but just flog your pathetic noodle and slip the money in the slot and let someone else clean up after you've spat your watery load.
It's not just that Rolemaster was a bad fit for the system, or that approaching LotR was a fundamental misstep.
Every single thing about this RPG is half-assed, embarrassing, shitty, and makes you loath something you used to like. All the actual thought that could have gone into this concept was turned to filling out little fucking tables like this was Calculator: the Number-Crunching. World-building is nonexistent. Art is terrible. Production values a level below somebody getting their copybook printed at Kinko's. This wasn't a product written by fans of Lord of the Rings. This was a product written by fans of Dungeons & Dragons 1e.
And like a lot of people, they didn't stop to think about why what they were doing was wrong.