Reflections on Middle-earth Roleplaying, Rolemaster, Against the Darkmaster, and Art

Back when I was a young lad and able to devote much of my time to role-playing games (late middle-school and high-school), I tried out a wide variety of different systems. Naturally, Dungeons and Dragons – and especially first edition AD&D – was a primary focus, given that it was the great colossus in the hobby during the 1980s, and everyone was familiar with it. But my friends and I also explored other games. We used our allowance money to try out alternatives like Dragonquest, Runequest, Thieves’ Guild, Traveller, Star Frontiers, and others. But our focus remained AD&D; it was the game with which we actually tried to play proper “campaigns” – usually failing for one reason or another, often with “total party kills” consciously or subconsciously engineered by tired or frustrated DMs. In contrast, we typically drifted away from the other systems after a couple of sessions. 

About halfway through high-school, though, my group – and especially me in my capacity as Game Master – shifted to Middle-earth Roleplaying (“MERP”). We still played other games – such as Call of Cthulhu and GURPS – but MERP became our main focus. My first “proper” campaign was one that I ran over a summer using MERP. The characters successfully completed a major quest and did some interesting things before my immaturity sadly led me to make some bad decisions that eventually caused the end of the campaign. Nonetheless, I remember it fondly, and parts of it vividly, even after all these years (almost four decades!).

Eventually we tried out Rolemaster as well. And although there were things about it that we liked, it proved less easy to use in play than the comparatively streamlined MERP. Sometimes we ‘mixed-and-matched’ things from the two systems, which was easy to do since MERP was a simplified “Tolkien-ized” version of Rolemaster (the relation between the two systems resembled that of Basic/Expert D&D and AD&D). In particular, the players used the individual weapon charts from Arms Law and spell charts from Spell Law, whereas I relied on the more general charts from MERP as GM. 

I continued to occasionally buy MERP and Rolemaster books even when I went to university and stopped playing RPGs regularly for a while. The Shadow World setting, by the highly creative Terry Amthor, especially intrigued me, although I never ran a campaign set in it. I bought the Rolemaster Companions as they were published and spent many hours daydreaming about the numerous options they provided (many of which, I recognized even at the time, were ill-conceived). However, the Middle-earth material remained my favourite. 

Given my longstanding interest in Rolemaster, I had known for many years that a new edition was in the works. This new version was ambitiously entitled “Rolemaster Unified” (“RMU”). It promised to “unite” elements of second edition Rolemaster (“RM2e”), the version that was dominant throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s (later fixed up slightly and republished as Rolemaster Classic [“RMC”] around 2007) and Rolemaster the Standard System (“RMSS”), the even-more-complicated version that was published in the 1990s (a truncated version of which was later published in a single hardcover book, Rolemaster Fantasy Role-playing, with expansion books to cover the rest of system). I won’t delve into the edition differences here, most of which I have forgotten over the years. My perception is the RM2e/RMC remained more popular overall, but that RMSS had (and perhaps still has) strong advocates. Personally, after trying to GM some RMSS sessions about 25 years ago, I concluded that I preferred RM2e/RMC, and preferred MERP to both. 

In any case, given my gaming history, I was curious to see what the new version of Rolemaster – RMU – looked like. So, I recently checked out the products at DrivethruRPG. Alas, my curiosity was quickly extinguished. One reason was the price. Four PDFs are needed for the complete game, each of which is quite expensive. Given that I currently am quite happy with Against the Darkmaster (“VsD”) for this kind of game, and was simply curious about the new edition, my reaction was “no thanks.” (The complete rulebook for VsD in PDF is only one quarter the price of the four PDFs needed to play RMU.)

But just as much of a turn off as the price for RMU was the cover art. I would much prefer blank covers than ones graced with those pictures. I sincerely hope that the artist never reads this post, since I may come across as a bit mean here, but those covers are not ones that I would want to have to look at on a regular basis while playing a game every week.  

This made me reflect on the high quality of the art that characterized the main ICE (Iron Crown Enterprises) fantasy role-playing games – MERP and Rolemaster – during the company’s heyday from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. That quality, for the most part, was due to the singular work of Angus McBride, whom I’ve praised many times at this blog in the past, including ranking him as one of the all-time greatest FRPG artists. 

That’s not to say that only McBride’s covers were excellent. The cover for the early UK edition of MERP was by Chris Achilleos and expressed a “metal” vision of Middle-earth better than anything else I’ve ever seen. (I remember seeing this cover in an advertisement in the UK gaming magazine White Dwarf back in the day and being bitter that I couldn’t purchase that version of the game in Canada.)

Also with respect to ICE’s Middle-earth line, the map artwork of Peter Fenlon was very important to me (and Fenlon is another artist whom I’ve praised here). Indeed, I spent hours just looking at Fenlon’s maps, thinking about how to detail the various locations on them (at least those that were not already described in the relevant Middle-earth setting books). I continue to cherish and use them to this day.

I actually started playing MERP before McBride started providing the covers for the line – although not before Fenlon started making the maps, as he was with the company from the start – so I don’t think my fondness for MERP was entirely due to the art. But I remember seeing McBride’s covers gracing the new MERP books and I can’t deny that they motivated me to buy a few more over the years than I would’ve otherwise. Certainly Middle-earth in my mind’s eye became infused with McBride’s vision of the world – and remains so even to this day.

I’ve mentioned before at this blog that I regard Against the Darkmaster (VsD) to be a worthy successor to MERP. It is not a “clone” – it changes too many things for it to be classified as such. But it is close enough to be readily compatible with MERP. I have had no difficulty in using elements of my MERP collection in both of my current VsD campaigns. 

In addition to its rules, VsD is also a worthy successor to MERP with respect to its art. The cover art for the core rulebook by Andrea Piparo is beautiful. 

The interior art for VsD is also of a very high quality. And I noticed an homage to one of my favourite McBride covers. (Unfortunately, I do not know which artist is responsible for the black and white picture below. The artists credited for the interior art are: Francesco Saverio Ferrara, Tommaso Galmacci, Rich Longmore, Heraldo Mussolini, Andrea Piparo, and Marcin Ściolny. The McBride picture was originally used for the Lost Realm of Cardolan module, and later used for the large Arnor book, which combined material from several earlier modules, including Cardolan.)

Well, this has been something of a rambling post. I guess that if I were to try to summarize my “key points” they would be:

1. I liked MERP and Rolemaster (2nd edition) back in the day.
2. Both MERP and Rolemaster, at least after the early days of ICE, benefitted from excellent cover art (primarily by Angus McBride). MERP also benefitted from amazing maps by Peter Fenlon. (The official RM setting, Shadow World, unfortunately did not enjoy as impressive cover or map art.)
3. The cover art for the new version of Rolemaster (RMU) is not that great, in my view. The core rules also are quite expensive (even as PDFs). So I’m passing on RMU, at least for the time being.
4. The rules for VsD are inspired heavily by MERP – and hence rock. The art for VsD is excellent as well. So I’m quite happy with the game overall – mechanically and aesthetically. 

Namárië!