The Power of Tolkien

My eldest son just turned 13 and has discovered Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings. Not just the movies, although that how it started, he branched out into the books. Luckily for him I have two sets of books. A good set that I keep on my shelf consisting mostly of stuff I bought in the 1990s like my red leather bound one volume Lord of the Rings. A beat up set that I inherited from my older brother along with a few paperbacks. These include Unfinished Tales, Simarillion, and other book I let him have the entirety of the beat up set and he been reading through it. During this he has engaged the interested of his little brother as well. While I am always happy for my kids it always special when they start to like something you like as well.

One of the tradition that Kelly Anne and I have with our kids is that we read to them nearly every night. So recently I started with the Tolkien's Lord of the Ring for my eldest. Because of our reading books tradition I have read a lot of authors out loud. Some read well doing this and other well... not so good.

I have to say that Tolkien is about the best author I ever read aloud. Not by a little but a lot. From his foreward to the Lord of the Rings itself his words flow off the page when read aloud. Also when reading aloud it is very evident the guy has a sense of humor, in a British sort of way. Even in the drier sections of his foreward and Concerning Hobbits my kids were laughing at his turn of phrases. Of course it helps I am using a light faux British accent while doing this.

While I always respected Tolkien for his achievement as an author and knew that he did a lot of work as a Oxford scholar. The fact that he is truly a master of the english language never really sank into until I started reading the Lord of the Rings out loud to my kids.

Update


TimmyD ask how I handle the poems/songs.

The short answer is that I sing. The long answer is that I memorized most of them. Basically what happened is that around 15 I read about how bard, poets, and shamans would memorize the epics and songs of their culture. The articles went into a little on how they did that so I decided to try it out on some of the tolkien poems I liked the best. And it worked after some practice. I used to know about 13 or 14 of them by hearting including a couple by N Robin Crossby of Harn fame. Probably I am down to about 6 or 7 now only because I don't practice near as often. But even the ones that I can't do off of the top of my head I can just look at the first couple of word in LOTR and the rest follows.

Even did one of my own. I wouldn't say it great but from the few that heard it isn't bad either. The reason for it was that I wanted to see how they did it back in the day and I composed it without writing anything down until it was finished. It was an interesting experience it took a couple of months to do.

The main trick is to remember the first line of each part. And use those to link the rest in your head. It helps when you have a good sense of the rhyme or meter of the poem as the cadence aids memory.

In the end there is no real magic just the willingness to practice at it until you get the hang of it. It is about as time consuming as playing a sport or practicing a hobby. Part of why it worked out for me is that at various points of my life I was doing these two to three hour drives to and from my home or college. So instead of playing the radio I would practice reciting these poems.

The thing that sucks about the whole exercise is that I have a poor singing voice due to the fact that my 50% deafness renders my singing way way off key. However there is more than one way to recite them than singing. You can do a sing-song or just plain recite them.

Some of the poems the kids like, other creep them out, and some they find boring. Their favorite is the Man in the Moon (sung by Frodo in the Prancing Pony). My eldest find the Hoard really creepy and sad. My youngest like Princess Mee from the Tom Bomdadill collection of Tolkien's poems. He got right away it would about Mee see her reflection in the ice as Princess Shee and found it very funny.

The underdark map from D (Drow) series

I seem to remember there was a project done by somebody in the OSR where they finished detailing the underdark map found in the D series. For the life of me I can remember where it is. Does anybody know what I am talking about? I think I found it a 1 1/2 to 2 years ago.

Update

Thanks to James and Mr. Castle I found it here the Encyclopaedia Subterranica and the corresponding Dragonsfoot thread.

What I liked about this project was that it filled in the rest of the map from the D series. While I was never really into the underdark for my campaign I hate unknown spaces on maps. I just want to know what there. Thanks to the Dragonsfoot team now we have a version that fills in the unknown.

The Concept of Level

Sometime it good to revisit the basics.

The question asked over on the RPGSite was "Why do Fantasy Games use Levels".

The short answer is "Because of D&D". That led naturally to the question where to do levels in D&D come from?

The answer is found in Chainmail. When the fantasy supplement was added Gygax needed a way to represent the heroes found in myth and novels. The route he choose was to represent them as X number of fighting men. So a Hero was worth 4 fighting men, and a Super Hero was worth 8. Wizards are not as neatly pegged but also have distinct levels of ability from the Seer to a full Wizard. The genesis from Chainmail to D&D saw this simplistic setup expanded by Arneson and Gygax into the full range of levels we see in the original edition of D&D.

Levels have endured over several editions of D&D and been imitated in other RPGs as well. The reason is that it is a easily grasped concept by the novice gamers. With the confusion of combat, character generation, spells, monsters, etc Level stands out as a clear and easy to use method of comparing the power of two character and denoting advancement. That simplicity allowed it to endure despite it early uses not being very realistic or amicable to character customizations

The truth about the Pizza

Well there is no truth. Rusty Battle Axe has the story here.

The simple fact the map had a 30 to 20 year old pizza stain on it when I scanned it.

This is how it looked to me.



This is how it looked to them.



Pizza the food that keeps on giving

Otherworld Minatures + Goblinoid Games = Something Awesome

A couple of weeks back I was approached by Richard from Otherworld Miniatures about contributing a small adventure to the upcoming boxed set of miniatures of Labyrinth Lord. I said

"Mmm let me think about it, yes!"

Basically the process is that it starts out with a background, then that is handed off to the first author who does his section and then the whole package is handed off to the next author and so forth down the line. Each of has a particular theme and a roster to use (Forest, Level 1, etc) . My own contribution will be involving a swamp some boglings, lizardmen, and well the rest will have to wait.

The nice thing about this project is that is plays to my strength from being involved running NERO live-action. Unlike a table top game every NERO event is essentially a collaborative effort. So while I have some ideas for my swamp I won't know what I will be doing with it until I get handed the "package" and see what the previous authors have done. With the caliber of folks involved I am sure there will be plenty of good ideas for me to weave in with my own.

My son's first map

My youngest is 5 years old. I was helping his older brother put together a school project and he wanted to do a project too. One of leftover was a big sheet of yellow posterboard. So he took and went away to his "project". An hour or two later he returned with this. It hard to take a good clear picture of a large posterboard so I annotated it.


The title of the map is Lego Land. Here is his account of who lives here.

Cloud Land
Where the clouds are.

Spring Land
The ground keeps going up and down like a spring

Mordor
Where the really bad people are. Note his older brother has developed an obsession with the Lord of the Rings so the youngest been getting an education on Tolkien lately.

Beraman
This is a sandy place where the Bionicles lives. I think he means Baramanga.

Snowland
Where people live snow cave.

Road 1
Where people take off and land.

Road 2
Another place where people take off and land.

The Shuttle between roads
Taking people between the two roads.

Keynah
Riding on her motorcycle. She has special powers.

Pot Bot
A monster village

Bt-Bta-Bth
Another monster village

Beach
A Bionicle Beach

Pot Not
Still another monster village

Good
where all the good people are but nobody sleeps there

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I have.

It is a mapping weekend.

Various things have caused me to build up a backlog of things to do for my gaming endeavors. So my spare time for the past couple of days have been spent clearing getting stuff done. Two of the project were some maps I promised to the friends.

The first a local area that a friend of mine wanted for a 4e campaign. It was fairly straight forward to do and I decided to use my color style.

Like my Gormmah map this feature my new swamp texture setup which I am way happier with. The trick is that I use the same blue as the water but apply a 50% transparency. The resulting greenish blue give the right color to the swampy terrain. My color maps use a harn type of terrain mapping. The color represents vegetation and the fill terrain. The dotted terrain are hills and the rough looking terrain in the SE corner are mountains.

As relayed by Zach here I polished his map of the Middle Isles. While it looks more professional it is still very much his work. What I do is create a bottom layer and paste the image that he sent me. I then traced over it and replicated the notes and terrain he had marked.

This is what I typically do when working other people's products. My job is realize THEIR vision not impose one of my own. I may suggest and inject a few details that flows from what they are trying to do. But the result is still very much their work. I manage to take some pretty rough drawings and still retain the essence of the author work.

Generally island intensive projects like this take a while to do because of all the coast lines. But my Bamboo Pen Tablet made this a lot easier on my hand and quicker. I was very glad to have this.

Today I am doing the maps for my upcoming Scourge of the Demon Wolf. This is an important steps as it will guide the organization of much of my final draft.