Saturday, July 14, 2012

A Brief Sad History, Revisited

So, I found out yesterday that my MERP.Con IV guest of honor talk, "A Brief, Sad History of Tolkien Roleplaying Games", is now available online in the form of a one-hour video (actually 67 minute, 58 seconds):


While the text of this has been available online for a long time -- I posted it here in the early days of this blog* -- the actual delivery included many asides and back-and-forths answering questions from the audience. Plus, of course, here you can see something of my show-and-tell, a part of my talk that didn't translate well into the text-only format.

Be warned that there are some technical glitches in the tape, as in a few places where the audio and visual tracks get out of sync, or a few words drop out of the audio track, but these shdn't affect anyone's watching the piece.
Just to clarify one such place: early on there's a place where I talk about Arneson and Gygax that doesn't quite come across: what I said was along the lines that Dave Arneson came up with the idea (for D&D) and then Gary Gygax figured out how to make a game out of it, in the sense of writing rules so that other people could figure out how to play: some skips in the audio track at that point make the sentence a little hard to follow.

Now that we're four years closer to the event of the next Tolkien-based movie, I was interested to see how close my predictions nr the end turned out; close, but not altogether on the mark.

Other than that, I had a great time attending the con, and thoroughly enjoyed writing up the piece; I'm glad to see it made available for those who cdn't be there in Spokane on that hot summer day in 2008.

. . . .

*Here the essay itself, broken into four pieces for easier posting:









Also available is the question and answer
at

3 comments:

  1. Steve MillerJuly 15, 2012 at 10:04 PM

    I will assume blame for the death of Decipher's LotR RPG. I seem to have contributed to a number of "final releases" in game lines. Not to mention a host of "never released" books. :)

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  2. BillJuly 18, 2012 at 6:04 AM

    I thoroughly enjoyed reading your talk. It confirmed much that I knew or suspected and taught me many new things. The story of the aborted TSR Tolkien game was new to me. Thanks for sharing.

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  3. John D. RateliffJuly 18, 2012 at 2:24 PM

    Hi Bill
    Glad you enjoyed it. If I were writing it today, I'd have to update it by mention of the most recent LotR rpg from Cubical 7; still haven't played this, but they got a lot of things right.

    Hi Steve
    I had forgotten you worked on that line. My contributions were a chapter to the rpg rulebook, roughly half of a Rohan sourcebook that was never finished or released, and the outline for a trilogy of adventures (the first of which I ran for the first time at that MerpCon). Which ones did you work on, and which of them made it out?

    --JDR

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