Over lunch today I flipped through my copy of Rogues of the Borderlands, an old MERP module. This is one of my favorite MERP books, because it's totally plain vanilla but it's done so damn well it's hard to care. I've joked more than once about combining this book with the Keep on the Borderlands, but the more I look at the prospect the more serious I get about it. It wouldn't take much work to use Middle Earth's Borderlands as the larger backdrop of B2. The Keep becomes the furthest outpost of Dunedain civilization and the Caves of Chaos become a major center for the local forces allied to the Witch-King of Angmar. It could totally work.Any gameblog readers familiar with the Runequest product Borderlands? Trying to incorporate that book into this hypothetical campaign world would be the next illogical step.
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Would you file off all the Middle-Earthiness? I'd be afraid that if you didn't, it'd come with a lot of LotR assumptions and baggage for a lot of players.
ReplyDeleteThat is why I never used the MERP module for Moria in a xD&D game even though I adore it; keeping all the names and locations and such straight from the module writeup to my own campaign world makes my eyes cross.
But thats what planes hopping is for! Why I played in a game where we hopped planes all the time! Yessir, we were always shifting to this place or that, never really finishing any adventures and... on second thought forget the planes hopping.
ReplyDeleteI've got Borderlands for RQ, and it's really good. The setup is a minor Lunar noble exiled to a homestead in the River of Cradles valley who hires the PCs as mercenary guards/troubleshooters. The area is wilderness, essentially "indian territory," and the campaign is a western with the serial numbers filed off. Book one details the Duke, his family, his homestead and the area around it (along with detailed random encounter charts) and then there are 7 additional books covering a year in the life of the homestead as a series of missions -- scouting the land, outlaw hunt (dealing with river pirates), rescuing the duke's kidnapped daughter, dealing with a plague and finding its cause, a dungeon-crawl exploration/assault on a mysterious temple, recovering a legendary treasure for the duke, and leading an overland trade caravan (which ties the adventure in with Griffin Mountain). Even if you don't combine this with the other modules for an "ultimate borderlands" game, it's still well worth picking up.
ReplyDeleteI'm planning on running Return to the Keep on the Borderlands module set in the Wilderlands using OSRIC (with some house-rule tweaks). This update to the KotB has some serious encounters in it that have 'TPK' written all over it.
ReplyDeleteWould you file off all the Middle-Earthiness? I'd be afraid that if you didn't, it'd come with a lot of LotR assumptions and baggage for a lot of players.
ReplyDeleteNo, if I filed off the serial numbers there just wouldn't be much point to the project for me. I'd rather wrestle with player expectations.
The real challenge of combining the Borderlands will be integrating the mutually incompatible setting assumptions of D&D, Middle Earth, and Glorantha. If this becomes a real project, I'd love to see your working notes to see how you do it.
ReplyDeleteAh, glorious MERP - the best supplements ever written...
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