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History
Written November 1989, private circulation
Reprinted in the UK PBM zine LiES #7, April 1993
Typed and converted to HTML by Gary Duke, July 1998
Mirrored from his Gary's
Site by RME, March 2001
The Lord of the Rings is one of the best read, most imitated and well regarded works of modern fiction. With that one trilogy, J. R. R. Tolkien inspired a whole welter of fantasy fiction; despite the fact that Tolkien was far from the first to write such fiction, it is easier to see his influence at work in the multitude of fantasy trilogies and sagas than any other writer's.
And with its setting of a well-mapped Middle-Earth, fought over by armies of Dwarves, Goblins, and Elves, it is hardly surprising that the books, with The Hobbit for support material, also became the inspiration for wargames. What true wargamer, after reading of the Battle of Five Armies, or the Siege of Minas Tirith, could resist the lure of recreating such a battle for himself?
When, in the Seventies (a time of especial popularity for Tolkien's works), companies like Avalon Hill and SPI began to recognise the potential for board-based versions of favourite wargame themes, it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later one of them would release a game set in Middle-Earth. Indeed, SPI's War of the Ring was to achieve some small popularity with gamers. However, of more interest to us today is a lesser-known game of the same name, produced by Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU) and very poorly received at the time (I well remember the comment of one acquaintance, who said of it: "nice box, shame about the rules.")
FGU's War of the Ring is, to the Diplomacy player, clearly derivative of Calhamer's original. Purists might even want to class it as a Diplomacy variant, with its province-based movement and concepts of supported attacks. But one thing this War of the Ring lacked was diplomacy, and for many, diplomacy is what makes Diplomacy, well, Diplomacy. So why, when the designer borrowed so much else from Calhamer, did he not take diplomacy, too?
Because FGU's game is for just two players, that's why.
Wargamers have long had problems finding opponents, and in the days before widespread wargaming clubs and gaming conventions, it may be that FGU thought that a two-player game was more suitable. After all, anyone who buys games can be expected to know someone he can play against - whereas filling a multi-player game might pose problems.
However, I believe that that's not the only reason FGU made War of the Ring a two-player game. There is an argument, which I shall return to again and again, that The Lord of the Rings is not really suited to a multi-player format.
Firstly, we have to consider the story. It's a tale of a war between good and evil, fought by great coalitions on both sides. Thus the Elves and the Dwarves might not like each other, but when it comes to goblins, they're both agreed that Middle-Earth would be a better place without them. Gandalf's role was to try to direct, or at least concert, the forces of good by appealing to their own self-interests, and though the Men of Gondor, the Rohirrim, and the Beornings, the Dwarves, the Elves and the Ents, may have formed an uneasy alliance, theirs was a war to end Sauron, with precious little blood-letting between the various combatants ranged on the side of good.
Likewise, Orcs and Corsairs, Haradrim and Nazgûl, might not have liked each other very much, but they were obviously prepared to lay aside their differences for the purpose of enslaving just about everyone else. And to reduce it to basics, The Lord of the Rings really is just that: Sauron's allies against the world.
Of course, there's Saruman, too. But we'll ignore him for the moment, much as he's one of my favourites.
And so we come to the postal Diplomacy hobby. A natural vehicle for interest in variants on Calhamer's theme, the postal hobby has fostered an ever-growing collection of alternatives to early-Twentieth Century Europe as a setting for the game - among them several Tolkien-based designs. Of these, Hartley Patterson's Downfall (of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King) and Lew Pulsipher's Middle Earth originals seem to have become the most popular, with Downfall itself begetting ever more and more updates and revisions and becoming one of the most widely-played variants in the world.
As someone who has played a small part in that process of Downfall revision, I too have spent some hours over a map of Middle-Earth, delving into Tolkien Companions and reference works. And wrestled in numerous conversations with other interested parties over the problems that confront anyone wanting to transpose the works of Tolkien to a board game.
The first, we've already begun to look at. The book games-designers are inspired by tells of a (largely) two-sided confrontation, and yet anyone attempting a variant of Diplomacy will want to involve at least five, preferably more, players. Saruman, who spends the book somewhere between the extremes of good and evil, offers a valid third power, but then things begin to get difficult.
One solution, used in Downfall, is to make each of the coalition partners on the side of good a separate power. Thus we have a player for the Dwarves, another for the Elves, a third for Gondor, and a fourth for Rohan. The addition of a Fellowship, Northern Alliance, Gandalf, Hobbit, or other power, to accommodate all the bits of the good coalition left over, can take the number of players up to seven.
This has much to commend it. Not least, it can represent the diffuse and uncoordinated nature of the forces of good, with Dwarves mistrusting Elves, the Men of Gondor unsure of the Rohirrim, and so on.
But its elegance is thwarted by a second problem confronting anyone wishing to turn The Lord of the Rings into a game: authenticity. In the book, we don't hear much about Gondor fighting Rohan or the Elves. More to the point, Sauron was so strong that Gandalf was able to persuade everyone else that it was in their own interests to fight him. Indeed, Sauron was too strong; in the book, there was no real military solution, and it took Frodo's destruction of the Ring to defeat the Evil One.
A game has to be more balanced, and the result in doubt. Few people will play a game of which the end is pre-determined; most complain of even the most trivial imbalance in even their favourite games. Thus to make Sauron as powerful as he is in the book would be to make a most unsatisfactory and unfulfilling game.
Then again, to make him significantly less powerful would undermine the incentive for the various 'good' players to unite against him. End result: Sauron making alliances with the Elves against the Dwarves, or Gondor and Saruman uniting against Rohan for a share of the supply centres.
Various solutions have been tried. In theory, the simplest would be to achieve such a balance between the strength of the powers as to oblige them to unite in a similar way to that seen in the book. In practice, however, this would be difficult to achieve - though it would perhaps be the most preferable, allowing players who do consider themselves capable of it to do things differently (perhaps conquering the Elves with the Dwarves and still managing to stop Sauron).
The Hartley Patterson/Glover Rogerson Downfalls use player alignments seemingly derived from the likes of Dungeons and Dragons (after all, Gygax borrowed from Tolkien, didn't he?), such that Gondor and Rohan are Good, Sauron Evil, and Saruman Neutral (with a tendency to evil). Alignment is then used to place restrictions on player activities, discouraging the sort of ‘unholy alliances’ described above.
Alternatively, an idea John Cudmore and I first applied to Downfall is the sort of victory conditions system seen in a lot of commercial games. This does have the advantage of allowing the designer to allocate a variety of objectives to the various powers, such that the motives will be the same as those in the book, leaving the players to decide how to pursue them. (For example, the Dwarves get a very small number of victory points for each Elven centre taken, a fair number for each Orc centre taken, and much, much more for each home supply centre they still hold at the end of the game. It's then up to the Dwarven player to decide whether to pursue an aggressive strategy and risk losing his home centres - or not.)
However, none of these solutions is unflawed. The third suffers the same problem as the first; it is difficult in practice to achieve a proper balance between the players. And the second, like the others to a lesser extent, comes close to dictating the course of the game to the players. If the five Good players are obliged, by the rules, to join together, why not make them the same player in the first place?
For this reason I agree very much with Mark Nelson's decision to remove Umbar, one of the more established Downfall powers, from his own latest version of the variant. [Ed. Note: This may well be a comment which no longer makes much sense unless you find the exact variant referred to...] I suspect Umbar has only been included so routinely in the past because it bolstered the number of powers to seven or eight; in the book, the Corsairs are clearly as aligned with Sauron as the armies of Mordor, and, in the game, Umbar usually has no more choice than to attack Gondor or be overwhelmed by Sauron. I have seen Umbar do well, usually through subtly playing off Sauron and Gondor through diplomacy, but it takes a rare player. Far better to accept that Umbar should be, in game terms, part of Sauron's empire at the start.
And as if this wasn't all enough, there's the small matter of the Ring - the centrepiece of the book, and therefore essential to any Lord of the Rings variant. I myself long ago abandoned the idea of having the GM 'hide' the Ring in a province at the start of the game and let players search for it. Quite apart from the matter of authenticity (that word again!), to make it worth looking for, the Ring has to be a powerful item indeed. And to have such a game effect won largely through the good luck of stumbling on it first is, I believe, unsuited to an otherwise non-random game like Diplomacy. Others disagree, but I will always locate the Ring in the Shire, under the control of Gandalf, hobbits, or a Fellowship player. It's where it started in The Lord of the Rings, it's not random, and it allows the game designer to make sure it's properly accommodated by the rest of the rules.
Then again, it's easy for Sauron to spot what's coming, where it's coming from, and to count the provinces to Mount Doom. At least random location ensures uncertainty on his part - after all, what happened in the book was the last thing he expected, whereas in a variant, most players know the plot already.
And finally, the chrome: the Nazgûl, the Ents, the Beornings, Shelob, the Balrog, Saruman's crows, the mountain passes, the citadels and fortresses, the Paths of the Dead and so much more. It's hard for any variant designer to resist the lure of these important features of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and all have, with varying degrees of success, been incorporated into at least one version of Downfall.
The Lord of the Rings is not alone in being a difficult work to turn into a game; few books or films are easily adaptable. But in being the one most regularly attempted as a Diplomacy variant, this particular book gives a useful insight into the sort of problems such a transfer poses. And from this insight, we can draw some conclusions.
The first is that a designer should establish in his own mind, from the start, just how faithful he wants to be to the original. The choice throughout will be between preserving the character of the book, or whatever, and producing a balanced or playable game. If he is prepared to make no compromises to the latter, the exercise is probably pointless; better to re-read the book than to play a game constrained from start to finish by the original plot.
If that seems unfulfilling, it might be worth recognising the compromises made in Diplomacy itself. Quite apart from the fact that Tunis should be French and Montenegro is left off the map, why aren't France and Russia obliged to form an alliance? What about the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and why does France start with a fleet in Brest when its naval strength at the time was concentrated in the Mediterranean? Because these compromises make the game more playable, balanced, and enjoyable.
In history, Britain, France and Russia formed a Triple Entente against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey; what Calhamer did with his design was to put seven players in a geo-strategic position recognisably resembling that faced by the Great Powers at the turn of the century - and leave the rest to them. The fact that, in Diplomacy, not everyone does what the Great Powers did is used by some secondary-school history teachers as a useful demonstration to their students.
The second lesson to be drawn from the likes of Downfall is that there is no end of chrome that a designer can add to a game if he uses a novel as his source. Once he starts to use it, he may find it hard to stop.
More to the point, the 'features' he may want to use are invariably those which were prominent in the plot; what about the less well-charted areas of the world in question? Thus, we read but a mention of the battles between Dwarves and Orcs in the North of Middle-Earth during the War of the Ring, and very little indeed about the Beornings and the Men of Dale. And what horrors of similar proportions to the Balrog or Shelob lurk in the unvisited South of Mirkwood? With such a limited perspective of what is intended to be a world-spanning game, it is perhaps unwarranted to dwell on the minutiæ of those areas more intimately known to the reader.
But to counter both these points, let us finally remember that the game has to be recognisable if it is to please those players who join in because they are fond of the original work. In a Tolkien variant, therefore, I would be wary of inventing 'new' bits of Middle-Earth, perhaps to the east, or inventing new powers to add to those read about in Tolkien, Indeed, I dislike the use by some of things like Iron Crown Enterprise's additions to Tolkien's Middle-Earth map, for their Middle Earth Role-Playing game. Call me a purist, but if it isn't Tolkien, I don't like to see it in a Tolkien variant.
The very plethora of Middle-Earth-based variants demonstrates that no-one yet has come up with an entirely satisfactory compromise between playability and realism. And the fact that many of the designs are updates of earlier ones, very often by the same designer, shows how strong is the urge to 'get it right'. But it also shows how strong is the attraction of such a project. Indeed, if I sound like I'm saying "it can't be done" above, I'm certainly not heeding my own advice; writing this article has again stimulated my desire to start from scratch with a new angle on the idea. Perhaps one day it will reach the variant bank...
Gary comments:
"And, of course, it did! And its name is Necromancer (although it's version 0.3 that's in the Variant Banks, with Miller Number ts30/08)."
Gary Duke has copies of his updated version of the Necromancer rules, and more, here.
An article on Necromancer strategy by Mikko Saari is to be found here.
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