Hi, all. I was recently given copies of Paladin and Donjon for Christmas. (A clarification for Clinton's sake: someone bought me copies.) Well done on both, Clinton, and I'm looking forward to playing them.

In fact....

I'm working to get a few people into roleplaying, and they are all Tolkien fans to a greater or lesser extent. Therefore, I have been considering running a fantasy game for them, either set in Middle Earth or at least capturing the essence of Middle Earth. I am looking at other games as well (including the new LotR RPG from Decipher), but I am also wanting to run Donjon or Paladin. So I thought that I'd solicit ideas from the group.

To wit, the question. If you were going to run a Lord of the Rings game using Donjon, how would you do it? Would the hack'n'slash dungeon crawling emphasis clash with the more "serious" concepts of Middle Earth? Has anyone tried running Donjon with the mood dial turned to Gritty? Any other ideas that I'm missing?

What about Paladin? Could this be fit into Middle Earth? An idea that I had (partially stolen from elsewhere) is that the White Council is more than the Istari, and that the "Paladins" could be lesser wizards on the Council. What sort of Code would they have? Is there a better way to implement this?

Anyone have any ideas?

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

Seth,

I'm glad I finally found time to get to this question. Here's my answers.

For Donjon, you could run a LotR game pretty easy. I'd make sure that the characters focus both on their race/class and their role in life. Aragorn, for example, would have Abilities that reflect his skill as a ranger, and his kingship. Frodo would have Abilities that reflect his hobbit-ness and his role as bearer of the Ring.

For Paladin, things are a lot more messy. Personally, I can only think of one way to run this - as the Fellowship. Since the Fellowship are all bound together by personal duty, they could constitute an Order. The one change is that each player would have to define his character's supernatural abilities - the way his Animus manifests.

For the Code, it might look something like this:

Minor Laws:
Do not act on personal wants and desires, only needs.
Never harm an innocent.
Never use the tools of Sauron or Saruman, no matter what the gain.

Major Laws:
Never use the power of the One Ring, no matter what the gain.
Never let evil (Orcs, Uruk-Hai, Balrogs, etc) live, no matter the cost.

Unbreakable Law:
Never obstruct the destruction of the One Ring.

Given that, each character could have his own powers:
Aragorn: commune with nature, inspire Men and Elves, whip ass.
Legolas: whip ass with arrows, commune with nature.
Gimli: know stone, whip ass with axe.
Frodo: overpower evil with sheer will, be supernaturally stealthy.

I hate to detract from the idea of Donjon or Paladin LotR, but a thought I had was to use Pinnacles forthcoming Savage Worlds...which is basically just a cleaned up, spiffy version of their Great Rail Wars game for Deadlands. Its basically an RPG whose combat system was borrowed from a wickedly fast and amazing deep miniatures war game. Its quite easy to have 30-40 characters on a side in a huge battle run through in next to no time. I'd been thinking a game like that would be great to capture epic battles like Moria or Helm's Deep if one was playing a combat heavy LotR game that is.

Clinton R. Nixon wrote: Legolas: whip ass with arrows, commune with nature.

Clinton R. Nixon wrote: For Paladin, things are a lot more messy. Personally, I can only think of one way to run this - as the Fellowship. Since the Fellowship are all bound together by personal duty, they could constitute an Order. The one change is that each player would have to define his character's supernatural abilities - the way his Animus manifests.

Tony,

Thanks for the good words about Paladin. I feel it could use a pretty rigorous re-write, but agree that the core mechanic works well. Feel free to post your questions either here or in Actual Play