Escaped gaming meme

[mithriltabby]

The ages of Middle-Earth:

1. Began with the rise of the Sun and ended with the fall of Morgoth.
2. Ended with the defeat of Sauron by the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.
3. Ended with the ultimate fall of Sauron with the destruction of the One Ring.
4. The Elves depart into the West as technology develops through the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution; only mortal elf-human hybrids remain by the time the Rohan Railroad opens. The volcanic ash coating Mordor becomes fertile earth after Sauron’s power is broken, and the Orcs dwelling there form a militaristic culture. Ends in a war comparable to our WWI/II (starring the Empire of Mordor and the Uruk-Hai for Nazi equivalents, perhaps in a bizarre alliance with some corrupt part-elf humans who are substituting “Elven” for “Aryan” in the propaganda, but with WWI trench warfare, war gases, etc.), by which time most of the monarchies have become democracies of one sort or another.
5. Technology continues to develop, though more slowly than in our world: electricity, quantum mechanics, computers, cybernetics. The age comes to a close when three competitive projects culminate: dwarven miners recover one Silmaril from the depths of the earth, halfling divers recover another from the sea, and the human equivalent of the Apollo project plucks the last from Eärendil’s brow as his boat sails in orbit.
6. The retrieval of the Silmarils fuels the development of a hybridization between technology and magic. A group of young elves set sail eastward from Valinor, following an obscure prophecy. And the player characters get to find out what happens next...

Details:

• Mithril is too valuable as a conductive element in technomagical apparatus for anyone to waste it in a sword or chainmail.
• Need to reread the stories of Valinor to figure out how it will appear from orbit. It needs to remain mysterious...
• Gandalf is worshipped as a messianic figure. If anyone gets word of this to Valinor, he will be immensely annoyed.
• Normal cyberware interferes in the body’s chi flows and screws up magical talents, but it’s as cheap as in Cyberpunk 2020.
• Different groups developed different forms of technomagic:
  • Humans have mystic hardtech and cyberware: chi batteries, spell projectors, etc.
  • Dwarvish alchemists have united the magical and physical sides of chemistry. Alchemical metallurgy, mystic gunpowder, magic-nullifying bullets, squirt guns that shoot bolts of various magical effects like the blasters in Farscape...
  • Halfing biotechnicians have magical biotech based on study of mystical creatures, both as implants and independent devices. Only the crazy ones are H R Gigeresque.
  • Orcish shamans have learned to deal with the spirits of technology, both on an individual basis and with the Great Spirits. e.g.: They make a lot of money appeasing the spirits of Roads to help prevent traffic jams on freeways. They also have immensely reliable standardized weapons, because they keep the mother spirits of the prototype weapons well appeased. Their tech is much like late 20th century hardtech, but with an animistic and anthropomorphized twist. Treating your gun well does make it work better.
  • Sorcery declined badly during the Fourth and Fifth ages, but those young elves from Valinor have some of the old-style training...
• Cultural notes:
  • Orcs left over in the vicinity of the Shire at the end of the Third Age (part of Saruman’s group) contribute the rhythmic insight to the cultural fusion that leads to the halfling invention of rock’n’roll in the late Fourth Age. This leads to halflings developing punk rock in the early Fifth Age while the humans develop heavy metal.

Inspiration list:

• Need to re-read Tolkien’s work.
• Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2020, MERP/Rolemaster
• Paul di Filippo’s Ribofunk; Walter Jon Williams’s Metropolitan and City on Fire; J Gregory Keyes’ The Waterborn and The Blackgod, and his Age of Unreason books; Martha Wells’ The Element of Fire and Death of the Necromancer
• weregamer, what was that game set in a fantasy world going through its Industrial Revolution?

Comments

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

If you ever actually try this, let me know. Depending on who's in the game, I'll either want to actively participate or chronicle the unfolding wrongness. :)

[grandmoffdavid.livejournal.com]

Actually, did you hear about the DoD 4th age game? We delt a bit with what happened to all those leftover rings, and what happens when you have geologists taking samples from volcanos. Much fun.

These aren't the hobbits you're looking for

[weregamer.livejournal.com]

That would be "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura", released by Sierra. Their physics has magic and technology directly opposed: Magic works by bending physical laws to the will, while Technology works by counting on the immutability of physical laws. Being sufficiently good at either makes the other less reliable around you. So mages must ride in the last car of the train, and magic shops do not allow technologists within.

Weregamer's thumbnail review: Although a really demented person (like us here) could have done more with the premise, it does a pretty good job of modelling this interesting idea. The main story is good, and you really can play a huge variety of characters. The main disappointment is that it's not the landmark game that the Fallouts were, despite the large overlap in development teams.

And the experience pace and level cap combine to mean that being really good at any one thing (out of 12 colleges of magic, 8 tech disciplines, and 4 categories of skills (combat, social, technical, thiefly)) will require complete specialization and will still only happen near the end of the game. Different players have "fixed" this by tweaking and extending the experience chart, or by editing the save file to give better starting stats so you don't have to spend most of your levels on meeting stat prerequisites.

[mithriltabby]

Where on Earth was Middle-Earth?: “The action of the story takes place in the North-West of ‘Middle-earth’, equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean (…) If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.”