mithriltabby | Escaped gaming meme (Reply)

The ages of Middle-Earth:

Began with the rise of the Sun and ended with the fall of Morgoth.
Ended with the defeat of Sauron by the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.
Ended with the ultimate fall of Sauron with the destruction of the One Ring.
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.
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.
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?