Returning this week to my complicated favorite, Iron Crown Enterprise’s Middle Earth Roleplaying, a game whose products I find fantastic and frustrating, often simultaneously! First up, an excellent example of that duality, 1988’s Cities of Middle Earth: Minas Tirith.
From the start, you get the sense that ICE was keen on making this a premier entry into MERP, as it is, to my knowledge, the only hardcover in the first edition line. It also sports one hell of a cover painting by mainstay Angus McBride. And, while gorgeous maps were pretty standard for MERP from the start, this map of the city is easily one of their best. MERP’s take on the city is directly inspired by Alan Lee’s fantastical take on the city, with is sweeping, axe like central cliff, which also formed the basis of its interpretation in the Jackson films (Tolkien’s vision of the city was never so dramatic).
As with most of the MERP supplements, this one suffers from the vagaries of the temporal setting. Most of the book is written both without respect to any particular time frame in Tolkien’s history and under the assumption that MERP campaigns are set around the year 1640 of the Third Age. This makes the experience of reading this hefty 160-page book feel weirdly unmoored and generic most of the time. Even when it does get into specifics of time, the year 1640 (1400 or so years before the War of the Ring and totally at odds with its cover art) marks the start of a particularly boring era of prosperity for the city after the throne was moved there from Gondor’s traditional capital of Osgiliath thanks to a plague. Aside of the fact that happy, flourishing cities make for less than thrilling RPG settings, the contrast between that and the Minas Tirith that lives in my head – one where visions of apocalyptic doom and despair hide behind magnificent white walls – is jarring.
As an exercise in city building for TTRPGs, it is a solid and fairly exhaustive effort that winds up being a bit less than inspiring for its intended setting. However, as with most MERP material, this is just asking to be the foundation of some enterprising GM’s homebrew capital city.
