Bree and the Barrow-Downs is an early MERP module – you can tell from the cover art, a painting from the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings animated film. I find the yellow-blue-red color extremely satisfying for some reason – maybe because the book features in the back cover ads of so many other MERP modules.

In substance, Bree is a little odd. It is set in the year 1700 of the Third Age, 1300 years before the Lord of the Rings and 40 years after most of the other MERP books. Which, doesn’t really matter because Bree is essentially unchanged over the centuries.

The Barrow-Downs are far more interesting, in all honesty. They’re the scene of one of the best moments in the Fellowship of the Ring and the book goes into surprising detail on over two dozen of them. Several of them are quite large. This is the sort of thing MERP does best, from my view – create something fun to read in a semi-Tolkien context that is also ripe for me to pillage for whatever homebrew game I am running.

The downside – not a single illustration of a barrow wight. That’s a hell of a missed opportunity. But MERP often neglects to illustrate the monsters, for some reason. Booo.