I’ve been a little crazy about Middle Earth Role Playing lately. I’ve always been a little crazy about MERP, actually, and I can’t really explain why. There are plenty of reasons not to love it. The system (a slightly simplified version of Rolemaster, the Iron Crown Enterprises house system) was always too complex, the magic system never felt right and the whole campaign setting only feels like Tolkien when it is explicitly adapting his writing. And yet, I find the weird fan fiction-esque exploration of earlier periods of Tolkien’s history kind of fascinating, the art usually quite good and the cartography some of the very best of the period.

This is Shelob’s Lair, an excellent example of a MERP module. These aren’t like D&D modules – you get some adventure threads, but also a good deal of detail on a specific region, from flora and fauna to history to detailed maps of interesting locales. This one looks at Cirith Ungol, the watch tower built by Gondor at a pass into Mordor to monitor the machinations of the Sauron, as well as the nearby lair of the Queen of Spiders.

The module is designed to be run around the year 1640 of the Third Age, some 1400 years before the events of the Lord of the Rings. It is interesting to see a Middle Earth before the decline depicted in Lord of the Rings – the Gondorian city of Minas Ithil has not yet become the Nazgul stronghold of Minas Morgul and there is still active resistance to Sauron’s power. At the same time, most folks are only familiar with the period of history described in the Lord of the Rings and that makes things a bit confusing and perhaps low stakes.

I quite like Charles Peale’s illustrations – they are very clean in an 80s way that I appreciate. I know next to nothing about him, though – he has the bad luck of sharing his name with Charles Wilson Peale, the famous painter of American patriots and is therefore extremely hard to Google.