Tolkien's legendarium has the best elves, orcs dwarves and men. How did he do it?
Tolkien's legendarium has the best elves, orcs dwarves and men. How did he do it?
Thomas Sanchez
Camden Evans
He was a really good writer
Lincoln Mitchell
By being an actual historian of medieval Europe and was able to actually build a functional world.
Parker Flores
With love and passion
Jose Morales
By not being neckbearded basement dweller with cliniual autism and writing for himself and not to pander for specific target group of maladjusted teenagers and undrdeveloped eyoung adults.
Unlike your typical tabletop fluff writer, you know.
Cooper Parker
Tolkien wrote stories, not sourcebooks. Old Man Willow is not scary if he's presented to you as "a Lesser Huorn (Willow) with Vulnerability to Bard song". While it's true that there were several different types of elf and orc, they don't get the RPG sourcebook treatment where each type is treated as sharply distinct from the others with its own 'thing' or 'theme'. Middle Earth feels more real because it doesn't stat everything, it's not designed from a gamist perspective.
Tolkien's legends are built using existing archetypes and themes from historical myths and legends. He drew on the fundamentals of what made those things interesting, as opposed to the knock-offs based on superficial resemblances as found in most DnD settings. I find a story like Turin Turambar a million times more interesting than Drizzt Derpurden or any Generic Heroes Kill Generic Orcs fantasy fiction. Also worth noting that many fantasy RPGs, as well as fantasy wargames and vidya, are intentionally dumbed down to the lowest common denominator to make them 'accessible', and this inevitably creates washed-out cliches that look like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.
Tolkien kept things grounded and used a light touch. He didn't go for the tryhard flashy approach, for the most part he went for humble cool ideas. You don't get flying cities made of frozen dragon tears around every corner in Middle Earth. Especially, Middle Earth magic is subtle rather than the high power spells that are casually flung around in most RPG fantasy settings. It's a prime example of less being more. Middle Earth feels more fantastical and fairy tale to me than any Warcraft or DnD clown-shoes setting.
Something that's sometimes missed is that Tolkien wrote it all himself while most RPG settings are a patchwork quilt made by multiple authors. Having one author helps keep things consistent.
Grayson Cruz
He didn't just copy Tolkien.
Camden Sanchez
>was able to actually build a functional world.
There's a ton of stuff in Middle-Earth that probably don't work, and Tolkien acknowledged this. He was a language guy. His knowledge in other areas were not great enough that he felt he could convincingly describe things like Gondorian philosophy or architecture or trade routes in any detail, for example. In the end though, that's probably what sets Tolkien apart from many other fantasy writers. He understood what he didn't know and intentionally left those areas vague. Most fantasy and sci-fi authors do not have this kind of restraint and will go into great detail explaining things they clearly don't understand which leads to their worlds falling apart in the seams.
Sebastian Hernandez
Robert King
Tolkien is hack becuz no talk bout ecunomics.
Jayden Peterson
>best orcs
Uhhhh sweety...?
Gavin Robinson
get out snagga
Owen Harris
I had never considered those things. You make a good point, user
Xavier Jackson
this
Tolkien didn't write to an audience of autismos looking to play games
D&D made a game of Tolkien's work for every autismo to play
Xavier Butler
There are many settings with better men than Tolkien's magic jackasses with no self control.
Brody Harris
Landon Long
t. HFY faggot
Robert Butler
Reminder that Gurrm wasn't shitting on Tolkien when he said that, he just chose the worst way to point out the differences between his approach to a medieval fantasy world and Tolkien's approach.
Tyler Lopez
>best orcs
Since when did Tolkien allow you to marry a cute orc girl?
Aiden Sanchez
Incidentally Lord of the Rings: War in the North is basically a video game version of a generic DND campaign but set in Middle-Earth, and winds up being probably the single best fantasy RPG ever made as well as the best example of LOTR put to the medium of video games ever made.
Nolan Gray
>walking may mays are better than tolkien orcs
Adrian Foster
Is that a mount & blade mod?
Jaxon Butler
Also he participated and commanded in WW1 so he actually knew what war is.
Jayden Adams
No it's a video game made by Snowblind, you can find it on Steam.
It's a pretty generic paint-by-the-numbers linear WRPG, don't expect anything too groundbreaking from it, but it's good at what it does and delivers plenty of fun.
Colton Cox
based post
Easton Thomas
>that whole bit where Frodo, Sam and Gollum go through the Dead Marshes was based on Tolkien's experiece during WW1
Creepy as shit.
Benjamin Cox
>Tolkien's legendarium has the best orcs
Except this isn't true. Tolkien himself was troubled by his lack of characterization and humanity explored in the orcs, and even he didn't understand how a race of creatures could just be objectively evil. It's one of the most lacking parts of the Middle-Earth setting and the most unfortunate aspect that his imitators for the last several decades have copied without ever exploring.
Mason Thompson
>Tolkien's legendarium has the best elves, orcs dwarves and men. How did he do it?
More impressively, it also has the worst elves. fucking eru, fëanor, stop yelling, we heard you the thousandth time you shouted muh silmarils and set yourself on fire with sheer anger
Dylan Lopez
>the part where Eowyn kills the witch-king was based on an actual incident where Tolkien's wife Edith slew the vampire that bit her in order to prevent herself from becoming Nosferatu
Tolkien saw some serious shit
Jeremiah Rivera
all noldor are cancer except cate blanchett
Adrian Johnson
and you know why? because she wasn't involved in the kinslaying, she just hitched a ride over later on
Owen Collins
>There are dead things, dead faces in the water
Ethan Thompson
But user, Tolkien's waifu killed the vampire and wore its skin to shapeshift into a giant bat.
Thomas Davis
I never understood Tolkien's issue with the orcs being pure evil.
They were the product of an evil pseudo-god twisting elves into abominations, not just some race that grew up somewhere. Not to mention that through their entire existance they were treated like shit and lived in extremely harsh conditions.
I'm pretty sure Tolkien just didn't believe in such a thing as someone being objectively and purely evil since he even gave Sauron noble qualities and made him into a formerly well-intentioned being that fell from grace.
Alexander Adams
exactly
>noldor
>nildor
>nilder
>nilger
>nigger
noldor = niggers
Kevin Clark
i loved that game, it was really good. shame its so underrated
Aaron Butler
He didn't believe that anything could be beyond the reach of God in terms of redemption.
Joshua Moore
>Best orcs
Fucking this. i recently re-read two towers (don't as why just that and not fellowship first first) and came to really appreciate every single scene with orcs.
From the constant aggressive bickering between isengard orcs, mordor orcs and mountain orcs as they try to move through Rohan, to the strange relationship Mordor's troops had with their master and Nazgul. The scenes where Frodo gets taken by two orcs and reader gets to listen their discussion is not somethign your average DM or modern fantasy writer would put on paper.
I have also come to really like the weakness Tolkiens orcs, goblins and trolls have to sun. At first it seems silly, but then you realise that when orcs and rest were created, Sun didn't even exist.
Ryder Wright
Most fantasy and sci fi do not restrain because otherwise they would not have a single area where they can go into detail.
Jason James
kys 40kid faggot, stop pushing your shit setting into good threads
Parker Sullivan
Nothing worth fapping to back then. All kinds of free time.
Cameron Diaz
>mfw Jackson inserts damn ton of witty banter, cool stunts and other things americans think a fight scene should have into battle scenes
Gavin Cooper
>Nothing worth fapping to back then.
>doesn't masturbate to the miniature daguerreotype of Queen Victoria in the rear locket of his heavy brass pocket watch with roman numerals and rococo hour and second hands
shaking my damn head sendpie
Brandon Martin
As much as he rails against allegory, Tolkien's work is fundamentally Catholic in its composition. The nature of evil in LotR is that all evil beings started as good and fell from grace as they fall victim to sin. Evil beings, however, are redeemable. There is a constant struggle between evil and good over a person's soul, and we all have the free will to change sides at any time. You can see this in Boromir, Gollum, Saruman, Sauron, Feanor, and just about every character he has ever written.
The orcs are incompatible with this worldview. Tolkien was troubled that he created beings without any free will at all. The Balrogs and other demons allied with Sauron were Maiar that volunteered to become evil, but the orcs, despite their sentience, are born mindless drones that make no statement on the nature of sin and redemption. Tolkien was right to feel he had erred in writing them as objective evil beings when that is antithetical to the story he created.
Nathan Jenkins
>Peter Jackson
>American
Nolan Bell
Actually, if you read LotR, you may actually notice that most orcs actually have character, and actual logical reason why they do what they do. They are not mindless drones, they are just bunch of assholish soldiers who are given a job by someone stronger than them, and want to get over with it as fast as possible and go scrath their navels in somewhere where it's nice and dark.
Then you have some shitters like Grishnakh who are all about muh "eye sees you" and muh "secret knowledge" and think they are great and mighty because they got some favour from some higher fucker.
Gavin Anderson
So, what's your excuse for not playing The One Ring RPG yet?
Logan Anderson
What's the point of arguing with the author himself? He wrote that the orcs are mindless drones with no capacity for redemption, not user. And he was greatly troubled by it
Adam Lopez
And yet not a single orc redeems themselves, in a world where sin and redemption are the central most binding themes. The orcs are not poorly written at all, but the omission of some moral conflict involving them is the literary failure.
Jonathan Watson
It could be that with no Dark Lord to follow the orcs scatter into increasingly depressed and listless tribes.
We know that Aragorn brought an end to the orcs.
We also know that the main job of the wizards was over.
What happened to the wizards after this? Sauron was reduced to insignificance but he left a lot of open wounds on the world. Maybe the wizards and some of the elves that stayed a while adopted the orcs that would listen. Brought them back to the light, taught them how to be good people and undid what had been done to them.
Aragorn and the armies of Gondor slaughter all the orcs that turn away from redemption.
The orcs that are redeemed are no longer orcs and come out into the sunlight.
Eli Powell
Third age TW exists user
Noah Brooks
>He wrote that the orcs are mindless drones with no capacity for redemption
[citation needed]
Joshua Taylor
"Orcs are mindless drones with no capacity for redemption. Also, Lewis is a hack"
-John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Jackson Anderson
Everyone else is discussing stuff they've read in his letters. If you were too lazy to do the required reading you don't get to participate in class discussion.
Nathaniel Baker
Tolkien showed restrain even when it came to languages though. There aren't long sections explaining the intricacies of Sindarin verb conjugation, for example. Instead we only get a few place names and maybe a phrase here and there in foreign languages. This is something most other genre writers seem incapable of doing, which I assume have to do with them attempting to fake that they have more extensive notes on their world than they actually do by forcing in needless details.
Really though, the only people who want more needless details are autistic fans, and there's a huge difference between what that group wants and what makes a good story.
Landon Morales
>tfw your horse gets stuck in the mud and goes mad with terror so you have to shoot it. This is the third horse this week.
Eli Carter
I don't Know Rules or have group.
Jordan Flores
I find Discworld elves and their alien morality more interesting than Tolkien's morally perfect ubermensch.
Parker Russell
>I'm not going to give you a source, I'm just going to act smug and condescending while continuing to claim I'm right without presenting evidence!
Mason Powell
>morally perfect ubermensch
>laughs in quenya
Kayden Robinson
>morally perfect ubermensch
>the premier achievements of the elven race are mass fratricide/genocide, millennia long wars over fucking jewelry, and being literally raped into orc-kind
Noah Parker
The elves had done the worst shit through history though.
The only reason some of the elves left by the time LotR takes place act like they know better than everyone else is because they are the ones who didn't get killed over stupid shit.
Adam Jackson
I love you
Aaron Kelly
You best not be talking shit about my husbando
Parker Ramirez
>millennia long wars over fucking jewelry
The war only lasted a few hundred years
Aiden Rivera
>I'm writing about faeries, but I am going to call them elves
For what reason, Terry ?
Wyatt Collins
To be honest, those wars about jewels were less about jewels and more about how those jewels were actually a clarke's third-law containers that held the last bits of light in a world darkened by rogue deity and his spider-abomination pal
Kevin Richardson
Is this not a piece of jewelry?
Silmaril or ring of power, all elves do is fuck everybody over for pretty baubles, that's not exactly a shining beacon of ethical fortitude, nor is it an author tract on the infallibilty thereof.
Jonathan Thomas
youtube.com
And the grooviest of them all
Bentley Ross
He spent his whole life working on it and was extensively familiar with several languages, histories, and mythologies.
Brandon Flores
Books are in the Veeky Forums troove. You can buy it later if you like it, like I did, if you're a person of principles. Rules are simple and easy to learn.
Group can be found on roll20, and unlike looking for D&D on r20 it will be a goo group since TOR community there consists of enthusisastic people who want to do something that is very specific and niche on the one hand while requiring focus and understanding on the other, and are 100% serious about that. Not rejects that can't find irl group for most popular ttrpg in the world.
These aren't exuses.
Jack Rodriguez
Poor guy got a back full of shrapnel at the Somme, didn’t he?
Kevin Howard
>and the orcses in the pits pits pits
Eli Peterson
Two sides of the same coin. Elves are fae or fey.
In Tolkien, elves are fey (in the archaic, “doomed to an unknown fate” sense) -because- they’ve seen the consequences of their own actions. Price of immortality is seeing what the law of unintended consequences does to you. (Spoiler: it’s shitty)
Pratchett’s elfs are just Fae. They are immortal, see what they do to people, and really just do not -care-. Because the definition of “people” is different.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore both.
Samuel Williams
Orcish funk will sound over arda, the black metal of Melkor and Tar Mairon will overthrow the universe
Joshua Powell
Tolkien was a ——-devout——— Catholic. Complete depravity was not theologically sound in any universe he’d create.
>that one time post- Vatican II where Tollers flat fucking refused to sing prayers in English, and basically shouted out the Mass entirely in Latin, because It Simply Wasn’t Done
Angel Long
What a fucking chad
Ryder Lopez
Ian Cruz
A lot of it was sort of distilled from the corpus of literature he was inspired by. Its fine because his Middle Earth was a different world than ours, yet on the other hand in comparison his elves especially suffer. Those elves are a wholly different creature - some would say for the better - than the vastly more sinister ones of legend and folklore. His dwarfs likewise are diminished and humanized, more social and forgiving, honorable and not treacherous. The original dwarfs might be better compared to stories of wicked genies and efreets.
Dylan Evans
It was because of one prince who decided to dedicate the most valuable gems and the most powerful magic as an artistic piece devoted to the planet itself. They were stolen by the guy who sent a giant spider through elf heaven.
And the ring was commissioned through trickery as literal mind controlling devices to kill all the leaders, while simultaneously empowering the big bad. Your oversimplification of elves bothers me.
Justin Martin
1. He invented them while you fucks just copy-paste his shit and sometimes dye it other colours
2. He was a master scholar of Anglo-Saxon and germanic culture and also a linguidt
and a litterature expert Rohan is literally just Anglo-Saxon Horsengland
3. He was MAKING shit while you guys are here arguing 'how to make elves' nigger he MADE the elves into a thing he was making cool races while you want to remake specific ones.
In other words he was a man of taste, culture, knowledge and also could use his imagination which I find is dreadfully lacking in the common tabletop player these days. You guys pay 500 bucks for books that tell you what your character should look like and I find that nuts.
Jacob Moore
>a linguidt
ebin
Ian Diaz
I swear it was on purpose swear on me mumdt
William Davis
I played that game and had a lot of fun with it.
Farin is best boy.
Ayden Baker
He’s drawing on the fact faerie has traditionally been a blanket term for various folklore beings? Elves are a type of faerie my dude.
Asher Rodriguez
>lel so random DDDDDDDDD
>no sense of discipline
>zero aesthetic
youtube.com
Irony that LoTR are still best GW miniatures
Xavier Ortiz
Dylan Brown
Logan Powell
Orks are a literal joke user.
Zachary Morales
I don't use the system, but the books are the best at feeling like the LoTR and the hobbit, bar none.
I would love to have some more depth to the "evil men" and the Dunleding, and other wild men.
Jonathan King
Have you read Tolkien user? Everything is the fault of the Elfs or Merlkor.
Nathan Brown
Dylan Robinson
>I have also come to really like the weakness Tolkiens orcs, goblins and trolls have to sun. At first it seems silly, but then you realise that when orcs and rest were created, Sun didn't even exist.
so interesting note, in early d&d orcs got -1 to hit in combat when they were in sunlight. that's basically fuck-all and meaningless, but arguably it's a mistranslation from chainmail, where they also got -1, but on a d6 roll, which should have been more like -4 or something.
deltasdnd.blogspot.co.nz
Cameron Davis
>morally perfect
you fuckin wot mate
Zachary Myers
>shits on tolkien for not mentioning tax policy
>not a single mention of tax policy in the bloated mess that is asoiaf
Lincoln Carter
>orcs get -4 str in sun
Michael Wilson
40k Orks are more like giant Gremlins than actual Orcs.
Mason Parker
Parker Lewis
Everyone else is just derivative of his work - and copies are never as good as the original.
Grayson Stewart
this so much