The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings, sometimes shortened to LOTR, is a trilogy of books written by JRR Tolkien in order to expand on the world he created for his shorter novel The Hobbit. He found that the setting he had built was far too interesting to abandon after a simplistic quest storyline, an experience common to modern GMs.
The trilogy consists of the following books:
- The Fellowship of the Ring
- The Two Towers
- The Return of the King
You have, of course, read them. If you haven't, gtfo and read them. And don't you even dare just watch the movies. Although amazing films, they aren't the same experience.
The epic story
If you have read them (which you have) but it's been so long that you've forgotten the details, here's a brief refresher:
Bilbo Buttocks Baggins, the protagonist of The Hobbit decides to leave home, and entrusts his magic ring to Frodo, a relative of his. Problem is, it turns out the Ring is a sort of quasi-phylactery for Sauron, Lord of Mordor and all around titanic douchebag. Gandalf the Grey, a wizard and close friend of Bilbo's, realises this and sends Frodo, along with Samwise Gamgee, a gardener and a little bitch, to Rivendell, where a council of races will decide what to do with it. Since there's no other way to destroy it, they decide to throw it into the volcano where it was forged, which happens to be right in the middle of Mordor. The party for this quest consists of:
- Frodo Baggins, Ringbearer, Halfling.
- Samwise Gamgee, Fighter/Gardener, Halfling
- Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck, Rogue, Halfling
- Peregrin "Pippin" Took, Fighter/Rogue/Fool, Halfling
- Gandalf the Grey, Wizard, Celestial
- Aragorn, Son of Arathorn, Fighter/Ranger, Human (Numinorian)
- Boromir, Fighter, Human
- Legolas Greenleaf, Archer, Elf
- Gimli son of Gloin, Fighter, Dwarf
So, off they go. After a few detours and sidetracks, the fellowship is split into three (even though you should never split the party). Frodo and Sam go off directly to Mordor, as Frodo's the only one who really needs to go and Sam is too much of a bro to abandon him. Pippin and Merry wind up in Gondor, a formerly prosperous kingdom, and Rohan, a nation of vikings on horseback, respectively, after having adventures with Ents. Boromir dies in an ambush but has a pile of corpses to show for his troubles and gets a river funeral. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli form a Human-Elf-Dwarf triple threat team and fuck evil's shit up for the rest of the trilogy, with Gimli as Dennis Rodman.
Despite having their own problems to content with, somehow the members of the divided fellowship seem to get involved with everyone else's mess and need to sort shit out. Their list of game achievements include and are not limited to; surviving a dungeon filled with insane number of goblins and a big motherfucking demon lord; foiling the plans of a wicked wizards and his orc army; saving not one but two human nations (and the entire world for that matter); winning a whole campaigns worth of scenerios and battles; and defeating the big bad evil guy of the setting with enough time to go home for tea and crumpets.
Finally Frodo, after going around the most fuck me way possible to get into Mordur, climbs a great big volcano but due to the ring being magic crack he decides not to drop it in until Golum happily bites his finger off and getting the ring, not realising that there is a volcano behind him....was this guy always so thick?
The Movies
Ralph Bakshi made an animated film based off the Fellowship of The Ring and the first half of The Two Towers which was released in 1978. The resulting film was tripy to say the least. It has a lot of weird animation, massive amounts of rotoscoping (filming a guy do an action and drawing over him, or sometimes dressing him up in a halloween monster costume running him through a sepia tone in the case of this film). Its also decides to make adjustments and stay faithful in the oddest ways. Many lines of dialogue were taken from the books word for word (with enough cut out so that you don't know what they are talking about), but they decide to make a prince of Gondor (the largest and greatest civilization in middle earth at the time) dressed like a Wagner Oprah Viking. The end result both leaves you both wierded out and bored. It got a sequel made by Rakin Bass covering the Return of the King, released in 1980. Which trades in some of the trippiness for being more mundanely bad and being pushed into the animation age ghetto.
But those two movies are footnotes compared to the ones that you have most likely seen, those being Peter Jackson's Lord of the Ring's Trilogy. By far the most financially successful and critically acclaimed fantasy films of all time, including winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards, which generally go for historical pieces and similar, not Fantasy or Sci-Fi. Which helped bring Fantasy to mainstream audiences and probably why many of you are you are here now. It has massive battles made possible by groundbreaking special effects technology. The films also have incredible amounts of attention to detail to bring the world of middle earth to life. While some changes were made, many of them were for the better such as developing Aragorn as a character rather than just a mythic archetype.
Alas, however, it seems greed got to poor Jackson (it's actually New Lines fault, they're apparently a few billion dollars in debt and needed the extra couple billion that 2 extra movies would get them to stay in business for the foreseeable future), and has now came out with a very mediocre Hobbit trilogy, trying to cram in the backstory of LOTR while adding his own fluff to the original story when it was totally unneeded.
Of course GW couldn't let such a profitable venture pass them by...
Back in the early 2000s, GW made a tabletop game based around this premise and called it The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. Because they ran out of short titles.
While it let you play out your favourite scenes from the movies (in the way YOU imagined them going), it failed to light the world on fire.
Gallery
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How the heck did a little hobbit beat this?
See also
The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game for the tabletop skirmish game.