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Middle Earth Role Playing/MERP 2nd Edition
Creatures of Middle-Earth
Creatures of Middle-earth BEASTS - everything from the Great Eagles of the Misty Mountains to the Ravens of Erebor to the noisy Neekerbreekers that so annoyed Merry, Pippin, Sam, and Frodo in the Midgewater Marshes. Each animal has a short description preceded by specifics on its size, preferred climate, and favored environment. MONSTERS - ranging from the mighty shapechanging Vampires of Morgoth, such as Thuringwethil, to the Wights guarding the tombs in the Barrow-downs, to the sly Crebain that served as Sauron's spies. MAPS - 21 b&w maps depicting where in Endor each creature dwells.
- GenresRole Playing Games
144 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1995
About the author
J.R.R. Tolkien
812 books79.4k followersJohn Ronald Reuel Tolkien: writer, artist, scholar, linguist. Known to millions around the world as the author of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien spent most of his life teaching at the University of Oxford where he was a distinguished academic in the fields of Old and Middle English and Old Norse. His creativity, confined to his spare time, found its outlet in fantasy works, stories for children, poetry, illustration and invented languages and alphabets.
Tolkien’s most popular works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set in Middle-earth, an imagined world with strangely familiar settings inhabited by ancient and extraordinary peoples. Through this secondary world Tolkien writes perceptively of universal human concerns – love and loss, courage and betrayal, humility and pride – giving his books a wide and enduring appeal.
Tolkien was an accomplished amateur artist who painted for pleasure and relaxation. He excelled at landscapes and often drew inspiration from his own stories. He illustrated many scenes from The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, sometimes drawing or painting as he was writing in order to visualize the imagined scene more clearly.
Tolkien was a professor at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford for almost forty years, teaching Old and Middle English, as well as Old Norse and Gothic. His illuminating lectures on works such as the Old English epic poem, Beowulf, illustrate his deep knowledge of ancient languages and at the same time provide new insights into peoples and legends from a remote past.
Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892 to English parents. He came to England aged three and was brought up in and around Birmingham. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1915 and saw active service in France during the First World War before being invalided home. After the war he pursued an academic career teaching Old and Middle English. Alongside his professional work, he invented his own languages and began to create what he called a mythology for England; it was this ‘legendarium’ that he would work on throughout his life. But his literary work did not start and end with Middle-earth, he also wrote poetry, children’s stories and fairy tales for adults. He died in 1973 and is buried in Oxford where he spent most of his adult life.
Tolkien’s most popular works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set in Middle-earth, an imagined world with strangely familiar settings inhabited by ancient and extraordinary peoples. Through this secondary world Tolkien writes perceptively of universal human concerns – love and loss, courage and betrayal, humility and pride – giving his books a wide and enduring appeal.
Tolkien was an accomplished amateur artist who painted for pleasure and relaxation. He excelled at landscapes and often drew inspiration from his own stories. He illustrated many scenes from The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, sometimes drawing or painting as he was writing in order to visualize the imagined scene more clearly.
Tolkien was a professor at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford for almost forty years, teaching Old and Middle English, as well as Old Norse and Gothic. His illuminating lectures on works such as the Old English epic poem, Beowulf, illustrate his deep knowledge of ancient languages and at the same time provide new insights into peoples and legends from a remote past.
Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892 to English parents. He came to England aged three and was brought up in and around Birmingham. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1915 and saw active service in France during the First World War before being invalided home. After the war he pursued an academic career teaching Old and Middle English. Alongside his professional work, he invented his own languages and began to create what he called a mythology for England; it was this ‘legendarium’ that he would work on throughout his life. But his literary work did not start and end with Middle-earth, he also wrote poetry, children’s stories and fairy tales for adults. He died in 1973 and is buried in Oxford where he spent most of his adult life.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 15, 2018
I have David Day’s A Tolkien Bestiary, which is a beautiful collection of artwork and descriptions that very strongly evoke Middle-Earth as Tolkien wrote it. I occasionally browse through it when I want an interesting non-standard monster in an adventure session. It is, however, focused on the things that matter to Tolkien’s readers, not to the characters adventuring through fantasy worlds.
I have never played the ICE middle-earth game, or even fully read the rules, but I have always enjoyed the covers. This sourcebook, however, while aimed at being a MERP sourcebook, is very useful for any fantasy game because it focuses on the things game masters need to know. Where David Day tells us that a thrush carried a message to Bard the Bowman, this book tells us that they speak in high-pitched voices and “make excellent scouts”.
There are two basic sections: normal animals, which includes the intelligent avians and even huge ocean-dwelling eels, and monsters, which includes balrogs, dragons, crebain, and were-worms, and so on. This means it does not have creatures that fit into neither category. For example, it has Huorns because they are monsters, but it does not have Ents, because they are neither animal nor monster.
For the animals, every couple of pages is a map showing where the creatures usually appear in Middle-earth.
The descriptions talk about things like how big the creatures are, their habitats, and how often they are encountered. The game stats (for Rolemaster, which is what MERP used) are in a table in the back. There is a conversion chart for other games in the introduction, converting the 1-100 numbers that Rolemaster uses to the 3d6 and 2d6 rolls that other games use, such as Dungeons & Dragons (3d6) and Tunnels & Trolls (3d6, 2d6).
I have never played the ICE middle-earth game, or even fully read the rules, but I have always enjoyed the covers. This sourcebook, however, while aimed at being a MERP sourcebook, is very useful for any fantasy game because it focuses on the things game masters need to know. Where David Day tells us that a thrush carried a message to Bard the Bowman, this book tells us that they speak in high-pitched voices and “make excellent scouts”.
Note: As a whole, the bats and birds of Middle-earth are larger, smarter, and more magical than more commonplace avians.
There are two basic sections: normal animals, which includes the intelligent avians and even huge ocean-dwelling eels, and monsters, which includes balrogs, dragons, crebain, and were-worms, and so on. This means it does not have creatures that fit into neither category. For example, it has Huorns because they are monsters, but it does not have Ents, because they are neither animal nor monster.
For the animals, every couple of pages is a map showing where the creatures usually appear in Middle-earth.
The descriptions talk about things like how big the creatures are, their habitats, and how often they are encountered. The game stats (for Rolemaster, which is what MERP used) are in a table in the back. There is a conversion chart for other games in the introduction, converting the 1-100 numbers that Rolemaster uses to the 3d6 and 2d6 rolls that other games use, such as Dungeons & Dragons (3d6) and Tunnels & Trolls (3d6, 2d6).
Displaying 1 of 1 review