What If? Alternate History Lord of the Rings

I've been thinking about Lord of the Rings things and roleplaying today, and that brought another topic to mind: how to roleplay in the LOTR setting.

There have been several different LOTR/Hobbit/Middle-Earth roleplaying rules sets issued over the years, especially by MERP (Middle-Earth Role Playing) from 1984, the Lord of the Rings Adventure Game from 2002, and The One Ring from 2011. I have never had an opportunity to play using any of these rules. Despite my being a big fan of LOTR, the friends I game with aren't interested enough in the setting to want to roleplay in it, particularly since it would require using different rules than our default d20 system rules.

I have to admit, I've always found it hard to imagine playing a LOTR RPG. Though JRR Tolkien wrote about many other periods of Middle-Earth's history, the part that's best defined is the period of LOTR itself, and the tale of the Fellowship's efforts to finally defeat Sauron once and for all. But everyone knows that Frodo was the Ringbearer, and his companions were Sam, Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, and Gandalf. Who could take their place? If a group of people decide to play in the Middle-Earth setting during that time period, do they replace the original members of the Fellowship? If they do, how? If they don't, are they elsewhere fighting to prevent Sauron from noticing Frodo's actions? That doesn't sound as fun if you know someone else is off saving the world while you're just acting as a distraction.

I couldn't get my head around playing in that setting without the player-characters having to be the characters from the books, and that didn't seem like much fun to me. It would be the ultimate 'railroad' campaign, where the player-characters' actions don't count because the outcome is predetermined.

But then a friend of mine started running a Star Wars campaign taking place during the time period of the original film trilogy. The player-characters started out as slightly shady folks with their own ship, a bit like Han Solo. Then they happened to land on Tatooine just in time to get a contract to transport an old man and a teenaged boy named Luke to the planet Alderaan. Basically, the premise of the campaign was that Han Solo arrived at the Mos Eiseley Cantina too late to pick up Obi-Wan and Luke Skywalker, and as a result, the player-characters took over the roles Luke and Han played in the movies. They rescued Princess Leia from the Death Star. Eventually one of the player-characters became a Jedi and took Luke's place in going to Dagobah to train with Master Yoda, and the PCs ultimately became the heroes of the Rebellion and destroyed the Death Star. But because they were different characters than the film characters, the outcome of the campaign wasn't identical to the ending of the movie trilogy.

After witnessing this, I started to think differently about how a group of players could play through LOTR and still have fun. How would things happen differently if the heroes weren't Frodo and his friends? Looking back on the history of Sauron and the One Ring, I'm trying to work out what direction such a campaign could take.

There's a lot of coincidence in LOTR. Isildur loses the Ring. Hundreds or thousands of years later, it's found by Deagol. Smeagol then takes the Ring from him and goes into hiding. Centuries later, Bilbo happens upon it in the goblin cave where Gollum is hiding. It isn't until Gandalf realizes what it is that the trajectory of the Ring starts to involve some conscious decisions. But what if Isildur had never lost the Ring, or if someone of his household had managed to find it immediately after his death? Perhaps the Ring could have been kept, openly or in secret, by the royal house of Gondor until that line faded. Maybe the Ring came under the control of the Stewards of Gondor after the royal line failed. It could have subtly influenced everything the rulers of Gondor did for centuries, making that kingdom into a very different place than it is in LOTR.

Or the Ring could have been put away in a treasure house and forgotten as the centuries passed and rulership of the country passed from one family to another. Then perhaps it could be stolen by a thief or found by a servant, and the story of its journey toward destruction could begin.

Going at the concept from another angle, Sauron could have succeeded in bringing Elves, Men, and Dwarves under his control through use of the Rings of Power, and the campaign could become a struggle to save the world from an eternity of darkness. The player-characters could be part of a rebel organization recruited to get the Ring and destroy it, which would make for a much darker and more challenging campaign.

For a campaign with a lighter tone and hewing closer to the original plot of the books, Frodo could refuse to take the Ring himself and instead a different group of characters could volunteer for that task, characters with different personalities and skills than the characters from the books. Meanwhile the book characters could be the ones organizing behind the scenes, forging alliances and attacking Sauron's forces to prevent the Dark Lord from noticing the party inching toward Mount Doom. This would give the player-characters the opportunity to meet the book characters, perhaps even to be their friends or family members, while the PCs remain the stars of the show.

Players can often be inventive in solving problems in roleplaying games. It would be interesting to see how a completely different group of people would try to solve the problem of getting access to Mount Doom without being caught by Sauron's forces. Would they sneak into Mordor disguised as orcs or Easterlings? Would they try to skirt around to the far side of the territory while Sauron's attention was directed at Rohan and Gondor? Would they recruit all the forces of Gondor, Rohan, Rivendell, Lothlorien, and the Misty Mountain to invade Mordor with a massive army? There are plenty of possibilities.

I doubt I'll ever get a chance to find out what an alternate version of LOTR would be like, and in some ways I think that's probably a good thing. I'm so invested in that world that I might make a nuisance of myself if the other players didn't treat the setting and its history with proper respect. But just the same, I'd still like an opportunity to try a LOTR roleplaying game myself someday.