Review of Mirkwood by Chris Seeman
First published in Other Hands 12 (January 1996) p. 56-58

Like the new Angmar module, Mirkwood represents a "third generation" product, revised and updated to conform to 2^nd edition MERP game mechanics. The "ur-text" (or, rather, texts) upon which the current module is based were released in 1983 under the titles of Northern Mirkwood, The Wood Elves' Realm and Southern Mirkwood, Haunt of the Necromancer. Later on, these modules were joined into a single revision/expansion: Mirkwood, The Wilds of Rhovanion. That module, like its predecessors, is now out of print, superseded by the current realm module.

As a straightforward reprint of the old Mirkwood module, there is little to be said about the new Mirkwood; when considered as a realm module in the company of Arnor, The Shire, and Angmar, however, I fear that the new Mirkwood is doomed to be superseded and replaced. The reason for this is simple: in a mere hundred and sixty pages, Mirkwood sets out to describe, not one, but many realms—and realms that cover a vast and varied geographic expanse. Even were Mirkwood to rival the Arnor module in size, it would inevitably fail to measure up to the high standards set by its peers for the Realms of Middle-earth series. Between Thranduil's realm, the Necromancer's domain, the Dwarves of the Iron Hills, the Northmen of the plains, the nomadic Easterlings, the secluded Woodmen, the mystical Beornings, and the mercantile Lake-men, there exists no single thread to weave this tapestry with the same elegance that binds Arnor, The Shire, and Angmar. The result is a much thinner treatment which in the end is less than satisfying.

In passing this kind of judgment, however, I do not want to suggest that the republication of Mirkwood is a mistake; on the contrary, the amount of time and labor it will take for the new generation of MERP writers to adequately flesh out the many realms, citadels, and peoples of Rhovanion in all their richness and diversity (a task already set in motion with the Lake-town and Dol Guldur modules) demands that some kind of overview be made available during the interim. Mirkwood of necessity fulfills that role.

Nevertheless, considered even as a surrogate, Mirkwood is a seriously flawed product. Many of its faults are intrinsic to the original works on which it is based; others, however, are manifestly attributable to their most recent revision. In this sense, my frustration with the new Mirkwood resonates a great deal with my criticisms of the new Angmar. The principal weaknesses of Mirkwood are fourfold: 1) internal contradiction, 2) incongruence of temporal setting, 3) organizational inconsistency, and 4) conflict with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. As with Angmar, I believe that these blunders could have been avoided had just a little more attention been paid to them.

One example of internal contradiction is the treatment of Côr Angálaladh, which is alternately identified throughout the module as a site of Elven origin (Oropher's first dwelling place in Mirkwood) or as an ancient Northman funeral ground. (In the Dol Guldur module, it is identified as the burial field of the Waildung princes.) It is unlikely that a Mannish group would dare to make use of an Elven refuge as an ancestral burial site, and it is equally illogical that a Northman site would be given a Sindarin name. Yet no effort has been made to reconcile this with the view adopted in Dol Guldur. At the very least, some remark about two divergent traditions concerning the site might have been given to acknowledge the inconsistency. As it is, the reader is left wondering which parts of the module to trust and which to discount. While Côr Angálaladh is a fairly minor discrepancy, it is indicative of a lack of authorial and/or editorial attention to consistency that becomes visible elsewhere in the module.

Far more consequential for the overall shape of Mirkwood is the authors' scarcely concealed yearning for a late Third Age (rather than a 1640) setting. Were we to envision the Third Age as an epic drama conducted in several movements, we would soon discover that the Mirkwood authors want everything to happen in Act 1, leaving little or no innovations to take place after 1640. Their Rhovanion is the land that Bilbo and the Dwarves traversed in The Hobbit—Thranduil has already abandoned the Mountains of Mirkwood (which, according to the Dol Guldur chronology, were not within the Necromancer's shadow until T.A. 2770); the town of Dale has been in existence from time immemorial (in spite of the fact that Tolkien set its founding SUBSEQUENT to the emergence of the Dwarven kingdom of Erebor in T.A. 1999); Galadriel resides in Lórien when Sauron enters Dol Guldur (contrary to the account given in Unfinished Tales, upon which ICE's Lórien module was based, that she did not return there until T.A. 1981).

The desire to have a module that is applicable to both late and mid-Third Age contexts achieves neither purpose; instead, the one setting detracts from the other and vice versa. For example, Mirkwood provides a layout of Dwarven Erebor, and yet neglects to include even the barest sketch of the mysterious caverns of that mountain as they would have existed for adventurers in 1640. Similarly, the claim that Dale existed prior to the neighboring Dwarven realm disrupts Tolkien's underlying conception of the site—that it was a center of commerce made possible by its symbiotic relationship to the King under the Mountain (Hob: 28). Prior to the establishment of Erebor, the site of Dale was far from any major artery of trade (being eclipsed by Esgaroth).

So, by ignoring Tolkien's published writings, the authors have created an illogically placed settlement. They attempt to explain this away by asserting that the Lonely Mountain had religious significance for the Northmen (59)—fair enough, but this claim does not mesh with the character of the town as portrayed in the module; instead, Dale is presented as a simple pit-stop for treasure hunters on their way to the Grey Mountains (61). Moreover, if Erebor were sacred to the Dale-folk, why would they permit Dwarves to claim it as their own?

The pattern of dismissing what Tolkien has written, only to generate a contradictory scenario that undermines the logic of the primary sources, is repeated in the authors' treatment of the Gondorian presence in southeastern Rhovanion. The module's Tale of Years dates the acquisition of Gondor's eastern territories to T.A. 379-389. According to Tolkien, this event took place more than a century and a half later (RotK: 324). Why this change? Is Tolkien's chronology not good enough? Altercations of this sort are maddening—less because they are made than because they are made without any justification and without any apparent purpose in mind. (Neither the date nor the event are ever referred to again in the module.)

More serious difficulties arise when the authors set out to describe the boundaries of Dor Rhúnen itself. In Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings (our primary source for the history of the Third Age), Tolkien writes: "The kings [of Gondor]...gave [the Northmen] wide lands beyond Anduin south of Greenwood the Great, to be a defence against the men of the East. For in the past the attacks of the Easterlings had come mostly over the plain between the Inland Sea and the Ash Mountains (326)." In complete contradiction to this, the Mirkwood authors have placed the Northmen to the EAST (rather than the south) of the forest, leaving the defense of the strategic invasion corridor to Gondorian-occupied and ruled Dor Rhúnen (51). How can the Northmen possibly function as a buffer against the Easterlings if their realm lies nowhere near the invasion corridor?!?!?!? The entire military history of southern Rhovanion would be changed!

It is perhaps worth pointing out that the political map appearing in Mirkwood nullifies not only Tolkien's conception, but also that of the Northwestern Middle-earth Gazetteer, which attempted to correct this error by pulling back the borders of Dor Rhúnen so that the Northmen could occupy the Inland Sea-Ash Mountain corridor like they were supposed to (144). Which is to be the "canonical" version, we may well wonder?

I want to move on now to the organizational aspects of the module. Three sections in particular evince imperfect attempts to harmonize different stages of revision/expansion: the people descriptions, the site descriptions, and the individual NPC bios. As for the profiles of the various cultures to be found in Rhovanion, the Mirkwood module employs two overlapping modes of presentation: straight narrative texts and more rigidly organized shaded boxes of information—some peoples get shaded boxes, others do not. (Why?) Where both formats are employed, a good amount of unnecessary repetition results, rendering the section less efficient as a quick reference tool for the GM.

Content-wise, there are also some notable omissions. For instance, we are given a great deal of information about the various Easterlings who have migrated into Rhovanion from Rhûn, yet no description whatsoever is provided for the Dorwinions (who are supposedly so crucial for the economic life of the region). This is unfortunate, seeing that a beautiful description of the folk of Dorwinion has been given in the River Running module, which could have easily been imported into the Mirkwood module.

Detailed site descriptions of Lake-town, Thranduil's halls, and Dol Guldur are conspicuously absent from the module (no doubt because these places have since been made the subjects of citadel modules). Still, it would have been nice to have had even a simple overview map or layout, given the importance of these sites. Their absence unbalances the module, which consequently gives more attention to minor or secondary sites like Dale. Not all sites that are singled out for description include numbered layouts. Dale, however, contains numbers but no descriptions corresponding to them. (If you're not going to describe sites by numbered locations, then don't put numbers in to confuse the reader.)

The biographies of the important individuals of Rhovanion (past, present, and future to 1640) suffer from the same unevenness as the culture descriptions, only more so. Many bios are given, but not all (and, in particular, not many of those for the 1640 NPCs) are accompanied by full MERP and RM stats. We are given complete stats for Beorn from The Hobbit, but none for his 1640 counterpart Beoraborn; for Gimli and Dáin Ironfoot, but not for Azaghâl and Fulla, the Dwarf-lords of the Iron Hills at the time when the module is supposedly set. (Indeed, these two get no bios whatsoever.)

As in the Angmar module, a lengthy Nazgûl biography has been imported from Lords of Middle-earth II for Khamûl, the Lieutenant of Dol Guldur, none of which has any bearing upon his role in Rhovanion at large—and, since Khamûl spends most of his time beneath the cinder cone of Amon Lanc, the full description he gets serves little purpose for this module. By contrast, no bios are given for the Mouth of Sauron or the Grimbúrz (i.e., those minions of the Necromancer most likely to be encountered in Rhovanion beyond the gates of Dol Guldur).

A final incongruence of the Mirkwood module lies in its handling of linguistic matters. The authors of Mirkwood are to be praised for their very thorough development of indigenous Northman names. In stark contrast to this, they display little knowledge of Tolkien's own invented languages. One need look no farther than ICE's own Elvish dictionary in the Middle-earth Campaign Guide to realize that the authors treat page after page of Quenya words as though they were Sindarin (especially 46). They even suggest that Vagaig, the name given for the Gondorian governor of Dor Rhúnen, is Sindarin for "Sharp Sword;" according to the Elvish dictionary in the Campaign Guide, however, this would be rendered into Sindarin as Maegvegil.

Taken individually, these and other errors may not seem all that heinous; taken together, they demonstrate that the authors of Mirkwood have not done their homework. When measured up to ICE's standards, Mirkwood is found neither to have been "based on extensive research" nor to have been "developed so that no conflict exists with any of the other primary publications (4)." But, for the moment, it's all we have. When all is said and done, Mirkwood remains the antiquated work of 1983. It is to be hoped that the more positive trend begun by Dol Guldur and Lake-town will be carried forward by other new works devoted to this region.