The Making of Arnor:
A Conversation with Wesley J. Frank
Chris: How did you first come to take up the task of compiling and revising the already existing Arnor material published by ICE?
Wes: When I decided to do some writing, I sent in three outlines: one for Near Harad, one for Shire and one for an Arnor module, a needed refit of the ICE's older modules set in Eriador, which I think came up in some conversations with Jessica Ney-Grimm. Jessica said that what she needed first was Arnor, and that there was a lot of good material out there that I could use in it, so I picked that one. My original thought was that Near Harad would be the easiest because it would have less to do with Tolkien's books and thus be less frightening; but Arnor was a great opportunity because it gave me a chance to take care of all the complaints I've had from twenty years of role playing.
Chris: So it was your own experience of running games in that region that drove you to revise the stuff.
Wes: Yes, it was sort of a put or shut up thing, where I spent all those years playing the game and criticizing, and now I had a chance to do better.
Chris: What did you see as the major strengths and weaknesses of the earlier modules?
Wes: Among the early modules, the original older ones such as Angmar and Umbar weren't connected properly; others, like Rangers of the North, were beautiful in concept but very difficult to game in. You couldn't get a feel of what it was like from town to town and in running an adventure. Cardolan was much better than that; it basically needed to be tidied up and put into some coherent whole. As for Hillmen of the Trollshaws—again, not enough background to know what you were doing when running in the area, so I was able to put in editorial unification and fill in all the gaps in the adventures.
Chris: So most of the adventures that showed up in the final version were things you added or had run before you actually started work on the module?
Wes: Actually, I wanted to make efficient use of the material in hand, so I only wrote one complete adventure for Arnor. I provided most of the story hooks scattered through the text, the plot leads and small-scale adventures. For the official adventure sections, I put together scenarios from Rangers and Cardolan, most of which I had played through as a character, and edited them as needed to make them coherent. Where there were gaps or dead spots, where the old material had not been properly play-tested, I added and re-wrote. I turned "The Mithril Room" into an honest dungeon crawl and "Hunt for the Warlord" into a mini-campaign with a gritty military feel to it. I enjoyed that. The one big adventure I put together myself was "The Banners of the High King" (the Second Age one). I had never seen a really high level adventure for Middle-earth, so I was able to cut loose with an entire volley there.
Chris: What axes did you have to grind when you were writing and drawing all this material together? What things did you want to emphasize or add to it?
Wes: In terms of general themes, I wanted a large-scale area module to give anybody who read ICE material an idea of what the people were like—the Dúnedain and the Commoners. I was able to put in a lot of detailed material about their society and wanted to give an idea of the people of Arnor as fighting an heroic fight. My favorite quote from The Lord of the Rings is the one which talks about a line of tall, stern men who fought off this horrible enemy for century after century: "...they had a vision as it were of a great expanse of years behind them, like a vast shadowy plain over which there strode shapes of Men, tall and grim with bright swords, and last came one with a star on his brow." And most of the time they were winning. So you find at different points in Arnor that most of the bad guys like the Witch-king and the Angúlion—even Umaug, the War Troll who appears on the cover—wind up getting a shot in the head from somebody because they were there for six hundred years and took a lot of bad defeats in that time. You have a bunch of people here you could be proud of as allies when you have an adventure. That is something that was missing from traditional D&D for many years. Humans are about the weakest creatures in the old campaigns. If it were not for the (powerful) D&D-style adventurers, they would just be wiped out. This was a chance to get one back for humans, I think.
Chris: There is also a lot in the background—in the history chapter and in the some of the descriptions of the peoples that inhabit Eriador, like the stuff you do on the Fëahíni and all the different spirits that are around. You give a lot more information about the cosmology of Middle-earth than previous modules have done, and it seems that this material is what you would expect to find in an introduction to MERP as a whole.
Wes: Quite. Something I really wanted to do with this module was put magic in Middle-earth. Some other writers consider Middle-earth to be a non-magical place. In my opinion, it is saturated in magic, but short of magicians. I felt, particularly since reading Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-stories," that he was trying to come up with a background for all English folklore, including fairies, witches, monsters and other strange beings. It is not just a bunch of guys chasing around a few spirits. I wanted to include a background for this, so that I or any other writer could put in something magical—some fantasy into your fantasy, as it were.
Chris: That has been a problem of the MERP line from the very beginning. You have this polarity between people who are using the system because it has neat maps and lots of detail and background, but who are basically working within a D&D mindset; and then there are the purists that want to get an experience of Middle-earth as they get from the books, yet maintain a rather doctrinaire view that you can't have all this magic running around as ICE presents it. One of the great things about Arnor is that you not only say there is magic, but you give concrete examples of locales where it might manifest itself—and on both sides, not just the various fairy peoples that inhabit the various forests of Eriador, but also the Banes of Angmar, that's a great way of integrating magic in a concrete way into a game.
Wes: The Banes of Angmar reflects something I think a lot of people who love Middle-earth have wanted to do: to go in and pick up where Tolkien seemed a little off, a little illogical. Like having a huge area of land completely uninhabited for a thousand years without plausible justification. The Banes of Angmar attempt to explain and rationalize that sort of thing. I love the process of rationalization. I think there are hundreds of Tolkien fans who want not only to cover the gaps and the interesting parts he did not get around to, but also simply to write in Middle-earth. And I got to do it.
Chris: Did you come up with the concept of the "Traveler's Guide" that appeared in Arnor? I think everyone will agree that it is definitely an improvement not only in terms of organization and accessibility, but it's also a much more economical way of conveying local flavor and detail.
Wes: The only thing like it at the time was the Northwestern Middle-earth Gazetteer, which I didn't even know existed until I was through with Arnor, much to my chagrin (continuity between the two works is poor). The inspiration for it came from my own sense of detail. I wanted to write something interesting about each town in Eriador. I figured that this would be the way to create a large scale module with something happening everywhere. Give people a grip on what's going on, no matter where they go. I've read many kinds of modules and fantasy works over the years, and the most brilliant work on that count is done for Warhammer and Call of Cthulhu—beautiful gazetteer work, very detailed, and you can sense the authors' joy when they are working on the small scale as well as on the larger themes. I wanted to create that for Middle-earth. It's a good way of organizing information so that you can transit from the small scale to the large scale. It was very successful in Arnor and I am glad to see other folks picking up the habit their own module projects.
Chris: "Rangers of the North" was the other bit—not the module but the actual section you wrote in the Arnor module, where you detailed how the Dúnedain lived after the fall of Arthedain and had some lists of things for them to do during that period.
Wes: I am very proud of that. I had to put the chapter together on the premise that we were going to give the world of the Rangers, in a small space, in enough detail for a campaign. Aragorn is my favorite character in The Lord of the Rings. I read about him and sense the depth of his intellect and his spirit and that wonderful concept of a people who understand that they are fighting a war that is going to outlast them, but who still have the courage and the conviction to carry it through. So I conceived them as a society of intellectuals — Aragorn is a very learned man from a society that operates on a very small scale (a few hundred people in three villages). You can compare it to the military holy orders in Europe, but with a Puritan, semi-monastic element. You have to include the idea of a small group of people who are attending to the daily chores of survival, but at the same time passing on a body of knowledge to their heirs and using it to make them, as fighters, superior to anyone else around them. They have to take on numerous foes while operating through a vast area with very small numbers. I always stand up for the thinking man as warrior, as a reaction to the Conan theme (in fantasy literature and in role playing games, especially D&D).
Chris: That is good material for some future module, just like with The Northern Waste—the author simply took your two-page description of Forochel and generated a two hundred page manuscript off of it.
Wes: I love that and it is a great compliment. It is something I had in mind when I was scoping (imagining) Arnor. I wanted to give people a springboard for doing all the modules and adventures I was looking for all my years as a player. That was the opportunity that came with Arnor: to do something that would give other people a step up the ladder.
Chris: You said that you had presented a proposal for a Shire module along with the Arnor proposal. Did the fact that you wrote Arnor first change any of your notions about the Shire or influence the way that you wrote that second module?
Wes: It didn't influence it thematically. It was a good way to set up the Shire module—by setting up the larger society first. The Shire is another project I have always wanted to do because it always goes back to traditional fantasy—Hobbits tend to get belittled, so I wanted to put together their society. After all, they are more like us than anyone else in Middle-earth, so The Shire allowed me to show them as being able to take care of their own business much the same as the Dúnedain in Arnor. I designed the Shire module as I was writing Arnor, but in doing so I didn't change much of I what I originally had in mind. Virtually nothing had been done about the Shire prior to my proposal. Jessica said that mine was the first outline she had ever seen for a Shire module that was the least bit exciting, because it actually posited that something interesting could happen there.
Chris: That is often the challenge for MERP writers, because the nature of Tolkien's world pushes the bounds of conventional fantasy gaming. Many of the earlier modules were quite understandably written from the perspective of your average adventuring party who were assumed to have certain invariable goals (e.g., going in and sacking Carn Dûm with no other thought that you could have any other kind of adventure in Angmar). With The Shire and Arnor and many other cases, it really does force one to think of different kinds of adventures and different kinds of motivations for characters.
Wes: The problem with Middle-earth is that the colorful titles you want are associated with places where there is so much power concentrated that it takes a lot of effort to come up with an adventure for them. You are more fortunate in the cities because wherever there are large populations of humans, there are adventures. On the other hand, what about Fangorn? It's pretty peaceful (although I have set some good adventures there in my campaign). As much as I enjoyed reading the Lórien module and the Eregion section that came with it, coming up with a good adventure there was difficult. It requires that you use it for a different kind of adventure—for politics or personal interaction—though I once ran a campaign where a character went in and wrecked Galadriel's mirror. All the players are still steamed about that. (They are not welcome in Lórien anymore.) I have every module that ICE put out and enjoyed reading them. I enjoy the challenge of taking the drier ones and creating adventures for them.
Chris: For sheer reading pleasure, Arnor comes out on top. For example, in the chapter on the geography or the flora and fauna you have a very nice flowing narrative of the land itself which is interesting to read. Arnor definitely has a very engaging natural history to it.
Wes: I have always loved to read about geography myself, and wanted to make my writing on the topic as efficient and colorful as possible.
Chris: Thanks you very much for your time.