As I have been thinking about Middle Earth--and reading through the excellent supplements by Cubicle 7 and Free League--I've been trying to picture what the day to day life of a person living there would be like. In The Lord of the Rings, we are with the high-level heroes: Aragorn, Legolas, Boromir, Gandalf, etc. We are following the Big Quest: destroy the ring! Hold off Sauron! Uncover the corruption of Saruman! All totally fun...but what about those who are not in the main quest? This weekend, I went and saw The War of the Rhohirrim, an anime set 200 years before LotR. It was only tangentially connected to LotR, and told the story of Helm Hammerhand and his war against the Dundeling upstart, Wulf. It was a good movie. I don't love Japanese animation, but I thought they did a great job of widening Tolkien's aperture and telling a story set in his world, based on a few paragraphs of writing in the appendixes. What I liked best about it, though, was that is showed people just...living. Conflict, sure. Some monsters, but mostly the lives of people who are not chasing the ring around, or living in the churn caused by the war.
Playing a game in Middle Earth has inherent limitations. Unlike your standard D&D world, there is very little magic, very few monsters, restricted classes, etc. None of that is bad at all, but when we did play our LotR campaign, were were Big Quest adjacent: we had the crown of the Witch King, we were seeking ring lore in Moria. It was totally fun, but I began to wonder how fun it would be to just play in Middle Earth without the ring quest line. I found myself thinking more and more about the Saxons, and how LotR presents Rohan as a Saxon culture (with horses). Then I began to ask...wouldn't it be just as fun to play a historical fantasy sent in Saxon England vs. Middle Earth? I pondered. I thought. I ruminated. I perseverated.
Then I remembered Saxon Crawl! I bought this PDF last year. It is a historical source booklet for playing DCC in the days of the Saxons, and has a bunch of suggestions for adapting existing modules for play. So...yeah, that's where I am right now. Fortunately for me, I already have a lot of the stuff the author's recommend. I am excited to start building this out.
