14 July 2011

ICE's Middle-earth Ad in Dragon

This one is from Dragon #67 (November 1982).

I remember finding that ad incredibly evocative as an adolescent infatuated with The Lord of the Rings.



I loved ICE's Middle-earth products during the 1980s and early 1990s. I still love them, although my fondness for the system has cooled off somewhat (and even more so for Rolemaster).

Around 1985, MERP supplanted entirely AD&D as my high-school group's main game. I ran it (and occasionally played it) almost every week for three years. I remember being impressed at how much more information was included in a typical MERP campaign module than an equally expensive TSR AD&D module.

I especially loved Peter Fenlon's gorgeous colour maps! (I’ll talk more about these maps in a future post.)

Even today I still pick up the occasional ICE Middle-earth book if I can find one reasonably priced. (Much of my high-school collection was 'borrowed' and never returned by a 'friend' once I went away to university. Since then I've gradually replaced most of the lost books, as well as gained some I never owned back then.)



Just thinking about ICE's Middle-earth books makes me want to break some out and run a campaign!

(Thanks to this post at Grognardia for the image of this ad, and for prompting me to write this post.)

2 comments:

  1. Speaking of awesome MERP maps, you gotta check out my friend Dan Cruger's work over at http://iguanaslair.blogspot.com/p/game-art.html

    He was a castle-rendering machine for ICE back in the day. Here I had been gaming with him for several years without knowing just how much of that MERP work was his.

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  2. Thanks, Scadgrad. I actually linked to Dan's excellent blog in an earlier post (http://akraticwizardry.blogspot.com/2011/03/evocative-merp-city-maps.html), and include it in my blogroll. But I should've mentioned his fine work again here!

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I'm a Canadian political philosopher who lives primarily in Toronto but teaches in Milwaukee (sometimes in person, sometimes online).