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.)
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
ReplyDeleteHe 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.
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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