Fellowship of the Ring by Mike Ploog

Credit: Mike Ploog.

It's Lord of the Rings, but it has a very D&D feel to it too.

A very nice LOTR picture by Matt Rhodes

Credit: Matt Rhodes.

This would be pretty good artwork for an illustrated edition of the trilogy.

Open the gate alittle!

http://imgur.com/krWb1cF

Hahahaha.

h/t langdonalger

It's been a LOTR kind of day

(via Mad Cartoon Network Wiki)

Went to yard sales today and came back with a bit of Tolkien loot. One - which was held inside a stable because why not - yielded Ballantine paperbacks of The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy. I did googling when I got home and apparently they're the editions that Ballantine came out with in response to the famous Ace Books editions from the 60s. Surprisingly good condition all around for their age; although The Hobbit has what looks like some coffee stains on the cover, but nothing major. The covers were painted by an artist named Barbara Remington who, according to this website, only read the books after she had done the covers. Apparently she didn't have time to read them before hand because of a deadline, so he asked friends who had read the books to give her an overview of the series. Talk about winging it! She succeeded too.

Then at a church yard sale, someone was selling a Gandalf action figure from the LOTR movies for a dollar! That sucker will be sitting on top of my stereo.

(via Fantastic Reviews Blog)

One thing that I find interesting/amusing about the Ballantines is the statement from J. R. R. Tolkien himself on the back cover of all three books:

(via Tolkien Collector's Guide)

You can practically feel how ticked off he was about Ace releasing those paperbacks without his consent. Pretty understandable, but fortunately, he did end up getting quite a bit of loot from those sales and it really helped the fantasy genre as a whole by widening the readership.

The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

Because this is a thing that existed and must be spread far and wide: Leonard Nimoy singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. Enjoy.

Finished S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire

And goddamn, Dies the Fire was excellence. I'll write up a non-review later, but it was excellent. With that out of way, it's time to move on to something else. I have three in mind:

Unofficial S.M.Stirling Fan Page.

The Protector's War is the sequel to Dies the Fire. I'm a bit worried about burning myself out on the Emberverse by jumping to the next book so quickly.

Lord of the Rings Wiki.

Partly because the first part of trilogy is coming out in December, but mostly because I want to read more of the classics. I did read a bit of this last year and enjoyed it.

A Wiki of Ice and Fire.

It's been several months since I finished A Game of Thrones and I'd like to be at least halfway through A Storm of Swords before season three of Game of Thrones airs, so I should probably get to reading A Clash of Kings soon.

What to choose, what the choose?

Topless Robot's 8 Things That Ruin D&D Games

Foxtrot.

Before anything else, can we all stop and take a moment to appreciate the fact that Bill Amend managed to reference LOTR, D&D, and Warhammer in a nationally syndicated comic strip?

Now, on to business. As soon as I saw this list, I knew I had to post it. The list includes such things as poor gaming location, forcing a session when some or all of the players' just aren't feeling it, and having a craptastic DM. Number eight on the list really caught my attention, though: "Putting Wayyy Too Much Money Into It". It instantly made me think of OSR, and the retro-clones. Oh, OSR and your supporting blogs, you have spellbound me.

Check it out, a recipe for Lembas Bread

Relevant, since I posted about Lembas Bread recently.

Cirith Ungol

xkcd.

The alt text is worth reading:

My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'

It took me a minute to grasp the meaning, but once I did, it was worth a snicker. The joke is that it sounds like Wilbur had to be saved from Charlotte, rather than Charlotte saving him from being slaughtered. The strip and title themselves are references to Cirith Ungol, the pass that Gollum led Frodo and Sam through on the way to Mordor. The pass led to Torech Ungol, home of that big old spider, Shelob. Basically, Randall Munroe managed to make a reference to both LOTR and Charlotte's Web in one comic. Gotta love xkcd.

And The Hobbit duology might become a trilogy

So much for our wallets, lol. Apparently Peter Jackson and the Studios are mulling it over and if they do it, Jackson will somehow create a third movie using Tolkien's own notes. Cripes.

Food for the journey

Clearly, the Elf that created Lembas never met Hobbits.

Charge of the Rohirrim

DEATH!!!

The Fellowship was a horribly unbalanced party.

So last night this happened on Tumblr. I reblogged a gif earlier that night of the scene from Return of the King, the one where Aragorn leads an army to Mordor to distract Sauron while Frodo snuck into Mount Doom. Specifically, it was of him shouting "For Frodo!" and charging Sauron's army. Somehow, this lead to me making a joke comparing The Lord of the Rings to a game of D&D and the Fellowship itself to a poorly balanced party. My argument was that the group had way too many fighters (Gimli, Legolas, Boromir (originally forgot about him) and the hobbits) and only one spellcaster. Aragorn was clearly multiclassing with levels in both fighter and ranger, although one person thought that he had a some points in paladin as well. I ended up conceding that Legolas was probably multiclassing as a ranger too. A consensus was also reached that at least two of the hobbits - Merry and Pippin) were low level rogues, while Frodo was an NPC. Sam was either a rogue or a bard.

What flabbergasts me though is the lack of a cleric or some other healer class. I'm sure Boromir would have appreciated having one around, although I don't think they would have been able to heal his douchebaggery. Also, whoever was DMing that game just really, really sucked. He threw how many monsters and creatures at the Fellowship and only managed to kill one of them? On top of that, he didn't dish out any loot. Given the number of the above they killed throughout the trilogy, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli alone should have been rolling in it.

I know I'm not the first person to do this, I would be dismayed if I was. Fun times.

Rings of Power

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

-- The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien.

(via The Lord of the Rings Wiki)

Enjoy Blind Guardian's epic ballad "Lord of the Rings"

First trailer released for The Hobbit

Enjoy.