THE WORLD It is the early summer of the year 2944 of the Third Age.

Rohan has been ruled for forty one years by Fengel, son of Folcwine. Unlike his late father, Fengel has neither the love, nor the respect of the people he rules . He is a greedy Gondor Turgon (89 aos de edad, 30 aos de gobierno, muere nueve aos en el futuro). Thengel vive en Gondor (39 aos de edad, casado desde el ao anterior con Morwen de Lossarnach) desde su mayoria de edad. Ecthelion II (58 aos de edad) Denethor II 14 aos de edad. Aragorn Telcontar 13 aos de edad Arathorn II muerto hace 11 aos. Bard rebuilding Dale. Saruman in Isengard (ultimos 300 aos, pero no es seor). Corrupto, pero no trabaja para Sauron. Dain II, king under the mountain, 177 aos de edad. 33 aos desde el invierno cruel y la ruina definitiva de Tharbad. 24 years since death of old Gerontius Took. 14 years since death of Isengrim III 5 years since death of Isumbras IV Current Thain Fortinbras Took (66 years old) y esposa Lalia Clayhanger Took the Fat/The Great 63 aos de vida, 30 de infeliz matrimonio. Hijo Ferumbras, 28 aos de edad. Bilbo Baggins 54 aos de edad. Arwen living in Lorien. Will stay there for eight more years.

There were seven of us at the beginning, two would leave before the end, three w ould join. Romn, our first GM, was a Tolkien geek through and through, who had his own websi te of Tolkien geekery and was a card carrying member of the STE (Spanish Tolkien Society). Though he obviously played no character as such, the NPC he used to h

erd us around during the first half of the campaign was an exercise in obscure T olkien lore. It was a centenarian hobbit rogue by the name of Hildifons Took. Now, if you goo gle the name or have the LotR appendix handy, you can check that this is an extr emely obscure canon character, a Took who left the Shire looking for adventures and never returned home. This ability to cleverly weave together obscure parts o f canon and roleplaying was something that to be entirely honest I was quite env ious at the time. It helped that Romn was a really cool guy, though. Javier was a MERP newb who first gained an interest in Lord of the Rings because of the Peter Jackson movies and being something of a Gimli fan decided to play a thoroughly classic dwarf warrior. His character had no meaningful backstory be yond being a dwarf and no name, so he was known to the other characters as Gruon (this being the Spanish name for the Grumpy Dwarf). Cristina was also new to MERP, but not new to roleplaying in general thanks to p revious experience with D&D. Though the MERP mechanics weren't good for min-maxi ng, she still decided to play Elturion, a Noldo elf wizard (Noldor having seriou sly broken advantages stat-wise over those of other species). However, since MER P wizards really, really suck at low levels, as she discovered later, this chara cter didn't last terribly long. Haydee felt like being as un-Tolkien as she could get away with, so she rolled a female Haradrim channeler (shaman/healer) by the name of Amira. I cannot say th at I much liked the 1001 nights style she tried to provide for Harad, but she re ally went all out with her character and particularly during the Umbar sidequest , so I was really cool with it by the end of the campaign. Leovigildo, he of the exceedingly unfortunate name, convinced Romn to let him pla y Haldan, a Gondorian paladin. Though the class didn't exist in any of the offic ial MERP rulebooks, there was a remarkably well balanced homebrewed version (cal led Order of Rynd Aratoran) floating around the Internet and so Haldan was allow ed. This allowing Internet stuff was the source of some serious hilarity a few m onths later. Juan, Romn's older brother, played a Rohirrim shield maiden called Leowyn, lifted straight from the corebook character examples. You could say that he wasn't too terribly invested in the game, but he was an overall cool guy who let us use th e back room of the comic shop he worked at for a while. Last and least of all, this humble narrator played a dunlending (those would be the Braveheart rejects that team up with Saruman in The Two Towers) bard, who I wrote to be the descendant of a character I had used in a previous campaign I ha d really liked. Initially, I had intended him to be the token evil (or hostile) party member, but soon enough Juan and myself started a running joke concerning the relationship between our characters that ended going to weird places. ******************************** Hopefully, the FAQ above will have clarified the situation some. So my group has recently started a new campaign, one that our DM says should las t a good long while - which usually means we hit level 20, or even go epic at so me point. By this point we're up to level 2, and we seem to be picking up traces of the central plot, or at least are on the right path. Some interesting stuff has come up though, and I'd be interested in getting some outside insight into things.

The campaign world has an large central island, give or take equal sailing dista nce from every major continent. Naturally the island is a port-city metropolis, with a smattering of races and cultures from everywhere on the world. A lot of t rade, import, export, ect. Not much you can't find there, and not many places on the world that you can't find a relatively direct path to. The player group is as follows: I'm planning on being a Human Warlock (with the classic "dark, mentally unstable witch" archetype). My current plan, unless something catches my eye, is to drop most of my feats into extra invocations to expand my versatility. I'm also prob ably going to carry around a handful of throwing daggers and the hardest poisons I can find, just in case. One player is being a Dragon Shaman (race: Lesser Aasimar turned Dragonborn). Th ey're manifesting wings as a dragonborn, are boosting their CON and CHA almost e xclusively (with a little into INT), and are going to take a lot of meta-breath feats. They're going for an "unkillable heal-battery with a hard to resist breat h weapon" motif. Third player is a kobold factotum, with a one-level dip into barbarian for fast movement. They're also taking the Wild Talent feat to become a psionic character , and then taking the Speed of Thought feat for a +50 base move rate. The rest w ill be Font of Inspiration abuse, so there's not much else to say. A tiny, hard to hit, lightning fast, versatile scout/rogue who's everywhere we need him to be . He's bugging the DM for a chance to add the "Dark" template to his character f or another +10 feet too. Fourth player is a human Swashbuckler/Barbarian. Probably wind up being a power attacking shock trooper or something. Anyway, onto the meat (and the questions). Our group had a few small confrontations heading towards the island in the first place. We had an attempted boarding by a group of pirates, but with some flamin g oil pints and quick thinking, we made it too much effort to continue attacking us, and forced them to turn off into another direction. Stuff like that. We had a larger confrontation when the captain of the ship we'd purchased passag e on realized we were smuggling the kobold in our luggage (the kobold having bee n wanted for questioning at the loading docks regarding a string of thefts), but we resolved it by palming him 5gp to upgrade our tickets to include a "no quest ions asked" policy. We still wound up swimming the last 100 yards to shore when the swashbuckler sai d something rude to one of the deck hands. But at least the captain was nice eno ugh to toss our luggage onto the islands docks instead of into the sea. He even told the dock master we'd been with him, so we didn't have to deal with too much hassle signing the log sheets and getting our stuff. Tough but fair, I guess. We started looking for work on the island, and something big sprang up almost im mediately. One of the trading companies was searching for an "exterminator". We tracked down the owner and started talking. Seems one of his ships had been visi ting a desert nation to acquire some recently unearthed treasures out of a longdead emporers tomb. It wasn't until they'd gotten back and started opening thing s up to examine them, that they discovered some kind of pest had apparently been sealed up in the packaging. They were fist sized scarabs, with seemingly metal carapaces and crystals growin g out of their back. The problem was, they were EATING metal objects during the voyage, but now they were eating the metal weapons and armor of anyone who tried to deal with them. And they could apparently cast cantrips, because they were s pitting little fireballs and acid splashes at anyone they saw. They'd allready k illed four men since they were unloaded. The owner finally had to seal up the building they'd unloaded the cargo into. Th e local authorities considered it his problem. He agreed to give us 50 gp each i

f we successfully cleared all the bugs from inside. Well, to make an allready long story short, the fight was brutal. We found out t hat we could strip the crystals out of the dead ones and cast the cantrips with them, which saved our butts when we realized that the white and gold scarabs cou ld cast Cure Minor Wounds. No way we would have survived otherwise. It was bruta l, but finally we killed them all and collected their shells to get the gems out . At the end of the day, we were level 2, and had a fair number of shiny little ge ms that could cast cantrips. That was the end of that session, so we're trying t o decide what to do with the stones at this point. Anyone can activate them as long as they're touching their skin, just by concent rating on them. I can actually fire them along with my eldritch blast, which is cool, but doesn't seem remarkably useful. We have: 12 Acid Splash 10 Ray of Frost 7 Cure Minor Wounds 5 Daze 5 Open/Close 3 Light 3 Create Water 2 Mage Hand We also have 2 that can cast True Strike, and one that can cast Reduce Person, f rom one of the scarabs that was larger and meaner and could apparently cast high er level spells. Our DM agreed that the Cure Minor Wounds gems could be activated while we were i n negative hitpoints, to stabilize ourselves. So we're each carrying two of thos e, except the dragon shaman who is carrying one. Right now we're just carrying the rest in a bag so we can grab them if there's s omething we might want them for, but I'm thinking of asking the group of I can h ave the offensive ones set into some quick and dirty (and cheap) rings so I can wear a whole mess of them at once and activate them with my eldritch blast as ne eded. Anyone have any clever thoughts on how these gems could come in handy? Or is it more likely they'll just be a novelty we find interesti