Sharrukin's Palace

Still plugging away at Twice-Crowned, with about 20 kilowords down in rough draft and a little more emerging every day or two. That’s still my primary project, and I plan to keep it that way until I really get stuck on something.

Still, my brain has to stay busy the rest of the day, and one chunk of time that I can’t apply to the novel is my daily commute to and from the office. That’s about 45-60 minutes per day total . . . and there’s a single audio-book that I’ve been listening to during that time, over the past many months. At this point, I’ve been through that audiobook so many times that I think I have a lot of passages nearly memorized.

That would be the Silmarillion, by J. R. R. Tolkien.

I’m going to assume that most of my readers are at least somewhat familiar with the book. Even if you haven’t read it, you probably know more or less what place it has in Tolkien’s overall body of work.

The biggest chunk of the Silmarillion itself is the story titled the Quenta Silmarillion, the “Tale of the Silmarils,” the epic history of Middle-earth’s “First Age” that provides deep background to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The bulk of the Quenta tells the story of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord of Middle-earth, who stole three great jewels from the Elves of Valinor. This theft provoked many of the Elves to follow Morgoth to Middle-earth and fight a centuries-long series of wars against him, which eventually ended in their utter defeat. Only the intervention of the Valar and the Elves who had remained behind in Valinor saved anything from the rack and ruin.

It’s a beautiful story, and I’m quite content with having spent many hundreds of hours of my life reading and listening to it over and over. But my brain sometimes does odd things with the material it encounters . . . and one thing my brain currently seems to be doing is designing a boardgame simulating the epic action of the Quenta.

So that’s what follows: a high-level prospectus for a tabletop game with the working title of The Wars of the Jewels.

The basic design always assumes two players. One player takes the role of Morgoth, while the other takes the role of the High King of the Noldor Elves, whoever that might be at any given time.

The proposed game comes in two levels of play, essentially a basic and advanced game.

The Battle Game can be played stand-alone, with as many as a dozen or so distinct scenarios portraying the various major military campaigns of the First Age. Each scenario provides a fixed order of battle for both sides, possibly with some special rules to reflect specific situations from the original story. The Battle Game involves very traditional wargame mechanics: small chits representing military units and heroes, moving across a hex-grid map that represents most of the region of Middle-earth called Beleriand. The scale of the Battle Game would be about 20-30 miles per hex and no more than 2-3 days per Battle game-turn; most Battle Game scenarios would be no more than 8-10 game-turns long, and some would be much shorter. I would envision even a long Battle Game scenario as something players could complete in a single afternoon or evening session.

The Epic Game is a grand-strategic simulation, portraying the ebb and flow of the whole series of conflicts. Here, the scale is about 40-50 years per Epic game-turn, so that the whole period of conflict between the Noldor and Morgoth can be played out in 12-15 game-turns.

The Epic Game would be the most challenging to design, I think. Right now I’m leaning toward a card-driven scheme, in which both players draw cards from deck of random events, and can either trigger those events or use point values on the cards to carry out actions. The basic mechanic would probably look a lot like some of the card-driven games published by GMT Games.

The two players wouldn’t be entirely symmetrical in the actions they could take. Both sides could probably do things like build up manpower, settle in empty or uncontrolled provinces, build fortresses, deploy heroes, or play a game of influence among the disparate Elven and allied factions. All of those would play into the possibility of a military campaign to be fought at the end of the Epic game-turn, using the Battle Game to determine the course of a war.

The Elves would also have a set of actions involving sending heroes out on Quests. A Quest would require the Elven player to gather a few heroes (how many would depend on the commitment of action points) and then send them through a series of challenges resolved with die-rolls on a set of tables. Quests could be used to rescue heroes currently captive in Morgoth’s dungeons, to kill dragons or Balrogs, or to attempt to sail to Valinor and persuade the Valar to help. One critical Quest would be to try to steal one of the Silmarils back from Morgoth – very difficult and risky, but probably a necessity if the Elves are not very lucky with their military campaigns.

One mechanic would involve manpower. Almost every faction, on either side, would maintain a Manpower score, indicating its current population. Factions of Men or Elves would have to be able to support their current Manpower with controlled provinces – they need land to supply their armies. Elven factions would replace Manpower lost to combat casualties very slowly, but Men would replace lost Manpower fairly quickly (hence giving the Elven player an incentive to set aside lands for Men). Dwarven factions wouldn’t need provinces under their control since they’re based in big underground cities, but their Manpower would be rather severely capped. Orcs have no limits on their Manpower, but they wouldn’t grow naturally, so Morgoth would have to commit actions to build up his Orc armies.

Available Manpower at the start of a Battle Game war would determine the force pool available for each side. Units lost in the course of the war would result in lost Manpower. The overall effect should be that the Elven player will have to worry about every unit lost in the Battle Game, especially the hard-to-replace Noldor Elves. The Elves and their allies will be crippled if they lose all the rich provinces of Beleriand. Meanwhile, Morgoth’s armies should seem nearly inexhaustible.

Another mechanic in the Epic Game would involve politics among the various factions opposing Morgoth. Half of the tragedy of the Quenta has to do with distrust and outright treachery among various factions of the Elves and Men. So in the game, Morgoth will never have to worry about the loyalty of his own armies, and the High King of the Noldor will always be able to rely on his own faction . . . but every other faction of Elves, Men, or Dwarves will be more or less unreliable.

Each Elven or allied faction would probably have a Loyalty score, indicating its current willingness to actively oppose Morgoth in warfare. Factions with high scores will commit all available forces to a war, and will forward-deploy them so as to come at Morgoth more quickly. Factions with lower scores might hang back, or might refuse to send some or all of their soldiers to fight. In a few cases, a faction might even treacherously go over to Morgoth’s side! Meanwhile, if a Silmaril ever comes into play, Morgoth might be able to this system to trigger outright warfare among his opponents, as they fight for possession of the great jewel.

I envision some “chrome” systems, of course. There should be a system keeping track of who the High King of the Noldor is from one Epic turn to the next – what if Fëanor had survived the first years of the conflict? More generally, if an Elven faction loses its current leader, there has to be some line of succession. There should also be a system to generate heroes from the Elven-allied houses of Men each Epic game-turn, and possibly marry one or more of those heroes into the Elven royal houses if certain conditions are met. That’s likely to be on the critical path to Elven victory if they can’t keep Morgoth’s armies contained.

I think that sums up most of my thinking on the subject so far. I can see the whole game in my head, and I begin to think I could design and test it to completion if I had the time. Of course, it would have to be a complex bit of freeware, since there is no way the Tolkien estate will ever license this particular piece of the legendarium for such an application. Yet another creative project that’s never likely to come to fruition – although man, it would be neat to see.