Far under the living earth, where time is not counted: Moria

The image on this older edition's cover is from Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings movie of 1978.

     ‘There is a way that we may attempt,’ said Gandalf. ‘I thought from the beginning, when I first considered this journey, that we should try it. But it is not a pleasant way, and I have not spoken of it to the Company before. Aragorn was against it, until the pass over the mountains had at least been tried.’

    ‘If it is a worse road than the Redhorn Gate, then it must be evil indeed,’ said Merry. ‘But you had better tell us about it, and let us know the worst at once.’

     ‘The road I speak of leads to the Mines of Moria,’ said Gandalf. Only Gimli lifted up his head; a smouldering fire was in his eyes. On all the others a dread fell at the mention of that name. Even to the hobbits it was a legend of vague fear.[…]

     ‘I too once passed the Dimrill Gate,’ said Aragorn quietly; ‘but though I also came out again, the memory is very evil. I do not wish to enter Moria a second time.’

-- The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter IV: A Journey in the Dark

     ‘Long I fell, and he fell with me. His fire was about me. I was burned. Then we plunged into the deep water and all was dark. Cold it was as the tide of death: almost it froze my heart.’

     ‘Deep is the abyss that is spanned by Durin’s Bridge, and none has measured it,’ said Gimli.

     ‘Yet it has a bottom, beyond light and knowledge,’ said Gandalf. ‘Thither I came at last, to the uttermost foundations of stone. He was with me still. His fire was quenched, but now he was a thing of slime, stronger than a strangling snake.

     ‘We fought far under the living earth, where time is not counted. Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him, till at last he fled into dark tunnels. They were not made by Durin’s folk, Gimli son of Gloin. Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day.’ 

– The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, Book III, Chapter V: The White Rider

There is something alluring yet horrifying about the depths of the earth. Below us are hidden places, caverns and passages sitting silent in the dark, mysteries stretching down through the ages never to be delved. Some are delved into, though, as we dig and mine, looking for treasures, while others reach up and open onto the surface, tempting spelunkers and offering shelter for man and beast. Even the most innocuous cave opening evokes a hint of the unknown, haunting the imagination. Thus, it is no surprise that caves and dark passages and gaping underground chasms figure into so many myths and legends, from the bleak, hushed land of listless dead of Hades, to the underworld of Jules Verne.

Tolkien's Middle-earth has more than its share of underground passages. From King Thingol's Menegroth to Morgoth's Angband, from the Goblin-king's city to Thranduil's palace in Northern Mirkwood, Middle-earth's surface has been riddled with delvings. Even Middle-earth's most humble folk, the Hobbits, dig holes in the ground to live in. However, the mightiest delvings are dug by the people for whom the underworld is home, a people created beneath the mountains and not the sky. Seemingly part of the living rock itself, the Dwarves have spent much of their history carving great and vast halls and cities stretching beneath hills and mountains all over Middle-earth. Much of that history has also seen those deep dwellings invaded and wrested from the hands of the Dwarves, to fall to the forces of evil. The greatest of all such cities was Moria.

Called Khazad-dum by the Dwarves, Moria was, by the time of Bilbo and Frodo, a name that evoked dread even amongst the unworldly Hobbits. A vast, multilayered city under the Misty Mountains, Moria was once the pride of Dwarves everywhere. It fell to darkness, the Dwarves driven from their greatest stronghold. Centuries after the fall, Moria was a shadowy realm, its state unknown. Attempts to retake the city met with failure, with even Balin's initially successful colony falling silent after years of gradual rebuilding.

There is no doubt that Moria was one of the models for dungeons in roleplaying games. The lost underground city became a template for many adventures for games like Dungeons & Dragons. Eventually, Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle-earth Roleplaying game would complete the circle, detailing Moria itself for game use. The initial book would be greatly expanded years later, but both detail a massive adventure area, filled with detail.

Angus McBride's cover for the revised and expanded Moria book for MERP depicts the Fellowship's desperate battle near Balin's tomb..

Even later, Decipher, another game company, would create the Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game, for which a massive boxed set would be published that detailed another take on the Dwarven city.

Box lid of Decipher's Moria. The image quality is poor due to the box being too large for my scanner.

I will deal with Decipher's boxed set later.

In some ways, I consider the two editions of Moria to be the masterworks of Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle-earth Roleplaying game. Not only do they evoke the atmosphere of Moria as depicted by Tolkien, they also embody the quintessence of the roleplaying game dungeon adventure. Integrating the two isn't necessarily as easy as it might seem; published roleplaying game adventures are not often as massive or evocative as what Tolkien described. The design team at ICE came up with clever ways to bring to life a massive underground city in a limited amount of space. 

Stock areas and passages help flesh out a city the size of Moria without having to detail every meter of the place.

As with most of ICE's MERP sourcebook offerings, there is an overview of the climate, ecology, and history of Moria. This is pretty interesting, as it makes the books something of a primer on dungeon adventure design in general. Subterranean flora and fauna are discussed, with how they all interact given some attention. While giving thought to the logic of a given adventure environment is not a recent innovation, and wasn't even when these books were first published, the Moria books are some of the most prominent examples. Using them to depict a non-Middle-earth underground setting would be logical.

The history of Moria is also, largely, the history of the Dwarven people, too. So, as sourcebooks like those for Mirkwood and Thranduil's Halls detail a history of Elven folk and their culture, Moria can be used as a reference guide for Dwarves apart from Moria. The history of the Dwarves is fascinating and filled with setbacks. They persevered in the face of incredible adversity spread over several millennia, maintaining their pride and culture in the face of odds that caused the Elves to slip away into the Uttermost West. Yet the Dwarves never gave up, and continually sought to reclaim their cities and treasures.

The cleverness of the MERP books resides in how practical and modular they are. Examples of typical rooms and passages are given, which lends an efficient air to the material. Tools, machinery, and architecture are depicted and discussed. 

Blended together, all of this combines to give the impression of a bustling, thriving city, whether it is still living or if it is now a shadowed memory.

Both editions are handsome, useful books. The maps in both are, as might be expected from MERP products, outstanding. The illustrations are good in general; I'm especially taken with the art by Kent Burles in the newer edition. It reminds me a bit of the art of Stephen Fabian and George Barr, mostly due to the mood and feel it evokes.

This and the Under-deeps picture above are examples of Kent Burles' expressive art.

Liz Danforth also provides several outstanding illustrations. Both books show MERP at its best; the older from when it had just hit its stride, the newer later in the line's run, when it was about to run its course.

And not to mention the Balrog, here depicted outstandingly by Liz Danforth.

These two books are among my favorite game books.  They both cram a wealth of gaming material between their covers, creating a vivid portrait of a place and a people that would appeal even to a non-gamer.

Moria by Decipher

I won't spend a lot of time on this product, not because it doesn't deserve it, but because I'm not as familiar with it. This is a boxed set - the cover of which can be seen above, which has a still from Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring. The box contains two books and several maps.One book details Dwarven culture, in a somewhat different, but similar, way to the MERP books. The other covers Moria itself, choosing to do something similar to what was done by ICE by breaking the city down into reusable modular parts. As a whole, this boxed set is much more sparsely illustrated than the MERP books. The maps are nice, and also usable in multiple ways, fitting together almost any way the user of the boxed set would like. It's a good, solid product, but I do prefer the MERP version.

Moria is a vast underworld in any incarnation. Its influence on gaming, as noted, is profound, to the point that there are numerous Morias going by other names; many adventures for roleplaying games use it as a template, whether unconsciously or not. Every deeply-delved dungeon with winding passages and echoing chambers contains a bit of Moria in its shadowed recesses.

Way Up North...in Middle-earth: The Grey Mountains

We go now from the vibrant far Southern reaches of Middle-earth, to the cold, windswept, mountainous North. One-time home to a Dwarven kingdom, it became the home to some of Middle-earth's most dangerous creatures: Dragons. These are the Grey Mountains.

The Withered Heath is the basin-shaped area between arms of the Grey Mountains to the North. Erebor, or the Lonely Mountain, is just south of central on this map, with the Long Lake on the Southern edge, and Mirkwood to the West.

Removed from much of the grand history of Middle-earth, the Grey Mountains nevertheless played an important role. They loomed in the distance from Mirkwood and Erebor, a haven for threats to the Free Peoples.

 While Dragons were the most spectacular of the region's inhabitants, Orcs also came to infest it, and doubtlessly they assumed ownership of the Dwarven halls delved under the mountains, once the Dwarves fled or were killed. That is, the Orcs took ownership of the fortresses the Dragons did not take for themselves. From then on, the folk of Northern Mirkwood and the surrounding lands had to be wary of attack from the North, drawing attention away from Sauron's machinations in the South.

Within the Grey Mountains is a vast plain called the Withered Heath. This desolate land is the stomping grounds of the Dragons, where they fight and, presumably, mate, far from the eyes of Elves and Men. They seem largely content to stay there, though occasionally one may decide to foray South and seize treasure for its own. The greatest of these conquerors was Smaug the Golden, who took the Lonely Mountain as his home, driving away and killing the Dwarves there, as well as making a ghost town of Dale. Smaug was the greatest of his kind in the Third Age of Middle-earth, but that is not to say his brethren in the Grey Mountains were of no consequence; without doubt similar scenes of destruction took place in Dwarven holds there, too.

This is one of my favorite Middle-earth Roleplaying books. It takes a region that Tolkien gave a little detail about, and manages to flesh it out in a way that seems appropriate to the setting. It's also interesting in its own right, separate from Middle-earth. It's a wild, rugged place by the time of Bilbo and Frodo, bleak and forbidding. The book details Dwarven underground cities and fortresses, an Orc fortress, a Mannish village, and the lairs of some of the Dragons who live in the Grey Mountains and the Withered Heath. An overview of the climate, flora and fauna is given, with Dragons as the apex predators, but bears, lions, and wolves also prowl about, preying on the reindeer, elk, and goats indigenous to the area. It's an area rich in adventure possibilities.

...and I didn't even mention the giants...

 Add in that far to the West, commanding the gap where the Grey Mountains end and the northernmost point of the Misty Mountains begin, stands Mount Gundabad. This great mountain-city, capital of an Orc kingdom, is an anchor-point for the Shadow in the North, and the Orc-King there draws strength from and exerts influence over the Orcs of the Grey Mountains. Even further West lays Angmar, one-time Empire of the Witch-King, and later a haunted land; between it, Mount Gundabad, and the Grey Mountains, the North of Middle-earth is a de facto bastion of evil. For a game, that's a good thing. After all, heroes need evil to fight.

Orcs on a dark expedition.

The Grey Mountains includes a mini-campaign of adventures that involve the characters belonging to the players to help defend a town from Orc raids and assorted other threats. Besides that, the various locations discussed in the book are implicitly ripe for adventure. The Dwarven strongholds, once abandoned, become lost cities waiting to be explored and cleared out, whether they have become homes to Orcs or Dragons.

A one-time bastion of the Dwarves, now lost and defiled by Orcs.

One level of several of a Dwarven city deep under the Grey Mountains. Yet another citadel of Dwarves now in the hands of evil.

A Grey Mountain Dwarven hall in happier times...and I realize the irony that this is a depiction of a funeral.

The book is pretty much chock-full of things for heroes to do. The mini-campaign - and the Dwarven settlements, if the Dwarves are still there - provides an opportunity for interaction between the player's characters and townsfolk, if that's the player's bag. But, if they're more the straightforward kind, who simply want to bash some heads and take some treasure, there is plenty of opportunity for that here.

This is a well-put-together book. It's a setting ripe for adventure. Being tucked away from much of the narrative action of The Lord of the Rings doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't important. Morgoth, Sauron's boss, had his base in the far North of Middle-earth, though that entire portion of the continent to the West was smashed out of existence at the end of the First Age. Still, some remnant of his memory could now still haunt those northern reaches that remain.

Homesteading in the Grey Mountains is not advised.

Certainly such lingering evil can be inferred from the fact that Tolkien made it a haven for Dragons, and it was accessible to places like Mount Gundabad and Angmar. What kept the Dragons there, rather than sallying South into the lands of the Free Peoples? Was it a lack of ambition on the part of Dragons? After driving away the Dwarves and claiming the treasures of that folk, did they simply decide it was easier to remain in the North and occasionally tangle with one another, rather than come into conflict with Men and Elves? Why was Smaug the only one to come South and make his mark? Did some other force for good tie down the Dragons, taking the fight to those Wyrms in the Grey Mountains and Withered Heath? Perhaps Smaug's presence prevented lesser Dragons from foraying out of their traditional territory, and Smaug's subsequent death gave them a healthy dose of fear at the capabilities of the smaller folk of Middle-earth. Whatever the reasons, there is a load of possibility to this region.