About Our Campaign Battle of Five Armies & The Third Age of Middle-Earth The current year for our Middle-Earth campaign is set during the year of 2946 of the Third Age. Inspired By J.R.R. Tolkien

At the time of me posting this I still have not started work on our adventure for my first Middle-earth campaign but I am planning to begin work on the Mirkwood Campaign very soon. Sure, this is a campaign that really needs an expert Loremaster to run "not a brand new Loremaster like myself" but regardless, I am going to give it a go and see what happens.

I am brand new to "Adventures in Middle-earth" as a Loremaster and this version of Dungeons & Dragons is a lot different than the standard 5th edition version . . . which is good because I'll never use WotC's material again.

I'm sure a lot of you hard core novel readers will flame me for what I am about to say but . . . this campaign will be based off of the 6 movies, not the novels. Sadly myself or my players have not read the books (I actually just started reading them) but have watched all of the movies so this is what I will base this campaign and all future Middle-earth adventures off of. For our situation, this makes the most sense, so while I am in story telling mode my players will be able to envision what is going on as they reflect on what things looked like in the movies.

I have done a lot of reading online and watched multiple videos on Middle-earth Lore, so I have much to draw from when running my campaigns. So if you are one of those that believes you don't know anything about Middle-earth unless you have read the books, then you might want to just move on to some other campaign blog.

I want this campaign blog to be just about our current campaign so it is easier for my players and visitors to navigate, so in the beginning stages this blog might be a little short on information but as we start playing it will grow quickly. The easiest way to navigate through this blog is to use the links across the top instead of browsing page by page. Pretty much everything my players will need will be located in the journals section which also has a link at the top.

One big thing is, with me being out of the game for close to twenty years, this is bound to start off a little rusty but I have never ran adventures online digitally before and the excitement has started to kick in for me. I still have a lot of reading to do to get myself back into DMing again and especially in the Middle-earth setting, this will be something all new for me and then on top of it all we will be playing online using Roll20 for battlemaps, character sheets and dice rolling and Discord for audio and video so this will be educational to say the least.

My plan is to run the Eaves of Mirkwood adventure and slide right into the Mirkwood campaign. Another thing I plan to do is move this campaign 30'ish years ahead to coincide with Frodo leaving the Shire (give or take a year or two). Towards the end of the Mirkwood campaign I want to adjust the story a little to merge into the War of the Ring time period. Personally, I just prefer the Lord of the Rings story over the Hobbit story, it's just a more indepth story (imho of course).

All of our game sessions will be locally recorded and then once we finish each session I will go back and do a lot of editing to give it a more ambience with sound effects, background ambience music and other things and then upload them to our Youtube channel as a playlist.

Giving the Middle Finger to WotC/Hasbro Battle of Five Armies & The Third Age of Middle-Earth The current year for our Middle-Earth campaign is set during the year of 2946 of the Third Age. Inspired By J.R.R. Tolkien

Recently I watched this video from "Diversity & Dragons" and I never realized WotC was "this" bad. He might be a smaller content creator but he spits pure facts in this video.

This guy touched on a lot of stuff he pulled from Twitter and one thing I want to make clear, all of these people I am about to highlight are affiliated with Hasbro/WotC in one form or another . . . some are editors, writers, executives and content creators. They publically say stuff that is pure racist and WotC/Hasbro lets them get away with it, and as a matter of fact Hasbro/WotC does its best to go along with these people and what they say. It's disgusting and embarrassing.

These are just a few of the tweets that were found on Twitter. Dominique Dickey posted a couple of tweets here and here. How much of a racist can someone be?

Then you have Sadie Lowrie who assisted as a writer for Call of the Netherdeep making tweets like this. I send her a tweet asking her about her tweet and this is the reply I got from her. Instead of explaining herself, she blocks me. Typical racist hiding from what she has done. The exact same thing happened with Sarah Madsen . . . when I sent her a tweet about these tweets that she made and I got another reply just like I got from Sadie Lowry.

Lets look at Makenzie De Armas with her tweet or how the one and only Christopher Perkins tweeted this and to think, it pretty much all started with this from Kyle Brinks. Why is it that whenever I get on Youtube, another video pops up on my home screen where Hasbro/WotC has done something stupid and made the news again? The worst part of it is, people still buy into that crap. It's just sad.

With that being sad, I want to make one thing perfectly clear, I'll never buy another product from Hasbro/WotC, I can't get behind racism & WOKE DEI Politics in any form. I simply cannot be a part of everything that is going on with the current state of Dungeons & Dragons right now.

Ready, Set, Go! Battle of Five Armies & The Third Age of Middle-Earth The current year for our Middle-Earth campaign is set during the year of 2946 of the Third Age. Inspired By J.R.R. Tolkien

I have some things that I would like to touch on with those of you that are first time readers of this blog. The first thing that I kind of want to get into is what many call the "Matt Mercer Effect". I think one thing we all can agree on is Matthew Mercer is ranked in the top level of Dungeon Masters.

The man knows his stuff, but it isn't just about Matthew, his players bring a huge part of what makes Critical Role special to the table. To quote an old saying ... "it takes two to tango", or in this case, it takes a Dungeon Master and a group of players to make a game special.

One thing I very much want to emphasize on is "I am not Matthew Mercer" and if you expect me as a Dungeon Master to be like Matthew Mercer then I would say "go find you another campaign to follow" because I am not on his level, nor will I even try to be and to be perfectly honest I am not sure if the world has a Dungeon Master that even comes close to his level of story telling "well maybe but I have yet to see one". I try to run a good game where my players have a good time (plain and simple) and in the past my players have all had a great time so I guess I am doing something right.

Critical Role is a staged game, with some scripting involved - Matthew and his players are all voice actors. When you watch his campaigns, this is not what Dungeon & Dragon games are really like. His campaigns are strictly constructed to bring entertainment to his viewers.

What we try to do here is get together as friends (this is important) and enjoy our time playing TTRPG's like it was played 35-40 years ago. We don't bring anything from the real world to our table, we simply get together as friends and enjoy this beautiful game called "The One Ring" in all its glory.