There’s no way to play the game itself using only what I’ve written. You’ll still need a GM (aka Loremaster) who has the full ruleset. If you have the same profound affection as I do for both Tolkien and RPGs, you will go out and buy a copy of this anyway. It is without reservation the best Tolkien treatment thus far. However, it pays respect to what has preceded it – you can see hints of MERP and the Decipher RPG in there. And, honestly, it would be worth the price of admission for the artwork alone, which is beautiful.

But back to the Quick Start: I think this is just enough of a ruleset, when accompanied by pregenerated characters, to let new players “follow along” with a knowledgeable GM. Its purpose is introduction, and my belief is that it is suited.

I plan to run one or several intro games via Google+ Hangout within a few weeks. My target is based on the release of Tabletop Forge, which is a Hangout App for playing RPGs.

TOR Quick Start

At length he shrugged. Only pointy-hatted morons bothered about such nonsense. Nat wore no such apparel.

An absurd thought stuck in Nat’s head, that the owner of this land could be held accountable for not making the greenery green enough to maximize the wellness of these horses. Back in the world, anyone who looked at Nat would see the angry halo of his guilt. The guilt of not being a perfect grass-tender. Only it wasn’t grass that he tended.

I’m not part of that anymore, he thought.

He hoped whoever lived here wasn’t so wired. Some people lived like that. Willfully disconnected, or gobbed with input-suppression plugins. Although – and this thought iced his stomach more than it should – there was no reason to think the horses themselves weren’t networked. Hell, they might not even be real horses. Nat had trouble shaking this idea, but in the end he decided it didn’t matter.

Whoever lived here. Back in the world it wouldn’t even make sense. That kind of ignorance was impossible. The punishment for Nat’s failure to predict had been to remove his ability to predict.

The horse’s head came up again, its mouth working. Sure looked convincing.

Some things are hard to detect. You have to be diligent. You have to keep looking. Moreaux crested the next pliant dune and peered ahead. He could not associate numerical adjustment with guilt or blame. It was them; they knew, and wanted him to fail to keep it quiet.

To the West there was a deprecated old highway. And a van. Moreaux knew it was them. The lizard-men were coming for him.

The lieutenant peered over his daily rag, squint-eyed with incredulity. “It’s calculating,” he said. And–flick!–up went the paper, hiding his face.

Finding an engine like that was rare enough on its own. But here was one in a jail cell, and its keeper so accustomed to his ward that he had become immunized to the wonder of it.

“Calculating what?” Sorley ventured.

The lieutenant drooped his paper again and regarded Sorley. The lieutenant had not considered this question. He opened his mouth to speak, and the engine fell abruptly silent.

Sorley, behind her, shifted his weight, drawing a creak from the belted instrument he wore. The lurker fled.

“Am I the sacrifice, or am I the cause?”

He felt sick.

The other perplexing thing about my academic philosophical career is that I kept almost all of my notes. I have a stack of them right here. They’re from before the age of laptops, and tablet computers existed only in Star Trek, so it’s just a bunch of dead trees with scribbles all over them. I have always been enough of a fan of handwriting to try out different styles, and at the time I was going through a phase in which I capitalized all the Ns and Rs. That’s not relevant to any particular point. It’s nice handwriting, good and clear and legible. And now I would like to start transferring those ideas into a format less susceptible to cat barf. I’ll treat them in whatever order they’ve been shuffled. On the top of the stack is Heraclitus.

Heraclitus was almost pre-classical, doing his thing in Greece five full centuries before the turn of our common era. He was a wealthy man. (That’s not a shock.) He wrote a book called On Nature, of which only about 1500 words have survived. His contemporaries gave him a nickname, The Riddler, because even in the glory days of philosophizing, nobody knew what the hell Harry was talking about. (I call him Harry. We’re familiar.)

A lot of Christians think logos has something to do with Jesus. In fact logos got its start with our guy Heraclitus, whence it was adopted into the wider space of Greek thinking generally. From there it passed down the centuries until Greeks and the inheritors of Greek culture were introduced to a particular Jewish cult, and they applied what was to them ready-made labels to the symbols they found therein. The ancient Greek term meant “word” but also all kinds of things connected to the concept of words, like pattern (this one is important), ratio, and reason.

Heraclitus said that change was the only constant thing in the universe. No thing or collection of things remained the same from moment to moment. If a thing seemed stable, that was an illusion. Strictly on the part of the perceiver, that is: the thing can’t make itself appear to not change — it’s your idiotic preconceived notions of stability. All this change nevertheless took place inside an ordered construct — a pattern — that repeated itself over and over. The pattern did not change; it was the cyclic pattern of change.

He had some rather wacky semi-atomic ideas with which he described how the pattern worked. It’s all based in fire, apparently, and the first element to emerge out of fire is…the sea. Yet more puzzling is that the sea gives rise to earth and to something that is either lightning or a snake. None of it makes sense physically. That didn’t matter to Harry. It didn’t matter to any of the ancient thinkers, because they had this notion of sympathy between the inner and outer worlds. That is, they thought our own internal states, thoughts, and emotions were intimately connected to the states of the external world. (I should hesitate to call this an ancient idea, although it is a hoary old one. What I mean is that it’s still just as popular today as it was back then. It’s a problem. By saying the world should work a certain way, we are shielded from seeing how it actually works.  It leads to mistaken notions, like Heraclitus’ crazy-town system of elements.) As far as Heraclitus was concerned, the make-up of the cosmos must be reflection of right philosophy. Since the pattern — the logos — was fundamental to all things, then this element of cognition, generally associated alchemically with fire (pyros), must be the base element of the universe. Ergo, water precipitates from fire. I doubt this was rigorously tested.

There were actually two sides to his elemental scheme, a downward and an upward side, condensation and rarefaction. A great wheel of going out and coming back in, emanating from fire to all the various forms and events, and then returning up an opposite path back to fire. It sets up a duality, and this duality he believed described all things. Opposite things require each other, he said. They’re not even two separate things! They’re the same thing on opposing sides of the logos-wheel. As such everything is a unity of opposites, stretched in tension across this Great Circle, and this tension Heraclitus calls War.

“War is the father of all and king of all,” says Harry. By this he means that the dynamism, the strife between the opposites, is the generative force that creates and sustains the universe. Let the tension collapse and the world withdraws entirely back to the primordial fire from which it came. Poof! Heraclitus saw this as being an act of will, or at least a sign of intelligent motive. The logos, then, the pattern, is God, the cosmic path. Travel down some centuries and introduce that idea to some Greek-speaking converts, and Bob’s your uncle.

Not every decision point gets fleshed out. Telling the story of every single skill acquisition would get stale, and would take forever too. So it’s just the main points, although it focuses a lot on the early stages of life. There are many other questions I might try to add to these charts over time — we’ll see.

The charts don’t take into account Nature, Resources, or Circles. I figure those are already described in ways that facilitate telling a story or two.

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