As a pretty big Tolkien fan, I wonder how people might have inserted him into the SR universe? The only reference I know of is the ork/troll group the "Sons of Sauron."

Do you consider Tolkien to just be another fantasy fiction writer, or someone who was inspired by "actual" SR pre-history. Perhaps he had a vision of previous worlds, but when he wrote LOTR, he didn't get it quite right, filling in the gaps with his own creations.

I've thought of creating a magical group along the lines of the Wizards of Middle-earth. I was going to have 4 orders, the White, Grey, Brown, and Blue, with training in spells and skills according to their specialties. The Valar (the dieties/arch-angels of M-e) can be mentor spirits.

A more extreme exercise is to create a variant of SR in which the sixth world has evolved from Tolkien's Middle-earth instead of Earthdawn. I'm not sure why you'd want to do this, other than for shits and giggles, but it would be interesting. Without Sauron, orks and trolls would have no evil motivation, but would be distrusted. Elves would probably not come from UGE, but instead "return" from across the sea. It would take some more tweaking, but could still work.

Dread Polack

Interesting thought. I should mention that in Tolkien, all of his wizards were, in fact, arch-angels of sorts, being one-step below the Valar (Gandalf=Olorin), but it's a cool idea for a magical group. Can you imagine the metaplane?

Here's a question...what does Sperethiel look like when written? Elvish script? How close do Quenyan & Sindarin (the languages Tolkien created) come to Sperethiel?

I think cultural references to Tolkien should be made in abundance, but I would rather make them ironic then serious. Not to disrespect Tolkien, just because I think it's more fun that way. I think you have to do either of the things you suggest if you are to mention Tolkien at all. Either you say he seriously had a vision of the 4th world, or you point some meta-game fun at the impropability of all the similarities between his work and the way things turned out.

I think Tolkien would be one of those embarassing references for orcs and trolls. I mean, the elves and dwarves come out okay, bar a few silly stereotypes, but the trolls and orcs are just painted as thick and violent.

It is probably going to be mostly subliminal though. Tolkien influenced most of the modern fantasy genre and the fantasy genre is where people would start looking to try to understand the new metahumans. So they half-expect a dwarf to prefer an axe to a shotgun and the elves to wear long flowing robes and use magic...

Sperethiel is a runic language, not like Tolkein's Elvish.

Off the top of my head, I can recall at least three distinct Tolkein references.

I can point you to one. Compare the heights of elves and humans. That's a very, very obscure Tolkien reference, as most games have elves as shorter.

Actually short elves are a D&D thing. I suspect trying to original not a complete rip off of Tolkien. The Elves mythological antecendants are Sidhe(celtic) and Alfar(norse) both of which are idealist human forms ie tall, a sign of good food growing up.

The story at the start of thev 2nd ed book makes reference to Tolkien in that he is just fiction and really torqued off the mettas, especially orcs and trolls.

Ophis, which do you think is more ripped off?

"What business does an elf, a man and a dwarf have in the Redmond Barrens?"

But seriously, I'd like to hear what people think of this concept: two gogangers - an elf and a dwarf - who are in a gay relationship, and are therefore known as "Legolas" and "Gimli."

Imagine Mothers of Metahumans pushing for a politically correct remake of the story. Har.

The three most memorable references were Thorin (from NAN:1), the Uruk-Hai from that Striper fiction, and the wizards paraphrase from Threats.

I don't think people seriously would believe that Tolkien had seen the Fourth World. Examples of similar things can be found all around you now, and we wouldn't say that literates are visionaries. Take "From the Earth to the Moon" as an example; do any of us really believe that Jules Verne had seen the future so he could describe the world as exactly as that? Or "20.000 Leagues of Underwater Travel", too.

Tolkien was working with existing myths and legends for his inspiration, too. Making his story the actual Shadowrun history really wouldn't work - there are too many differences (elves are all immortals, wizards are not human, orks were originally created from elves, trolls turn to stone if they get hit by sunlight, etc.).

There would be both ironic and fanboyish references to Tolkien (elves would probably like Tolkien, since they come off so well in it, while orks might resent their portrayal, even though there were no "real" orks when Tolkien wrote about orcs).

I had an outline written up for a Shadowrun campaign based on the Tolkien mythology as history (as opposed to Tolkien's writings being fiction within the SR universe). I never really got to run it beyond a couple of games, though.

Anyway, it kind of went along the lines of Aragorn kind of meshing up with Arthurian legend, what's left of the Dunedain meshing up with contemporary monarchies and so being "bred out" in the large part, the Elves and Dwarves buggering off in their own ways (their histories being lost for the most part and their existence treated as mythology or religious mythology), Hobbits finding obscure corners of the world away from humanity and slowly dying off or interbreeding, Orcs and Trolls dying/being killed off, the world going mostly "normal" for a thousand years or so... Then everything goes wacky again, with the world wars, harnessing of the atom, manned space flight, then meshing up with SR history.

All in kind of "conspiracy theory" runner-intel kind of way: Rumor was that Morgoth found a way back to Earth, a Silmaril was found (privately), Atlantean has something to do with the Dunedain, UGE was just a quicker way (think Eru and Aule) of bringing those more capable of fighting evil back to Earth (though some "immortal" Elves come back the way they left). Morgoth had something to do with goblinization (in order to breed his own armies), but Orks and Trolls turned out more freewilled than before, some dragons are Morgoth's tools, others aren't, and lots of other stuff I don't remember right now...

I never got to flesh it out as much as I would have liked. I had planned on doing so during game play, but for various reasons my interest in gaming in general kind of fell off (mostly due to moving and not finding the caliber of players here that I was used to, as well as not being able to get into gaming online). Anyway, I had a lot of fun piecing those things together. I really didn't find it too difficult to put everything together (Tolkien history, real-world history and SR universe), but I was okay with dropping some things in favor of others and really creating my own universe out of it.

The Encyclopedia of Arda turned out to be a pretty useful developmental tool for that.

Oh how I loves the bishies.

FanGirl - You would get along with the executive of the anime club that I used to go to often.

Lets just say, the majority of them are female and have a preference for yaoi ...

Boy, those guys have a word for everything!

Actually, I bet I would get along with the anime club executive; I seem to get along well with most fanboys/girls. After all, I'm friends with Emo....

Anyway, I don't intend for my Legolas and Gimli to exist solely as a source of cheap thrills (though they certainly could provide those...tee hee). I want them and their relationship to be as realistic and emotionally complex as I can make them, and I only hope I'm up to the challenge.

[ODD TANGENT]Interestingly enough, I first realized that I liked yaoi/boy's love-type stuff when I watched Elijah Wood kissing Sean Astin on the forehead at the end of the third LOTR movie. I have had a crush on Elijah Wood since I saw the first movie at age fourteen (Elijah's my bishie), so I really liked to see that pairing even though Sean Astin is kinda goofy-looking. [/ODD TANGENT]

And...cut!

As far as references go, the protagonist of "the loner" (I believe that was the title, the novel with wolf, the lonestar undercover cop) mentions "a bunch of people celebrating the 100th aniversary of the release of some book by some guy called Tolkien."

Her campaigns are probably the world's longest multiplayer yaoi games. I wouldn't be surprised if she had tentacle spirits statted up.

If Humanis loves it, what would the Tirs think? Probably required reading in their schools...