The RPlague

[Orual]

Just to clarify: if that was my Rie that was mentioned, she is not an elf. She's a human. It's also her nickname; her full name is Talmérië (no, it's not real Elvish, but it sounded a fair approximation). "Moonflower" I take no credit for, however.

As a writer, I find the "missing parents" cliché sometimes necessary for purposes of characterization. In "Search for the Book" I play a young man named Arethin, whose father is dead. This is to lay the foundation for his devotion and protectiveness towards his mother and younger brother, and to provide conflict when it came time to leave Dale. For sure people can overuse it for the angst factor, just as they can overdo sword-wielding warrior maidens, but none of these clichés in and of themselves are bad. A good writer can pull any of them off (though it would take a miracle to write a good orphaned, sword-wiedling warrior maiden with an unknown past and amnesia). Certainly the amnesia thing is way too easy to overplay, especially when it comes to young maidens who cannot remember a thing and thus fall immediately into the arms of the first roguishly handsome hero (or villain!) who happens their way.

Our Middle-Earth RPG settings, are, frankly, sounding less and less Middle-Earthly.

I'm not really sure what you mean by that. There are a lot of areas that Tolkien left open, as is inevitable in a world as big as Middle-earth. He (probably unknowingly) created a huge opportunity for games like we are so fortunate to have here at the Downs, and so all of the RPG's cannot be expected to be the same. Sure, some of the characters are a little clichéd or uncanon. But for the most part, I find my fellow players and the games fairly faithful to the spirit of Tolkien.

~*~Orual~*~