Saturday, October 5, 2024

Dungeons Deep And Caverns Old: Gareth Hanrahan On The ‘Terrifying’ Process Of Digging Into Moria For The One Ring TTRPG

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The week of Gen Con also coincided with the release of the newest supplement for Free League’s The One Ring TTRPG Moria – Through the Doors of Durin, and the 5E Lord of the Rings Roleplaying equivalent Moria – Shadow of Khazad-dûm. Being a huge Tolkien nerd I of course have been vibrating quietly for months at the prospect of digging into one of the coolest places in Middle-earth, and as such jumped at the chance to talk to The One Ring designer Gareth Hanrahan at Gen Con about the creation of the new book.

The Doors of Durin from Moria: Through The Doors of Durin
Annon edhellen, edro hi ammen.

As a big Lord of the Rings fan and a fan of The One Ring, I’m so excited to chat with you. I want to start by talking about Moria itself, which maybe one of the most requested Middle Earth locations to explore, and most interesting places in the whole setting. So what was it like getting to actually dig into Moria (no pun intended)?

Gareth: Terrifying.

Yeah?

Gareth: The reference point I keep going back to is Gimli’s line about the Caves of Aglarond where the dwarves would tend these flowering glades of stone and do one tap a day for a century, slowly opening up new vistas. My very, very first roleplay experience was to give a card sheet saying, your elf is passed through Moria. I remember looking at the old Moria books. I know how much psychic weight this place has. It really is like the Ur-dungeon. So delving in there was… absolutely terrifying because you know you it has to be right. It has to be perfectly right because everyone has their own conceptions. So you’re trying to stay as true to Tolkien, still making it useful, making it playable, giving enough details the GM feels that you’re supporting them, but also to make it their own.

So the very first chapter of the book was the chapter on tone and mood. How to make it feel right for Moria. That is my own sort of like you here’s what you need to achieve with the rest of us. That made it easier, because I have a path to follow in the darkness.

The gates of Moria
 “We must face the long dark of Moria. Be on your guard. There are older and fouler things than Orcs, in the deep places of the world.”

With the other books we started to navigate a bit away from the material covered right in Tolkien’s books. All the stuff in Eriador, in Mirkwood — it’s areas that the characters were near but nothing actually impacted on their journey. Whereas with Moria, that’s right in the path. And while obviously GMs can do whatever they want in their games, you know, to hell with canon, we’d had to trod this very, very careful path between giving the players lots of stuff to do and adding lots of orcs to kill, and also ensuring that it would all line up with canon later on, because as the licensor and like, you know, the game line going forward, it all leads to the… in alignment but also your own campaigns can deviate wildly.

There was a lot of very careful thinking about what the players could do that wouldn’t impact things. In the original draft back in the day you’re playing Balin’s Expedition and we’ll be able to redo it all, but now we’ll be a bit more flexible, we’ll set it before that and basically make it more of a generally usable supplement. You can hop in tomorrow for a quick visit, which obviously won’t impact on canon at all. Or you can tell them we’re playing The Reclamation, we’re going to go kill that Balrog.

I’ve really enjoyed, you know, broadly, is the way you’ve been able to play in those margins. People obviously want to go and experience what they’ve seen in the movies and the books, but getting to go into, Arnor or Eriador, the deeper levels is so cool.

Moria Through The Doors of Durin Red Nail's House
“Far, far below the deepest delving 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.

Gareth: It’s such a sacred document for fantasy. There’s a bit where The Fellowshop is pushed to The Chamber of Mazarbul and Frodo feels tunnels off of the darkness. Anytime you try and explain a mystery or explain the unknown, it loses power. There’s a mission in The Path to Dead where there’s a skeleton crawling through the door and that’s a fantastically mysterious and powerful image, its unknowable.

With Moria, we had to offer suggestions and options and possibilities of what might be on there. But we sort of left it flexible enough so players observed some mysteries and explored others. It is an incredibly delicate balance, the act to get it right. I must say, I said I was terrified writing it. I was even more terrified when it actually came out. Because I thought I’d done a good job, but until a wider people were ready to come and talk, I couldn’t be sure that I’d threaded that needle. It was. probably the most nerve-racking release ever for me.

What Tolkien does that it makes the world alive, you know, and people build it up so much, they build up in their stories, in their heads going off the notes. You’re drawing the curtain back just a little bit.

Gareth: And the other thing is, there’s a huge difference between novels and books, or novels and games, because Tolkien can, like, you know, draw the curtain back a tiny little bit. and let it drop back. And he used this fantastic line about that, and the essence of it is you’re on a mountain peak and all the mists part, and you see this land drenched with sun glides in the distance. And then you have the mystery of the worlds you never explore. But in role-playing games, you push the curtain back, and the players go, “right, curtain!” [EN: At this point Gareth mimes yanking a curtain back]

The Balrog in Moria Through The Doors of Durin
“You fear to go into those mines. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum… shadow and flame”

I would say, some players hear Gandalf say something cryptic and they’ll go, look, explain that. Give us bullet points of what we should be doing. Stop talking in riddles. It’s just such a narrow line to that. I’m so glad we got, I think, most of the way there.

Is there a part that you really enjoyed getting to explore and write about?

Gareth: There’s one thing I wanted to do is add a bunch of side entrances, like other ways in, because canonically we’ve got Westgate and Eastgate. But there’s more traffic out there, the Orcs are running out, the Dwarves. So my favorite one, there’s a human settlement in the mountains north of Moria. And at one point generations ago they dug down and broke into a tone of the connects to Moria. And one of the things we’re gonna do is the vast scope of history. Moria fell a thousand years ago. These are short lived, mortal humans. They’ve heard legends of this dark place down south, but they haven’t made the connection. They think they’ve broken into this like, you know, mysterious underworld, it’s like a realm of the gods.

Gates in Moria: Through the Doors of Durin
“Dark is the water of Kheled-Zaram, and cold are the springs of Kibil-Nala, and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dum in Elder Days before the fall of mighty kings beneath the stone.”

I was going to just sort of take, I can’t say everyone knows Maria, and look at it from a totally different perspective. hese people who don’t know they’re exploring the Dwarrodelf, who just think happened upon these wonders. Like medieval people breaking into a Roman tomb.

You can grab Moria – Through the Doors of Durin and the 5E equivalent Moria – Shadow of Khazad-dûm now on the Free League Publishing shop, at DriveThruRPG, and at your FLGS.

Images via Free League Publishing

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  • Dan Arndt

    Fiction writer, board game fanatic, DM. Has an MFA and isn't quite sure what to do now. If you have a dog, I'd very much like to pet it. Operating out of Indianapolis.

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