Games, Design, Culture, Politics...

When I was at Decipher in the aforementioned meeting with the people at Games Workshop about cross promoting our Lord of the Rings RPG with their Lord of the Rings miniature wargame my boss, the closest thing I’ve come to meeting a genuine Tolkien scholar, said “What you really want, but can’t have, is stuff from the First Age. Which would you rather be, a random dude from Minas Tirith fighting Orcs in the ruins of Osgiliath, or an Elf Demigod fighting an army of Balrogs?”

“Holy shit!” the guys from GW didn’t say, but should have, “That sounds awesome, what do we have to do to get that?”

“Wait for Christopher Tolkien to die.”

Christoper Tolkien is one of the sons of J.R.R. Tolkien and the executor of his literary estate. His father in the 70s sold the film rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to the Saul Zaentz Corporation, who created a subsidiary business; Tolkien Enterprises. Tolkien Enterprises has nothing to do with the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, except insofar that they are licensees in perpetuity as I understand it. Which means the license will never go back to the Tolkien Estate.

When someone, anyone, makes a movie based on the Lord of the Rings, or a game, or…pretty much anything except calendars which I believe are done through the publisher of the books, that movie or game is in some way produced through this license with Tolkien Enterprises.

New Line Cinema, for instance, bought the rights from The Saul Zaentz Corporation to make the movies with Peter Jackson. They had nothing to do with the Tolkien Estate, they went through Saul Zaentz & Co.

If you want to make a game based on the movies, and we did, then you have to go to New Line and get a license from them for their movies. You don’t have to deal with the Saul Zaentz corporation.

If you want your game to include references to anything in the novel(s) that isn’t in the movies, then you need to go to the Saul Zaentz Corp. and make a deal with them. You need two licenses, in other words, to cover the movies and the books. In neither instance are you dealing with the Tolkien Estate.

That’s what we did. Decipher licensed the movies from New Line (who bought the rights from the Saul Zaentz Corp) and licensed the books from the Saul Zaentz corp. Now we could include anything from either the original trilogy of books, or the new movies, in our game.

Getting our game done was kinda a pain in the ass, especially for someone like my boss who was, as I mentioned, a Tolkien nut. There was all sorts of stuff he’d like to include from, say, the Silmarillion or the Book of Lost Tales, but could not. Because the original license between Tolkien and Saul Zaentz covered only the original three books and the Hobbit. There was even some controversy over whether things mentioned in the appendix to the third book were covered by the license.

When you are working on a licensed property (and that’s all I ever worked on in the tabletop game business) you usually have to go through approvals which means submitting your work to the licensor, the guys who own the original property. Whenever we published a new Trek book, we had to first send it to Paramount and someone there, usually a very groovy dude, would read through it and let us know whether we’d presented the property in the right light. This isn’t merely fact checking, you understand. One thing we got dinged on early with Paramount was a picture of an overweight Starfleet NPC for a Trek book. The note came back; “Starfleet personnel are all fit and healthy.” On some things they would budge, especially if we could provide an example from the show, but on other things, like fat Starfleet officers, they would not.

Often this process first requires you to educate your licensor on what you’re working on. Our first guy at Paramount didn’t know what an RPG was and asked questions like “Do the players have to make their own characters?” And “do they have to be allowed to make up their own stories?” Don’t be too harsh on these guys, a lot of people don’t know what an RPG is and almost without exception Paramount was great to work with.

New Line and Tolkien Enterprises were great to work with too. I often see people blaming the failures, both real and perceived, of the Lord of the Rings RPG, or the Star Trek RPG, on the licensor, but in my experience we may have used them as an excuse, but the problems always lay with us. I mean, yes, it’s a pain in the ass to have to submit your work for review before publishing in the first place, but usually everyone wants the same thing; your product to be as good as it can be. You’re all on the same team.

The only problems that ever came about were a result, not of New Line or Tolkien Ent., but because of the Tolkien Estate, which is to say Christopher Tolkien.

He had nothing to do with our products, or indeed New Line’s movie, directly. But he was..strongly opposed to the movies New Line was making and therefore going over everything with a fine-tooth comb to find anything that he could use to revoke the license. If New Line, or Saul Zaentz or any of their licensees put anything in their books that was in direct violation of the licensing agreement, then Tolkien could sue and get the license revoked. Which he seems very much to want to do. So we had to be very careful, not because the people we bought the license from were particularly intractable, but because the ultimate SOURCE of the license in the first place was waiting for the opportunity to take the license away.

Most people, on hearing this, shout “boo!” Were it not for Christopher Tolkien’s attitude toward this stuff, you’d have all sorts of great stuff from the Silmarillion in your games and they’d be bad-ass.

Christopher Tolkien’s rationale for this, his opposition for virtually any work derived from his father’s novels, is not financial. He’s set for life. He’s also a respected professor and scholar in his own right. He appears, based on what I’ve read and seen, to be genuinely interested in protecting his father’s vision. And yours.

Thomas Aquinas once observed that when you look at a painting you are not appreciating the painting, you are appreciating that version of the painting which you have built in your imagination. You may not notice certain things the artist put in his painting, and you may imagine things in the painting the painter didn’t put there. You instantly create a version of the painting in your head which is unique to you. And it is this mental version of the painting which you are really appreciating.

Furthermore, he argued, that act of creation, you building a mental image of the painting, is just as valid an act of creation as the one the artist engaged in when creating the painting in the first place. The artist is a better painter, but he is not necessarily better at imagining the painting.

I often think of this while playing D&D. I have players who love to engage with the setting I’ve created and make up bits and play in character, and I have players who are really just audience members and perfectly happy to be so. I have learned that the latter players are not less creative than the former. Even the audience member is creating a version of my campaign in his head and that act of creation is just as valid as the GM’s. I long ago gave up trying to turn audience members into co-creators because I learned that they’re both appreciating the game, and to the same degree, just in different ways.

Christopher Tolkien loves his father’s work, and loves that version of it you build in your head when you read it. When you and I read The Lord of the Rings we both imagined Frodo and Gollum and Gandalf, and we each imagined them differently. My Gandalf does not look exactly like your Gandalf and it is this that Christopher Tolkien wants to protect.

It’s a battle he’s mostly lost with the Lord of the Rings, but he’s determined not to lose it with his father’s other work. For now, and for at least a couple of generations to come, Gandalf will be Ian McKellan. There are, of course, people who can see the movie and then read the book and their book-Gandalf won’t look like movie-Gandalf (when I read Star Trek books as a teenager, my Kirk didn’t look exactly like Shatner, I can’t explain why) but these people are in the minority.

For the price of getting to see the books on the big screen, New Line has killed our own creative vision. This is Chris Tolkien’s attitude and, having heard his arguments, mine as well. I loved the movies, but I loved the books more and now the latter will be at least informed by the former in my imagination. Gandalf will look like Ian McKellan. Duke Leto will look like Jürgen Prochnow. Good casting in both cases, but I was not consulted.

Sometimes people say to me “hey the movies are good for the books! Exposing them to millions more people.” Well, the books have been consistently popular for decades. They don’t need help. Movie or no, your grandkids will be able to buy them in a bookstore in decades to come.

If we still have bookstores.

End of Line

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