Tolkien Quest System

An interesting aside; when I was younger, I had three of Iron Crown's Tolkien Quest fantasy gamebooks. These were sorta like Choose Your Own Adventure games, except instead of a single page, you went to an "entry" and there were several entries on most pages. There was also a small system of sorts for you to play a game, kinda like a solo D&D game, while you read the book, made choices, fought monsters, and tried to get to the end without dying. The most famous of them were the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, and they were fine as what they were, but their system was laughably simple and would never hold water as something you'd want to use as a roleplaying system.

The better (i.e., more detailed) series were Tolkien Quest (later Middle-earth Quest) and the Lone Wolf books. Both actually had systems that allowed you to create somewhat customized characters. While the system was dirt simple compared to D&D, which was at the peak of its mainstream faddish popularity at about the time this game out, I did always think that with the right GM, the system was adequate to actually play in a game, not just a solo run through the book kind of affair. The Tolkien Quest books in particular were unusual; it allowed you to use ICE's MERP system optionally and run yourself through the book. I had at least half a dozen of the Lone Wolf books, probably a few more than that of the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, and I had three of ICE's books, Night of the Nazgul, The Legend of Weathertop, and Rescue in Mirkwood. While the copies I had referred to upcoming titles; a good 8-9 or so of them, I never actually saw any of them at all beyond those three. Apparently, at some point, three more did actually show up, somewhere. The other three or four that were announced never did.

The other thing that made it very unusual compared to others that on some thick, slick paper with colored ink, like a color plate illustration, they had a hex map. Instead of simply moving around like a Choose Your Own Adventure like book, you were supposed to pay attention to what hex you were in, and when you finished doing whatever in that hex, it just said move on. You were then supposed to know that you were moving from hex 8D or whatever, pick a direction; say 9D, and go to the text for 9D. The Tolkien Quest books, more than any other of these, felt like playing an actual role-playing game. It was the closest thing to a usable system (outside of the confines of the solo adventure book itself, that is) that any of them had ever produced too.

In any case, I found a reproduction of the system, called QuestGame, and re-read it. Mostly, it is surprisingly usable. You could actually run a Middle-earth based game (or one with similar context on races and whatnot) with the system exactly as is. But for short campaigns, one-shots, etc. it would actually work very well, and have a similar rules-lite feel to OD&D. That's not to say that it would feel like OD&D. As was typical for ICE, you'd have to consult a chart every time you got into combat, for instance, it's one major downside for use in a generic sense; I doubt more rules-like fans would find that an attractive addition. Other than that, I'm actually surprised at how closely, in some ways, it resembles Microlite.

It has only three stats instead of the D&D-standard 6: although the names are slightly different, they are also the same stats as m20 (I think Mind is called Intelligence, and maybe Dexterity is called Agility.) It's got about 7-8 skills, although melee and missile attacks are skills, so that's really only one or two more than m20. They are also very similar. Weapons and armor lists are brief, and about the same complexity and similar mechanics as m20. Armor class (called defense bonus, or something like that) is also one of the skills. In this, they are if anything more streamlined than m20, by treating combat as simply part of their brusquely simplified skill system. Hit points, called endurance, are a bit on the generous side, but healing is slow and a bit difficult compared to D&D. And the magic system is much simpler; instead of spending some of your skill points, you can use skill points at character creation to get spells. There are about 15 to pick from, and their mechanics are very simple and modest, requiring very little interpretation to figure out, if any.

The advanced rules, which weren't really necessarily all that advanced, even offered modest (similar to skill-based systems like Chaosium's) advancement from one gamebook to another, if you chose to use the same character multiple times. And they had a formula option for those who didn't want to consult the combat table.

The Lone Wolf books were probably the only other ones that offered anything like an actual RPG-like experience, or a system that could be used for an RPG, including book to book character progression. I actually found this quite compelling when I was a middle-schooler in 1984-6 or so; the heyday of this kind of gamebook. Not that I've ever tried to use either system; Lone Wolf's or the Tolkien Quest QuestGame system (QG? Like GQ, but backwards?), but the point is that you could and the experience wouldn't be one that is unpleasant if you like rules-lite, OD&D-like gaming. If anything, it's an interesting case study in how lite can a rules-lite system go and still be usable. The super simple "basic" system is only three pages long (and these are pages that don't have a ton of text on them, let's remember), although that's the absolute bare minimum, which assumes you use the pregen character, and mostly just read the book while rolling a few dice here and there. Three more pages allow you to create a unique character, although the options for doing so are almost nonexistent; the only variation, really, will be in the dice rolls used to create the characters.

The Advanced System adds another nine and a half pages of rules, or so. Keep in mind that a few of these rules, like movement on the hex map, and time tracked, are unique to the gamebook experience and therefore have little if any application outside of it. This is a rules-lite system that is only about fifteen pages long. Granted, it has no antagonists; those appear in the book as needed.

I'm almost wondering if I could adapt these to use in Dark•Heritage. I'm not sure that I'd want to ever use it, but I do find the idea of doing so just as an experiment to see how well it could be done, kinda intriguing. Like I said, I'm not a huge fan of the combat table, and the combat formula is better, but probably still not great. Combat would probably be tedious and repetitive after a time, because few opponents have any abilities other than attacking; all you really ever do is swing your weapons back and forth until someone dies. But clearly, combat was meant to be somewhat infrequent in the book environment, and takes a back seat to enjoying the Choose Your Own Adventure in Middle-earth experience. ICE also made the interesting, although probably sensible decision to make the book self-contained; you could even pick a number without using any dice, using a table in the book, or flipping to numbers on the corners of the pages. Otherwise, they also didn't assume that the readers would have funny shaped D&D dice, so the range of numbers was 2-12; i.e., two regular dice like you probably had in several board games in your games closet or basement or wherever had what you needed without you having to go search out a somewhat esoteric tool from a weird hobby shop that maybe your town had and maybe it didn't, still back in the mid-80s. (Although most likely it did. Heck; you could buy D&D in department stores in the early 80s.)

In any case, the system wasn't really designed to be used by a GM as a rules-lite alternative to "regular" systems. Heck, this is ICE we're talking about, the inventors of Rolemaster. Rules-lite wasn't in their DNA; complex, chart-heavy simulationist gaming was their DNA. But it was meant to be simple enough that even younger readers could indulge in solo-adventuring using the Choose Your Own Adventure-like nature of the book, and get an honest-to-goodness RPG experience out of it with their character sheet. But seeing how eerily similar in some ways it ends up being to m20, I don't see any reason why you couldn't use the system as a "regular" RPG experience, if you're the kind of person who likes that kind of rules-lite, referee-rulings heavy experience that very early D&D would have been anyway.

As an aside, due to some lawyer passive-aggressiveness, this indulgence by ICE ended up mostly costing them their company. The Tolkien Estate brought Saul Zaentz company to court, saying that they didn't have the rights to license to ICE for this kind of book, and ICE was forced to pulp most of their unsold inventory, worth well north of two million dollars. Sadly, the three books that I had, which I bought before all of that happened, are quite rare now and sell for obscene prices online; like ~$200 a piece. By the time they were able to revive the line with a "fixed" license, the gamebook fad was fading, and they'd missed the chance to make big bank with it.