At Long Last, Moria

Reviewing Moria: Through the Doors of Durin

There’s really two essays here. One is a rumination on Moria, the greatest dungeon in the history of fantasy literature, and how its manifested in roleplaying games. The second is a much more specific review of Moria: Through the Doors of Durin for The One Ring RPG, published by Free League.

Let’s start with the easy part first: Moria: Through the Doors of Durin is an excellent, if not flawless, product that’s well written, lovingly illustrated, and smartly conceived. It’s 288 pages on thicker paper than most RPG books, making it both beautiful and monumental. It has some unexpected delights in it. If Moria interests you, you’ll enjoy it. Oh, and it comes with a lovely poster map.

Moria poses unique challenges for an RPG; it is frustrating both in what it reveals and in what it conceals. Much about it is very well known, which can make it difficult to find a way to introduce characters to it. We know, for example, that Balin led an expedition into Moria, which sounds like a fantastic campaign premise. But we also know everyone on that expedition died within 5 years. So, I hope your table likes tragedy.

At the same time, Moria is immeasurably vast, a dwarven city and associated mines thousands of years old. The shortest path through Moria is 40 miles long. No single book could possibly document all that. However, that scale leaves enormous blank spots on any map, and its in those blank spots that a gamemaster can do, well, almost anything. Tolkien himself wrote that it would be up to “other hands and other minds” to continue the story of Middle-earth, and those blank spots are an invitation.

Gareth Hanrahan is lead writer on Moria: Through the Doors of Durin and he’s made some smart choices that inform this book’s structure and how it works. Hanrahan wisely understands that there’s basically three kinds of Moria adventure. The first, illustrated by the Fellowship themselves, is the Journey Through. In a Journey Through, the player characters go into Moria because they have no other choice, and they have one goal: to get out as fast as possible. The second kind of adventure, illustrated in The Hobbit when Thorin leads his company into Smaug’s lair with the hope of recovering the Arkenstone, is the Treasure Hunt. In a Treasure Hunt, the player characters are looking for a specific item or a specific place, and they’re basically on a raid. They’re not going to linger in Moria any longer than they have to; they intend to get in, get the McGuffin, and get out. The third and final kind of Moria adventure is the Reclaim, illustrated by Balin’s expedition. A Reclaim adventure is a whole campaign built around the idea of going into Moria and staying. It means cleaning out the Orcs and whatever else is in there, potentially re-opening the city.

Free League’s Moria supports all three of these kinds of adventure, but in different and unexpected ways. The introduction claims to support only the first two, the Journey Through and the Treasure Hunt, saying that re-opening Moria is “beyond the scope of this book.” But, in fact, the last 36 pages of this book are devoted to a robust solo play mini-game in which you, the player, create a heroic Dwarf, build a band of redoubtable Dwarf allies, join Balin’s expedition, and participate in the 5-year quest to reclaim Moria. A solo RPG is not for everyone; if you consider the primary benefit of role-playing to be social interaction (as I do), you might never play this mini-game. On the other hand, there is something beautiful about turning Middle-earth gamers into prose novelists, writing the story of their exploits down into their own Book of Mazarbul. Tolkien called the process of authorship “subcreation,” because he saw himself as a creator working inside someone else’s (that is, God’s) Creation, and creating was a way for us mere mortals to imitate that great Creator. It’s a sacred act. And the final 36 pages of Moria: Through the Doors of Durin encourage you, the reader, to join in that act of creation. But all that poetry aside, it’s well supported and looks super cool.

Moria: Through the Doors of Durin does not attempt to document every road, mine, and hall of Khazad-dum. Instead, it details 26 “landmarks,” a format introduced with the second edition of The One Ring. These landmarks are scattered all over, from the cloudy peaks atop the mountains to the open spaces outside each of the well-known doors, from locations the Fellowship walked through to places only hinted at (like the lair of the Balrog or the flooded depths through which Gandalf and the Balrog passes). Most of the locations detailed in this book are wholly new to it, not mentioned in the source material at all. Locations that are taken from the source material are always detailed and elaborated upon so there are surprises the players will not expect, and ways for the location to generate new stories.

Hanrahan points out that the defining features of Moria is that it is dark and empty. Nevertheless, there are a surprising number of nonplayer characters included in this book. Most are enemies of one form or another, of course, but not all. Several have a distinct Gollum-like feel to them, but there are Orcs and Goblins aplenty; Dwarves traitorous, captured, or enslaved; and many new monsters—though it feels weird to call them that. Hanrahan works hard to ensure any new creature, spirit, or what have you in Moria feels appropriate to Middle-earth and I respect that. Some fantasy settings—I’m looking at you Hogwarts—suffocate under a limitation that no new monster, no new spell, can be introduced into that world without the imprimatur of the original creator. This would have left us with a Middle-earth populated by nothing but Wolves and Spiders, Orcs and Goblins, and that would cripple an RPG. Instead, we’ve got giant cave bats, a monstrous centipede, dwarven wraiths, fire-spirits, and much more. The Orcs and Goblins feel very orcish in a Tolkien way, so they are sometimes sympathetic and often funny or a bit ridiculous.

The book includes a couple of chapters that set the table for Moria in your campaign—how to run it, what the major themes are, what characters know about it—and customizing The One Ring’s journey rules for Moria. All of this is really solid and useful, often relying on tables to help a gamemaster flesh out Moria as the players discover it. In contrast to traditional “dungeon crawls,” the players are not expected to be mapping as they go, and every mile, or even every day, of travel is not documented. Instead, in Tolkien fashion, we pass quickly over the boring stuff to get to the important decision moments and scenes in which the themes of Moria manifest.

I can’t finish this review without pointing out a couple of weak spots in the book. I don’t do this out of maliciousness or to dissuade you from checking it out, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to make the book better. Moria: Through the Doors of Durin has two kinds of illustration: beautiful line art depicting scenes, and architectural illustrations of each landmark. These latter illustrations are often awe-inspiring, and I love using them at the table, because they just look impressive. These are not tactical battle maps; there’s no grid square. They’re also empty of Orcs or anyone else. They show what the place looks like, and I love showing them to players because they can then imagine their characters in that space. This style of art was an innovation of the second edition of The One Ring and it’s great.

But some of these illustrations in Moria: Through the Doors of Durin are just not as good as the rest. I suspect one of the artists they hired is just not as experienced as the others. I understand this; there’s a lot of these places to illustrate, and giving them all to your one best artist just isn’t practical if you want this book to ever actually come out. “The Fortress of Malech” is where I noticed this, and once I did, I instantly spotted the other illustrations by this same artist. And, honestly, I would probably not show these pieces to my players. The other ones look so good in comparison, the bad ones are just a sad trombone noise. This is important because it really does affect how I use the book. I want to send players to places with cool art, so I can show them that art, not to places where I have to keep the book to myself.

And, finally, Hanrahan says this on page 12:

Moria is not a ‘classical’ dungeon, of the sort found in many tabletop roleplaying games. It is not a series of rooms linked by neat corridors, each room containing a suitably balanced group of wacky monsters or some over-the-top puzzle.

These are the kinds of cheap shots a good editor saves you from taking. I don’t make fun of your games, man, and you can make your point without mocking the kinds of adventures which millions of people around the world enjoy.

I didn’t get around to my larger thoughts on Moria, and this review is already long, so I’ll wrap here. Check out Moria: Through the Doors of Durin, or its near-identical sibling, Moria: Shadow of Khazad-dûm, which replaces all the game specific text of The One Ring version with game stats for D&D 5th edition, a game of wacky monsters, over-the-top puzzles, and suitably balanced encounters at the end of neat corridors.