Slaying the Dragon by Ben Riggs

Author:Ben Riggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

14

TSR AND TOLKIEN, OR THE GAME THAT WAS NOT

IN THE EARLY 1990s, TSR had the opportunity to produce a role-playing game set in Middle-earth, the fantasy world created by J. R. R. Tolkien. Given the fish-bait strategy, this would seem like an opportunity. Tolkien and his works already had a worldwide following. Creating a game in one of his worlds might bring countless droves of Middle-earth fanatics into the Dungeons & Dragons community. The man in charge of this effort would be editor John Rateliff.

He discovered the works of J. R. R. Tolkien while attending Magnolia Junior High School in Magnolia, Arkansas (“Home of the Cubs!”), by methodically consuming the contents of his school library. He began his digestion of the texts by looking at all the authors whose last names started with A. He chose all the books that looked interesting and read them. Task complete, he moved on to B. This continued until he reached T. There, he encountered The Hobbit, and he fell in love. He remembered, “The thing that appeals to me most about Tolkien is I’d never met anyone who thought about trees the way I did. I think of trees as individuals, not interchangeable.” He said that cutting down old trees to plant new ones never made any sense to him. “Tolkien really liked and appreciated trees, and he conveyed that,” he said.

Like Bob Salvatore’s, Rateliff’s life was forever changed by reading the works of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Rateliff said that growing up in Magnolia, he felt like “a fish out of water” and that he didn’t find people that truly shared his interests until he left Arkansas for the wide world beyond. He attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for graduate school because it was one of only two universities in America that had collections of Tolkien’s documents. The university’s Raynor Memorial Libraries hold “the original manuscripts and multiple working drafts” for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Despite this, during his time at Marquette, Rateliff was told by his faculty advisor that they didn’t want to catch him working on Tolkien. Disobeying orders, he would sneak over to the archives whenever he had free time to behold the hoarded Tolkien treasures housed within. He pointed out, “Things have changed, and Marquette is very proud of having the Tolkien collection now. It fascinates me how things change over time. Like D&D. D&D used to be a fringe hobby, but now it’s become a mainstream hobby. But D&D hasn’t changed that much. The people in the world around it changed.”

After graduation, Rateliff found work in publishing and, championed by fellow Marquette alumnus Jim Lowder, made his way to TSR. One day, he was called up to the executive suites and shown into a conference room. He’d rarely been up here before. This was the natural habitat of Lorraine Williams and her pack of vice presidents. It was all very fancy. The room had plush chairs and a large table with a glass surface and legs carved like dragons.

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