Tolkienesque Fantasy

So. I had this dream last night. It was basically a 60s British sit-com called “Tolkienessque Fantasy”.

The idea is that all the things that Tolkien wrote about were actually real. There is a real “Middle Earth” and Hobbits and all that. He would “go down there” and report his findings in books. Silly? Yes. It gets sillier.

So you have Professor Tolkien circa 1960-1965, and he has two college students. William, his studious grad student, Polly, a ditzy undergrad and his secretary/housemaid Donna, who for reasons I am not clear on, was called “Dondo”. Polly and William were both very Mod.

So this lot would adventure every week down to Middle Earth. William would approach Professor Tolkien about some minor detail about Middle Earth history (I suppose there are courses in Middle Earth history at Oxford in 1961) and Tolkien (who seemed very Hobbit like) would declare “I don’t know. Shall we go down to ask Bilbo?” and off they would go on one madcap adventure after the next.

Did I mention that all my dreams are usually this detailed?

Anyway, I thought it might make a fun game model. It’s one part “The Hobbit”, one part “The Chronicles of Narnia”, a tiny part “Doctor Who”, and a little bit of “Are You Being Served?” and “Faulty Towers”. Approach Middle Earth from a modern frame of reference. Played totally as a farce mind you. This wouldn’t be Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or even Jackson’s or Bashi’s. Maybe it would be Rankin-Bass, but there is an obvious cartoon element here.

So if I ever get the desire to run a 60s game and don’t want to get into all the drug culture or psychedelica of the time, I might try this.