Certain Fathoms

A Collection of Middle Earth Adjacent OSR Modules

I have recently released Wilderlands https://dedzeppelin.itch.io/wilderlands on itch.io, a game of Tolkien-esque fantasy using Into the Odd and Cairn as a base. Throughout the playtesting process, I scoured Reddit, Discord, and blogs for adventures in the OSR that were an appropriate tone for either playing in Middle Earth itself by changing around the names, or playing in a world with similar tone and themes of Middle Earth, such as very few wizards, creatures who inhabit Middle Earth, and a more grounded, even somber tone than many of the great modules often recommended in the OSR now. Here is a list of the modules I will be recommending below, and I will try to discuss them with as few spoilers as possible - but if you want to avoid even light spoilers, send this list or blog to your DM and hopefully they can find some use out of it!

Without further ado, lets jump into the deep dives!

My first recommendation (with some caveats), and an inspiration for my own project, is Free League's One Ring materials, particularly their Moria supplement. The books themselves are produced to an amazingly high standard, and do well to convey the tone of how an adventure set in Middle Earth should feel. My largest complaint across their books however, especially in Ruins of the Lost Realm / Tales from the Lone Lands, is a lack of gameable content in the OSR tradition. Many landmarks are not strong in exploration or problem solving, and many adventures can be quite linear. From these publications I usually only mine ideas or concepts for my own content, rather than run as-is. However, these problems are mostly mitigated in the Moria supplement, which I find to be highly gameable and a clever way of portraying the mostly empty and foreboding lost city of the Dwarves - a pointcrawl through the deep, trying to avoid or outsmart the countless feuding orcs who make the ruins their home.

Here is where I will also mention there is reams and reams of materials for MERP (Middle Earth Role Playing) from the 80s and 90s to be found second hand or on scanned PDFs. I have little experience with MERP modules, but know they are set many hundreds of years before The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and represent the world before much of the decline that is seen in the published works of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. If that sounds interesting to you, it may be worth tracking down some older collections.

Next up is an OSR classic, Barrow of the Elf King. This is a great one shot or single session dungeon, with minimal changes required to drop it right into Middle Earth. When I ran it I changed the goblin child to a Hobbit child to match a Hobbit village I had nearby, but everything else I ran as is and it fit splendidly, with great decision making and exploration throughout.

A great start to a campaign, or a hook for future adventure is One Man's Tomb by Logen Nein on itch.io. Written for his system Ever On, a clever mix of the One Ring system and FKR principles, One Man's Tomb is about traveling to a small dungeon and finding a relic of the people beyond the sea, racing to beat the Goblins on the way as well. For a single page, One Man's Tomb evokes a strong Tolkien flavor and is perfectly paced for a single session - the reason I would recommend it starting a campaign or story arc is the relic to be found is completely unspecific by Logen, requiring you the GM to figure out what it is. In my opinion, some kind of object to direct the players like a key to Moria or a tapestry detailing the location of a lost Numenorean stronghold is infinitely more interesting than another magic sword, and that is the way I have played it.

Speaking of magic tapestries, we come to my favorite of the original TSR modules, Night's Dark Terror. With competing goblin clans, sieges, lost civilizations, and factions to negotiate with over a dynamic hexcrawl, this module is jam packed with thrilling story moments and player agency. While like all TSR modules I make some changes to both tone and content (such as giving important NPCs less 'plot armor'), I think you can't go wrong with slotting this into any campaign.

Another module I have had great success with is the DCC adventure Doom of the Savage Kings, where the adventures come upon a village that sacrifices one of its own to a otherworldly beast that attacks every three nights. The module does a great job of leaving exactly how to defeat the beast open ended, featuring large personalities like a petty Jarl and sniveling court wizard who run the village, witches, innkeepers, and thieves scattered amongst the cowed residents, and a populated dungeon and lair where tools to defeat the beast can be found. My largest complaint with this module is the linearity and lack of problem solving opportunities in the dungeon in favor of fun traps and battles in the DCC fashion, but that can be easily remedied by an experienced dungeon master who can tweak some of the challenges before running it.

A fun one page dungeon that I slotted into my Middle Earth game is the Burial Mound of Gilliard Wolfclan. Its a great dungeon packed with content for such a light publication, with a session of fun and diplomacy. My only change in bringing the dungeon into Middle Earth was to say the orcs in the dungeon were from the Misty Mountains, and introduced an orc from Mordor instead of an elf as the destabilizing force who took over this group. A great seeded adventure for a hex crawl.

Finally, I want to recommend The Necropolis of Nuromen for a fun, multi-session dungeon crawl through a dark wizard's fortress-become-tomb. I am not a huge fan of the overworld map and content provided in the module, such as the keep and general geography, with the Necropolis itself not even marked on the map. However, things quickly turn around once the dungeon itself is breached. Unlike other great dungeons like Hole in the Oak or Incandescent Grottos, Nuromen's abode has a consistent tone throughout, hewing much closer to Gygaxian Naturalism than Mythic Underworld styles - but fun exploration and problem solving is still found even as (most) of the denizens and traps have an internal logic to them. My suggestion would be to seed only the ruined village and dungeon somewhere in your campaign world, and plant rumors or other tasks related to the area to make your players aware of it.

These are the modules I have had fun and success running in my games of Wilderlands for Tolkien-adjacent adventuring, although I think they would be great in any OSR system where the GM is looking for a group of modules with a consistent tone. Hopefully you have discovered a new module or two for your own games!