After a late night of drinking and talking, the last I want to do is wake up early. And yet, there's a rather annoying tradition Sunday morning wherein Sweet and maybe one or two other people have breakfast delivered to the room. Usually they have an 08:00 game and have to wake up and take a shower or whatever. Meanwhile I'm asleep, not stupid enough to get into a morning game if I'm going to sleep late. Too bad I'm a light sleeper because people make a *lot* of noise when they think they're being quiet.

This time though I don't Dave had a game because the meal came in at 09:15 or so. Anyway, I finally went back to sleep after Sweet left. I woke up and Chris was still asleep and Dave came back from whereever he went. Not too sure what we did then. Actually, Dave and I went down to the dealer rooms and I bought the last four Red Alert! starter packs that Eric had. That's a rare item since they didn't make a lot before LUG lost the license. Later I went to the 13:00 MERP seminar. This one was done by three guys, long time MERP gamers, at least one of whom had worked for ICE.

The first half was the actual seminar. The first guy talked about using a little bit of realism to bring a campaign to life. Mostly common sense things, be well read, think about ecology, add a bit of economics. The second guy talked about making magic magical. Don't dwell too much on the mechanics of magic, know when to introduce a little bit rather than a lot, have players play humans because that's how Tolkein depicts the world -- through human eyes. He also talked about evil and corruption and how it affects characters. As characters become corrupted you can present the world through their eyes: did the peasant stabling your horse take something out of your saddlebags (or did you just drop it)? The last guy, I forgot what he talked about.

Then they talked about MERP and its future. ICE did a great thing with MERP, it steadily produced MERP modules for 15 years, keeping the world alive and the players happy. Look at Tekumel, another wonderfully detailed world that has suffered through three bad publishers with very little gaming material printed. In contrast ICE put out detailed modules and supplements, each with a wealth of material that was really outstanding compared to anything else out there.

But that became one of the problems with the system. The first generation of MERP products (the one with the different color covers) included modules that, although detailed, were still fairly small and self contained 32-page books with a more or less ready-to-run adventure. Then there were the 128+ page supplements which had lots of background material but no immediately useful adventures.

The second generation of MERP products (with the grey-black covers) were only supplements, and big ones two. A couple were 256 page monsters and most were more than 128 pages. Partly this was because that's the material that was being submitted to ICE, but also because the owners and other people in ICE (seasoned gamers all) wanted those kind of supplements. Unfortunately, that made it very hard for newcomers to get into the system. There was a steep curve of commitment from game masters before they could run a MERP campaign.

It was an inverted pyramid. Most of the new products catered to the top of the pyramid -- the veteran players. Few products were produced for the bottom of the pyramid -- the new players. In consequence, the MERP demographics aged year after year without a good infusion of new players. But another problem with older gamers is that they don't game as much, which also results in less sales.

Another factor was the actual license, which rose dramatically after the movie deal to something on the order of $250k a year to license Middle Earth. During the last round of lean times ICE kept the MERP license 3 years too long. They weren't selling enough MERP products, they were hoping that the movie (which was taking years to even start filming) would be finished which would invigorate sales, the owners loved MERP and didn't want to let it go. So they kept the license, racked up a big debt, and then couldn't pay Tolkein Enterprises, which shut them down by calling in all their debts.

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