Jeff salutes: Graham Staplehurst

I don't really know anything about Graham Staplehurst other than his credits: Robin Hood (the Rolemaster/HERO sourcebook), Angmar, Minis Tirith, Phantom of the Northern Marshes, Gates of Mordor, as well as White Dwarf articles stretching from #18 to #93, including all of these MERP articles:

Issue #64 - "The Dawn of Unlight: A MERP/AD&D Scenario in the Forest of Mirkwood"
Issue #73 - "Star Spray" - another MERP/AD&D dual stat
Issue #77 - "A Secret Wish: An Adventure for MERP and D&D"
Issue #79 - "Where and Back Again? Or, Starting a Middle-earth Campaign"
Issue #87 - "Taurëfantô" - also MERP, set in Mirkwood
Issue #89 - "On Ealden Byrgen" - actually a Robin Hood adventure
Issue #93 - "Letters From A Foreign Land: Multi-System Adventure for 3-5 PCs"  Purportedly statted up for WFRP, MERP and Call of Cthulhu!

Back in the day I got Robin Hood when it first came out.  I recall thinking it was pretty dang good, but without orcs and wizards I didn't see much reason to run it for my game group.  I think that's the big problem with medieval historical games in this hobby: they can feel like D&D Minus.  Still, Mr. Staplehurst did great work with the material.

I've got two of his White Dwarf adventures, "The Dawn of Unlight" and "Star Spray" and I think they are pretty excellent.  Each takes an incident in the Silmarillion and explores its ramifications in the age of Bilbo Baggins, giving a real epic turn to the PCs activities.  Another virtue of both is that they're short, maybe 3 or 4 pages each, but easily expandable into large arcs with suggestions how to do so.  And in "Star Spray" there's a side quest where you try to capture a live wooly mammoth for a circus.  How sweet is that?  The only thing that may annoy some is that there's a little bit of the Big Important NPCs The Players Are Supposed To Watch In Awe, but they all have stats so if the party really wants to backstab them they can.

Any other Graham Staplehurst fans out there?  How are his full-blown MERP modules?

Additional: While researching Mr. Staplehurst I came across a MERP article in White Dwarf written by someone else.  Martin Veart's "Up and Coming: A Look at Levels in Middle-Earth Role-Playing" in issue #80 sounds intriguing.  With MERP rating a typical orc warrior as level 3 to 5, I've always wanted to see an explanation for what a first level adventurer represents.  Are you a kid at first level?  I remember one MERP session where our entire party was routed by a single grumpy orc.

a couple of scans

Up first is a page typed up by my buddy Dave back in the 80's. We got into MERP for a while and he put all the Experience Points charts together. In MERP you get XP for just about anything interesting you do: crits to baddies, travelling overland, casting spells, maneuver rolls, killing monsters, even having a good idea.

The blank space in the bottom left has some mostly-erased chicken scratched totalling XPs for Tom, Chris, Eric and Colin.  That's all the regulars in my high school game group except Dave and me.  I think the handwriting is mine, so these numbers probably go back to my run of the starter modules in the back of the MERP rulebook or Bree and the Barrow Downs.  Chris ran some sort of warrior who was always scoping out poisons to put on his spear and Eric had an elf tricked out with max Dex, max bow skill, a crossbow and a single mithril-tipped bolt.  Their master plan invariable involved ambushing the monsters, Eric shooting the most dangerous-looking foe and then Chris poisoning the rest of them.  That campaign only ran maybe 4 to 6 sessions, but it was a lot of fun.  The players soured on the game after running into an enemy sorcerer who knew both Spell Store and Fire Ball.  The result was the entire party taking a C heat critical.

The gang murmured about switching games, so like a bastich I ran Call of Cthulhu next.  That actually went well until Chris's big game hunter used a Yuggothian freeze ray on the warp core of Tsathoggua's spaceship.  Dave's professor was the only one to escape the ensuing explosion.  He got away by throwing himself in a river, but then drowned in the rapids.  Good times.

Next up is a page from Steve Jackson's Fantasy Gamer, issue #3 (1984).  I don't have a story here, I just thought folks would dig a one-page character class that focuses on strangling people.