DM of the Rings

Back in the days when I was an active roleplayer, every so often one of us would have the brilliant (brilliant, I say!) idea of keeping a journal of our games so that we could then write up our adventures and, presto!, have an instant fantasy story.

It turns out that this never worked out well in practice. As fun as the games were, translating them into fiction never quite panned out. Years later I realized that the problem wasn't that our campaigns were lame, it was that the media were too different.

Even though fantasy role playing borrows from the same settings as fantasy fiction, the types of narratives they generate are very different from one another.

The DM of the Rings is a humorous, yet perceptive, examination of this phenomenon in the form of a web comic that asks what would the Lord of the Rings have been like if they had been done as a fantasy RPG campaign. It is often achingly funny while, at the same time, serving as a good study of roleplaying as well as storytelling.

Be sure to read the author's comments at the bottom of the strips.