DM Mike being unavailable to run the Random Encounter group through Dungeons & Dragons adventures this week, we shall instead travel to other realms and play by other rules. This Sunday will be Iron Crown Enterprises' Middle-Earth Role Playing, run by GM Bob. Most of the group skipped gameday, but we picked up two players from the hobby store regulars at Out of the Box and that gave us four players and a GM. I'd never played any of the I.C.E. games, so this was all new to me. The system is very skill based and being old school, the skills involve a bit of math to figure out the values. Fortunately, there was a hefty stack of premade characters to choose from. I left mine with the GM, so I don't remember much about the character specifics. I choose a mounted warrior, I believe he was a rider of Rohan. So, some armor and a sword, bonuses to fighting on horseback. He was a warrior, that's really all you need to know. We started out defending a small fort that was exper...