Richly detailed heroes and personalities are what lend Tolkien's works much of its wonder. And it is through these heroes, or characters, that ME-PBM is played. The only way you can affect the world is by giving your characters orders: you issue orders to your characters, who, through implementing them, then affect your nation and the world around them. Throughout the rules we have used the convention of saying that ‘you’ may do something: this, then, refers to the fact that you can order your characters to do something. Your nation begins with eight characters, many of which are taken from Tolkien’s writings. Each turn, your characters will be pictured on your results sheet, together with their name, character ID, statistics, and the results of any acts they have performed that turn. The character’s ID consists simply of the first 5 characters of their name (ignoring case and accents, but including punctuation and blank spaces), and is used to refer to that character – and for others to refer to them – in orders (detailed later).
The content in the Characters section is from numerous sources, including player contributions and from The Middle-earth PBM Guide by Middle-earth Games.