Like many Tolkien fans, we wanted to move to Middle-Earth. And like many others, we created a Role Playing Group to do so. The Inn of the Burping Troll opened February of 2002 on the Netscape LOTR Message Board and was soon populated by an exotic assortment of elves, men, hobbits and orcs, along with a bartending balrog and a lyrical warg. As the months passed, the personae we adopted took on their own lives. The characters brought in friends and relatives, and a mysterious stranger arrived to turn the place on its ear.

The second phase of The Burping Troll began with the creation of burpingtroll.com to archive the adventures the characters insisted we tell. New, more canonical, guidelines were established concerning our use of Tolkien's landscapes; however the warg, the balrog and the rehabilitated orcs refused to leave. Thus, our stories are set in the Fourth Age of a Middle-Earth where orcs play cribbage with elves, a balrog serves Rangers steaming cups of mulled wine and hobbit lasses scold the warg for tracking mud on the common room floor. That said, we strive to enrich, not distort Tolkien's canonical characters, places, situations and events, and we hope you will find our stories to be a worthy continuation of his glorious myth.