About Ranger of the Realms

I've always loved Tolkien, but only as a casual fan. I knew the movies, had read The Hobbit, made a couple attempts at the trilogy. The deeper lore (the Silmarillion, the ages before the Ring) were a hazy background mythology I'd never explored.

That changed watching Rings of Power. I found myself continuously pausing to look up explainer videos. Who was Celebrimor? What happened to the Two Trees? Why did Galadriel have that look when someone mentioned Fëanor? This is when I started to realize how deep the world Tolkien created really was. Not just deep—structurally different. He built languages first, then the peoples who spoke them, then their histories. That's backwards from how worldbuilding usually works, and it's why his world has a weight others lack.

On a train ride home from New York one night, I wondered: could I combine two things I love? My fascination with AI systems and my growing interest in Tolkien lore? Could I build something that would make the kind of explainer videos I'd been watching...on any topic I wanted? Could I make them high quality, educational, and interesting?

Two hours of working with Claude Code later, I was listening to episode one on my car ride home from the train station. It wasn't 'slop'. It was pretty damn good. Not perfect. But I loved it.

There's an irony worth acknowledging: the more I've worked with AI to create these systems, the more I've come to appreciate what human artists do. AI shows you what pattern-matching produces—the mold, the starting point. It also reveals what it can't produce: the choices, the restraint, the meaningful departures from expectation that make art art.

Yet this project has felt deeply creative. Piecing together the system—iterating until each outcome improves on the last, designing for taste rather than generic output—that's creative work in its own right, and it's on a topic I love. What started as on-demand Tolkien explainers for my own curiosity has become something worth sharing. I've learned more about his universe than I ever expected, and now many others are learning alongside me.

Perhaps that's the greatest respect I can pay to Tolkien's genius: opening his world to more people, hoping some will discover the depth that captured me. So quality matters. Every aspect of this system has been iterated to ensure it. Getting it right isn't pedantry; it's the only way to honor what he created. It has to have taste. It can't feel generic. And honestly? It's been a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy it...