Okay for starters there’s this guy Hurin and he’s pretty cool and he goes off to war with his buddies the elves against Morgoth, and it doesn’t work out and Hurin ends up in chains before Morgoth and Morgoth is all “tell me where Gondolin is,” and Hurin is all “I don’t know where Gondolin is,” which is true he doesn’t know where Gondolin is but Morgoth doesn’t take no for an answer. He’s all “Do you see this rock? I made this rock. I made the sky, I made the sea, I made the hills and the valleys and they all take my orders because I am King Shit of Fuck Mountain, I’m one of the Valar, you tell me where Gondolin is or else I curse your children,” and Hurin is all “I still don’t know asshole,” and Morgoth is all “that’s I still don’t know Your Majesty of Fuck Mountain, just for that boom, big ass curse.” So Morgoth leaves Hurin chained up on Fuck Mountain, and does a mighty curse-whammy on Hurin’s whole family.

Meanwhile Hurin has a son who is really precocious he is an angsty teenager while still only nine, and he goes to talk to his family’s carpenter and ask about elves and Gondolin and the carpenter is all “I used to know elves, I went to war with elves, I mean me and the elves fought orcs is what I mean there, and they are awesome, they get like +2 to every ability and proficiency with all the exotic weapons, and I think we’d all be happier if they had never come over the ocean to here in the first place.” And Turin is all “I should go meet elves then” and Turin’s mother Morwen is all “yeah let’s go see elves, you go and I’ll catch up.”

But then Morwen realizes that all her clothes are out of fashion and the elves will make fun of her, so she doesn’t go, she stays behind in Hurin’s little kingdom which is totally overrun with bad guys at this point. So Turin goes on alone and he hangs out with the Fashionable Elves and they give him a bow and teach him to shoot arrows from it, like you do, and he grows up and becomes an Angry Young Man, and this one elf starts making fun of his mother’s unfashionable clothing so he and Turin get into a fight and Turin says screw this and goes off to be Robin Hood for a while.

Turin-as-Robin-Hood ends up in charge of this wandering group of Merry Men who had been just aimlessly screwing around on account of they had no leader, and he leads them on a glorious crusade against a senior citizen dwarf, who promises to let the Merry Men live in his house if only Turin agrees to not murder him for no reason. Turin reluctantly agrees, because the Merry Men are tired of getting rained on even though you’d think they knew what living in the forest meant and what they were signing up for when they became Merry Men. And one of Turin’s Fashionable Elf buddies shows up while the Merry Men are moving in, and Turin is off gathering potatoes or something, so the Merry Men capture the elf and are about to cut him open to see if elves really bleed wine as they have been led to understand, when the elf talks them into not torturing him to death for no reason.

This elf, by the way, happens to have brought with him from the armories of the Fashionable Elfking ANGLACHEL THE PLUS FIFTEEN BADASS AWESOME CURSED SWORD THE WIELDER OF WHICH IS CURSED, just because he thought it looked pretty. And Turin is really pleased to see this elf, and all of the sudden there’s panic in the ranks of the Merry Men, because Turin stops sleeping with any of them and starts sleeping exclusively with his elf buddy.  For serious the word ‘trysting’ is used.

Time passes, and Turin and his Merry Men become a force to be reckoned with among those who reckon forces that kill orcs at random. Meanwhile the senior citizen dwarf is getting more and more resentful of Turin and his Merry Men, who are all the time using his kitchen and not washing their dishes, and who track mud in all over the place, and who never buy any toilet paper or light bulbs or anything. The senior citizen dwarf especially dislikes the elf and the change in the trysting arrangements brought about by his arrival, because he and Turin and been getting along, so he decides to betray the Merry Men to a convenient sortie of orcs.

Turin kills a bunch of orcs, and for a while he’s wielding his elf buddy’s awesome cursed sword and he accidentally murders some of his favorite Merry Men at that point, but anyway, he loses the sword and he gets captured just like his dad did. His elf buddy follows the orcs as they’re leading him back to Fuck Mountain, and boom boom boom, the elf kills a bunch of orcs, which Turin sleeps through, and then unties Turin and Turin wakes up and is unable to distinguish his elf buddy from the orcs that had been torturing him, so he grabs the elf buddy’s CURSED SWORD and kills him. Whoopsy! He feels bad afterwards, but not enough to get rid of the sword, because it’s +15, even if it’s cursed.

Turin and another elf, who is also critically injured but not in fact at Turin’s hand, they go off to the nearest kingdom of the elves. These aren’t the Fashionable Elves that he was living with before, these are the Poor Judgement Elves. They fete him and bind his wounds and they clean up his cursed sword and rename it from Anglachel to Gurthang, because Anglachel didn’t get the whole “cursed sword of evil cursedness” message across strongly enough.

And Turin, this time instead of beating up elves and going off into the woods, he seduces the Poor Judgement Elfking’s daughter and institutes a bloodless coup displacing the Poor Judgement Elfking as commander-in-chief of the Poor Judgement Elfking’s army. And everyone lives happily ever after!

Until Smaug shows up. Okay it isn’t Smaug, it’s another dragon named Glaurung but it’s the same basic template. Turin and the Poor Judgement Elves rides out to fight him, and round one of combat Glaurung wins initiative and he’s all make a Will save Turin and Turin is all I got a 24, it that enough? and Glaurung is all NO.

So Glaurung taunts Turin and paints him a word-picture about how his mother and sister (he has a sister) have been sitting around in Hurin’s house waiting for him to show up, and Turin is all shit, I should call Mom, and he can’t call Mom because it’s the First Age and there are no telephones, so he rides off in the middle of the battle and all the elves are like WTF? while they’re getting murdered by orcs.

Turin goes all the way back to his family’s house, and he finds out that his mother and sister eventually went off to stay with the Fashionable Elves, leaving these nasty foreign guys with nasty foreign habits, Morgoth’s guys, in charge of everything. This pisses him off, so he kills the head foreign guy, and then he finds out that his aunt had been forcibly married to the head foreign guy, and she was using his position to ensure that the occupation went fairly lightly for all Hurin’s people, and Turin’s gone and screwed that up.

She’s all the hell did you do that for at least when he was alive they weren’t randomly murdering people on account of he knew it would piss me off now we have no defense against whatever sociopath they send to replace him and Turin is all then I’ll kill him too and then like four hundred guys show up with tanks.

Turin’s aunt is all fat lot of good you’re doing anyone anywhere and Turin is all well shit.

So he heads back towards the Poor Judgement Elfking’s kingdom, where he’d been de facto military dictator, and he finds out along the way that when the commander of the army deserts his post in the middle of battle things don’t go well for that side, and the Poor Judgement Elfking’s daughter had been captured.

He went to rescue her, but too late, some Merry Men had also tried to rescue her and just gotten her killed. Not Turin’s old Merry Men, but an unrelated group. In the First Age there were like eight thousand bands of Merry Men wandering Middle-Earth, hunting orcs.

And Turin runs off to yet another kingdom, this one not full of elves but instead human beings, the Foolish Humans, and they’re all wow nice +15 sword you have there mister and he’s all yeah but it’s cursed.

They’re all impressed by Turin, and are like want to become Minister of Defense? and he’s all why not and they’re all just tell us your name so we can put it on the coup d’etat planning documentation and he’s all I’m Turin son of Hur… you know what? Just call me Captain Makes Dumb Mistakes, but he says the last part in High Elven so it comes out Turambar.

Turin Turambar does the whole bloodless coup thing again and kindly permits the previous king to keep being called king and live in the nicest hut and so on. Meanwhile his mother and his sister, out living with the Fashionable Elves, they hear about the massacre of the Poor Judgement Elves and how Turin had been in charge, and they decide to go searching for him. The Fashionable Elves aren’t eager to let them go, but they’re insistent, and they ride out and whoops, there’s Glaurung the dragon again. Suprise round! Everybody make a Will save. Morwen, Turin’s mother, fails.  Niënor rolls a 1. That’s a critical failure. Normally you can’t “critically fail” Will saves, but this is Glaurung we are talking about.

Turin’s mother ends up cowering in the fog, and Turin’s sister goes stark raving mad, rips her clothes off, and runs hundreds of miles naked through the woods until she happens upon the Foolish Humans.

They’re all, whoa, extremely tanned naked crazy woman, better take her to Turambar and “King” Foolish. Turin and King Foolish nurse Turin’s sister back to health, and she gradually stops being crazy but she does have amnesia so they just call her Naked Tan Woman (it sounds better in High Elven) and then King Foolish wants to marry her for some reason, but then Turin also wants to marry her because CURSE.

Long story short Naked Tan Woman and Captain Makes Dumb Mistakes wed and Naked Tan Woman is soon pregnant. King Foolish is really pissy about the whole thing.

You can tell we’re getting to the end, because Tolkien would never let the incestuous child actually get born, so Glaurung shows up to initiate Operation KILL FOOLISH HUMANS. Turin leads the Foolish Humans on a sortie to take him out, except that all the Foolish Humans are like, wait, actually fight Glaurung? Have you noticed he’s the size of a major office building and he breathes fire, plus he has this crazy mental whammy where you fail a Will save and you start making very poor life choices?

Which kind of belies their name, ‘Foolish Humans.’

Regardless, Turin goes off himself to fight Glaurung, and yay, Turin wins thanks in part to his AWESOME CURSED SWORD. Man versus dragon!  Fafnir and Siegfried!  Richard Gere and Sean Connery!  Pete and Pete’s Dragon!

As he’s dying Glaurung bleeds on Turin, and Turin is all ew dragon blood and fails yet another Will save and goes unconscious. Naked Tan Woman comes running up, eager to see her husband and know whether all the noises she heard meant anything.

Like, those explosions, and Glaurung booming YOU GOT HER PREGNANT? MAN OH MAN I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT WAIT UNTIL I TELL KING SHIT OF FUCK MOUNTAIN crazy loud and everything, whether that means her beloved Captain Makes Dumb Mistakes is alive or dead. She runs up, she sees him lying there snoring, and she assumes he’s dead, because she’s not that bright, also CURSE.

But the shock is enough to suddenly cause her to recover her memory, because that’s totally how neuroscience works, and she realizes that she’s his sister and he’s her brother and she’s bearing his incestuous curse-baby, so she runs and throws herself off the nearest convenient cliff. She runs right past this elf on the way to see King Foolish on totally unrelated business, and pauses only long enough to tell him about it.

The elf completes his unrelated business, and mentions the whole suicide incest curse scandal thing to King Foolish in passing, just as after-dinner conversation.

King Foolish is heartbroken. He goes to the other Foolish Humans, and he fills them in on how Turin’s dead, Naked Tan Woman was his sister and she’s also dead, and now that whole curse thing is totally played out and surely it’s for the best. The Foolish Humans (who you may remember were basically taking their orders from Turin at this point, rather than from King Foolish) are really disappointed that he’s dead.

And then Turin wakes up, on account of he wasn’t dead, remember, and he goes back to the Foolish Humans expecting a big ol’ feast or party or orgy or something, celebrations about how Glaurung was slain, and boy, does King Foolish look foolish!

Turin doesn’t want to hear King Foolish’s story about Naked Tan Woman being his sister, but King Foolish tells him to look at the facts, and by facts we mean Naked Tan Woman’s broken body on the rocks below. So Turin realizes that yeah, she was his sister after all, otherwise she wouldn’t have killed herself, unless of course King Foolish killed her… He’s about to use his AWESOME CURSED SWORD to kill King Foolish, but then King Foolish is all this is totally crazy Turmabar and Turin realizes yeah, it is totally crazy.

So Turin decides the sane thing to do is kill himself. “Hey, cursed sword,” he says to his sword. “I’m talking to my sword and expecting a response, which is a totally sane thing to do.  Do you think I should kill myself?”

The cursed sword answers back “hell yes you should kill yourself you remember that innocent elf you killed way back in the seventh paragraph? I have been waiting for a chance to avenge his death for the whole story,” so Turin falls on his sword and dies.

MEANWHILE Hurin is still chained up on Fuck Mountain, and Morgoth, King Shit, has one of his trademark unexpected changes of heart, and lets him go. Morgoth laughs ominously the whole time, but Hurin doesn’t care.

Hurin runs all the way to the Foolish Humans, who have erected a little monument to Captain Makes Dumb Mistakes and Naked Tan Woman, and he stands there looking at the monument and working out the full ramifications of Morgoth’s CURSE, when along comes this totally decrepit beggar woman.

This crone is revealed to be Morwen, Hurin’s wife and the mother of his children, and Morwen confirms that being a homeless crazy beggar woman cowering in the fog for years sucks just as much as being chained up on Fuck Mountain, and then she dies.

The End! Plus a heartwarming epilogue in which the senior citizen dwarf shows up claiming Glaurung’s treasure hoard, but then Hurin kills him, and then King Foolish congratulates Hurin on his sound judgement and Hurin kills King Foolish too and all the Foolish Humans just to really run that point into the ground.