The One Ring 2E

I’m not sure my readership is the target audience for this. I’m not sure who my actual audience is anyway. I have written so infrequently as of late that I thank any of you who are returning to me or reading my work for the first time.

Lord of the Rings is more than a few books that were written by some long dead fellow. Lord of the Rings is a rich dynamic world that brought about fantasy to our world. A rich world, or maybe more appropriately, universe that has inspired millions through books, movies, cartoons, board games (some better than others, I’m looking at you LotR Monopoly, what a money grab), card games (I recently discovered and have fallen in love with LotR TCG a Living Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games), television series, and of course TTRPGs.

The One Ring was born in the 2011 under the title The One Ring: Adventures over the Edge of the Wild by Cubicle 7. It was published until 2019. Afterwards it was bought by Free League Publishing.

Game Mechanics and the Dice

The original game’s mechanics included a dice pool system and you must meet a target number. this system largely remained intact in its second edition. One of the defining feature I might add is that there is a single 12 sided die rolled along with a number of 6 siders that are determined by your various stats and bonuses originating from equipment and the like. The 12 sided die has a couple of special features on it however. Only 1-10 are enumerated on the sides. The remaining two faces hold a Gandalf Rune and Eye of Sauron respectively. The 6 sided dice contain either filled in numbers or empty numbers (See the image below if this is at all confusing.) These help to determine certain things at certain points depending on how worn down the characters are. I will not be giving a full rules break down here today.

TOR 2E Official Dice Set, image from Free League’s Site

So We have cool semi customized dice, could you play with regular dice? Absolutely you could, so one should not feel overly compelled to purchase these, except they are pretty cool. I like the feel of the dice and they look pretty nifty and work well during play, making it much easier to explain to your players that the 11, when rolled, is really an automatic failure because it corresponds to the Eye of Sauron.

But how does the game run?

Well there are a lot of rules that are present for many good reasons. I like the rules, they represent the feeling of an adventure in Middle-earth, where the journey is mainly the adventure.

All that said I do not think I will run the game again, at least not with these rules. For all of their cool adventuring checks and hidden maps, and cool dice mechanics; they are just too much for me to want to keep track of.

I played through a good portion of the Starter Box adventure with my players and we bounced a bit off of all the rolling and extraneous rules that were meant to granulate the game. In practice I can see a hardcore group of Middle-earth fans taking the time to play the game and learn all of the intricacies that seem like they would add up to an amazing experience, but my group, this is not.

This is a game where the parts matter to the whole. I do not feel that this game is for drop in drop out groups. My home table regularly is unable to make it on various nights and with 3-6 people showing on any particular game night it becomes ever so hard to plan out what game we will be playing.

I am Still Recommending This Game

I will not run this game again, at least probably not for a long time. But I love LotR and Middle-earth, and the books themselves are lovely. They contain a good amount of lore about the setting. I love reading through the books and learning more about the wonderful world of Tolkien.

I should briefly take a moment to introduce the different pieces to The One Ring 2E.

there is a starter set which comes with a slightly abridged rule set. A 5 part adventure, this adventure is very railroaded and does not slowly let up on the “hand-holding” as you move through it, which is what one might want from a learning product. The setting guide is well written and mirrors a lot of the Prologue; 1:Concerning Hobbits, 2: Concerning Pipe-weed, 3: Of the Ordering of the Shire, and NOTE ON THE SHIRE RECORDS from the Fellowship of the Ring. Finally it comes with a few small things that can be used in this and further adventures like the combat cards and some item cards a double sided map of Eriador and The Shire.

It is a cool product that I would recommend if you are at all a lover of Hobbits… Yeah see where I’m going here?

The full TOR rulebook is a lovely piece that after going through the rules (again I restate tehy are not bad, just more than I or my group wants to have to deal with). The pages are beautiful with their cream color, images are mostly line drawings or beautiful (oil?, watercolor?) paintings that work so well to bring the world alive. There is a lore section that goes over the world in a way that it can still be used as a setting guide for anyone looking to play in Middle-earth. there is also a portion to help you make your own nameless thing, an adventure that I have not run but seems like it could be fun.

The splat books for TOR are also a good look. The most recent books digs deep into Moria and the rest of Khazad-dûm. The other books are similar in that they build out a portion of Middle-earth and provide adventure hooks, locations, patrons, and many other things that can be used in adventure design for your game in Middle-earth.

There are two other splat books available as well, Tales from the Lone Lands, Ruins of the Lost Realm. These contain roughly everything you need to expand your adventures in Middle-earth with more locations, map, adventure hooks, history. Basically all of the poeple, places and things you might need to play in the world. they are also just beautiful books following the conventions set out in the core rules book.

Is this book really for you?

If you are someone who would love to read more about the Lord of the Rings universe, or want to get some great ideas for running adventures in the world of Middle-earth and mant something more than the source books written by Tolkien himself. Do you have a game group that will put in a little effort to learn the rules and be able to play regularly enough to keep the game running smoothly? The answer is simple. These are a wonderful set of books.

This halfling has purchased them and will not be looking back. They have a place on my shelves for the works that they are. I think I can even use the books to create smaller adventures that might be able to be run as one shots, the ideas contained are many and do not necessarily need to be used in Middle-earth or even with TOR’s rules.

Might i recommend something so simple as Sam Doebler’s, Middle-Earth Adventures. I also have seen a new hack of Tunnel Goons that also weaves in simplification of TOR’s rules. As soon as this is available I will make sure to include it here in an update.

Update: Ring Goons has been released! make sure to check it out!

Derek Bizier, the Halfling “Hobbit Master” Master (I can use it here because I’m talking about Tolkien!)