[OSSR]The One Ring

[Ancient History]

OSSR: The One Ring

Role Playing Game



This is the second edition called “The One Ring Roleplaying Game” from 2014. There is also a first edition in 2011 called “The One Ring: Adventures Over the Edge of the Wild.” There was an announcement of a third edition called “The One Ring: 2nd Edition” and that was never actually published and Cubicle 7 lost the license in 2019 so it never will be published. We are holding the second edition, not the book that was going to be called the second edition, because that book doesn't exist.

Your music for this review is The Breaking of the Fellowship.

AncientH

In our review of MERP, we noted that a roleplaying game set in the world of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings seems like a no-brainer. License to print money, right? But the reality is that while LOTR is a great set of books, the setting can be very problematic as far as actually adventuring there. These are pretty much the same issues that would dog the creators of The One Ring.

However, this book is much prettier.

Frank

In a very real way, all roleplaying games are Middle Earth roleplaying games. Tolkien's elf stories had such a dramatic impact on fantasy fandom that authors in the 60s and 70s were mostly writing homage and response. The very first elf game grew directly out of direct Tolkien fandom and it was only a lawsuit by Tolkien's estate that made D&D distance itself from having literal Hobbits and Ents. Since all RPGs are based on D&D, and D&D is very much based on Tolkien's elf stories, literally every single elf game that exists has very clear and obvious DNA from the Middle Earth setting. Even ones that don't literally have orcs and elves are fairly obvious about where those have been removed or changed. Trollocs are “like orcs” and everyone fucking knows it.

Nevertheless, the appeal of playing in literal Middle Earth rather than novel fantasy worlds that are distinct enough from Middle Earth to escape the eye of copyright law. Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fanfiction and Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga started as Star Trek fanfiction. But some people want just actual honest fanfiction. And there's nothing wrong with that. Heck, the Barrayarans are Klingons in the original draft and the Klingons are “highly influenced” by orcs from Lord of the Rings. But sometimes you want your Coke original flavor, if you know what I mean.


The connections and influences between Middle Earth and Star Trek are deep and also weird.

Getting the license to have “actual hobbits” in your elf game rather than “halflings” or “gnomes” or “podlings” or “kender” or “kithkin” or whatever other term that has been created to avoid copyright infringement is certainly worth money to an aspiring game. How much money that's worth is quite arguable, and there have been times in the last thirty years that there was no Middle Earth Roleplaying System in print simply because Tolkien's estate was asking more money than could be justified for a niche product like an RPG. In any case, by 2011, the Tolkien estate was asking for so little for an RPG license that the folks at Cubicle 7 could afford it,and here we are.

AncientH

In the 1970s, nobody mom-and-pop shops could put out games just as good as Dungeons & Dragons because D&D was crap and everybody was an amateur. It took time for TSR to build up to the point where you could actually distinguish quality of art and printing apart from some crap that people did in their garage.

Fast forward forty years later, and we're in a similar situation. Desktop publishing and cheap Chinese printing hit the point in the 2010s where if you were willing to shell out a few hundred bucks to folks on deviantart, you too could produce a quality full-color product that could sit on the shelf next to D&D without embarrassment.

And Cubicle 7 might not be exactly a garage project, but it started life to print more shit for SLA Industries.

Frank

This book is 300 pages plus and index and some sample pregenerated characters at the back of the book. The main book is divided into 9 parts.

I want to talk a bit about fonts. All the box text and the character sheets are done in Luminari Fantasy, a readable but heavily embellished font. It's not DaVinci Forward Regular.

But when you have an embellished font and it takes up a significant amount of the page and shows up over and over again through the book – it looks weird. It really jumps off the page, especially the lower case “d” which looks like a potion bottle in an early sprite-based dungeon crawler. Not a fan. Anyway, when they do an entire page of this shit like they do to open the book (with a letter from a Dwarf to Bilbo), I punch out. Not quite as hard as when it's long stretches of DaVinci Forward Regular, but about as much as if it was an equally long chunk of italics. It's just exhausting and ain't no one got time for this.

Most of the book is in a normal serif font that makes little impact (which is fine!) but having only a single “other” font and having it be a very distinctive one and using it for long stretches of text is not a great look.

AncientH

I should also mention that though this was post-LOTR movies, it seems like the LOTR RPG license doesn't really come with access to any of the previous art assets. Everything looks new. Maybe a little generic, but it's LOTR: you honestly cannot get more generic without going pre-Tolkien.

Which does make me wonder who does own the art assets to stuff like The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game - I'm going to guess Decipher? Feels really weird to have so much LOTR-art in effective limbo.

Frank

There are six people who made this (not including the art department). And most of them are Italians. The product is made through Sophisticated Games, which is a UK company that does a lot of business in Italy and subsequently published by Cubicle 7, which is a different UK company that also does a lot of work in France. At the back of the book there are literally hundreds of playtesters. Which is pretty cool. This is a second edition, so they might be including people who gave feedback on the previous edition from three years prior. Even so, it's still very cool and I applaud them for doing this.

As an aside: The Lord of the Rings has a weird history in Italy, because Italian fascists made Lord of the Rings based summer camps in the post-war period. There's a big fight in Italy over which translation of Tolkien's work into Italian is the “correct” one. On account of one of the translations having been done by avowed fascist sympathizer Princess Vittoria Alliata while she was a teenager. I have absolutely no idea where the Italian authors of this book fall on this issue. This book is of course all in English.


Italian fascist “Hobbit Camps” were a real thing. This book may not be related to that as it was made in the post Peter-Jackson world.

AncientH

I guess I should point out that expectations are middling for this game. It's a licensed property done by a small RPG company. That said, Cubicle 7 has put out some interesting product before (Cthulhu Britannica probably deserves an OSSR at some point, if only so Frank and I can make Brexit jokes). So I don't expect this to be completely shit. I expect it to have broken a couple hearts.

Not mine, though.

Part One: Introduction

Frank

The introduction is 22 pages long and doesn't talk about this game's weird dice system for the first 18 of them. This introduction is not “this is my book, I hope you like it” it's more like a meticulously paced narrative describing an argument for why this book is for you. You might think this book would have the basic argument “Roleplaying is like peanut butter, Middle Earth is like chocolate. You know you want it.”


Fucking Hershey's, have some class.

Anyway, it doesn't do that. It starts by wanting you to know that they are writing Tolkien fanfaction and are unafraid to write lugubrious prose.

It is the year 2946 of the Third Age, and the lands east of the Misty Mountains are astir. From the cloud-shrouded peaks above the High Pass to the spider-infested gloom of the forest of Mirkwood, paths long-deserted are trodden once again.

I admit that I am not enough of a Hobbit nerd to know off the top of my head where 2946 of the Third Age puts this book with reference to the movies or the books. Wikipedia informs me that this is the year when Ponto Baggins was born, as well as the year that Isembold Took died. I... still am not enough of a Hobbit nerd to tell you what that means. A bit more digging tells me that this is 5 years after the Battle of the Five Armies, sixty-two years before the War of the Ring. There's probably a Hobbit nerd reason for this date, but I have no idea what it might be.

The weirdest part to me is that I am enough of a Hobbit nerd to know that the actual ring called “The One Ring” was hidden in Bilbo's house during the period between those two wars. It seems very strange to me to call an RPG “The One Ring” when the location of The One Ring is very much known and also too it very much will not be seen or touched by absolutely anyone.

AncientH

We ranted about this a little in the MERP review, but the thing is that you can either set an RPG in Middle Earth before the War of the Ring, or after. The War itself has problems with canonicity and not being able to do sweet fuck-all to affect the world; setting things after the end means you're in a magical world where the magic is dwindling, the Big Bad is defeated, and even the fucking elves are busy fucking off. So really, it's the interwar period or you set it back in the Second Age or something.

I can't fault them for the choice. But it is a bit of an odd duck of a title.

Frank

The introduction seems to believe that this book is called some variation of the “XXX guide” because they refer to the book in your hand as a “guide” six times on the first proper page (which is page 10 because reasons).

Anyway, the main conceit of this book's “What is Roleplaying?” section is that it is a table top version of computer roleplaying games. Explicitly. It comes at it from the standpoint of computer games and works back to this being a tabletop game with actual humans at that table. I have no judgment on that good or bad, but it's the most inherently 21st century thing about this book.

This book wants you to call PCs “Player Heroes” and Mr. Cavern is called the “Loremaster.” I have no idea if that sounds better in Italian. I can't imagine it sounding much worse.

AncientH

A Note on Gender
All references to players and the Loremaster in the game
text use the masculine pronoun for ease of expression: this
should not be interpreted as excluding female players,
characters or Loremasters. Although Middle-earth in the
Third Age is not a place where women often choose a life
of adventure, Tolkien’s books introduced some memorable
exceptions, providing ample inspiration to players who
want to play female heroes.

This is about the most half-assed way to put it. I know people give Lovecraft a bad time for the lack of female characters in his works, but if you're going to be writing fanfiction, let's not forget that some of the most bad-ass elves are female and there's no telling what gender the Ringwraiths identify as. Just because Tolkien was kinda dickish about the whole thing doesn't mean you have to trip over your dick because you're defaulting to masculine pronouns.

Frank

The example of play is confusing as fuck. Mostly because this is the first time the sample characters are used. They are used throughout the book. They have character sheets in the appendix starting on page 302. But here on page 11, we are introduced to one of the characters with the following line:

Claire (playing The Bride): I’m following.

What the actual fuck? So eventually, and by eventually I do mean that confirmation is exactly three hundred pages down the line, we find out that there is a character who is named “The Bride” and that she is one of the Woodmen of Wilderland and she has an axe and a Hound of Mirkwood and is basically what D&D players would call a “Ranger.” And indeed, this character concept is obviously inspired by Aragorn the Ranger and also D&D Rangers that are in turn inspired by Aragorn the Ranger. But she's not called a “Ranger” because in Middle Earth specifically the Rangers are an actual group with specific duties towards the borders of Gondor rather than the more generic “Aragorn-like character” that the word has come to mean in RPG circles.


Where RPG ideas come from.

This is actually a place where the fanfiction is hurt by being officially licensed. Fantasy terminology has progressed a lot in the last eighty fucking years, and we have words that mean things. Obviously if people want to play out cooperative storytelling games set in Middle Earth, someone is going to want to be a fucking Ranger. I mean, fucking obviously, right? But the word “ranger” only appears three times in the whole book and you have to do quite a bit of digging to find that the skillset you want is mostly available to the Woodmen. By prioritizing Tolkien's actual World War 2 era nomenclature, it makes things hard to find for 21st century fantasy fans – even if Middle Earth happens to be their first or greatest love.

Anyway, the example of play could have had like one sentence descriptions of who these characters are and what they were doing, but it doesn't. It's in media res and confusing AF.

At the conclusion of the example of play they tell you that they are going to be using male pronouns by default. Which is not wrong exactly, but let's just say that this was a much more defensible choice in 1914 than in 2014.

AncientH

Future supplements for The One Ring will progressively
widen the geographical boundaries of the setting, while
adventures and campaigns will detail events further along
the timeline. Rivendell, for example, takes your company
west across the Misty Mountains to begin exploring
Eriador, while the Darkening of Mirkwood advances the
Tale of Years to 2977 as the heroes engage in a 30-year
quest set within Mirkwood.

This is a very Shadowrun way of doing things, which is very odd for Cubicle 7, but also not inherently a bad idea. The only real problem is that there's only 55 years between the start date of the setting and the beginning of The Lord of the Ring. Were they really trying to time this to when the license would expire or something?

Frank

The setting of this game gets six pages. Basically it's set in the area around where the last part of The Hobbit took place shortly after the end of The Hobbit. For people keeping track at home, that does mean that this is a game called “The One Ring” which is set in an area that the actual One Ring was taken out of five years prior. That seems to be a fundamental oversight. There is a perfunctory explanation of why you would want to adventure in an area now that the Goblin King, the Necromancer, and the Dragon that were there recently are all gone, and it does a better job than you'd expect given those limitations.

Much of this is given over to six playable character peoples: Bardings, Beornings, Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain, Elves of Mirkwood, Hobbits of the Shire, and Woodmen of Wilderland. Five of those are groups that live in the area the presumed adventures take place in. And Hobbits of the Shire are in there because I think if you set a game “slightly after The Hobbit” and didn't let people play fucking Hobbits, there would be a revolt.

But probably the hamster wheels in your head are already spinning about the first two. Bardings? Beornings? What the fuck? So first of all, when Bard became king after slaying Smaug, some of the Men of Dale decided to be called Bardings. That's minor canon, but it's legit. The Beornings are only mentioned in passing in a couple sentences in the Lord of the Rings and are never described. However, they were expanded upon in a 1982 video game of The Hobbit, and this book expands that description.

Which goes back to the whole thing about fanfiction expanding upon other fanfiction. This book takes a deep interest in specifically Lord of the Rings licensed works to expand upon. And some of those works are... kind of obscure. Contrasted with the whole “ranger” thing of refusing to acknowledge popular works in the genre that aren't specifically Tolkien licensed, it makes for a pretty difficult read at time if your level of Hobbit nerddom is anywhere short of “Grand Master.” I really strongly feel that you could get a more “Middle Earth Feel” for the casual fan by being less of a stickler for the licensed products of the Tolkien family estate.

AncientH

A lot of shit actually happened in the 60 years between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ring. The White Council got off their butts and chased the Necromancer out of the Mirkwood, and he went back down to Mordor and started gathering armies again. Saruman started building up his forces. Elves started leaving.

So you do actually have a Big Bad: Sauron. And smaller big bads: giant spiders, orcs & goblins. You've got expanding settlements into the frontier and lost ruins and shit. It is, I have to admit, about as well as you can do without tipping your hand and just having the Witch-King show up to fuck around with people or scour the world as if looking for something. Or if Smaug turned out to have been female and laid some eggs.

Hell, they even manage to shove Radagast into the store, in a vague effort to make him useful for something for once.

Frank

The game is big on its idea of having Adventuring Phases followed by Fellowship Phases followed by Adventure Phases and so on. We'll get to that when we get there, the introduction spends a few pages trying to get me to care about this, but doesn't succeed. There's also an attempt to get an explicit pass the story stick mechanic called “storytelling initiative” but again there's not enough meat in the intro to say whether it actually means anything.

As such, I'd say that the introduction could probably be improved by having a bunch of these pages condensed into a glossary. And I mean an actual glossary. Because they do give us a thing called a “glossary” but it's wordy and cryptic and I genuinely don't feel enlightened at all for having read it. For example:

Cultural Blessing: A cultural blessing describes a special ability or quality so profoundly ingrained in a given community that in the game it is made available to all its members.

What another RPG might call “race and class” is called “culture and calling” and you only get six of one and five of the other. So there genuinely aren't a lot of characters that are supported here. But of course, also too the system is skill based and so there isn't actually much reason to expect two Dwarven Slayers to have much overlap in competency outside a few narrow areas. As is often the case with skill based games, it does expect you to level up swords and spears separately, which means in practice that players have every incentive to hyperspecialize like 4e D&D characters. The “Axe Guy” is definitely not going to use a spear, even if they find a really good elf spear from the ancient times or whatever the fuck.

AncientH

A lot of this is dancing around like it's My First Roleplaying Game. Which honestly is fucking tiresome. You came into the store, you bought the book. You know what you're about.

They do let you download PDF character sheets right off the website, though. Which is nice.

The nicest thing that can be said about the general mechanical concept of the game is they are trying very hard not to be D&D. That is the beginning and end of it. Other than that it is a hodge-podge of ideas, most of which seem to be drawn from completely different games. I'll be honest that of all the games I've seen, this looks like it was inspired by WoD's Storyteller system more than anything else. You've got three attributes (Body/Heart/Wits), each of which has a bevy of different skills under them, but you also have Valour, Wisdom, Shadow Weakness, Endurance, Hope, Virtues, Fellowship, Standing...

Yeah, okay, this is a lot of crap to go through. Experience and Advancement Points are different things?

Frank

The dice system is bonkers. You roll a dicepool and add all the faces together. And your first die is a d12 and all the rest are d6s. And one sixth of the faces are special and do special stuff. Also, the difficulty chart is pretty severe. A “very easy” task is target number 10, which means that someone without relevant skill dots succeeds only 16.7% of the time. A character with three relevant skill dots (the most any of the sample characters have in anything) still fails the “very easy” task 8% of the time.

If you're weary, the extra d6s have their 1, 2, and 3 converted to zero, which means that being tired makes a bigger difference for highly skilled characters and relatively easy tasks. For a character with one skill dot against a “moderate” difficulty (target number 14), the chances of success do not change at all (16.7% chance of success either way). It's all very weird, and I don't know why it works like this! There's a lot of page space telling me that endurance is stamina and determination, but I could really use some sidebars telling me what the actual fuck the writers were thinking when making some of these design decisions.

There's also “hope points” which allow you to buy a bonus to your roll based on your attributes (attributes do not otherwise seem to modify your chance of success), and based on the very low chances the sample characters have of succeeding at most things on a straight roll, I expect you are expected to spend these hope points like they were going out of style. Every sample character has double digits of hope points, so this checks out. Of course... if the players are spending this hope currency to add their stats to their rolls on almost every roll, why not skip that shit and just add the stat to the roll in the first place? Is the hope reserve supposed to be a mechanic that prevents players from hogging the spotlight by limiting the number of rolls each player can make during an adventure before they start sucking? I don't know. Again it would be super useful to have this chapter tell me more about what they were thinking and less about the dictionary definition of misery.

You also get “degrees of success” by how many 6s you rolled on the d6s in your dicepool. But it doesn't seem obvious what happens if you get multiple 6s and still fail. And since even a “moderate” difficulty is TN 14, that's not weird at all. Having 2 d6s in your pool seems to be a thing the game is telling you is supposed to be good, and if they both come up 6 but you roll badly on the d12 you can still easily fail. So you get Extraordinary Success and also Failure? I guess?

AncientH

Just remember that on the 12-sided dice ‘Feat’ die, the 11 is the Eye of Sauron symbol C and the 12 is a Gandalf rune A. On the 6-sided ‘Success’ dice, the 6 shows also a tengwar rune ñ.

They use the actual symbols in the text, but I'm not going to try and take a picture. You're actually supposed to switch that for "adversaries," but that seems like a lot of bookkeeping.

So, every roll is 1d12 + skill dice against a TN (usually 14), where you're trying to roll higher than. This all seems really 1980s-era funky, and I'm wondering if someone misread a copy of an old fan-made LOTR/World of Darkness netbook or something. It also feels very Call of Cthulhu-ish in that I'm sure the first thing you do is try not to actually roll dice unless you cannot avoid it.

Frank

The final portion of the section is called ““Eyeballing” A Die Result” and it is a helpful reminder that if the dice come up very high or very low you can skip the part where you add up the numbers because you pretty much know whether it's beaten the target number or not. This is a total waste of space in the book; but I think that if you are even tempted to put something like that in there you should take that as a clue that your dice system is too complicated.

Anyway, after we get some watercolors of New Zealand, it will be Part Two: Creating a Character

Some of these chapters we can combine, so there won't be 9 more updates.

AncientH

You might ask yourself "what is the point of this system?" and if I told you "probably to sell dice, I don't think that would be wrong. But let's break this down a little further by what we know about this game:

It's not D&D. By which I mean, very specifically in 2014, it is not D&D 3, 4, or 5. They did not want six attributes, they did not want 1d20 + skill ranks + bonuses. They wanted a single resolution mechanic using dice, and they wanted a dice pool method a la Shadowrun, World of Darkness, or Earthdawn. All the weird gimmicky stuff with special dice characters is just fiddling about. Also, by design they wanted to keep dice pools minimized: no bucket-of-dice. Six 6-siders and a 12-sider are all you need to play.

So yes, the dice mechanics are nuts and not good, but they do represent some of the essential design criteria.

[DragonChild]

https://frialigan.se/en/news/#/pressrel ... th-2979811

From my understanding, the book was written through a secondary company, and only kinda published by Cubicle7, so the second edition will be made, just by Free League Publishing. They bought all the work - and the designer - from what I can tell.

[Mord]

If you're weary, the extra d6s have their 1, 2, and 3 converted to zero, which means that being tired makes a bigger difference for highly skilled characters and relatively easy tasks. For a character with one skill dot against a “moderate” difficulty (target number 14), the chances of success do not change at all (16.7% chance of success either way).

For those of you wondering how that works: the "Eye of Sauron" result on the d12 counts as a 0 (but not an automatic failure), while the "Gandalf" result is an automatic success (but not a number per se). I whipped up a quick Anydice script to show the results by giving a "Gandalf" a numeric equivalent of 99.

[Libertad]

I'm currently in an Adventures in Middle-Earth campaign on Roll20. It's made by the same creators as TOR, but using 5e D&D as a basis with some imported mechanics like Journey rules. There's less variety given the overall lack of spellcasting, and there's a lot more emphasis on charting safe routes through treacherous wildlands, earning trust of local communities so you can safely Long Rest there (the Rest mechanics are no longer 1 hour/8 hours but based on where you can camp), as well as the more typical faire of fighting local menaces like Shelob's brethren and goblins.

We're only doing the published adventures so I cannot tell how much it's typical faire, but PCs who can specialize in wilderness lore-style stuff are at a great advantage. Survival skill is practically god-tier for how many boons high results can get you while Journeying.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: The One RPG

Chapter Two: Creating a Hero



Your musical accompaniment will be 15 minutes of elf music. For your elf game.

AncientH

Whatever their motivation or purpose, most characters
created for The One Ring are individuals who have
chosen to abandon their day-to-day activities and become
adventurers. They are not soldiers or captains following
the commands of a lord, nor are they subtle Wizards
trying to weave the threads spun by fate: they are bold
souls putting themselves in peril by their own free will,
sometimes simply for the love of adventure itself.

This is right away the essential fucking problem, not just with The One Ring but with any and all Middle-Earth roleplaying games. You have one question to answer at the outset, and that is: What the fuck am I doing?

As this illustrates, there's no good answer for that. Dungeons & Dragons took the basic assumption that you were a professional adventurer(TM) and ran with it; you can get isolated campaigns where you start out as a moisture farmer and become a space wizard, but for most of the groups everyone was on the same page: there is a dungeon, we're going to explore the shit out of it, kill monsters and take their treasures.

The LOTR and Hobbit, however, are actually laser-focused. There are set missions with goals. Weird shit happens along the way, dungeons are delved, monsters are slain and looted, but none of these people is just there for the hell of it or to make some coin.

So it becomes supremely important before you start to make a character to have some fucking idea what you're going to be doing. If the whole adventure involves an ancient grimoire written in ancient Numenorean and nobody can read it, then you're all proper fucked, aren't you? If you go into the thing expecting to solve all your problems with a sword and instead it's all talking and diplomacy and shit, whose fault is that?

On top of which, there's not a lot of basis for character roles in LOTR. Aragorn is a Ranger and Biblo is a Thief (nominally), but most of the Dwarfs are just Dwarfs (armed to the fucking teeth, but just dudes, not soldiers or anything) and Orlando Bloom is just An Elf. Not the best elf, not necessarily the first-place winner in the All-Sindarin Archery Competition, just An Elf. He's not a terrible Elf, in fact he's probably a Pretty Good Elf, but he doesn't actually have a job description beyond "Be An Elf." Even fucking Spock was at least Science Officer.

Frank

The character creation rules are fifty-two pages long. They include five to seven page asides on each of the six allowed starting character cultures. I think in seven pages you could just list all the Elves of Mirkwood, but here we are. I feel this chapter is too wordy and doesn't explain enough. The sentence fragment “The character creation process takes a number of steps,” is not followed by giving you a brief rundown of the steps or even a list of the steps. It just sort of wanders off into ramble text about how the character you created is yours and influenced by what you want your character to be. The actual list of steps isn't even on the same fucking page, and I would say that it is an excessive number of steps, but regardless the steps are:

Hero Creation Summary
Select a Heroic Culture
Record a character’s Cultural blessing and skill list
Select two Specialities
Roll (or choose) Background
Record Basic Attributes and Favoured Skill
Select two Distinctive Features

Customise your Hero
Choose your hero’s Favoured Attributes
Spend Previous Experience to buy skill levels
Choose a Calling and Favoured skills
Generate the scores for Endurance and Hope
Prioritise the scores for Valour and Wisdom
(choosing, accordingly, your starting Reward or Virtue)
Record Starting Gear and Fatigue

Now I have been known to get pretty upset at games that lead with the whole “character concept” angle without first telling you what the actual fuck an appropriate character concept might be. But in this case, we're playing Lord of the Rings fanfiction. We know god damn well that your character concept is a Dwarven Warrior, an Elven Ranger, or a Hobbit Rogue. We know this. It's OK to be vaguely goal-oriented in character generation instead of... whatever this is.

Even when it gives us a section called “focused choices” and you think that might be about making character creation choices to create a character who is good at things... no. Just... no. It's a 281 word essay about how most characters won't have traveled far or met people from far away before the first adventure. I'm not even joking. It's hard for me to convey how much talking around the point this book does. The heading “Heroic Cultures” appears twice on subsequent pages.

AncientH

There are, very roughly, two avenues of game design when it comes to character creation.

The first is what you might call functional design: You figure out what you want your character to do or be capable of, and work backwards from that. This is the general approach of munchkins, power gamers, and other people that don't want to be frustrated because their character can't actually accomplish anything by rolling dice at the table.

The second is what you might call thematic design: You figure out who you want your character to be, and work towards that. This is a lot more intuitive and appropriate for first-time players, who decide early on they want to be an Elf with a Bow, and if they can be that then they feel they have succeeded at character creation.

Good game design tends to moderate between these two choices. You want people to play who they want while also giving them enough room to be effective characters that can succeed at the challenges their character is going to face. You can encourage flexibility and offer options that appeal to individual players.

For designers that fall into the thematic trap, there is the whole ideal of lifepath character generation, where you basically build the character up from birth. That's...kind of what we're looking at here. In The One Ring, you're basically trying to find your character in the process of creating them, and by Aulë is it a long, complicated slog.

Frank

Actually making a character is a bewildering ordeal where you make a lot of tiny choices that affect future choices in somewhat surprising ways. Picking a culture is more like choosing a clan in Vampire than picking a race or class in D&D. Complete with coming with White Wolf style statements about the other groups. Each culture gets some fixed selections and some selections off of short lists. Which selections are fixed and which selections are off of a short list don't really make sense to me. Every person from an entire culture gets the same starting wealth level, which would be weird in any fantasy world but is especially weird in Middle Earth considering how much time Tolkien spent talking about social classes.

Much of the space is taken up with packages that limit character creation customization but don't seem to add much. Your attributes add up to 14 with a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 7 in any one, but rather than leave it at that you get to pick one of six stat assignments and each one of those comes with a favored skill and a slightly different set of chooseable traits. And the stats are pretty tightly grouped between the different packages. For the Bardings, Wits is between 2 and 4, Body is between 4 and 6, and Heart is between 5 and 7. For Mirkwood Elves, literally all of the packages give you a Wits of 6 or 7, breaking the 2-4, 4-6, 5-7 split system employed by the other cultures.

The starting skill points of the different cultures do not add up to the same number. Bardings get 20 points of skills, Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain get 17, most of the groups get 18. This is because when you're out of this part of chargen, skills cost triangular point values, and all the cultures give you 29 XP worth of skills.

Some of the choices are fake. Every culture gives you the option of having one of your weapon skills underlined or put into (parentheses). The first means it's a favored skill, the second means it applies to a weapon group. Since you are not normally going to fight with two different kinds of axe, and skill favoring has concrete advantages, this isn't remotely fair of a tradeoff.

AncientH

The languages bit is bizarre to me, since Tolkien spent an awful lot of fucking time on languages and this game...doesn't. If you aren't able to take Quenya or the Black Speech as an elective, I don't even fucking know what you're doing with your Tolkienian RPG. Most characters, unfortunately, will at best be able to speak two languages: "Common Speech" and your native language (Hobbits forgot theirs, apparently, which is just fucking bizarre).

The big thing you immediately take away looking at page after page of these things is that none of the cultural backgrounds cover anything remotely like magic, and very few of them deal with being a bad-ass. They tend to be evocatively described but not...useful? Which is probably why they have "Callings."

A "Calling" is something less than a class but more than an archetype. There are no levels in the game, the Calling just provides favored skills, an additional trait, and a Shadow Weakness. As Frank noted above, there aren't many of these and they all kind of suck. So they are:

Scholar, Slayer, Treasure Hunter, Wanderer, Warden

Notably absent? Ranger. I mean, the degree to which they don't want you to be an actual Wizard or anything close to a Wizard is real here, but calling it a "Warden" rather than a "Ranger" is just fucking bizarre.

But yes, I guess you can be a Beorning Keeper of Tales Scholar if that's what you want. For some reason.

Frank

There are sixty-eight traits in the game. 44 of them are “distinctive features” and 24 of them are “specialties.” Your choice of culture gives you a selection of six of the specialties and you choose two. Then your package gives you a selection of eight distinctive features and you choose two from that as well. There is substantial overlap between the packages within each culture – so “Grim” is one of your choices no matter which package you have if you're a Beorning and “Adventurous” is one of your choices no matter which package you have if you're a Barding.

They don't explain this here, but having traits that describe what your character intends to be doing during the game is one of the principal ways of unlocking character advancement, so having traits you can mention frequently is very important. And figuring out how to get the traits you want is genuinely difficult. Spoiler alert: I genuinely don't know that there's any difference between some of these traits.

Clever You are ingenious and smart, quick to learn and able to make intuitive leaps.
Cunning Your wit is sharp, and you are ready to use it to your advantage.
Curious Your inquisitive nature is easily aroused by what is often not your concern

That's me skipping ahead like 30 pages, but those are the actual game descriptions of those traits. There isn't a next shoe to drop where they also have distinct bonuses to die rolls or something. Invoking them does exactly the same thing when it happens and those single sentence descriptions are the entirety of the game descriptions of when those invocations can be made.

AncientH

I don't normally say this, but I think there might be too damn much art in this book. The word-density per page is ridiculous - I could have squeezed all the fucking Callings into one column of one page, and not felt cramped.

I did a word count, and this is just over 130k words for 330 or so pages, so we're really looking at less than 400 words per page in terms of text. There's a lot of book here, but it isn't saying much. In MERP days this would have been maybe 90 pages.

Frank

The Callings are what you'd expect a character class to be: Scholar, Slayer, Treasure Hunter, Wandered, and Warden. Actually, these do almost nothing. There are 18 Common Skills, and you choose two of them to underline. And your Calling gives you a choice of six of the skills to mark this way. Which is close enough to just letting everyone tag two skills of their choice that I don't know why this is a thing.

Functionally the Calling gives you a single trait and a “shadow weakness” that determines how you'd go evil if you started to turn evil. I mean... this is Lord of the Rings, so characters falling to corruption is a reasonable thing to include... but in practice I think by the time you develop “Dragon Sickness” or whatever, the campaign is functionally over.

AncientH

Endurance and Hope
Endurance and Hope are the fundamental resources that
keep a character going. Their starting scores are based on
a hero’s basic Heart rating and modified by his Culture (as
shown on the table below).

Attributes don't do much, but Heart is arguably the most important one because it enters into calculations of Endurance and Hope values, which determine how long your character lives and, probably, how effective they are sink actually getting any skill roll to function without spending a Hope point seems a bit iffy.

I want to say some of these weird incidentals on what equipment you start out with and crap reminds me a bit of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but that might be just because it's a throwback to 80s-style RPG design. Like, if you have at least one rank in Song, you can start out with a musical instrument gratis.

Frank

Favored Attributes are a weird thing. Each attribute has its base value, and it also has its favored value, which is 1, 2, or 3 points higher. The attribute only seems to matter when you spend a hope point to succeed instead of fail, and there are various circumstances when you'd add the favored bonus instead of the normal bonus. Why this isn't just a separate conditional “favor” bonus I do not know. It seems unnecessarily baroque for what is on average an extremely conditional +2 bonus.

Like in Vampire, you start with some experience points. And you can buy up your starting skills at triangular costs. You get 10 points to spend on whatever you like, which since it costs 6 points to raise your starting specialist weapon up to 3 (which you very much want to do), means that you only have 4 freebie points to spend on normal skills.

AncientH

So, there's these two stats called Valour and Wisdom. With each rank above 1, they get a bonus, called either a Virtue (Wisdom), or a Reward (Valour). The Reward is always something physical, which presumably you could loot from somebody's corpse, so I don't know why people thought that was a good idea.

Anyway, you can start with Valour 2/Wisdom 1 or Valour1/Wisdom 2, giving you either a free Virtue or a free Reward. Virtues range from "Swordmaster" to "Twice-Baked Honey Cakes", and Rewards go from "Giant-slaying Spear" to "Lucky Armour."

Frank

Are we not done yet? We spent freebie points. Fuck me!

OK, we also have to calculate a bunch of shit like encumbrance and endurance and fatigue. Those all sound like they could be the same thing, but they are different things because go fuck yourself. Dwarves have a higher Endurance and also too they subtract a number from the fatigue value of the shit they carry and these are different things and it makes me want to die. I actually cannot imagine wanting to use encumbrance rules this complicated. And yet, one of the six starting character cultures has interacting with the carrying things rules as their primary selling point.


If only there was some in-world way to have things but not literally carry those things.

Finally we get to choose to start with a Virtue or a Reward from your character's Culture list. This is done in a roundabout fashion where it spends 150 words explaining that Valor and Wisdom start at 1, we add one to one of those at chargen, and get a bonus Reward if we boost Valor and a bonus Virtue if we boost Wisdom. This book is very long winded about simple concepts!

AncientH

I peeked ahead 30-40 pages to the reward and virtues, and while they bury the lead a little, if you actually want to do some magic in this fantasy RPG, it consists entirely of Virtues. They're not very good virtues, but the Elves of Mirkwood can get "Wood-Elf Magic" and the Dwarfs of the Lonely Mountain can get "Broken Spells."

Keep in mind, these are totally culturally separate. You're never going to be a human or hobbit magic-user. Not fucking happening. If you want to use any magic at all, you need to first be a Dwarf or Elf, and then make sure you take Wisdom over Valour, and then make sure you pick the right fucking Virtue.

And for that, you get...well, we'll get to that by and by.

Long story short: they really don't want you to play at being a magic-user.

Frank

Not directly related to character generation, the party is called a “Company” and there is a common pool of Hope Refreshment Points called Fellowship Points. This is equal to the number of player characters plus the number of Halflings. Also each character can be obsessed with one of the other heroes and that gives you an extra way to replenish Hope at the cost of having the death of the focus character contribute even more to the TPK death cycle than it already would. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd always take, but actually the bonus turns out to be meaningless and to never trigger, so it's a giant trap option but you won't find that out for fifty more pages.

Anyway, the existence of Fellowship points makes the Hope pools even more pointless. If one player is hogging the spotlight and making all the rolls, they chew through their Hope points, but then they can just keep doing that by also burning through the Company's Fellowship pool. The effect is extremely trivial (the Fellowship points are equal in value to Hope points but characters have like 12 Hope points each, and the whole Company has like 4 Fellowship Points total), but it seems deeply at odds to any purpose running out of Hope points could serve.

AncientH

Honestly, the whole thing reminds me of 3rd edition Shadowrun where you had an individual Karma Pool and then a Group or team Karma Pool, which you just pooled dice out of whenever you needed them. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the ultimate inspiration here.

Frank

All in all, this chapter is a bewildering ordeal. It's very long winded and confusing, and many of the choices you make in it lack even a one sentence description of what they do or mean. Having decided what kind of character you want to play, I'm genuinely not sure how to go about building towards that. The attempt seems to be to generate the feel of lifepath character generation without actually having any of the real advantages of lifepath generation. It seems like it's still really easy to get out of character generation being genuinely bad at your intended character's core competencies. It takes a lot pf system mastery to have much control over the outcomes, and most of the choices are inconsequential even so.

AncientH

The idea that your PCs all know each other and have formed bonds of fellowship and won't immediately cut each other's throats just for the boots they are wearing is all well and good. Picking out the first place they met is kind of weird though. What if you all met standing in line at the house of the single whore that Bree supports?



Chapter Three: Fundamental Characteristics


The chapter title is misleading as it rapidly goes off into describing things that aren't fundamental or characteristical, and ends up talking about gear, treasure, and wound healing.

Frank

Having spent 52 pages describing how to assign all the words and numbers on the character sheet, the book spends another chapter and another 54 pages attempting to describe what the words and numbers actually mean. This is not economical of language.

There's a lot of words dropped on things being favored or unfavored. And what it all means is that when you spend a hope point to add an attribute value to your die rolls, if you're using a favored skill you add the favored bonus in addition to the attribute bonus. This is very slightly gameable, because you choose which attributes get the +3, +2, and +1 favored bonus, and you get to choose your favored skills, so you can arrange for that to matter slightly more or slightly less. But then there are Elves who get the Favored bonus most of the time, and even that bit of system mastery matters little.

Attributes also do other stuff. Wits adds to initiative and base defense value in a way that isn't explained until later chapters. Body adds to combat damage about half the time based on special symbols on die rolls. Heart straight up gives you more Hope points. Having available hope points is mostly a bigger deal than adding a bigger number with the Hope points you spent. A skill of 3 still fails over 30% of the time at TN 14, but if you have even a stat bonus of 5 your penumbra of “success with hope spent” is over 95%.

AncientH

Is it just me or is it weird that we're 84 pages in before they really explain what attributes do?

Anyway, Attributes top out at 12 and skills at 6, that's not counting various flavors of Favoured. So your maximum die roll is 1d12 + 6d6 + X (if you spend a hope point), where X can be between 1 and, if I count this right, 18? Not that you are ever going to get to the point where you're rolling 6d6 of anything, but I'm just saying, if you have to roll at all, you might as well spend a hope point.

Frank

We get descriptions of what attributes and skills “mean” and I am much less annoyed by this than I usually am in games like this. In Shadowrun your dicepool is attribute + skill + equipment, so a skill of 2 or 5 doesn't mean anything at all absent the rest of the inputs. But in this game your dicepool is pretty much just the skill value. So whether you are likely to succeed or fail at a task before having to spend Hope points is genuinely skill dependent. The terms aren't that helpful, because without me telling you, I doubt you can figure out if “prodigious” is supposed to be better or worse than “outstanding,” but it does tell me that 2 dice is supposed to be “average,” and that succeeds at TN 10 74.1% and at TN 14 just 41.9% of the time. So that tells me that Average skilled people are expected to spend Hope to complete Moderate tasks more than half the time.

The descriptions of skills and values takes up five pages, but very little information is actually presented. There is a Song skill, its description is 113 words long and includes a quote that's probably from the Hobbit. I have no idea when I would roll a Song check or what difference it would make were I to get a result that was good or bad.


I like short songs.

The non-weapon skills are put into a 3x6 matrix. The columns determine which stat is added when you spend Hope, and the rows don't seem to matter much. They are obliquely related to which combinations of skills you can choose to start with the Favor underline on, and not much beyond that.

This section could really be about twice as long and include some sample target numbers for what you might want to try to do and what would happen if you succeeded or failed. Also there doesn't seem to be any rules in here for opposed skill checks, so I don't know what happens if I succeed at an Awareness test and you succeed at a Stealth test.

This book just casually talks about mattocks as if they were a normal weapon. That is apparently legitimate LotR fan wankery in that there are several Dwarves from the Iron Hills that have named war picks in various Tolkien scribblings.


Also there is a rendition of a mattock in the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies, which might be more important than obscure Dwarven weapon names.

AncientH

Proficiency in a Cultural Weapon skill is applied when the
character is using any weapon belonging to that category.
So, a character with (Axes) ?? possesses two skill ranks
while using any axe, be it a simple axe or a long-hafted axe.

This is, I think, based off a half-remembered argument about Weapon Proficiency Groups in D&D 3.x. Don't get me wrong, Shadowrun did skill groups for weapons and shit too, but lumping all axes together seems weirdly specific enough I'm going to go with D&D as the culprit.

Unlike D&D, there aren't a shitload of weapons available, so this is all a bit more sillier than normal. The "Sword group" includes short swords, swords, and long swords, but not daggers. What is the difference between a sword and a long sword in this context? No fucking idea. Tolkien did not give a tenth of a shit and neither should you.

Frank

Traits are important but nebulous things. As discussed in the last chapter, there are sixty-eight of them, and some of them are obviously more useful than others – and some are not obviously different in any way from some of the others. Each has a very brief description, that is supposed to give you an idea of when it might apply. They can be invoked to do three things:

• Take 10.
• Argue with Mr. Cavern about 'no save' situations.
• Gain advancement points.

That last one is a big longterm incentive to constantly bug the rest of the players about your character's traits because it makes your character better in a real and cumulative permanent fashion by doing it more. The first one is the worst “automatic success” system I have ever seen – in that telling the other players why the current action is in keeping with your character traits such that you shouldn't have to roll dice is normally going to take more time than just rolling the fucking dice.

And finally: the middle one seems to be a world of butthurt all the time. Like, it encourages Mr. Cavern to say “You fail, no die roll!” and then the players to argue that they should get a die roll based on having vague shit written on their character sheet.

It's like all the bad parts of Runequest Skill Experience and FATE Aspects had a baby.

Anyway, the “specialties” traits are the most mysterious of all, because they are mostly tasks like Boating and Burglary, which just inherently doesn't seem like it's good for much other than the routine success die roll skipping bits. But then one of them is – and I swear I am not making this up – Smoking, and I cannot honestly see how that's ever going to be good for literally anything.


But if you want, your Hobbit can be a giant stoner, for what that's worth. Which is presumably nothing.

AncientH

I think the design principle behind Traits is that there are things you want down on the character sheet that have an effect on the game but which you never want to roll. In Space Madness! I called these tags, and they just covered bodies of lore. Which works for the "Specialties" trait like "Herb-lore" or "Smith-craft," but doesn't really work for "Distinctive Features" like "Gruff" or "Small."

So yes, I generally agree with Frank that what they appear to have wanted was some way to apply keywords to your character Legend of the Five Rings style, but what they actually wrote is some sort of mother-may-I bullshit.

Frank

Wisdom and Valor are two special stats that mostly work like skills that you roll reactively and (hopefully) rarely. Wisdom is the number of dice you roll to resist corruption, and Valor is the number of dice you roll to resist fear. Also, every time you gain a point of Wisdom or Valor you get a special perk. The generic Wisdom perks are extremely weak, generally equal to a quarter of a stat point or less. Literally the best of them is one where you get two Hope points – which is a lot less than getting two points of Heart. There are also Cultural options, and while most of them are meaningless, some change the XP cost of things, which in a long enough game is very good.

Some of the special abilities are deeply surreal. “Twice Baked Honeycakes” is the actual name of an ability. The exact parameters of Elf and Dwarf magic aren't defined, but they look pretty baller to be honest. As one of the Woodmen you can have a giant dog.

The Valor perks are all modest equipment upgrades. Like, you raise your valor and after the levelup song finishes you get... a shield with a +1 Parry bonus. These are things you could just fucking buy! Also, many of the weapons have special gimmicks that proc only on the Gandalf Rune, which is to say that one in 12 attacks they do a thing. You could be in three actual battles and have that never come up.

This Valor and Wisdom shit goes on for 16 pages, and almost none of it is shit you care about at all. Also it's super confusing because the upgraded equipment you get from Valor increases is listed before it tells you what the regular equipment does, so it's pretty confusing.

AncientH

So, magic! I promised this, and now it's here.

Broken Spells
There are three of these. You can buy one each time you select this Virtue. These are basically the shit that Dwarfs and Gandalf were trying to do in The Hobbit. "Spells of Opening and Shutting" can lock or unlock doors, "Spells o Prohibition and Exclusion" let you carve runes that wake you up if somebody is sneaking up on you at night, and "Spells of Secrecy" let you carve runes to hide a hidden door or object.

The object concealed by the spell can only be found with an extraordinary Search result, unless the searcher is a Dwarf (in which case a simple success is enough).

Wood Elf Magic
Feels like it wasn't written by the same person:

You are mastering what mortals might call ‘Elf-magic.’ You
learn how to fling a Stinging Arrow when you first select
this Virtue. You may later master the making of Elf-lights
as your undertaking, and spending one Experience point
during a Fellowship phase; finally, you discover the secret
of Enchanted Sleep by spending another Experience point
as another undertaking during a later Fellowship phase.

"Stinging Arrow" lets you spend a Hope point to make an arrow fly twice as far or to confirm a successful hit is a Piercing Attack.

"Elf Lights" lets you turn your torch into a bug zapper that attracts mortals.

"Enchanted Sleep" lets you maybe drop anybody entranced by the elf lights into an enchanted sleep.

...which is, again, all very low-end Hobbit-type shit. Not even setting pinecones on fire and throwing them at wargs.

Which reinforces what I said earlier about the designers really wanting you not to have anything to do with magic in this fantasy-oriented RPG.

Frank

The game attempts to model the thing that happens in Tolkien books where Bilbo and Aragorn get shunned by normal townsfolk when they spend a lot of time having adventures. That's deeply on brand, and I cannot fault them for doing this. In Middle Earth, when a Hobbit goes on an adventure and comes back, the locals are trying to auction their furniture after having them declared presumed dead. That just is a thing that happens in this setting. And having a “standing” at home that ticks down during your adventures is legit.


Checks out.

AncientH

I supposed I should also mention "Herbal Remedies," which is a thing some Hobbits can get as a Virtue, having learned from Radagast which are Fragrant Weeds and which are Poison Remedies. Does this have to be a Hobbit-only thing?

I'll say this about the swords: whatever artist they got for them actually references some ancient and medieval swords. "Short swords" have leaf-shaped blades, "swords" look like the Roman gladius, and "long swords" look like the Roman spatha. On the other hand, "Axe" apparently covers everything from what we'd call a hatchet to Viking-style war-axe.

Given that they're basically using a simplified sub-set of D&D weapons here, the combat rules appear to be a little more complicated than they need to be. Pointy bit goes in the other character, next.

Frank

Next Up: The Adventuring Phase.

[Blicero]

I reread Lord of the Rings for the first time in many years recently, and it struck me just how aesthetically specific Middle-Earth is. For Tolkien, every elf is noble, every orc is foul, Gollum is pathetic but tragic, and so on. (This is no by means a novel observation, just one I fully appreciated on this readthrough.)

If you were to play an elfgame in Middle-Earth, it'd be a waste if you didn't adopt that style, I think. It's much more essential than any given set of proper nouns or historical events. But, that very sustained mood is the sort of thing I've never seen successfully pulled off in a TTRPG campaign.

You're going to get someone who makes jokes at weird times, someone poking fun at the assumptions of the setting, a Mister Cavern who isn't 100% on 100% of the time, etc. To be clear, all that stuff is fine, even good for a kitchen sink fantasy, or a postmodern cyberpunk game, or a cynical GRRM-ripoff, but it's less desirable in a shared mood-poem.

Also, this game's "Darkening of Mirkwood" I think is one of those adventures that has deeply fervent adherents on random portions of the internet. I've never quite seen how a 30-year campaign wouldn't just end up being a total railroad though.

[Ancient History]

Also, this game's "Darkening of Mirkwood" I think is one of those adventures that has deeply fervent adherents on random portions of the internet. I've never quite seen how a 30-year campaign wouldn't just end up being a total railroad though.

Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and Masks of Nyarlathotep for Call of Cthulhu

Doomstones for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Harlequin and Harlequin's Back for Shadowrun

All of the S-series modules for AD&D.

There are a lot of classic, beloved campaigns which are absolute shit except for nostalgia.

[Chamomile]

This game's journey system/campaign are the seeds of the wilderness adventure system I designed like eight years ago. I really liked how things were divided up by terrain and threat in a way that made you really care about the places you were passing through, but it was way too fiddly and any player ability to impact the setting was junked in favor of slavish adherence to canon. And the Mirkwood region was the perfect place to tell canon to get bent! It was far enough out of the way of any canon events that were generally well known players could change things drastically without most of them even realizing that the canon of the movies they'd seen and loved had technically been violated.

[maglag]

This is right away the essential fucking problem, not just with The One Ring but with any and all Middle-Earth roleplaying games. You have one question to answer at the outset, and that is: What the fuck am I doing?

As this illustrates, there's no good answer for that. Dungeons & Dragons took the basic assumption that you were a professional adventurer(TM) and ran with it; you can get isolated campaigns where you start out as a moisture farmer and become a space wizard, but for most of the groups everyone was on the same page: there is a dungeon, we're going to explore the shit out of it, kill monsters and take their treasures.

The LOTR and Hobbit, however, are actually laser-focused. There are set missions with goals. Weird shit happens along the way, dungeons are delved, monsters are slain and looted, but none of these people is just there for the hell of it or to make some coin.

The Hobbit literally starts with a party of dwarves looking to hire a rogue to hire to help them go slay a dragon and take its hoard. A contract is signed including Bilbo being promised a part of the loot. There's no higher calling or noble cause, just simple business for profit and fun.

Sure, eventually turns out Gandalf the wizard manipulating them all along, but from the point of view of most hobbits (and Bilbo himself) at start, they did go in an adventure just for gold and glory.

In particular the whole "looking for a rogue to hire" bit strongly implies that adventurers in middle earth aren't that rare since you can hope to make a profession out of it with bureaucracy and everything. Tolkien just decided to focus in the bigger epic quests, but the adventuring for gold and glory roots are still there. Bilbo does end the Hobbit book returning to the Shire extra-rich and retiring to a cozy, decadent life to the envy of his neighbours.

If only there was some in-world way to have things but not literally carry those things.

The party do end up needing to abandon the pack mount when they reach an actual dungeon. In the Hobbit obtaining and keeping mounts was no trivial task.

And when Gandalf the Wizard gets a proper trained warhorse (not a pegasus or unicorn or gryphon, just a fucking masterwork but still nonmagic horse), it's treated as a freaking holy relic.

[deaddmwalking]

And when Gandalf the Wizard gets a proper trained warhorse (not a pegasus or unicorn or gryphon, just a fucking masterwork but still nonmagic horse), it's treated as a freaking holy relic.

*adjusts his nerd glasses*

Shadowfax is not a 'masterwork but still nonmagic horse'. He is the king of horses, with the ability to run further and faster than other horses, and hear a call across thousands of miles.

Many things in the Lord of the Rings are not explicitly magical (like the elvish ropes), but the way they're so much more useful than 'mundane' examples (like untying themselves when it is convenient) would appear to be magical for lack of a better example.

Speculating a bit, I think that we use the term 'magic' to describe things that are fundamentally breaking the rules of physics; the elves (and Gandalf) understand that magic is part of the world and don't see it as breaking those physical laws. Shadowfax is 'enough special' to be magical by the way we use the term; even if the elves and/or angels walking the earth in mortal form wouldn't use that word.

[maglag]

And when Gandalf the Wizard gets a proper trained warhorse (not a pegasus or unicorn or gryphon, just a fucking masterwork but still nonmagic horse), it's treated as a freaking holy relic.

*adjusts his nerd glasses*

Shadowfax is not a 'masterwork but still nonmagic horse'. He is the king of horses, with the ability to run further and faster than other horses, and hear a call across thousands of miles.

Many things in the Lord of the Rings are not explicitly magical (like the elvish ropes), but the way they're so much more useful than 'mundane' examples (like untying themselves when it is convenient) would appear to be magical for lack of a better example.

Speculating a bit, I think that we use the term 'magic' to describe things that are fundamentally breaking the rules of physics; the elves (and Gandalf) understand that magic is part of the world and don't see it as breaking those physical laws. Shadowfax is 'enough special' to be magical by the way we use the term; even if the elves and/or angels walking the earth in mortal form wouldn't use that word.

There's indeed a lot of magic mundane stuff in Lotr.

There's swords that glow when certain kinds of creatures approach and that can harm ethereal wraiths.

There's unsinkable boats.

There's lembas that break calories limits in a big way.

There's a star in a bottle.

There's a rope that hurts evil beings just by touch and also unties itself on command.

Shadowfax isn't one of them. It's just a horse that's a bit faster than the average horse. Lembas feed a lot more than their mass would suggest, but Shadowfax isn't able to run circles around normal horses and while lembas are the best travel ration in the setting, Shadowfax is competing (and losing) against other mounts like giant eagles and Nazguls in the same story. Gandalf would do much better with one of those, but is forced to settle for a simple horse that doesn't do anything that a well-bred horse couldn't.

And case in point in both the Hobbit and Lotr the party ends up having to walk and carry their own gear most of the time. Even regular horses are are hard to get (and more important, keep), let alone a masterwork horse.

[Ancient History]

This is right away the essential fucking problem, not just with The One Ring but with any and all Middle-Earth roleplaying games. You have one question to answer at the outset, and that is: What the fuck am I doing?

As this illustrates, there's no good answer for that. Dungeons & Dragons took the basic assumption that you were a professional adventurer(TM) and ran with it; you can get isolated campaigns where you start out as a moisture farmer and become a space wizard, but for most of the groups everyone was on the same page: there is a dungeon, we're going to explore the shit out of it, kill monsters and take their treasures.

The LOTR and Hobbit, however, are actually laser-focused. There are set missions with goals. Weird shit happens along the way, dungeons are delved, monsters are slain and looted, but none of these people is just there for the hell of it or to make some coin.

The Hobbit literally starts with a party of dwarves looking to hire a rogue to hire to help them go slay a dragon and take its hoard. A contract is signed including Bilbo being promised a part of the loot. There's no higher calling or noble cause, just simple business for profit and fun.

Sure, eventually turns out Gandalf the wizard manipulating them all along, but from the point of view of most hobbits (and Bilbo himself) at start, they did go in an adventure just for gold and glory.

The whole adventure centered around Thorin Oakenshield being The Last Descendant with a magical map and an ancestral claim to the place. It wasn't 11 random dwarfs deciding to go rip off Smaug for coke and whore money like this was Detroit.

OSSR: The One Ring

Chapter 4: The Adventuring Phase



Your music for this chapter is the extended Mordor Theme.

AncientH

Right-minded, respectable folk know that adventures are disturbing, uncomfortable things. Not only do they make people late for dinner, but they often imperil the lives of those who embark upon them.

I should point out that maglag is correct in one regard, in that The One Ring is taking is primary inspiration more from The Hobbit than The Lord of the Ring. It still doesn't present random groups of adventurers as "a thing" in the world, but it assumes that your company has together for [some purpose] to do [something].

Figuring out what that purpose is and what the fuck you're supposed to do is largely left as an academic exercise to Mister Cavern and the Player Heroes.

Frank

The game's “big idea” is the idea of alternating “adventuring phase” and “fellowship phase.” And despite this chapter telling us that the adventuring phase is “by far the largest part of the game” this chapter is only barely the longest chapter in the book at 56 pages. Considering that both of the previous chapters were required reading to complete character generation, the game spends less page space on its “phases” than on its character sheet.

The first thing to realize about the Adventuring phase is that it's not a phase. Or at least it's not a phase in the way games normally use the word. It's not like a movement phase in Warhammer or like a combat phase in Magic the Gathering. And most importantly of all: it's not like any “phase” in any RPG I've ever played or read. For one thing, an adventuring phase can last longer than a session and can also include other things called phases inside it (such as an “interaction phase”). Is this an Italian to English thing? I don't know. It's possible that the Italian “Fase” makes more sense in this context, but it might be just as batshit in the original.

The adventuring phase isn't like an adventuring day, it's literally the entire adventure. You can rest and travel overland and sing and dance and eat twice baked honeycakes and have downtime and have it still be the same adventuring phase. I am looking at the chapter right now and I genuinely don't know what the purpose of this nomenclature is supposed to be.

AncientH

I suspect - although I may be entirely wrong - this may be a legacy of the Middle-Earth Collectible Card Game, which was one of those CCGs that focused on traveling through a landscape and encountering and dealing with various hazards. Or maybe they just wanted to formalize the distinction between "adventure time" and "downtime between adventures." I don't know.


Not a witch.

It's super-weird because the description of how things work suggests a sort of action economy like we normally associate with combat, but there is no real limit on actions?

Frank

One thing that this book likes to stroke its chin about is that the player's declarations in the adventuring phase are reactive to the MC's declaration while the player's declarations in the fellowship phase are proactive. That doesn't seem to be quite backwards, but it's certainly close enough to backwards as to be complete fucking gibberish.

Task resolution is actually completely normal for a roleplaying game. The player announces what their character is trying to do, the MC decides how difficult that is, the player has the opportunity to argue that it should be easier due to abilities their character has, dice are rolled, the player chooses to spend metagame currency to influence the roll, and then the success or failure of the action is acknowledged by the MC. There are some specific weirdnesses in this system like how the basic dice system is bonkers and how the difficulty of the task doesn't seem to figure in to whether a player can argue for automatic success or not, but in the broadest sense this is the task resolution of Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire the Masquerade, Kryszta?y Czasu, and pretty much whatever RPG you got going back to the days of garage printing in the 70s. Describing this format as “reactive” on the part of the player is... very odd. The first declaration of “I pick the lock” is from the player and the last declaration of “the door opens” is from the Loremaster... so isn't that definitionally proactive on the part of the player?

AncientH

Most of the chapter just describes the basic mechanic resolution, which suggests to me that this should have been much earlier in the ruleset. But what do I know?



I'm guessing they're saving all the actual "what fucking adventures do we go on in the Adventuring Phase" for the Loremaster chapter, but it doesn't really matter. None of this matters. Are you actually trying to roll dice for this game? Why?

Frank

A moderately central point to how a system like this works is how difficult the tasks actually are. The default Target Number is 14, but what is a default action? I don't know! The difficulty chart helpfully tells us that a Target Number of 16 is harder than a 14 while a 12 is easier, but without a set of examples I genuinely do not know where to start. There are some italicized examples of play, but they are so cryptic as to be of no help. Trotter sneaks out of the hall and the stealth check is TN 14, but we haven't been told anything about the hall or the guards or whatever. So what was it about the task that made it TN 14 and not 12 or 16? I don't know!

As mentioned previously, the way you get automatic success is by invoking traits or virtues that apply to the situation. I cannot possibly sufficiently underline the fact that there is no relation to skill values, attributes, task difficulty, or fucking anything. Traits and virtues have no numbers attached, so you can't be more cunning or more keen eyed or whatever. And there doesn't seem to be an intermediate effect. The book talks about “possibly improving chances” but there aren't any improved chances. Automatic success, as implied by the name, is automatic. If the MC accepts the argument that the character being a smoker makes them able to slip out of the hall undetected (an actual example in this book) then there are no chances. Dice are not rolled. If the MC says that sounds “totally whack” then the die roll proceeds as normal.

The actual effects of different degrees of success could also be fleshed out. The game recognizes four success levels, and as previously noted it's entirely possible to meet the criteria for the highest (Extraordinary Success) and the lowest (Failure) at the same time. I don't know what that means. But more broadly, there's only 18 skills and four success levels, why the fuck isn't there an example of what normal success, great success, and extraordinary success do with each of the skills? I'm not talking about how I'd like to see some target numbers and success level interpretations for using Athletics on jumping and climbing, although of course I would think that would be helpful. I don't understand what the difference between “travel” and “explore” is supposed to be, and I don't have an example of what succeeding greatly or extraordinarily might mean in any context.

Tests are exactly like Tasks. Literally exactly. The only difference is the MC initiates them by saying that the player should probably make a Search roll rather than the player saying that they should probably make a Search roll. Reading this feels like I'm taking crazy pills because it's the exact same process and the exact same resolution method and these could obviously have been combined and the extra space spent on describing system outputs.

AncientH

There are Opposed Tests, but because this game is a hatecrime, there are two different ways to resolve them.

A character attempts an action, and another character
then tries to nullify its outcome. The contestants might
use different abilities, or the same one, depending on the
nature of the opposed roll.

Examples: a hero hides to spy upon a Loremaster
character who might discover him (Stealth vs. Awareness);
an adventurer addresses a listener to rouse him to action
while another orator tries to calm his spirits (Persuade vs.
Persuade).

When this happens, the active character rolls first to see
if he succeeds in the first place: the action is resolved
normally, by rolling against a TN. If the roll fails, then
the second character succeeds automatically. If the acting
character succeeds, the challenging character rolls against
the same TN: if the roll fails, then the consequences of the
acting character’s roll are resolved; if it succeeds, the two
successful results are compared and the better roll takes
effect (see below).

If the action features a direct confrontation, then all
individuals involved roll simultaneously. Again, the
contestants might use different abilities, or the same one,
depending on the nature of the opposed roll.

Examples: One character is discussing a learnt topic while
another challenges him with witty remarks in front of an
audience (Lore vs. Riddle), or two characters are armwrestling (Athletics vs. Athletics).

When this happens, all rolls are resolved simultaneously
and their results compared (see below). If both rolls fail,
roll again or, if more appropriate, the contest is tied.

In the first instance, it's very much a case of "I don't have to be faster than the bear, I just need to be faster than you." If the first person rolling fucks up their roll, the other person wins automatically. In the second instance, you have to compare results - and you may not even be rolling the same thing against the same TN, so you're actually counting who gets the most T icons. And if you're counting hits, then this is a completely fucking different game, isn't it?

Also, I have no idea how Hope works in this situation. I guess it does nothing?

Frank

There's a mini-essay about how the MC can require higher success thresholds for really epic tasks if they get tired of players going “crit fishing” for Gandlaf Runes that would make them succeed at any Target Number. But... listed Target Numbers only go up to 20, and for anyone who has a significant chance of making those rolls, almost half of their successes are great successes anyway. It really seems like a temper tantrum over the fact that the fundamental game mechanics of this game are pretty dumb.

But of course, crit fishing is definitely a big problem in this game. In a four player hero company, if one character is a “specialist” (meaning: rolls 3 success dice) and the other three characters are untrained (rolling zero success dice), the specialist has about a 1 in 4 chance of success at a TN 20 task (25.7%). But if the other three characters each take their one in twelve chance of getting a Gandalf Rune, that's also about a one in four chance of success (23.0%). If a task is unlikely to succeed and you don't relish spending Hope on it, you simply might as well start things off by having the Hobbit try to smash down the door or have the Woodsman try to translate the inscription. That just... that's just how this system works.

And the authors seem genuinely upset that players familiar with the system do that, but I genuinely think that the answer is to make a system that is less dumb rather than rage at the players. The author doesn't agree with me on this point though. I think this is the result of having three hundred playtesters – clearly people did point out fundamental failure states of the core action resolution mechanic. But the author wasn't willing to fundamentally alter his pet dice system.

AncientH

We get some noise on cooperative rolls and prolonged rolls, and honestly this feels like the kind of shit that you put into an RPG because you read it somewhere else. Nothing in the game so far actually requires any set amount of time beyond Loremaster fiat. It's not like Shadowrun 4 where there were extended rolls where you spent weeks counting successes. So yes, these things exist, but no, you're probably never using them.

"Prolonged actions" are kind of Take 10s. You take X times as long, but the TN goes down, but you now have to make many additional rolls to succeed. You're basically being punished for taking your time.

Frank

If Tolkien books are about anything more than casual racism and repressed homo-eroticism they are about traveling. So for a Middle Earth RPG to go all up ons with the journey rules is reasonable and on brand. This book presents twelve actual pages of rules for its journey minigame. Is it good? I'm not sure. It's definitely more fiddly than I would want for a typical elf game, but I can see the argument that if you wanted to do a pastiche of specifically Tolkien's elf stories in your elf game that this is the kind of thing you might want.

But really the question ought to be whether it generates the right kind of stories and outcomes. And... I'm not sure whether it does or not. There's a “random hazards” set of charts whose outputs are incredibly random (like “lol I'm so random” random), but the suggestion is actually to not use those and instead use a deck of cards that aren't included with this book and I don't know what the outputs are like.

I'd have to run sample characters through these things a lot of times to get a handle on what the outputs are like for traveling between places I can remember from the books or movies, but I suspect I wouldn't be much impressed. I think that if the fellowship is traveling through the woods they should have woods encounters and if they are traveling through the mountains they should have mountain encounters. That kind of terrain relevant encounter table is an elf game cliché, but it is such because that is how The Hobbit seemed to work! I don't think “cruel weather” or whatever should be the same in mountains and in valleys.

I don't think all of these ideas are necessarily bad. I kind of like the thing where there are journey jobs that make players be the default point man for certain kinds of hazards. At least, I like that in concept. But all in all, this set of journey rules is too fiddly and too uninspiring for me to be motivated to math hammer out its failure points.

AncientH

I'm going to admit that journeys are maybe my least favorite part of RPGs. For me, it really is all about the destination. The rest is wilderness encounters and survival checks. So this part of the RPG is almost enough to make me want to check out.

Not that, dammit.

Traveling is a chore. It is not really very exciting, except in the Oregon Trail sense, and Oregon Trail is only exciting because everything is automated. You travel until you hit something interesting, and then the game stops for a moment as you resolve your difficulty or bury your dead, and you travel onwards. I'm sure there are some wildlife enthusiasts that get very interested in geology and geography and hunting and yadda yadda, but for the most fucking part, you're zipping between obstacles and landmarks and watching your food supplies dwindle.

Frank

The combat rules are 16 pages long and ambitious. It's all narrative and die roll based, no miniatures. No hexes or squares. No move actions. It's all stances and positions and die rolls. Lots and lots of die rolls. I appreciate the ambition here. But there are way too many fucking die rolls. Also, it seems excessively easy to push this combat system well off the RNG. Wits just adds linearly to the target number to hit you. That's just a thing it does. Shields add linearly to that. One of the sample characters has a Parry rating while in the wilderness of ten and she isn't even optimized. That doesn't mean that the target number to hit her is ten, that means that the target number to hit her is increased by ten. It starts at various numbers based on stances and positions and shit, but it's essentially inconceivable for the target number to hit her ever falling below 16. Many monsters are already just crit fishing for the Eye of Sauron to hit under any circumstances. And with a bit more min/maxing she could be sporting a to-hit target number of 28 from enemy archery as a starting character. That's completely off the RNG for normal opponents. And on the flip side, one of the other sample characters has a Parry value of 4, and basically gets hit most of the time.

The main issue is that there are so many die rolls involved that I can't see Hope points mattering much one way or the other. Rando orcs and spiders have 12 hit points, which is just enough that it will probably take 2 hits whether you're using a sword or a two-handed ax. Crit fishing is going to come up with a lot of crits, because battles are a lot of rounds in this game.

AncientH

As a side note, I have no idea how this is supposed to play out if two members of the Company just decide to duel because they don't like each other's face. I guess once gets to be "the Enemy?"

I am REALLY bored at home today.

Combat generally follows the rules for a Roman legion, for whatever reason. You draw up your lines, throw out your opening volley of missile weapons, and then close in for hack'n'slash (or smash, if you prefer a mattock). A good chunk of this also involves stances (Forward, Open, Defensive, or Rearward), which modifies your numbers and...

Well, the more aggressive your stance, the sooner you act. The sooner you act, the lower the TN to hit you. So if you can drop the goblins in one rush, you want to be as aggressive as possible. If you have enough armor or whatever to tank a hit, you want to be as aggressive as possible. There's basically no reason for anyone to ever be "Open." It's all or nothing.

Frank

So... Armor. Armor doesn't make you take less damage. Shields make you take less damage by causing your parry value to rise and thus for you to get hit less often, but armor does not. What armor does is affect the “protection test” which is a thing you roll to avoid getting the “wounded” condition. If you are “wounded” then your chance of dying if you run out of hit points goes way up. You have to make a protection test to avoid a wound whenever the enemy attacking you rolled at least their weapon's piercing number on the d12. Note that this means that if it's harder to hit you, a larger proportion of attacks that do hit will also be piercing – so our example min/maxer Woodland Wilder not-a-ranger with a shield that can only ever be hit by enemies rolling an Eye of Sauron will also have to roll a protection test every single hit because every hit will also be a piercing hit.

But either way, the number of hit points you lose from a hit doesn't change. Which is a bit of a long way around to say that these rules 100% support going into combat in a bikini. Indeed, wearing helmets seems to mostly be a sucker's game except that there's a weird second wind mechanic where you can lose some fatigue by dramatically removing your helmet and I think you have to start with a helmet on to do that.


Easterlings have large shields and a removable helmet and might be the best army for this game system.

There's a few weird exceptions. Armor protects you from fire even though it doesn't do anything against enemy swords. I am not a fan of any of this. This seems to hit the sweet spot where no one is happy with how armor works and also you have to make quite regular armor based die rolls that do not change the outcome of battle but do sometimes result in your character dying.

AncientH

In an engagement, the Loremaster is instructed to pair up enemies and heroes as much as possible. So a big melee devolves into a bunch of individual fights, and you only take two orcs at the same time if it's Spring break and you're feeling experimental.



Also, since unarmed martial arts aren't a thing, you can make "Brawling Attacks" using your Dagger skill.

Only four inches?
You'll feel me.

Frank

This game pointedly refuses to use normal RPG terminology so a journey encounter is called a hazard, and a social challenge is called an encounter. The social challenge rules are simple and to the point. They are clearly influenced by the “skill challenges” of 4th edition, but they are better in every way. There's a limited number of rounds and individual characters get kicked off the island when they fail and at the end you tally up successful rolls from the whole party. That's... fine. It's not a big thing one way or the other, but it's fine. It does the job.

It reminds me how amazingly bad 4e D&D's actual skill challenge rules were. These rules are nothing special and aren't that different from the ones in 4th edition. But they work instead of not working, so there's that.

AncientH

Throwing attacks are also made using the Dagger skill, which officially makes Dagger the best weapon skill, I think. It may not do a lot of damage, but you're basically never unarmed since if you can't use a sword you can at least chuck it at a motherfucker.

Chapter 5: The Fellowship Phase

Frank

The Fellowship Phase chapter is only 12 pages long, which is actually shorter than the appendix with the sample characters in it (although there is more text). This book has now told me at least four different times that the Fellowship Phase is more player pro-active, but I honestly don't see it. It seems to follow exactly the same structure as performing downtime tasks during an adventure. Really, truly, deeply I have no idea what they are on about and I am literally reading what they said about what they are on about!

Other than the fact that Tolkien loved the word, I also don't know why this is called the Fellowship Phase. It's a piece of extended downtime, and unlike the adventuring part, the player characters are not expected to be together during it. It's like the social distancing phase.

In any case, this is downtime where you spend XP and convert treasure into social respectability and shit.

AncientH

The default pacing of gameplay for The One Ring sees a group of adventurers take part in one adventure per year of game time.

<blink>

I mean jeezus dude, I know it gets hard to get a group together once you all start having kids, but I'm pretty sure we can meet more often than that.

Frank

Honestly there's not a lot here. Here on page 196 they finally reveal that they give out two different flavors of XP because they don't want to let you spend it all on weapon skills because they know that you're a fucking powergamer and you'd probably do that.

Anyway, while there's some useful rules in here about how successful of an adventurer you have to be to come home and get made into a minor noble versus coming home to people pretending to have thought you dead and auctioning your stuff – there isn't really enough here to get worked up about this being a coequal phase with the rest of the game. It's like the bookkeeping phase at the end of a game of Mordheim or Necromunda. Nothing more than that.

AncientH

The players are free to spend the phase at any place they
have already visited during the game. The Adventurer’s
Map comes in useful here, especially if the players have
updated the information on it and kept track of their
journeys.

The route bringing the company or each individual
player-hero to his chosen destination is considered to
take place ‘behind the scenes’ without Fatigue tests and
consequences, unless the Loremaster or his players have
a mind to play out the details.

This is reminding me less of an RPG and more one of those cooperative miniature skirmish games that have a narrative campaign attached to them.

Frank

I approve of the Receive Title bit, but it seems kinda... empty? Like, there should be some objective amount of renown points you need to get in order to be called Elf Friend or whatever. The endpoints are there, but the path is not, and it seems kind of half-assed.

I personally don't have strong opinions as to whether characters should be granted lands and titles because the player noticed that they had enough renown to qualify or the MC noticed that they had enough renown to qualify. It's a cooperative storytelling game, and either is a reasonable means of handling it.

But this doesn't have concrete criteria for being declared Hero of the Woodmen at all, which makes the choice to have the player request it all the weirder. Like, the player says “I think the Woodmen should declare me Hero of the Woodmen.” and the Loremaster is like “Why the fuck would they do that?” and then... what?

AncientH

Despite all the talk about titles and lands, nobody is actually discussing the details of the quasi-feudal setting of LOTR, so who gives you this title and what it is and how it compares to anyone else is completely fucking up in the air. I mean, the assumption is you start as...what? Freeman? Peasant? Nobody knows what the fuck the social rankings are in Middle Earth, except you've got a handful of kings and some Dwarfs whose word for "king" probably also doubles with "mine supervisor."

Frank

Mark on your calendars how bullshit the shadow reduction rate is, because that's going to be a thing once they actually tell you what shadow points do.

AncientH

Players with a Standing score are allowed to elaborate on
the year’s end narration, to testify how their heroes may
have affected events taking place in their home settlement
or region. When the Loremaster has finished describing
the changes occurring in their homeland for the current
year’s end, one or more players may intervene to let
their characters participate in the events taking place (all
players belonging to the same Culture may take part in the
narration together).

This honestly feels like the kind of thing that, if you were playing a dynastic game of conquest, would be relevant and interesting. Like, if you have Standing X, you can intervene in occasions with standing X-1. Like major weddings, town charters, that kind of thing. But what the hell does it mean for The One Ring? I'm still not sure what kind of events make it into the grand roll-up at the end of the year, much less why you would give a fuck about them.

Frank

Next up.... The Loremaster


No.

[jadagul]

The first declaration of “I pick the lock” is from the player and the last declaration of “the door opens” is from the Loremaster... so isn't that definitionally proactive on the part of the player?

I'm guessing they think the first declaration is "there is a door" from the Loremaster?

In the Adventuring phase, the Loremaster says "hey, a spider jumps you!" and you decide what to do. In the Fellowship phase, you say "I should be declared Hero of the Woodmen!" and the Loremaster responds.

[Thaluikhain]

Was going to say much the same as the above post, but using the example of an orc rather than a spider.

The combat rules are 16 pages long and ambitious. It's all narrative and die roll based, no miniatures. No hexes or squares. No move actions.

No move actions? How does that work?

[Username17]

No move actions? How does that work?

Not very well. (drum beats, laugh track)

Your position in combat is either in close combat or rearward and able to use missile weapons. So... the combat positioning system of Might & Magic 2.

-Username17

[Stubbazubba]

The combat rules are 16 pages long and ambitious. It's all narrative and die roll based, no miniatures. No hexes or squares. No move actions.

No move actions? How does that work?

The One Ring had an abstract positioning system where you were in one of four positions relative to the bad guys, which it somewhat misleadingly called Stances: Forward, Open, Defensive, and Rearward. The first three were all melee stances, with Rearward being ranged. Stances determined the initiative order, the base TN for attacks both for and against you (that's right, the bad guys don't pick their own Stance, they are just a mass of units whose attacks are contingent on the player characters' Stances), and which special maneuvers were available to you. Terrain features were all abstracted. Assuming neither side was ambushed, then both sides exchanged 1-2 ranged volleys as they closed to melee and then the above setup kicked in.

It was terribly boring and dull, like most things in Middle-earth, but it could be overhauled into a workable almost boardgame-like setup. The first thing I did was house rule a Hidden stance where you cannot be attacked but can attack as usual (yeah, there were no rules in a Lord of the Rings game for attacking someone who couldn't see you, like when you wear the Ring that's in the title of the book). But to get much mileage out of the idea you'd want to go back to the drawing board.

[Thaluikhain]

So, you can't encircle enemies to surround them or get past their HtH people and attack their support people? Pass.

[Username17]

So, you can't encircle enemies to surround them or get past their HtH people and attack their support people? Pass.

There are functionally only two positions: close combat and not. There is some obfuscation of letting you pick three close combat stances, but functionally it's just that player characters inherently have Expertise of up to -6/+6.

But yeah, it kind of seems like there should be achievable positioning goals. But there really aren't. There's a thing where at the start of battle you make a check to get an extra die to roll on a later test, but it's very small compared to the number of times you will roll dice in a typical battle.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

The lack of a positioning system and the 1:1 pair-offs also mean that you want to get as many people into the front rank as possible.

If you have a party of 5 and three of them are elves hanging back shooting arrows, that leaves 2 dudes to handle all the front-line troops - which means that probably the guys up front are going to have to deal with 2 opponents each simultaneously, at least for a round or two.

[Chamomile]

The One Ring has a lot of ideas like this where they're interesting and clever, but then maimed by overcomplex execution. In this case: This whole "stances" thing is not a bad way to simplify combat down for a game whose focus is on other things, without quite boiling it down to a single die roll. But 1) the math on combat means that most combat is not over in 2-3 rounds and 15 minutes of table time like you'd want, and 2) this is Lord of the Rings, and while you could make an argument for having a journey or wilderness survival system of equal importance to combat, you can't really make an argument that combat should be stripped down as far as it would need to be to make this whole "stances" thing work. Every single book's climax is a combat, often a mass combat!

[Ancient History]

OSSR: The One Ring RPG

Chapter 6: The Loremaster

AncientH

Then a minstrel and loremaster stood up and named all the names of the Lords of the Mark in their order...

That's some deep loremastering there.

So, this is the gamemastering section. You know what that means!

If you are not going to take the part of the Loremaster, you do not need to read from this point of the volume onwards, and you definitely shouldn’t read the introductory scenario in Part Nine: The Marsh Bell, as it will spoil the adventure for you if you know its secrets.

There's something to be said for how RPG books attempt to deliberately limit their audience like this. It's why, ultimately, the Player's Guide and Dungeon Master's Guide got split up. I'm not certain that's a good idea, since it increases the number of books you need to play, and yet clearly not everybody needs the same number of books - not everybody at the table needs their own Player's Guide - so I'm not sure what the actual economic dynamics of splitting up books like that is.

Well, I know it leads to more piracy, but that's just a given.

Frank

The longest chapters are behind us. This chapter is only 18 pages. If you were hoping for a good rundown of how hard basic tasks are supposed to be or how many die rolls people are expected to make during an adventure (and thus how many were expected to be hope powered), that has already not happened. This chapter does the standard infuriating things for a Mr. Cavern section: it refers to the previous two thirds of the book as “the first half” and it tells the players who aren't going to be playing Mr. Cavern that they don't need to read any farther. That last bit has been a thing games have been telling people since the Ford administration, but it has always always been bullshit. For fuck's sake, the reader hasn't even been told how you get advancement points yet.

AncientH

I'm not sure there's ever been a solid "So you're the gamemaster" section, and that includes any of the ones I've written. You're told to do basic gamemaster-y things like "Describe the consequences of the adventurer's actions" and "Describe events from the ongoing plot."

Notable tidbit they did try to nail down: How to gamemaster in Middle Fucking Earth.

Arguably the most important task of a Loremaster is to act as the interface between the players and Middle-earth. Getting the Middle-earth “mood” right is essential in order to give the players the feeling that they are a part of the unfolding events at the end of the Third Age. Many players will be no strangers to this much-loved setting, and so familiarity with the source material will be important for the Loremaster.

In addition to helping create an authentic Middle-earth experience, taking another look at Tolkien’s books will remind Loremasters of the many small details which can provide the seed of an adventure plot.

Like all good advice, this sounds like the sort of thing you would automatically do yourself if you were trying to be a gamemaster in Middle Earth regardless of what game system was involved. If I was trying to recreate the Middle Earth experience with GURPS, I would go back to Tolkien's books. That Is What You Do. It isn't wrong so much as blindingly fucking obvious.

Frank

This chapter starts on page 202 and there isn't a rule until page 212. The first ten pages of this book's MC chapter is mostly the author's OKCupid profile explaining what he's looking for in a Loremaster. Which mostly seems to be “knows enough Tolkien Lore to not piss him off by having non-canon shit happen.”

Anyway, the book seems to think you will get an average of 4 advancement points per session. A player who is up on how getting them works can easily get twice that without even spamming dumb actions. Like skill XP in every system all the way back to Runequest, this system is bad. It encourages you to waste table time by taking extraneous actions so that you get checks on your skills. It encourages you to waste more table time by explaining how your actions are in-character for one of your traits. It's also an amazing “rich get richer” thing, where you need to succeed at a roll to get skill XP, but it's more than that even because to get your second or third point of skill XP in an adventure you need to roll a 6 on one of your d6s, which happens 42.1% of the time if you already have three and only 16.7% of the time if you only have one.

Like obviously there's a certain satisfaction to be gained in being able to say that your Song skill went up because of that cool time you sang a grim song and reminded everyone that your character had the Grim trait. But holy actual fuck is this shit terrible in every way. People who hog the spotlight now get better at hogging the spotlight later. It rewards time wasting.

And these bullshit points are way more numerous than the ones you get for actually accomplishing mission objectives – which are just 1-3 points a session. Also the author seems to think that a typical adventure will take 3 sessions to complete, which honestly sounds terrible. But beyond sounding terrible, it deeply implies a game which you play for a really really long time, so these disparities in advancement between characters would have a lot of time to fester and metastasize if you actually played this way. This book is no-shit talking about ninety session campaigns – which is like a weekly gaming group meeting for two years straight. By the time you do that, the disparity between the player who constantly talks about how adventurous or curious their character is and the player who doesn't talk much would be night and day.

AncientH

If no circles have been checked yet, the Loremaster should feel free to award the Advancement point upon any successful roll.

Thanks for playing.

Finally, a number of supplementary Experience points are awarded by the Loremaster at the end of the Adventuring phase. Generally, this bonus should not exceed an approximate ratio of 1 Experience point for every two game sessions in the Adventuring phase (for example, a four-session adventure should yield a final reward of 2 supplementary Experience points).

I'm pretty sure I've given this rant before, but in brief: experience points are really weird for Tolkien, because Tolkien does not generally have characters experience anything like growth in terms of skills and abilities. Bilbo starts out as a fat middle-aged hobbit and sixty years later he's a fat old hobbit, and he never develops any noticeable skill in that time frame, except maybe ranks in Craft (Poetry Just To Fuck With Elves). He never learns to be a thief, he never improves his thief skills. In The Hobbit, it's plain from page 1 that he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.

No one does. No one cares. We don't really give a shit if Samwise Gamgee levels up his Short Sword skill to use his Barrowblade or whatever. Wizards are just immortal bastards.

Which doesn't mean XP and advancement in Middle Earth roleplaying doesn't have its place, but it is entirely a measure of needing to decide what the goals are and how to get there. They try to do that in The One Ring.

Frank

As previously stated, nothing is more destructive to a player’s suspension of disbelief and immersion in the game than the feeling that his player’s fate is being dictated by the Loremaster’s choices and not his own.

When we get to the squishy text about being a good MC instead of a bad one, the advice is actually pretty decent. It's not really specific to The One Ring for the most part, but it's not half bad. It's not a quarter bad. It's pretty good. But remember that the author is stressing how important it is to maintain the appearance of fairness in large part because the actual game is very unfair. A tremendous amount of character effectiveness and character advancement is based on games of Mother May I between the player and the MC. If you can convince the MC that your Hobbit being a stoner is the solution to all problems, you don't roll dice at all.

I don't think this is an issue that can be handled with good advice about impartiality and fairness. The rewards of successful bullshitting aren't +1 or +2 or whatever, it's automatic success. The game just inherently has too much discretionary power over character action success. Avoiding butthurt is impossible.

AncientH

I've been seeing a lot of hot takes lately that rules, ultimately, do not matter and get in the way of having fun in a roleplaying game. I think that you can certainly have a lot of fun in a game with no or soft rules; Calvinball is very fun. However, rules also represent a sort of social contract between the gamemaster and the players: you agree to play by the rules of the game when you agree to sit down at the game. House rules and all are fine, but it's a social contract.

I think a lot of people don't get that.

The One Ring kind of gets it. The people writing the game recognize that people are doing this thing because they want a certain experience, the point of the system as written is to try and help deliver that experience. Obviously, they can't control what goes on at your table - if somebody wants to write an erotically charged sexventure based off Marion Zimmer Bradley's Arwen fanfic, you can't stop them and maybe people really do want to do that. But at least all the tables playing this game know to roll their "Sword" skill when "attacking," to take the Rearward stance if they are so inclined, and that points are awarded for success.

That's all important.

Frank

The book has a brief set of essays about what it might mean to raise or lower target numbers. I feel that despite the fact that this book has talked around this point many times, the authors don't really know what the outputs of this system are. The high end target numbers really aren't that hard to get if you're willing to spend a hope point, and failure on the lower target numbers is pretty common if you aren't. The average starting attribute without the favor bonus is 5, which means that the difference between spending a hope point and not is like half the RNG.

With a system like this, the game just really needed to sit the fuck down and mathhammer the outputs and give some solid examples for what each skill did at each target number. Having done that, the correct choice would then be to scrap this system because the outputs are dumb, but even if you were contractually bound to keep the system because you'd put in an order for all these dumb special dice, there just needs to be a lot more data points as to what makes a TN 16 Riddle task different from a TN 14 Riddle task.

You can tell they've thought about this a lot, but not in a systematic way, so this is all garbage.

AncientH

The thing is, 30-40 years earlier this would have been fine. Fine-ish. Lots of games had arbitrary difficulty settings and weird dice mechanics and tracking individual skill point raises and shit. Not always all together, but these were all paints in the game designer's toolbox.

But in the 2010s? You have to wonder what they were reading and inspired by.

I keep going back to Storyteller. A lot of this looks like Storyteller style knock-off mechanics, even if they explicitly aren't. I feel like there's some weird Gothic punk DNA in there somewhere.

We're also introduced to Loremaster Characters, but Frank's rant on that is better than what I had planned.

Frank

Non-Player Characters – or NPCs – are a staple of RPGs and have been since forever. Like, literally forever, since the weirdass Napoleonic war LARP that D&D grew out of had judges that would temporarily sub in for transiently important bystanders and shit. Some games have cutesy names for NPCs – such as this game which calls them Loremaster Characters.

Loremaster Characters end up being divided into named and unnamed, but they can literally have a name and not be a “Named Loremaster Character” because go fuck yourself. The game ties itself into knots about this,but basically the only reason this is remotely a thing is that the core random number generator is garbage. In most games you'd have a character make an Awareness test and a character make a Stealth test and whoever wins would win. It wouldn't fucking matter whether one was a Player Hero and another was a Named Loremaster Character Antagonist, you'd just fucking do it. But because this game's task resolution system doesn't output degrees of success that are easily comparable, all of this shit becomes super complicated.

Now personally I would think that if you found yourself saying “gosh, it's really hard to model it being more difficult to sneak by guards if the guards are more competent in this system” then the correct choice is to burn the system and start over in the ruins and ashes with a new system. Because that's a very foundational problem.

AncientH

As I said, Frank says it better than I do. From a Lore perspective, I suspect that the people writing this were influenced by certain theories of how Tolkien's fictional world operates, where some people are just supposed to be on another level and if your spiritual nobility ranking isn't high enough you just get stomped like when Luffy releases his conqueror's khaki.



Still standing? Named characters.

Realistically, this could have gone a lot worse where if any of the Officially Canon(TM) Tolkien characters appear on screen you automatically fail. I suppose that could still be the case for Elf NPCs like Elrond or Galadriel, but let's think of something else.

Chapter 7: The Shadow

Frank

This book gives itself 30 pages for the chapter on the opposition. This opposition is basically “Sauron and friends” because you're in Middle Earth during the last century of the Third Age.

The first 9 pages are about getting corrupted by the shadow. This is Middle Earth, so major characters having bouts of madness and falling to shadow is definitely on brand. However, I think having it happen to player characters is fucked up.

The core mechanic is that you gradually accumulate Shadow points and you gradually spend your Hope points, and when the first number gets bigger than the second number you become a ticking time bomb. That is, the next time you roll dice and the d12 comes up with the Eye of Sauron you cash out most of your Shadow points and temporarily go crazy and turn on your friends. Like Boromir in Fellowship or Thorin in The Hobbit. And the fact that both of the examples that spring to mind are factually from this setting's book series means that I can see why the authors decided to put this in. It is reasonably on-brand for this setting.


Uh oh. Boromir is going crazy.

The biggest problem with this is that it biases towards inaction. If you get some Shadow points and are at risk of going crazy, the only way to avoid that is to not roll dice. Any die roll can come up with the eye, and no roll is more or less likely to screw you than another (unless you got a roll twice and pick ability, in which case the chances go to a much more manageable 1 in 144). If you want to avoid screwing the party, you'll avoid taking actions. The player's route to arm mitigation is to contribute to the game and the story as little as possible. And that extends not only to future sessions, but to further adventures! Shadow goes away at an extremely slow pace, so even if you refresh Hope you'll be sitting on a much reduced functional Hope pool for next adventure, which in turn limits how much your character can safely take actions. You could easily get to a situation where there's a door or something, and none of the players want to try to open it because none of them want to roll dice. This is a straight up fail state for the entire game, and it can persist from one adventure to the next.

The next issue is that the things you get Shadow for aren't usually things you have a lot of control over and frequently hit the entire Company simultaneously. When the Company's journey takes it through evil ground, everyone just gets hit with Shadow. You can also pick up Shadow for “misdeeds” but that's oldschool AD&D alignment fuckery where the MC has the option of screwing you over for making “violent threats” in a game about sword wielding adventurers.

AncientH

It is kind of weird because when it happens to Boromir in LOTR, that's specifically the One Ring fucking with him. As it does with absolutely everybody. It never really happens in The Hobbit, unless you count Gollum (One Ring again), and it doesn't really happen anywhere else in the Legendarium.

It kinda reminds me of the Shadow from Wraith, which, again, is just me drawing comparisons with White Wolf games. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor also came out in 2014, but I'm 90% sure that was just coincidence and that had no influence on this game what-so-fucking-ever.

Frank

Such that any of the numbers on your character sheet matter at all, it is in comparison to the monsters. The latter 20 pages of this chapter are the monsters. This being Middle Earth, there aren't actually that many different monsters. Most of what you fight is some variety of Orc, Troll, Spider, or Wolf. This book reaches for the obscure Silmarilion lore and busts out Vampires and Bats. Since team monster makes virtually no choices in this game, the main question is merely what happens if you fight them in various stances.

Recall that players can be made defensively by tweaking out Wits as an Elf or Woodman and then shielding up. Doing pretty much anything else and team monster will hit you all the time unless you go rearward and use archery. This means that the standard party is the big buff high Body bowman behind the small and nimble Elvish shield bearer. If that seems dumb to you and maybe backwards, you are probably not alone.

The other way to fight is to have everyone go into Forward stance and not even try to dodge blows but instead just race the enemy on hit points. You obviously lose a lot more hit points doing it this way, but you actually take less potentially mortal wounds because piercing attacks are based on special symbols coming up on literal dice so fewer turns is less wounds whether you're getting hit more or not.

Which is better? Depends on how the MC plays it. Monsters on Team Sauron have small “Hate” pools that are just like Hope. But since enemies on Team Monster aren't going to be “on camera” before or after their big combat against the Player Heroes, so there's really nothing stopping the MC from having the Orcs spend Hate all the time. If they do that, defensive stances and defensive builds are basically bullshit. If they don't, shields and bows is a grindy and effective option. But of course, it's extremely random, because of course quite large percentages of attacks that hit at all are also great and extraordinary hits that do extra damage because of the way the dice system works.

In any case, all the enemies roll between 2 and 4 dice on basic attacks and their hit point total varies from 12 from a rando spider out to 90 for a high end troll. Monsters are very much just piles of hit points with expected damage outputs.

But the real takeaway is that the Company does have to be designed with optimal tactics in mind. A Dwarf with a mattock has no business being in the same Company as an Elf with a shield. It's actually kind of comical how poorly this game handles players not being on the same page from a tactical standpoint. And your tactics aren't going to change much battle to battle, because a fight against Orcs isn't very different from a fight against Wolves.

AncientH

Unlike the Heroes, the monsters can actually cast Dreadful Spells by spending Hate points. These are less cool than they sound, since they only ones that can use the ability are a fucking spider, but it's something.

Noticeably absent: Evil men. Like, there should be some dudes like Grima Wormtongue that fell to Shadow or something, but they're not presented here. That feels like an oversight. But at least the monsters that are here are relevant, and the art is pretty good! Not Warhammer Fantasy Bestiary good, but pretty good!

Frank

Next up... the Campaign

[angelfromanotherpin]

The hard divide between PCs and Enemies is one of the most obnoxious things in this game. What happens when NPCs strive against each other? 404'd! Even the Buffy system did better; the outputs it produces are dumb but at least there are outputs. It's especially egregious because Orcs are supposed to have infighting all the time, but if you as their adversaries try to exploit that, it goes straight to the MC for an ass-pull.

I feel I should point out that Hate doesn't actually work much like Hope. Enemies get their Attribute Level as a bonus to all Favored rolls without spending anything. Hate is spent only through their special abilities. Your basic orc has no special abilities that cost Hate, and can't burst effectiveness at all; their single Hate point exists only to be lost by being intimidated or in sunlight, at which point their Craven trait makes them run.

[Username17]

I feel I should point out that Hate doesn't actually work much like Hope. Enemies get their Attribute Level as a bonus to all Favored rolls without spending anything. Hate is spent only through their special abilities. Your basic orc has no special abilities that cost Hate, and can't burst effectiveness at all; their single Hate point exists only to be lost by being intimidated or in sunlight, at which point their Craven trait makes them run.

I would believe that. I assumed that Hate could be spent like Hope, because it doesn't actually say what it inherently does. But I suppose it is at least as likely that the intention is that it literally does nothing. One of the issues I have with this book is that since it doesn't bother explaining its design decisions and many of the design decisions are factually weird and bad, when it comes to parts where the description is telegraphic it becomes very hard to fill in the blanks.

It gets such that you end up with questions that sound like jokes, but which there actually isn't a definite answer. So like, I roll both simple failure and extraordinary success, what happens? That sounds like a joke question, but I'm actually not 100% certain what the answer is supposed to be.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

OSSR: The One Ring RPG

Chapter Eight: The Campaign

AncientH

To be honest, I think I would really enjoy the opportunity to design an adventure set in Middle-Earth. It would require the kind of meticulous thought and careful collation of sources that appeals to me, and even if the Player Heroes immediately went off the fucking rails, it would be nice to at least splash a little in Tolkien's pond and see what you can do.

I don't know if I'd be up for a campaign, though.

It's one thing to visit Tolkien's world for a while, and something else again to live in it for any length of time. You know the shape of history, and the Player Heroes are not in it. Whatever they do, however they contribute and whatever they accomplish, there's that eternal sense of working in between the legs of the world.



The One Ring in particular doesn't feel like a good fit for campaigns. It's not particularly epic or gritty. It occupies this weird middle ground where you aspire to basic competence and having achieved that, are a bit at a loss of what to do and where to go. The Necromancer has fled, Dol Guldur lies empty, the Big Bad magical artifact is in the pocket of a particularly fat-arse hobbit in the Shire. Does this world still need heroes?

Frank

More than in any other game we've ever reviewed, the campaign section isn't about campaigns or maybe a campaign, it's literally the campaign. I have never seen a definite article be so incredibly definite in my whole life. This chapter is 34 pages long, and the first seven pages are telling you things that are going to happen if you play the campaign long enough. Not events that you might cause or prevent – just literally stuff that is most definitely going to happen.


Which makes this section Dickensian.

This is followed by a piece on some key locations in the area presumed area of the campaign. And the last half of the chapter is a big pimping of the Darkening of Mirkwood campaign that the book expects you will be playing.

All in all, there is about 1 page of this entire chapter that is about campaigns in general rather than telling you how to precisely replicated the campaign that the author ran that one time. There is a section called Campaign Outlines, and it starts at the end of page 271 and runs a bit more than half of page 272. Seriously.

Lord of the Rings RPG material often is so slavish in its devotion as to prompt the reader to ask why the author is make LotR games rather than just writing LotR fanfiction. This chapter is like more of that than normal.

AncientH

If there's one thing this chapter, and this book needed to emphasize to the audience it is that there is still work to be done. Darkness to be foiled, villains to be defeated, treasure to be won, honor to be gained. You might not be fighting for cosmic stakes, but there should be dreams, aspirations, and, you know I must be fucking pissed if I have to use a line from Joseph Fucking Campbell, a call to adventure.

Instead we get a long role of years with various events that happened to other people in other places. And what we needed were guidelines and ideas on how player heroes could be a part of that. Did you fight together at the Battle of Five Armies, and were noted by a Wizard for how well you fought together, and asked to investigate a human cult of Morgoth? Did the King Under the Mountain offer you a reward if you would cleanse the orc-filth from a remote outpost of the Lonely Mountain? Did an old man come and whisper of a magic ring that might yet survive in the guts of a fire-drake, the last spawn of Smaug? Did an Elf messenger go astray in the Mirkwood, with a missive from the White Council containing important information?

Yeah, these are all very fan-ficky, but that is the shit you need. This chapter leaves all of the heavy imaginative lifting up to Mr. Cavern and the players, and it sucks.

Frank

Radagast isn't much described in the original books. He is adapted from a German retelling of Slavic folklore. The orginal “Radegast” looks like this:



Historically it's a mountain god/spirit similar to a Japanese Kami. I bring this up because I want to talk about Tolkien scholarship versus Tolkien's scholarship. Actual Tolkien was a linguist and a folklorist who did really deep dives on real world languages and myths and constructed those aspects of his fantasy world. But Tolkienian fanbois are mostly not scholars of Norse and Hebrew. The ins and outs of European tribal migrations and linguistic drift is completely lost on most of the people who can tell you about Elf genealogies from the Unfinished Tales. And this old scholarship has implications far beyond the aesthetics of Middle Earth – the reason that D&D had to change the name of Hobbits but did not have to change the name of Orcs is because Tolkien used an archaic Middle English word for Orcs and a “completely made up” word for Hobbits. Copyright laws care about that shit.

So like, the Dwarves are based on the Jews. Not in a gross anti-Semitic way, but in the way where Tolkien studied historical Hebrew as part of designing the Dwarvish language and studied stories and legends of the Jewish diaspora while making Dwarvish songs. Which isn't to say that there's literally a Dwarven Torah or something, but that if you were to find yourself writing more information about Tolkien's Dwarves for the purpose of cooperative storytelling and world building, that you should probably spend more time studying Jewish folklore than ruminating about Games Workshop. Which is not a thing this book does, so I'm just left wondering “Why?” a whole lot of the time.

Anyway, Radagast and the Woodmen are based on the people and folklore of the Slavs and Celts that lived in the northern portions of the Austro-Hungaria. Slovakia and Czech Republic today. That's just the actual factual source material for this part of Middle Earth. And there really isn't evidence that the author knows this. There's reference to a blue lamp from a previous age, which is a reference to the Lamps of the Valar from the Silmarillion and I think the author is trying to out-Hobbit-nerd everyone. He is definitely out-Hobbit-nerding me. But what he is not doing is actually showing any insight as to why we'd want to or what we'd gain from incorporating the Woodmen into our stories other than really wanting to min/max our Parry score in order to have archers in our team not suck butt.

AncientH

We can debate how racist the Dwarfs are. It's ultimately academic, they aren't literal Jews or Jewish stereotypes in the setting. Just like they aren't Scottish.



Or Welsh.

The thing is, you can be forgiven for having Gandalf the Grey be your Mr. Johnson for a LotR campaign. Radagast, Saruman, and the Blue Wizards are easy alternatives. It's pretty much what the wizards are there for. But you have to create a reason for the Player Heroes to care about these things. Sure, the players might squee their pants a little when wizard-sempai notices them, but will their characters know? Or care?

Frank

I actually think this campaign/game/story is set too early. It's only been five years since the Battle of the Five Armies, so the idea that anyone should consider themselves a Barding or a Beorning is less than five years old. Specifically, since even human characters in this game are older than ten, any character who “is” a Barding spent a majority of their life not being a Barding. The actual player heroes only consider themselves Bardings if they have the zeal of the converted, since of course they grew up being Dalish or Lake Towners or something.

Consider how contentious identities like “Yugoslavian” and “Slovenian” were in 1996. For fuck's sake, I know a Serbian doctor who considers himself Yugoslavian today, although he's too old to be a sword wielding adventurer. If you're going to have two of the six starting character cultures be new, you should probably set the starting point of the game far enough into the future that at least the youngest characters could have potentially grown up in those new nations.

This chapter sagely tells us that there has been time for the status quo to settle in on Bard's new Dale. But there hasn't been enough time for anyone to have been raised in that status quo.

And due to the longer lives of Dwarves, this situation is actually more absurd for the “Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain." The Lonely Mountain was reclaimed from Smaug five years ago. Any Dwarf who calls the Lonely Mountain their home now is someone who accepted Thorin's call for settlement some time in the last five years. But all the rest of the character's life was spent in the Iron Hills or something. No character is meaningfully from the Lonely Mountain, it was fucking uninhabited for 171 years.

AncientH

To add onto this, there's no reason not to set things 30 years after the Battle of Five Armies. You still have 20-odd years of play time before the start of The Lord of the Rings. It's not like your characters are going to age out. If anything, you could just set everything five years before LOTR starts, and then your PCs will be adventure-hardened veterans when its time to go kick some Mordor butt during the War of the Ring!

...but that might be thinking too ambitiously.

Frank

There's a significant amount of chin stroking about what to do when someone has to bring in a new character while the rest of the team has like 15 game years of skill advancement. Basically the suggestion is to give the player making a new or replacement character an insultingly small pile of XP to make a character that is strictly better than a normal starting character but still woefully inadequate to play the game with the other characters who are now rolling like 5 attack dice and rolling 6 dice on their favorite skills and shit.

What this fundamentally comes down to is that this game doesn't have character levels or threat levels. There is, in short, no way for the game to tell you whether a challenge is “appropriate” for the characters or whether the characters are “appropriate” for the challenge.

AncientH

This is a challenge for a lot of games, not just The One Ring. Shadowrun and GURPS for example, have a very time "balancing" encounters because points don't always equal effectiveness, and it's absolutely possible for specialized PCs or NPCs to curb stomp in certain situations. In Space Madness! my best solution to this was to give a Threat Assessment based on the character's highest dicepool...and you could presumably do something similar in TOR. They just didn't think about it.

Chapter Nine: The Marsh Bell

Frank

The final portion of the book is a 14 page chapter of a sample adventure. It's a rescue mission where the player heroes are supposed to rescue Balin. In case you've forgotten, Balin is one of the twelve Dwarves from The Hobbit. In the movies, he looks like this:



Does that help at all? I confess that it probably does not, because I legit cannot tell you which of the Dwarves said or did what in that book because there are fucking twelve of them and the fact that the non-Thorin ones are pretty interchangeable is a running joke.

AncientH

Hraf son of Hrabin, a Raven of the Mountain, has brought to Erebor some sinister tidings: two Dwarven messengers who left the Lonely Mountain on an errand are nowhere to be found. The Kingdom under the Mountain is astir, and Glóin the Dwarf himself has spread word that whoever provides news of the missing Dwarves will be richly rewarded.

You do not start in a tavern. There is no poster put up. Your lord does not call you to counsel. No wizard plucks at your sleeve. You're supposed to succeed at a Valar-damned Riddle roll to get this critical information to start the adventure.

You could fail and spend the session farming fucking turnips.

Frank

The main issue with having the players need to succeed at a couple of die rolls in order to be given the quest in the first place is that is a failstate of the entire adventure. If the player characters don't succeed at their riddle check or don't convince the Dwarf to tell them to find the other Dwarf, they aren't on the mission at all. They haven't suffered a setback, the trail has simply forked and the entire adventure goes in the trash can.

I think people got a bit too up their own assholes talking about “fail forward” in the early 2010s, but this is ridiculous. And not acceptable. It's OK to have setbacks, setbacks are good. If you can't have setbacks, die rolls don't mean anything. But you need to have the adventure start. Only once it has begun and the players have cause to try again or struggle on despite costs and difficulties can a setback exist.

So basically: fuck this adventure. Fuck it before it even gets started.

AncientH

Presuming your Loremaster has ignored the first fucking die roll, and you get on the case, you face obstacle number two: the people you want to help probably don't want your help.

Glóin is prejudiced against Elves, which reduces the basic Tolerance rating for the Encounter by one if there are Elves in the company. Additionally, he will refuse to deal directly with an elf spokesman.

Yes, how dare you have an Elf in your company, much less a charismatic one that is good at talking. Suck it up, Glóin, all you need is to hire one, not sleep with one.

Frank

The bad guys are incalculably numerous and also weak and shitty. Marsh dwellers appear to be completely made up, and they are subhuman losers. But also despite the fact that they are naked and crappy, they literally never run out, so if you stand and fight you automatically lose. This is terrible.

I honestly can't imagine a worse way to try to introduce the game than to have the sample combat encounter blow off the combat rules and have combat be a thing you literally cannot win. I just... I am angry. This book has ended on a sour note. Fuck this book.

AncientH

Marsh Dwellers are basically discount Gollums. Let that sink in.

If you get far enough, there is a Stone Troll. The NPC sheet is...not optimal. You remember how there were like 60 fucking numbers on the regular PC sheet? Well, this has less, which is technically good, but it does it in a way that is very weird and still takes up half a page where it should take up no more than a small paragraph.

You also have to deal with dangerous strangling plants, "gore-crows", and the Marsh Bell, which can give the Player Hero a Shadow point and make them Miserable with a capital M. Such characters can only be saved through the power of Song, which is about the point I wanted to disembowel myself.

Notably lacking from the adventure: a useful map. Map 1 is set at too high a scale to actually show any of the geographic features of the Lonely Marshes, Map 2 covers only the Lair of the Marsh-Dwellers and doesn't even indicate the entrances and exits. But it lists the fucking wine cellar, because that's important.

Anyway, then we get the Pre-Generated Character Sheets as an appendix and an Index. That's pretty much the book.

[deaddmwalking]

 you know I must be fucking pissed if I have to use a line from Joseph Fucking Campbell, a call to adventure. 

Please elaborate.