The One Ring Second Edition
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Tabletop Roleplaying Games
The One Ring Second Edition
The One Ring is a tabletop roleplaying game of journeys and fellowship in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, designed by Francesco Nepitello and Marco Maggi. The first edition was published by Cubicle 7 in 2011 and set in Wilderland, the lands around Mirkwood and the Lonely Mountain. Cubicle 7 stopped publishing the game in 2019, and Free League Publishing took over the licence in 2020, announcing a second edition that moved the setting to Eriador. It was funded on Kickstarter, with backer shipments beginning in October 2021 and general retail release on 22 March 2022. The second edition won a 2022 Gold ENnie Award for interior art, and its French edition won the 2024 Graal d'or for Best New Edition.
The second edition replaces the first edition published by Cubicle 7, and the two share a core approach to travel, hope and shadow.
Description
Players take on heroes of the Free Peoples of Middle-earth, such as Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves and Men of the North, who band together as a company. The Game Master is called the Loremaster (LM), and the second edition is set in Eriador roughly twenty years after Bilbo Baggins disappeared from the Shire. Sauron's shadow is growing again, but the world is still mostly quiet, and the game concentrates on the small, hard-won victories of ordinary heroes rather than saving the world.
Play alternates between two rhythms. During the Adventuring phase, the company travels, explores, fights and talks its way through the Wild. In the Fellowship phase between adventures, heroes rest, recover, practise skills and pursue personal undertakings. The game asks a table to accept slow, attritional travel in which the road itself wears the company down, and to play characters whose hope can falter. It suits groups who want Tolkien's tone, not Tolkien's powerful wizards and heroes.