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The first RPG session I ever played was a scenario from a module set in Middle-Earth, using the Rolemaster system. I kept playing Rolemaster for a long, long time, and through that avenue also kept semi up-to-date with the Middle-Earth Role Playing releases. But Iron Crown Enterprises lost the license, and then the movies came out and there was a very uninspired Lord of the Rings RPG put out that never really went anywhere.

So when The One Ring was released, I was very interested. And, as I have written elsewhere, I feel that this is the first RPG that properly captures the themes and ‘feel’ of the books. I have collected the whole print run of the first edition. Just when there were (very exciting!) hints about a Moria supplement, Cubicle 7, the publisher, announced that they were parting ways with the license holder (Serious Games) and would stop publishing The One Ring. We don’t know what caused this rift, but I am guessing that C7’s other lines (Warhammer, Doctor Who, etc) took too much attention away from The One Ring.

But soon after, it was announced that The Free League would publish the second edition of The One Ring. That was, I thought, good news. The Free League has a reputation of producing high quality books — I have all of their books for their Tales from the Loop game, and they’re gorgeous. So when the kickstarter for the second edition dropped, I made sure to get all the books. But meanwhile my campaign for The One Ring with my former colleagues is still going strong, so I never really got around to diving into the changes.

A couple of weeks ago, the kickstarter campaign for the Moria supplement was announced — so I guess there was work done on Moria after all. Of course, I backed that campaign so fast my credit card never knew what hit it. But looking through the stretch goals, I saw a term used that I was not familiar with. It seemed like a game term, but I knew for sure that the first edition didn’t have anything called a Landmark.

Now I was curious. I started reading through the second edition rulebook, the various “booklets” and the adventure anthology Ruins of the Lost Realm. I really like the rules changes, but I’m not so sure about the way adventures are presented.

The first edition (even the single-volume revised first edition) was amazingly badly organised. Certain procedures were spread out across three different sections, causing frantic leafing through the rulebook to answer a relatively simple rules question. That is all much, much better in the second edition! It is also very nice to see rules that were presented as optional in expansions for the first edition, such as the treasure rules and the rules for the Eye Awareness, made an integral part of the game. It’s a nice reset into a new baseline.

In the first edition, the difficulty of a test was determined by the target number. Default TN is 14, but it could be lowered or increased for easier or more difficult tasks. The stats did not really factor in, except when a point of Hope was spent. This is much different in the second edition: the default target number is 20 minus the stat. Difficulty is factored in by rolling two feat dice and taking the best or worst of the two rolls, or by adding or removing success dice. In combat, the ‘stance’ (the way you fight) determined the target number. Now, the stance determines whether you get advantage or disadvantage on the roll.

This streamlines the dice rolling a lot, since there are fewer variables to contend with. I like that a lot.

The default setting is Eriador, so everything west of the Misty Mountains. That means there is some overlap with some of the first edition expansions (mainly Bree and Rivendell) but it puts its own spin on things. But it also means you can use some of the material from the first edition to flesh out the setting of the second edition. A booklet also details how to create characters from the available cultures in the first edition, which is a nice touch.

I also like that a Ranger is now a viable starting character type.

The scenarios in the first edition were very structured: a series of scenes that string together into a story. It is a bit rail-roady: the course of action is clear and the NPCs steer the Fellowship into the direction of the next scene. It’s not a big problem (unless you have a very uncooperative group) but it’s not really as free as could be. In the second edition, adventure locations are detailed and there is a situation that is the cause for the Fellowship to visit the location. It’s much more ‘open’, which means it’s more work for the GM to manage running the scenario, but it’s much more flexible to fit it in a campaign.

In the first edition, Fellowships could get a Patron who could help them and send them on errands (leading to the adventures) but in the second edition a Fellowship starts out with a Patron, which shapes the whole campaign. I like that, because it gives flavour and impulse to the game, rather than the group being some kind of generic group of heroes that just do stuff because they’re heroes.

But the game has become less Middle-Earthy to me because of the scenarios. There are now more magical artefacts strewn about, there are Black Numenoreans who have been trained in ‘sorcery’ by Sauron, an adventure location even details how the Fellowship might gain access to a Palantir! The first edition was so low-powered and low-magic that I can’t imagine that there would ever be a scenario where the Fellowship was able to gaze onto a priceless artefact like a Palantir.

It reminds me of the MERP scenarios: as these were geared towards people running them with Rolemaster, which itself started out as a set of variant rules for D&D, these were much more D&D-like in their aesthetics. There were magic items everywhere, you could get magical weapons or items that gave a bonus on certain skills at the drop of a hat. These scenarios are not as ‘bad’ as that, but if you want to discover the treasure hoard of the last king of Arnor, then Ruins of the Lost Kingdom has you covered.

(The ‘open’ way of writing scenarios reminded me of Rolemaster as well. I find it interesting — in Tales from the Loop, Rolemaster is specifically called out as an RPG that Swedish kids played in the 1980s, and I wonder if we see the influence of the Free League at work in the way adventures are structured. It might not even be a conscious decision, but if you played Rolemaster back then, you must have used MERP scenarios, and it might be that for the Swedish editors, this is what a Middle-Earth scenario ‘looks’ like.)

I think these scenarios will be more accessible to D&D players. While it’s always good to broaden the appeal of a good RPG, and to entice D&D players to play something else than D&D, I’m not sure I applaud this direction. As with the first edition, there are also books to use the Middle-Earth setting with D&D, so some cross-contamination is to be expected. But if the numbers of the recent Kickstarter are to believed, then the vast majority of players use the ‘home’ system, and not D&D.

I love the streamlined rules, and I do think you can have some awesome campaigns with the provided scenarios. And maybe the first edition was too low-powered: it’s hard to feel like a hero if you’e always crawling through the mud, after all. It just seems like a little less authentic Middle-Earth to me.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.