The One Ring tabletop RPG is a cozy take on The Lord of the Rings
Tabletop role-playing games made a massive mark last year, with more crowdfunding campaigns crossing the million-dollar mark on Kickstarter than any year before. Chief among them was The One Ring, the second edition of the award-winning RPG system first published in 2011. The campaign earned more than $2 million, because of course it did: The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and its precursor The Hobbit, is the granddaddy of virtually all forms of role-playing, one of the lodestones of the genre and one of the most well-known fantasy franchises of all time.
So how do you make a modern tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) out of something so beloved and so well-known?
In the age of the legacyquel — that is, additional tie-in media created well after the publication date of the original piece — it feels like a hard arc to make Tolkien’s Middle-earth stand out among all the derivative mythologies that have sprouted up around it. The Lord of the Rings exists in every size imaginable, on every computing system, game console, television screen, and for every age level. The challenge here is to make sure that this TTRPG appeals to both fans who grew up with the franchise and fans who have never truly grappled with the original texts. It needs to feel compelling without becoming cloying; welcoming without being watered down.
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The system’s core rules, a book titled The One Ring:
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