The One Ring Roleplaying Game


The One Ring Roleplaying Game is a tabletop role-playing game published by Cubicle 7. It is set in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, in the time between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Since its release, a number of other materials have been published, with more on the way.
Cubicle 7 announced on 27 November 2019 that they would cease publishing The One Ring and Adventures in Middle-earth properties. On 9 March 2020 Free League Publishing announced that it will publish a new edition of the game with Nepitello and Maggi as authors and lead designers.

History of the game and general description

The game was first published in 2011 under the title The One Ring: Adventures over the Edge of the Wild. This first edition core book and the majority of subsequent products supported play in the portion of the region of Rhovanion known as "The Wild", the setting of the later portions of The Hobbit east of the Misty Mountains. That was due to the project of releasing two other up-coming core books dealing with other regions, countries and kingdoms of Middle-earth, but instead of pursuing the idea of releasing two more core books, a revised edition was released in Summer 2014, which saw the original two-volume slipcase set combined into a single hardback edition. This version was substantially re-edited and re-laid out, with errata and clarifications added. Cubicle 7 also released a Clarifications and Amendments Document at the same time, to support owners of the previous edition. The name was changed from The One Ring: Adventures Over the Edge of the Wild to The One Ring Roleplaying Game.
The supplement Rivendell expands the original territory described in the first edition to the eastern portions of Eriador, the setting of The Fellowship of the Ring, and "covering not only Rivendell itself, but Angmar, Fornost, Mount Gram, Tharbad and everywhere in between."
The base game and some of the supplements have also been released in French, German, Italian and Spanish.
A second edition of The One Ring was announced but never released.

Game mechanics

Games of The One Ring are split into two phases: the Adventuring phase and the Fellowship phase. In an Adventuring phase, a company of adventurers heads off from their homes and into the Wild, in search of adventure; whereas the Fellowship phase provides heroes with the opportunity to rest and recuperate, to practise their skills or pursue a noble undertaking.
The One Ring Roleplaying Game uses a special set of dice: the twelve-sided Feat die, which is marked with numbers 1-10, as well as two special symbols, Gandalf’s rune and the Eye of Sauron, and a six-sided Success die, which is numbered 1-6, with a Tengwar rune on the 6. A regular d12 and d6 can be substituted.
When a roll is made, it consists of the Feat die plus a number of Success dice equal to the skill being used. The sum is compared to the Target Number of the action.
What sets the game apart from other fantasy/adventure RPGs is the factoring-in of the hardship involved in traveling in the wilderness for any length of time. The rules covering the making of journeys across country in Rhovanion involve an easy-to-administer mechanism for attrition, making such journeys a challenge in and of themselves. Consequences of this typically play out as challenges arising for a given "role" in a party of adventurers, with suggested roles taken by specific player characters at the journey's start being those of scout, guide, lookout and hunter.

Supplements