I spent some time this weekend reading through The One Ring 2E (the Special Edition; OMG that book is gorgeous and the paper is awesome) along with Ruins of the Lost Realm, and watching various lore videos on YouTube.
I know a lot of people are hesitant or downright hostile to playing in Middle Earth for various reasons, from simply not liking the setting or because they don't think there is room for their own stories or whatever. I think it is a great setting for play because it is at once well defined from a thematic standpoint but full of undefined areas in both space and time. I also generally like to think of the Elves in particular as Unreliable Narrators, given how much terrible crap some of them got up to, even while talking up their own stewardship of the world. I don't mean to say that the Bad Guys of Middle Earth aren't Evil, just that the Elves are sure to have a skewed view of history and likely downplay or outright ignore things. It is in these "elf blind spots" that a lot of fun things can happen.
Plus, Tolkien does not get enough credit for embracing darkness and even weirdness in his world. Bombadil is a head scratcher, and so are whatever "were-worms" are. Unnamed Things allow you to put any sort of evil in the world, and you don't have to necessarily tie them to Melkor/Morgoth/Sauron (hello, Ungoliant).
Anyway, I tought it would be nice to have a thread where we can talk about The One Ring and other Middle Earth RPGs.
The first thing I always think about when considering a ME game is when to set it. The various wars of the First and Second Age are always seductive, but I really like the Fall of Arnor and the wars against the Witch King to be fertile ground (big "fall of the Carolingian Empire" energy in there). Of course, there is always the Fourth Age if you want tons of freedom to do whatever, creating your own version of The Return of the Shadow.
I like the default time and place of TOR, but do sort of feel it is too comfortably nestled in between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. If I want to run a game that is about the personals tories of people in that world, it's fine. But if I am of a mind to do something more epic and consequential, it does feel a little bit limiting or irrelevant even. One thing I have never done that I kind of want to try is to put the player generated characters in possession of the Ring and just see what happens.
I know a lot of people are hesitant or downright hostile to playing in Middle Earth for various reasons, from simply not liking the setting or because they don't think there is room for their own stories or whatever. I think it is a great setting for play because it is at once well defined from a thematic standpoint but full of undefined areas in both space and time. I also generally like to think of the Elves in particular as Unreliable Narrators, given how much terrible crap some of them got up to, even while talking up their own stewardship of the world. I don't mean to say that the Bad Guys of Middle Earth aren't Evil, just that the Elves are sure to have a skewed view of history and likely downplay or outright ignore things. It is in these "elf blind spots" that a lot of fun things can happen.
Plus, Tolkien does not get enough credit for embracing darkness and even weirdness in his world. Bombadil is a head scratcher, and so are whatever "were-worms" are. Unnamed Things allow you to put any sort of evil in the world, and you don't have to necessarily tie them to Melkor/Morgoth/Sauron (hello, Ungoliant).
Anyway, I tought it would be nice to have a thread where we can talk about The One Ring and other Middle Earth RPGs.
The first thing I always think about when considering a ME game is when to set it. The various wars of the First and Second Age are always seductive, but I really like the Fall of Arnor and the wars against the Witch King to be fertile ground (big "fall of the Carolingian Empire" energy in there). Of course, there is always the Fourth Age if you want tons of freedom to do whatever, creating your own version of The Return of the Shadow.
I like the default time and place of TOR, but do sort of feel it is too comfortably nestled in between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. If I want to run a game that is about the personals tories of people in that world, it's fine. But if I am of a mind to do something more epic and consequential, it does feel a little bit limiting or irrelevant even. One thing I have never done that I kind of want to try is to put the player generated characters in possession of the Ring and just see what happens.
