D&D comes to Middle Earth (from Cubicle 7)

Here some news that I didn't foresee. Cubicle 7, the company of The One Ring, the best adaptation of Tolkien's Middle Earth plans to bring D&D to Middle Earth. Bearing in mind the high quality books that they produced for the The One Ring roleplaying game (they're at the top of the review section), it'll be very interesting to see. There's not much information yet, other than a short announcement.

Here is Cubicle's 7 news. The image above is of the existing The One Ring RPG from Cubicle 7.


A release in Summer 2016 really isn't far away at all. Lord of the Rings and D&D really is an exciting combination (was Gandalf really just a 5th level magic-user?)

Sophisticated Games is a British board game company which develops book-based JRR Tolkien games under license from Middle-earth Enterprises, and has published many titles in this area: Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, the award winning War of the Ring series and, of course, in conjunction with Cubicle 7, The One Ring RPG. Cubicle 7, on the other hand, is reposible for not just The One Ring, but also other licensed RPGs like Doctor Who.

I have purchased a small number of products in The One Ring line with the understanding that at some point I'd convince my group to actually play it. The books are of such quality and my loyalty to Lord of the Rings as an IP made owning them almost a necessity even if I wasn't going to play the system right away.

However, my reaction to this is a decided "meh," with a hint of disgruntled mumbling in the background. Because production and release of material for the One Ring product line has already been glacially slow at best. Adding a separate, "D&D 5e" compatible line to go with it just means it's going to take that much longer to get actual sourcebooks for Noldor and Gondor cultures. When was that super-duper One Ring "Advanced Player's Guide" supposed to have been released already? Oh, wait, back in the fall of 2015? And now it's Spring 2016? Not building up the confidence here.

My prediction that I'd quickly move on to other things if they dragged out the release cycle was correct. I've moved on. And the corporate-game-playing, delayed-release, transparent money-grab of deliberately keeping the stuff I really want just out of reach doesn't sit well with me. I'm to the point with Cubicle 7 where I'd say to them point blank, "Give me my friggin' One Ring Noldor and Gondor cultures so I can buy whatever it is I need to buy, and then never have to do business with you again."

Same thing with Fantasy Flight. I made the decision in 2013 that I'd never consider buying Fantasy Flight's Star Wars until as a player I at least had the OPTION of playing a full Jedi if I wanted to, and not a moment before. And, well, guess what? Now I have the option of playing a Jedi in FF's Force and Destiny, but I simply don't even care.

Anyone want to place bets on whether Gondor and Noldor elf characters are playable classes/races in the "D&D 5e Lord of the Rings" release right from the get go? Because my inner cynic is whispering that the D&D version will have them from Day 1.

This is all kinds of awesome!!!!!

It is probably a pretty safe bet that the number of sales lost to release schedule slow down will be completely insignificant compared to sales gained by producing a 5E compatible game.

I smell another $1M kickstarter.

I am a HUGE fan of the one ring and if they do this right I'll be a huge fan of this too.

Wow - that's great news! Their books are beautiful, and while I've heard good things about the system, I'm not interested in switching from 5e for fantasy. I've thought about picking up some of those books just for reading purposes...but this makes a ton of sense, and I imagine will make for some big sales numbers. Very good, indeed.

Von Ether said:

I smell another $1M kickstarter.

Click to expand...

if anything could do it, this could! Then again, they say it's coming out this summer, so it sounds like it's well underway already.

I think the idea behind this is cool but something about Middle Earth just never translated well to RPG in my opinion. This was the problem with the MERP and Rolemaster versions. For one thing, the story line is so well established it is not easy to bend the canon. Furthermore, the use of magic was always poorly defined. Even Gandalf the Wizard used magic very sparingly and never showy. To me, the magic is the whole point of a fantasy game world and to limit it seems to be missing out on a large element. Of course there are folks that enjoy very low magic worlds. I just happen to NOT be one of them. Finally, what would be the monster population? Previous game versions of LotR limited themselves to only what was found in the books. This basically meant orcs. Period. Of course there were also the occasional dragon, troll, spider, giant eagle, worg, ent, etc. but by and large these were few and far between. Coming across orcs over and over again gets redundant after a while.