Cubicle 7 No Longer Producing The One Ring and Adventures in Middle Earth

Cubicle 7 has announced that it will cease publishing Tolkien-related games, including The One Ring and Adventures in Middle Earth, in early 2020. The One Ring 2E is cancelled.

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‘I am with you at present,’ said Gandalf, ‘but soon I shall not be. I am not coming to the Shire.’


We have some very unfortunate and unexpected news to share. Contractual differences arose recently which we have been unable to resolve, and so we have decided to end our licensing agreement with Sophisticated Games. It is with regret that we have made this very tough decision to withdraw.

This means we will cease publishing The One Ring and Adventures in Middle-earth™ in the first half of 2020. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give us enough time to release the much-anticipated The One Ring – The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game second edition. As many of you know, our first edition of The One Ring is eight years old, and we had high hopes of a full product line to support our second edition. Our team have worked incredibly hard on this new edition; with many of the announced titles already written and edited, so being very close to completion makes this decision even harder.

We fully appreciate how invested so many of you are, both in regards to stock and your love of the game. Especially those who have followed our journey from first edition, or have customers who have pre-ordered the second edition or Rohan Region Guide. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused.

We will continue selling our existing stock over the next few months. We will be offering some discounts on our website for consumers as part of our Black Friday sale this week. We will not be reprinting any of these titles, so if you wish to stock up, we would suggest you contact your preferred distributor soon.
 
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Several were done or contributed to by freelancers, rather than C7 staff.

Same thing to me. They were hired or contracted by C7 and not Sophisticated Games, and while they wrote the material, they worked for C7. It is not like they wrote the rule book, then took it to C7 and said "look at this cool book, you should go and talk to SG about sub-leasing their deal to publish Middle-Earth games." So on the actual payroll as an employee or hired to freelance the work, they were still being paid by C7.
 

aramis erak

Legend
Same thing to me. They were hired or contracted by C7 and not Sophisticated Games, and while they wrote the material, they worked for C7. It is not like they wrote the rule book, then took it to C7 and said "look at this cool book, you should go and talk to SG about sub-leasing their deal to publish Middle-Earth games." So on the actual payroll as an employee or hired to freelance the work, they were still being paid by C7.
Francisco and Marco went to SG, who contracted C7, at least that's the impression Francisco was giving on RPGG.
 


AndromedaRPG

Explorer
FYI $15 will get you digital copies of all the Adventures in Middle-Earth books


Well, it is all of them but the Rohan Region Guide. Still an awesome deal! That final PDF can be purchased from DriveThruRPG at this time.
 

Lurker Above

Explorer
Oh well, another Middle Earth tabletop rpg bites the dust, leaving MERP as the continuing champion of the genre. I wanted to like TOR/AiME but I just thought the mechanics in both cases were too intrusive and meta-gamey. The character classes were pretty lame as well. This is too bad because the art was pretty good and the decision to set the game between The Hobbit and LOTR made sense from a standpoint of familiarity, though it also had limitations that one didn't have with the earlier default time period of MERP. Still, a bit of a shame they didn't get to finish the product line they had planned out.
 


JeffB

Legend
My 2 clacks..

ICE/MERP held the license the longest by far : 82-ish for the first ME universal system supplement, then '84 for MERP itself and held through 1999. And produced the most amount of material by far.

And disregarding whatever one feels about the system itself, the source material that ICE produced are some of the best RPG "Lore" material produced in the hobby. On the whole, the MERP sourcebooks are pretty danged amazing The maps too- Fantastic maps. I'd say if there was a downfall it would be some of the adventure books. Not all, but some.

Also- Angus McBride one of the best (and prolific ME) artists of all time- His covers and interiors- well C7 or Decipher cannot compare in the least.

From a business perspective ICE did a fantastic job with keeping the setting alive much like WEG did for Star Wars during times when the franchise was otherwise dead. Today, it's easy to be successful with a LOTR/ME product unless you are inept. But when ICE had the license, It was nowhere near the pop culture heavyweight it is now in the post PJ Movie years.

So yeah, I'd give ICE's work the nod. The bad thing is the MERP material is not available anymore for purchase and print copies of most things are VERY expensive so many people are not/will never be familiar with it :(
 

Crusadius

Adventurer
Frankly, that is not a fact and it´s quite debatable.

To add to the post by @JeffB, MERP had two editions and, according to wikipedia, ICE was working on a 3rd edition before they lost the licence. ICE also release a CCG and an introductory rpg with the Intellectual Property. MERP may not be the best ruleset for LotR, but ICE supported the IP for 15 years and from all appearances would have kept going for a few more years. For longevity and support, I think ICE is ahead of the pack.
 

Lurker Above

Explorer
The setting detail alone in the ICE products is amazing. Sure, they went "off canon" a bit, but is it cool to have names and backstories for all nine ringwraiths? Hell, yes!

And unlike TOR or AiME, they didn't just try to shoehorn you into reliving the books with restrictive journey mechanics and audiences and patrons and crap like that. They gave you a metric ton of material and said, enjoy! The maps alone are worth the product price. I'm still re-purposing those old MERP maps for my current games.
 

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