The official Lord of the Rings RPG – titled The One Ring Roleplaying Game – will be hitting stores on March 22, 2022. Free League Publishing, the game’s creator, announced the coming retail launch in a press release on Thursday.
Free League Publishing game designer and CEO Tomas Härenstam tells Wargamer he expects demand to be high for The One Ring’s release and hopes it’ll do as well as the firm’s Alien RPG (which Härenstam says has consistently ranked among the top five bestselling roleplaying games, according to ICv2).
Free League Publishing announced in March 2020 that it was working on a second edition of The One Ring Roleplaying Game, retaining the 2011 first-edition’s designer Francesco Nepitelloi, but adding updated rules, art direction, and setting. In a highly successful Kickstarter launch in February last year, the game punched far above its target, raising nearly $2 million / £1.5 million. Kickstarter backers have since received their copies, but until now it wasn’t clear when the game would be making its way (presumably hiking across mountains, and through forests and mines) to retailers. We now know it’s just around the corner, coming in late March.
As well as the core rulebook and boxed starter set, the retail release of The One Ring roleplaying game will include the add-ons that were available to high-rolling Kickstarter backers, including custom dice sets, a Loremaster (GM) screen, and a Rivendell compendium booklet containing rules for having Elrond as a patron and playing as a High Elf.
Free League Publishing has had these products available to pre-order on its store since December 2021, when digital PDF versions of the game also dropped.
Speaking about The One Ring’s future, Tomas Härenstam tells Wargamer: “We have a bunch of wonderful things lined up.” The first of these will be a new campaign book entitled Ruins of the Lost Realm, with more news on this expansion promised soon. Free League Publishing also has a Blade Runner RPG in the works, slated for release later this year.
If news of The One Ring has got you itching to gather together some friends and some dice, you’ll need to know about the best tabletop RPGs on offer. If you’d prefer to cut your teeth with D&D, our Fighter, Wizard or Cleric D&D class guides are a great place to start.