Lord of the Rings RPG Announced, Adapts Dungeons & Dragons 5E Rules

The Lord of the Rings is returning to 5E. Free League Publishing has announced The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying, a new game that adapts Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition rules for use in Middle-Earth. The game will introduce six new classes, six original "heroic cultures" found in Eriador, and rules for journeys, "wondrous artefacts", and the more subtle style of magic found in Middle-Earth. A Core Rulebook and a Shire Adventures adventure module will be released for pre-order this fall, with a retail release planned in 1Q 2023. 

Free League Publishing launched a new edition of The One Ring, the Lord of the Rings roleplaying game built around an original ruleset, earlier this year after raising over $2MM on Kickstarter. Free League took over The One Ring from Cubicle 7, who had published the game's first edition starting in 2011. 

While not said outright, The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying appears to be a new edition of Adventures in Middle-Earth, the previous 5E adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Cubicle 7 previously published Adventures in Middle-Earth as a companion game to The One Ring, but it lost the license to publish that game along with The One Ring in 2019. Adventures in Middle-Earth received wide acclaim for how it adapted traveling rules for 5E, with many Dungeon Masters using those rules in their other 5E games. One key difference is that The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying focuses on Eriador, an area briefly explored in Adventures in Middle-Earth but is used as the primary region setting in the new edition of The One Ring. 

More information about The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying will be released in the coming months. Pre-ordering The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying's Core Rulebook or Shire Adventures will give players immediate access to the PDF versions of both books.