The One Ring Starter Set - First Impressions

During my childhood, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit made me fall in love with fantasy and reading in general, so I was really excited to finally have the 2nd edition of The One Ring RPG from Free League Publishing in my hands. I bought both the Core Book and the Starter Set, but for this post I'm only going to look at the latter. Starter sets have been a mixed bag for me in the past, but the Forbidden Lands box (also from Free League) had such fantastic production values that I trusted them to deliver another quality product.

My blog is focused on solo gaming, so that is the lens through which I'm going to focus my first impressions. At the time of writing this post, I have not yet read anything from the core book, but the beautiful hardcover alone makes me really excited to give it a go. I just thought it would be interesting to approach the starter set without any preconceived notions of how things 'should' be.

The bullet points and pictures should be enough to give you a rough idea for how relevant this product would be for you, but feel free to read further to get my detailed thoughts on each point.

• Great production value
• Gorgeous cartography, artwork, and thick paper
• Item cards are the exception with boring and generic artwork
• Simplified rules aimed at beginners or younger players
• Skill based dice pool game
• No death or lasting injuries RAW
• Designed for lower risk Shire adventures
• Only premade characters
• Existing characters from the lore
• No character creation rules at all
• Premade adventures
• Could serve as adventure hooks or general inspiration
• Archaic layout with walls of text
• The Shire setting information
• The main focus for solo players
• Plenty of locations and background information for custom adventures

Tl;dr conclusion: Great production values but limited in scope. Feels very much like a demo and not a complete game on its own. Usable for veteran solo players that already own other supplemental products that they can use to play satisfying solo adventures. As someone who loves cartography, the map alone made it worth it to me.

Production Value

Everything from the box down to the dice feels nice and sturdy. Even if you don't intend to use any of the material in one of your sessions, it is still a nice product to own for collectors.

The two booklets (Rules and Adventures) are staple bound, but the paper is thick enough that it shouldn't be a problem when it comes to long term use. The longer setting information about the Shire is in a softcover glue bound book. The new art is fantastic, and especially the maps are a pleasure to behold.

Speaking of maps, the large double-sided foldout map is incredible. I spent ages just pouring over the different regions and imagining the various adventures that could take place there.

The inside of the box itself has a smaller version of one of the maps printed on it, while the other half of the box shows you a handy quick reference as a pseudo gm screen. I don't know how usable the presented information would be for the full rules because there isn't any indication for the amount of changes they made between the core book and the starter set.

The custom dice look great and feel good to roll. The d6s have an extra rune on the 6 value, but it still shows the number, so they could be used for other games as well. The d12s however have two different icons and only show numbers from 1 to 10. Keep that in mind and assign values to these icons before you use them in other games.

My only complaint is with the item cards. The artwork on the back is just so boring and generic. I understand that it isn't easy to make a sword look interesting, but they don't even invoke Middle Earth for me. I'd believe you if you told me these cards were for a generic fantasy boardgame.

Simplified Rules

My main problem with starter sets for RPGs has always been that a lot of them don't include the full rules to the game. I understand that the idea is to slowly introduce new players to the game, but in reality it forces players to learn two slightly different rulesets, which only leads to confusion at the table. For solo play, this isn't that big of a deal, but it still annoys me to a certain extent.
That being said, The One Ring does a decent job of tying these simplifications into the greater theme of the box. You're not supposed to die in these stories and the entire tone of the game is more relaxed and mellow - you are in the Shire after all.

Only premade characters and adventures

The lack of any sort of custom character creation is something that baffles me. It automatically puts a limit on the usability of the entire box and makes it feel extremely restrictive. The premade adventures are designed with the pre-generated characters in mind, so I can only assume that they designed these restrictions on purpose. I don't understand why they thought a focused story with limited characters would be more alluring to people than the complete freedom of custom characters.

The setting book of The Shire provides the loremaster (GM) with a random table of rumors and adventure hooks for every region but doesn't provide any other guidelines or tools to create custom adventures. For a box that is targeted at new or younger players, it most definitely isn't friendly for new loremasters. The premade adventures have a terrible layout, where almost everything is hidden in walls of text that would be a pain to reference during play. How do they expect new loremasters to use the setting book if they have no tools or guidelines besides "adventures have a beginning, a middle, and an end" (exaggerated to make my point, but that's pretty much all they give you in the rules).

Excuse my short excursion into multiplayer content, but these issues felt too glaring to just gloss over.

The main focus for solo players

Coming back to solo play, the setting book is actually fantastic as an inspirational resource. Tons of locations and rumors just waiting to be explored through play. You will definitely need a GM emulator and other supplements to play a satisfying solo session, but that's the norm with multiplayer products and nothing unusual.

There are a few random tables for rumors and adventure hooks, but nothing crazy that would make me use this book in other solo games. It is very much a focused product that wants you to play a specific kind of game set in the Shire of Middle Earth. Flipping through these pages makes me want to randomly generate a character, a location, and an adventure hook, but this brings me back to the lack of custom character creation. Such a wasted opportunity.

Conclusion

I already knew that I wanted more before buying the starter set, so I have the full rules of the core book to look forward to. If you are, however, only buying this box set for your solo sessions, then you need to tailor your expectations or this will be a disappointment. Think of it like a sourcebook for the shire and a beautiful map that just waits to be explored. Be ready to include several other solo supplements to make it work for your sessions.

This is definitely not a first purchase for players new to the solo hobby. Personally, I really am glad to own this starter set and, despite my criticisms, look forward to explore (a very specific part of) Middle Earth with it. Obviously not by itself, but with the help of a gm emulator, plenty of random generators, and most likely the core book for custom character creation.