Category: Roleplaying

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Sources of Art for LotR and The One Ring

This page collects the various resources I draw from when looking for art for games of The One Ring.

Table of Contents:

  1. Art by the Artist
  2. Card Art
  3. Character & NPC Art
  4. Maps
  5. Tools
  6. Related

Art by the Artist

Card Art

If you’re looking for landscapes, filter by “Lands”. If you look open a card, you can download the full art. The resolution depends on the quality of the official art released by the artist, but there are several with high resolutions.

Character & NPC Art

Maps

Tools

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Safe Prolonged Rest Criteria for The One Ring

Fatigue is cleared at a rate of 1 point for each Prolonged Rest taken in a “sheltered and safe refuge.”

This requirement, however, has raised a lot of questions:

  • Does it have to be their safe haven?
    • If they have their safe haven in Bree and are given room and board in Rivendell, does that count?
  • Only settlements with walls?
  • Does it just have to be “civilization” in general?
  • Would a defensible cave be safe?

I like to play this situationally. Generally, in the wilds, there will not be a chance for Fatigue reduction. It does not have to be the company’s safe haven, but it will typically happen in a town, city, or Dwarven hall.

There are certainly pockets of rest to be found in the wilds: I might be convinced to give out a safe night’s rest in a protected grove in Lindon, or as guest-friends of homesteaders.

I also think that some towns should not provide safe refuge by default. Tharbad, for example, could easily be justified as not providing a safe rest unless the company takes specific action to create a pocket of safety. After all, as Freesia pointed out with this line, even the harmless innkeeper can be quite unsettling:

Timothy Titus: “Sure, you can have a hot bath! It’s not like I’d make SOUP out of you or anything, ha ha ha!”

Other Criteria I Liked

DanW’s criteria is being able to take a bath:

My rule of thumb is somewhere you can get a hot bath, which I think fits what we see in the Lord of the Rings pretty nicely.

Crickhollow; Tom’s House; Prancing Pony; Rivendell; Lorien; Edoras; Helm’s Deep; Minas Tirith.

I’d make exceptions for some cold baths too: Treebeard’s House and Henneth Annûn.

Freesia’s criteria, stated two different ways:

If you spent the night here without posting watches and I surprised you with some kind of attack, would you feel like I’d not been playing fair?

In my games the rule is “are you going to post guards? would you feel I was cheating if I had something bad happen to you if you didn’t post guards?” and if they can safely say no to both, then I give them a safe rest… and also, feel wholly unencumbered if I then describe what bad thing happened while they were sleeping like babies.

References

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Non-lethal Damage in The One Ring

A common situation that seems to come up in my games and in the Discord server: how do we deal non-lethal damage? I don’t want to kill the guy – I just want to knock him out!

By the rules, we see this in the 2e CRB, 3rd printing:

Player-heroes whose Endurance is reduced to zero drop unconscious, and wake up after one hour with 1 Endurance point.
(pg 69)

Once a victorious battle is over, the Player-heroes often must deal with the dead and dying. If the information is relevant, the Loremaster can consider that adversaries that were taken out of combat reducing them to zero Endurance could be still barely alive when a fight has ended, and might even survive if rescued.
(pg 143)

From this, we can say that the baseline mechanic of “falling unconscious at 0 Endurance” can be reasonably extended to adversaries.

I play with the following considerations:

  1. The player-hero must declare their intent to deal non-lethal damage, render someone unconscious, or otherwise non-lethally subdue a foe (e.g., “I hit him with the pommel of my sword”, “I take the flat of my sword and whack him across the back of the legs to try to knock him down”).
  2. Piercing blows still count as piercing blows, so there’s risk when using weapons.
  3. Unarmed attacks (Brawling) are an option to reduce the risk of piercing blows.
  4. Grappling someone can be achieved using Brawling; narrate that they are grappling. A high-attribute opponent may require extra successes.
  5. Ranged attacks can’t take a non-lethal option.
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Ally and Player Burdens for The One Ring

I really enjoy using Ally Bands from the Moria: Through the Doors of Durin supplement for The One Ring RPG.

This expands the Ally Gifts and Quirks with an optional third distinguishing trait: a burden.

  • A Gift says what an Ally can do.
  • A Quirk says how you recognize them.
  • A burden hints at what they want… or might be running away from.

What we want is good stories, and what helps that is having more hooks. Of course, though we all have our burdens, we don’t always know about the burdens of others. Adding a Burden is most useful when you want to give someone more narrative weight – the party’s favorite NPC, an ally surviving three expeditions, or someone who seems to be driving the Band apart. It isn’t necessary to give every ally a Burden (unless you want to play a soap opera); just having one or two can drive a story in unexpected directions.

While I conceived of this in the context of Ally Bands, the table is also a useful source of inspiration when creating new player-heroes.

These Burdens are the kind of details that are great to explore in a Fellowship Phase: debt gets paid, confession gets made, letters get sent. They also make some of the losses land harder…

Burdens Table

The entries on this table are deliberately culture-neutral. I suggest filling in details in a culturally specific way. A dwarf and a Breelander might both be in debt, but their stories are likely to be quite different.

Many entries have (notes in parentheses). This serves as an optional, additional twist on the burden.

Feat Die Success Die: 1–2 Success Die: 3–4 Success Die: 5–6
25 Owes a ruinous debt to a hard creditor (and is ashamed of it) Blames themselves for a death they could not have prevented Has seen the Enemy’s true strength (and no longer argues when others speak of victory)
1 Sends every coin home to family (who do not write back) Carries a weapon/armor/token of a dead friend (have sworn to return it to that friend’s kin) Tells one story often (and leaves out the part that matters)
2 Took this work under a name that is not theirs (and flinches when surprised by its use) Wants desperately to go home (and will not admit it) Believes they saw their own death (and is settling accounts)
3 Serving out a sentence, an exile, or a penance Nurses a grudge (older than anyone else in the Band) Was refused by someone they loved (and took this work to be gone)
4 Promised someone they would not take this job/errand Carries an old head-wound, and the Band has learned which days to leave them be Suspects another Ally of something, rightly or wrongly
5 Following a rumor of a lost kinsman into the dark Their family name once meant something Keeps a secret (that would break the Band’s trust if told)
6 Wants the quick answer, the easy road, the shortest way Duty-bound to a post (they would abandon if anyone would take it) Has a child, or one coming (and has not told the Band)
7 Trying to buy back a thing their family sold or lost Swore an oath (they now regret) Signed for a share they have already promised away
8 Certain the expedition is cursed (and saying so) Someone they wronged is also in the group Younger than they claimed to be when they signed on
9 Wants to be reckoned worthy (by one particular person) Grieving (and works twice as hard so no one asks about it) Left a craft or calling they were good at (and misses it daily)
10 Has a rival in the group (and competes beyond all sense) Cannot go home (there is nothing left to go home to) Made a promise to a dying comrade (and has not kept it)
15 Believes they are destined for something (and it makes them reckless) Owes their life to another Ally (and cannot repay it) Serving someone else’s purpose (and does not know it)

Giving Burdens More Heft

I mostly use Burdens narratively, but they can be incorporated into play mechanically. Consider:

  • Unresolved Burdens can trigger shadow tests, especially if postponing or working against the direction a Burden would drive a character toward.
  • Connecting an action to a Burden is a source of inspiration, similar to a Distinctive Feature.
  • Acting against a Burden makes a roll ill-favored (similar to a Shadow Flaw).
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Ally Bands in The One Ring

I really enjoy using the rules for Ally Bands in The One Ring from the Moria: Through the Doors of Durin supplement – which, by the way, is one of the best RPG supplements I’ve come across, and a total joy for any fan of Middle-earth.

Bands have featured heavily in our campaign Twilight of the Western Shores. There are two player-heroes in this game, and we have adapted the Band rules to represent the groups of NPCs they recruit.

This page collects my notes on using Bands during play, along with the extensions I’ve created.

Overview

Bands are introduced in the context of doing a solo campaign in Moria, set during Balin’s ill-fated expedition to retake those hallowed halls. You craft a player-hero, but you also create a Band of Ally dwarves that accompany you.

Bands as a whole have one Target Number to roll against (“Readiness”), a “Burden” level, and five skills – Expertise, Manoeuvre, Rally, Vigilance, and War – that roughly map onto the skills of the player-heroes. Readiness can be improved by succeeding at missions and “Hardening” allies. Band skills can be adjusted by changing the size of the Band, deciding how heavily kitted it is, and selecting a specialization.

Individual members of a Band are distinguished by a gift – a unique characteristic that can be invoked for +1d on a roll – and a quirk – a narrative detail about personality or appearance that sets members apart from one another. Members also have their own injury and fatigue tracks.

The Band rules also cover Clashes, which expand the standard combat rules in The One Ring to model the effect of having larger groups in play. You can resolve things at the level of the Clash, or your player-hero can focus on dueling an “arch-foe” while the Band dukes it out.

Expanding Bands

  1. Supporting Other Cultures
  2. Ally Burdens

Supporting Other Cultures

In the context of Moria, Bands are composed of dwarves on a mission to reclaim their ancestral halls, and many of the tables are themed around that premise. Because of this, questions often come up about how to adapt Moria Bands for other cultures or for use outside of Moria.

In Twilight of the Western Shores, this was never really a problem: we picked culturally appropriate Gifts and Quirks to model the NPCs that were recruited. Most of the Gifts and Quirks are also relatively generic, or easily adjusted to be so.

While our group is fine with narrative selection, other players want more structure. I took it as a fun exercise to create alternative tables for other cultures. Some entries are unique to each culture, some are reskinned variations of the same idea, and some are a direct port of a “stock” entry.

  • Alternative Gifts and Quirks for Ally Bands

Once I organize the materials, I will also add name tables for different cultures.

Ally Burdens

Ally Bands help organize supporting NPCs in a way that makes them distinct and usable through Gifts and Quirks. I’ve expanded on this with Ally Burdens, which flesh out key Band members with additional details about what they might be seeking… or running from.

This is most useful when you want to give someone more narrative weight – the party’s favorite NPC, an ally who has survived three expeditions, or perhaps someone who seems to be driving the Band apart. Restraint helps here: not every Ally needs one (some of us do well to keep our burdens hidden, after all). Though if what you’re after is more of a soap opera feel, then the more burdens the merrier.

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TOR Micropost: The Bucklebury Inn

The Bucklebury Inn

A low, cheerful building tucked across from Buck Hill, near the ferry, the Bucklebury Inn is well-loved by ferry-workers, fishermen, and the sprawling Brandybuck relations who desire a break from Brandy Hall. The common room smells of pipeweed and roasting meat, the ale is pulled from deep cool cellars, and the sound of merry chatter fills the air.

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Phillip’s Notes on The One Ring 2e

I’ve been cleaning up and publishing some of my notes from running The One Ring (2nd edition). This page serves as a place to collect and organize the various posts.

Table of Contents:

  1. For Players
  2. For Loremasters
    1. Regional – Eriador
  3. Ally Bands

For Players

For Loremasters

Regional – Eriador

Ally Bands

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Where Can a New Party Start in Eriador?

I would say the majority of games I’ve played in and observed start at The Prancing Pony in Bree. Nothing wrong with that, of course, it is an iconic location for Lord of the Rings fans and a great meeting place for multiple cultures.

But sometimes we like to mix it up. Here are some suggestions for other starting points:

  • Bilbo’s house in the Shire
  • The Summer Smoke Ring Festival at Staddle
  • The Dwarven House outside of Mithlond
  • The Halls of the Dwarves (detailed in Realms of the Three Rings), particularly Clearweather Market
    • I called the inn in Clearweather Market “The Bedrock”
  • The Bridge Inn at Tharbad
  • The Queen’s Hall at Lond Daer
  • The Last Bridge or Sarn Ford, with a crisis already underway
  • Weathertop, with Rangers asking for help with a crisis from those traveling on The East Road
  • In media res – traveling on The East Road or south on the Greenway, with a destination already in mind

These are suggested with the idea of being a newly formed mixed-culture party. Other locations might be suitable with a more restricted set of cultures.

References

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Running The One Ring 2e for Two Players

I’ve been running a campaign of The One Ring for two players for over a year now. Questions about adjusting TOR for two players seem to come up surprisingly often, so I wanted to share my notes.

In short, I recommend giving 5 extra experience points, adjusting the fellowship pool amount, and playing as you normally would. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be!

Table of Contents:

  1. Character Creation
  2. Fellowship Pool
  3. Fellowship Focus
  4. Situational Difficulty
  5. Combat
  6. Benefits of Two Players
  7. References

Character Creation

I do not recommend reducing the attribute TNs (i.e., calculating from a base of 18 instead of 20). While it makes things initially easier, players can ramp up to a power level where it’s difficult to challenge them. Starting with base 18 makes this happen much sooner.

I do recommend adding 5 extra starting experience for each player.

Players need to be aware that in a two player game, not all combinations of cultures and characters will work. I recommend some extra hand holding here to make sure that there’s good coverage of the necessary journey/council/combat/healing skills.

We have not used the Strider distinctive feature in our game, and this hasn’t been a noticeable difficulty for the party. It is an option though.

You could start the characters at Valour and/or Wisdom 2.

Fellowship Pool

DanW uses (8 – player count).

“I sometimes calculate the base pool = 8 less number of heroes, rather than just number of heroes. It boosts small parties and debuffs larger ones, with no impact on a typical party of 4.”

We play 1.5 hr sessions, I gave them with an extra +1 to the baseline (i.e., 3 points per session before cultural and patron bonuses). The end result is effectively the same as DanW’s.

Fellowship Focus

With just two players, we don’t play with fellowship focus. No shadow point when the other takes a wound, only +1d when assisting.

Situational Difficulty

My personal approach was to start with mimimal adjustments, tell the players that we might have to adjust things along the way if we find there’s a balance problem, and then just dive into the game.

I think the big pitfall to avoid in a two player game is making things too easy out of worry about difficulty. I observe my own tendency to pull punches and give extra rewards when playing with two players. And this does help in the beginning, but it’s also easy enough to get yourself into a spot where it’s hard to challenge the players.

I recommend remembering you have the option to offer Success with Woe instead of a Failure in many circumstances. This can allow the players to push the narrative forward instead of getting stuck, while having fun, awful setbacks accompanying it.

Combat

Fights are definitely a place where I worry – I don’t want to make every fight easy, but I also don’t want to wipe the party unexpectedly. In the first combat roll of our campaign, one of my players took nasty wound and I thought it was going to be a TPK. But since then, they have gone better than expected.

It’s fine for parties to struggle with combat. My players have gotten wise about recruiting help, using situations to their advantage, and finding alternatives to combat.

Moria warbands are a good way to model help from multiple NPCs.

I recommend giving one of the players the Cleaving quality on a piece of treasure – this helps keep the momentum up in fights.

I’m open to Skirmish stance from Strider mode, they haven’t reached for it yet. But it’s something to consider.

Benefits of Two Players

We focus so much on the adjustments needed for smaller parties, I just want to talk about some of the benefits I see from my small group:

  • Scheduling is so easy – we played 44/52 weeks in 2025!
  • Each player gets plenty of spotlight time, and they also get plenty of breaks
  • Splitting the party is easy to manage – switch back and forth between players.
  • Decisions get made quickly

References

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Crime and Punishment in Eriador

Something that has come up in several different games of The One Ring has been the topic of taking someone prisoner and delivering them to justice in some settlement or other. This comes up especially often in relation to a certain published adventure with a despicable dwarf, but has also happened in other situations as well. I wanted to capture my thoughts on this matter, and how I approach this type of situation in my games.

I understand the drive to do this. We are roleplaying Tolkienian heroes, oriented to the good, and non-Orc enemies should be captured and tried by those with more authority. The problem is that the sense of justice and judgment that holds in our world doesn’t really hold in Eriador. We have a “justice system,” and we put punishment and locking people up out-of-sight and into the hands of “qualified people.”

But the towns and villages that remain in Eriador are small, disparate remnants of an emptied, collapsed kingdom. There is no central authority. Each settlement makes their own law. Nobody wants to take prisoners off of your hands. Nobody wants to lock up prisoners for long periods of time, continuing to feed and care for them in the meantime. People certainly would not appreciate you to bringing problems INTO their homes!

In fact, what we think of as “jails” or “prisons” are (mostly) non-existent!

  • Different villages might have a lock-hole to keep a drunk overnight or to briefly hold a criminal awaiting trial. This would be the most that you might find, and even this might be something that doesn’t exist!
  • Bree would likely have the above, or even a small jail of sorts. But a 1e adventure notes they would have to construct a gallows for an execution, they don’t have one ready.
  • The Shire is not a place I would take prisoners for justice…
  • Perhaps the Halls of the Dwarves are similar to Bree here.
  • Tharbad is probably the one place with a proper prison, but conditions are grim and justice is wanting in that place. Also, why would the Master want to take in an external prisoner, unless he was someone who escaped from the city that will be publicly executed as a warning to others?
  • Why would the elves appreciate you bringing a bandit to their borders to deal with?

If you bring a prisoner to one of these places, the first question that should arise is what do these people care about the alleged crimes?

  • If you take a dwarf to the Halls of the Dwarves (where they were already exiled from!) for troubles in another land, what do you expect these people to do about it? It didn’t happen in their land, you were the one who brought him back.
  • Perhaps you’ve taken a problematic dwarf to Bree for the Reeve to dispense justice. But the relevant crimes in Bree, at best, might be a failure to pay for goods and services. You probably had something bigger in mind for punishment!

In many cases, the people are likely to not be interested, and if they can be persuaded to care, they’re going to offer lesser punishments than what the players are expecting, including the prisoner’s likely freedom.

Because the nature of punishment is not quite the same as what the players are expecting. If you’re not keeping prisoners long-term, you are left with a small set of outcomes. These outcomes are not oriented around an ideal of “justice” as much as maintaining social stability and limiting the possibilities of vendettas and revenge cycles. Execution is extremely unlikely as an outcome, though if crimes were heinous enough it might happen. That means you’re left with:

  • Financial settlement (e.g., paying a fine, weregild for a death)
  • Another form of restitution, like a period of indentured servitude or manning a necessary-but-unenjoyable position for a time
  • Exile or outlawry (declaring them outside the protections of society, free to be hunted down and killed)

This judgment is likely to be decided by a local leader, a council of leaders, possibly involving a neutral arbiter to set the terms of settlement among the parties.

So, for the most part, nobody’s going to help you take prisoners off your hands and serve them justice (unless you’ve been asked to do just that). If they do, it’s not going to be the “justice” you’re wishing for. They’re likely to be banished at best, and that means their freedom to do the same elsewhere.

What options are left?

  • Make the prisoner swear an oath before releasing them (which should be taken very seriously, very Tolkien-esque)
  • Try to scare someone straight
  • Hope that the hard life in the wilds will care of killing them eventually
  • Eat the misdeed shadow and dispense your own justice

A tough set of choices for the heroic players who wish “justice” to be served in a more “civilized” manner!

References