The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying 5E (2023)
Tabletop Roleplaying Games
The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying 5E (2023)
English
Rules-medium
Free League Publishing
The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying is a tabletop roleplaying game of journeys, fellowship, and creeping Shadow in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, published by Free League Publishing in collaboration with Sophisticated Games. It is the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (5E) sister line to Free League's own The One Ring, adapting that game's setting and structure to the 5E rules under the Open Game License (OGL), with a core compendium released in 2023 and a boxed Starter Set following in July 2025. It is a supplement rather than a standalone rules text: it does not reproduce the 5E basic rules, so a table needs the D&D rulebooks (or access to them) to play.
The game is the successor to Adventures in Middle-earth, Cubicle 7's earlier 5E take on Tolkien's world, and a 5E counterpart to The One Ring, whose original designers were Francesco Nepitello and Marco Maggi.
Description
Players take on heroes drawn from six cultures of Eriador, the northwestern stretch of Middle-earth, in the year 2965 of the Third Age, when the Shadow is gathering but the great wars are still decades away.
The Game Master (GM) runs a world built around travel, hospitality, and quiet dread rather than dungeon delving: parties plan routes across rivers and mountain passes, hold councils with the people they meet, and spend downtime between adventures recovering from what the road did to them. The game asks a table to accept a lower-magic, slower-burning Tolkien tone than a standard 5E campaign - characters stop at level 10, evil leaves a lasting mark on a hero's spirit, and winning is as often about enduring a journey as clearing a room.