There have been many role-playing games set in the fantasy world by J.R.R. Tolkien, both official and fan created, and many attempts to play D&D in Middle-earth.
Nevertheless, here we are proposing a new one, based on the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Contrary to most other works, we aim to make things as simple as possible, keeping to the original D&D rules as much as possible: we don't aim to make "the best Middle-earth RPG ever", but just to provide something easy to learn, that works smoothly and is fun to play.
D&D, being the most popular fantasy RPG, provides a very solid base for the game: character creation, skills, combat, monsters and powers are well designed and playtested. The 4th edition has also many changes that suit well the setting: cleric-less healing, minions, and a more reasonable magic system are the important ones, but overall many features of the races and classes make them better. D&D feels a bit too "flashy", but much of this flashiness only comes from names and descriptions; most of the actions that characters can do are ok for Middle-earth provided the players describe them more in Tolkien's flavour.
But now it's time to close this introduction and go to the real game.
What to keep, what to add
While all the material will be released in many separate articles, I think it's useful to have an overview of what we will keep from original D&D and what we will add. This will also allow people to start playing even before all material has been written. We'll also concentrate at first only to the heroic tier (levels 1-10), leaving the others for the future.
Races: of all the D&D races, there are some which can be used as-is: humans and dwarves are already ok, the halfling can work as hobbits (but the DM should remember that adventuring hobbits are very rare), and the D&D elf can be used for sylvan elves; the Noldor and Sindar elves will have their own race, soon to be written, and the Dunedain will be rendered with a racial feat for humans (Dunadan Blood). Half-elves are very exceptional characters in Tolkien's world, so we'll just ignore them and leave to the DM the problem of people wanting to play Earendil or Elrond.
Classes: fighter, rogue, ranger and warlord are ok; even if the description of their powers is sometimes too flashy, they serve our purpose fine. There will be one additional class, the Magician, which will provide the spells and supernatural powers needed; multiclassing will allow to build characters which are not "full time wizards", a rare role in Tolkien's world; to provide a quick starting point, a first version of the magician will be written just by selecting a suitable set of existing powers from the other classes, and only later we'll try to write brand new powers. The same procedure will be followed also for the rituals.
Skills: the D&D skills are fine, but a few skills will have to be added, Perform and Craft, which are not directly useful in combat but play an important role in Middle-earth.
Feats: the racial feats will need some work, but most likely all the rest is ok as it is.
Items: non-magical items appropriate to the setting will be usable without changes, but some more thinking will be needed for the magical ones. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that many exceptional quality items can be rendered in D&D terms as magic items, as magic in Middle-earth is less explicit that in D&D; this also makes things easier, as plusses from magic items are needed to keep the game balanced without altering the other rules. In particular, many magical weapons, armour, cloaks, amulets and rings can work fine, provided they don't glow of green light all the time and don't allow the character to fly or do other embarrassing and unnatural things.
Monsters: there are many D&D monsters that can work perfectly in Middle-earth, at least if they're coloured in less eye-catching dyes, and sometimes renamed. Both goblinoids and orcs, and possibly even kobolds, can be used to represent the large variety of Tolkien's orcs and uruks; wolves, worgs, spiders, ogres, some giants and incorporeal undeads will work almost out of the box, and together with evil humans this will already provide a good amount of enemies for low level characters.
Beyond the rules
In addition to providing the rules, we'd like also to provide campaign ideas, short adventure hooks, and playtest records to show rules working.
We'll also encourage any feedback from readers, and if any of you is interested in contributing to the project – either on the rules side or on the adventure one – you're welcome.
