LORE - A Lord of the Rings Adventure Game Retroclone

"I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." - J.R.R. Tolkien

My favorite licensed Tolkien game was published by Iron Crown Enterprises in 1991. It was called The Lord of the Rings Adventure Game (abbreviated, bizarrely, as "LOR"). Because I'm very charmed by the system, I ran some games using an adaptation of it.

When I began the Middle-earth Hexcrawl project, I wrote them with an eye towards this adaptation. The more I wrote daily hexes, the more I found myself co-developing a system to use to run the hexcrawl. 

I've called this system Lore. It is a retroclone of The Lord of the Rings Adventure Game, much expanded and elaborated on and with many optional subsystems. It is what I will use to run the Middle-earth Hexcrawl. 

You can check out the game, here:

Click the picture to get the game!

This is entirely a fan work, like a piece of fanfiction published in the Tolkien Society bulletin. My use of the terms, concepts, characters, names, and texts are not a challenge to the trademark or copyright.

Art and Cartography

• The Middle-earth Hex Map was created through the research and labor of Idraluna Archive
• Art is by Goran Gligovic, used by kind permission

Additional Thanks

• Hope, hexcrawling rules, and certain wandering encounter events are sourced from Arnold K. of Goblinpunch's Hex Crawling v3, shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
• When populating hexes, I frequently relied on the bounty of the blog d4caltrops by Ktrey. You might see some results from his wonderful d100 tables here.
• Special thanks to Elizabeth for her encouragement.

Sprawling, but incomplete

The Lord of the Rings Adventure Game is a simple piece of game design; its rules barely take up 34 pages. Like many old games, it is an imperfect beast but has many good ideas. This adaptation has become swollen—almost bloated like Shelob. It has spoiled the original's simplicity in favour of gluttonously feasting on subsystems that appeal to my sensibilities. Such is the author's prerogative! 

And yet, this game is incomplete. Not only are there subsystems mentioned (e.g., Downtime) that I haven't finished explaining, but the whole thing is unedited. The entire thing was written in a stream of consciousness to get the ideas onto paper with no thought of clarification or harmonization. 

But if I didn't stop working and publish this game on my blog in an unfinished state, it would never be seen by anyone besides myself. I am prioritizing sharing the results of my fever dream labours over presenting something that's, well, presentable. 

I suspect that as I continue to reread the trilogy every year I will continue to return to these rules and worry at it. Check back in sometime. Maybe you will find some improvements! I hope there is something here that is appealing to you, friend. 

If you end up running the Middle-earth Hexcrawl using these rules, please do let me know.