This one is for Cubicle 7 and Francesco. Maybe it's too early for this discussion but I was wondering if there is a plan in place for the future supplements for the The One Ring (excluding the next two Core Releases)? From what I've gathered from various internet sources these are in the works. I'm not sure what is rumor and what is fact:

Rivendell Sourcebook
Campaign Guide
The Darkening of Mirkwood (could be the same as the Campaign Guide?)
Dol Guldur, Hill of Dark Sorcery (Could be included in the above)
Loremaster's Screen
GenCon Adventure

Am I missing anything? Could we get an official statement as to the tentative release plans for these books, and the order of their release?

Thanks. Waiting with open wallet for more TOR products.

I'm more interested in actual pre-written adventure and campaigns than "describe an area" sourcebooks.

Is there a plan for a big ass TOR adventure book?

I'm not very fond of official adventures releases, though I'd certainly like a supplement giving plot hooks to the Loremaster to create a long lasting campaign.

And as I said before, I'd really love to see a book with at least 30 new monster special abilities. Although any LM can create his special abilities based on what we've seen so far, an official supplement would be much more balanced.

New virtues, rewards and character templates would also be sweet.

From the previous thread, this is all I've seen in interviews online and videos posted by Jon -

GM Screen with Lake Town booklet (and map by Jon Hodgson)
Adventure Anthology
Campaign Guide - Mirkwood
Rivendell Sourcebook (Still on the cards?)
The Errantries of the King (2012) - focused on Aragaron's journey to become king
War of the Ring (2013)

Though now I think about it, the names you mentioned may well have been in some of those interviews.

What I'm hoping for is basically The Great Pendragon Campaign for TOR. When we do get adventures, I'm hoping that they are as detailed as possible.

One of the characteristics of a narrativistic game is that it dwells mostly on theme, mood, and feel, rather then the details. Middle-Earth gaming has a long and storied history of glorious mapwork. From MERP to CODA, beautiful large-scale maps were commonplace, but there were also very detailed small-area maps as well.

I want to see magnificent, well-detailed Jon Hodgson maps of Rhosgobel, of a woodsman town, of Dale, of the Lonely Mountain.

What I don't need at all, are skeleton outlines of "plot points" with no meat hanging on the bones.

Tolkien's world is lovingly and exquisitely detailed, and a game worthy of the title should aspire to this as well, with illustration and map, but also with world and campaign detail worthy of the Professor.

Personally, I prefer campaign guides to adventures.

Campaign guides tend to include outlines for adventure and plot hooks anyway, but the wealth of source material included provides inspiration for your own adventures.

Adventure books themselves are (unavoidably) designed for a generic party and in my experience, there is no such thing as a generic party.

Players create quirky characters and I find it better to craft an adventure around their quirks.

And (this is a very big plus to me)... an adventure you create yourself is much easier to run as you know it by heart (having written it) and so don't have keep flicking back and forth to find the right page, or look up some obscure detail.

TOR is an easy system to improvise with, so you can work with notes instead of page after page of spell lists and monster stats (anyone that's run high level D&D, any level MERP, M&M etc. will know what I'm talking about)!

Try running Exalted, biatch !!

Creating NPCs villain sheets took me hours and hours of reading through countless charms...

And sometimes you spent hours creating a combo of charms to use next day, picking every charm thinking of challenging your players properly and they cut through your NPC like butter because of something you didn't foresee !

Damn, it was HARD.

No thanks! Never really liked white wolf!

And who are you calling biatch?

Haha, just kidding!

But seriously, Exalted is the gamemasters nightmare, trust me!

Not to jump topics but if you run Exalted 2e, use this: http://wiki.white-wolf.com/exalted/index.p...%27s_NPC_System

It makes your life so much easier.

Ha, thanks! I already knew this one.

No more Exalted for me, thank you. Now I'm looking forward to playing TOR.

; )

My main ones I want to see are the GM screen and some not related adventures you can run at anytime AND especially a campaign book that is similar to the Great Pendragon campaign that you can run a group through. This latter thing in particular would be epically awesome.

I think for me it's the meat and bones of an area - maps of regions with maps of the places in them - ruins, towns, dungeons. The things that inhabit them. Just to give people an idea of what's out there and perhaps adventure hooks to go along with that.

I like having some official adventures, it's a help and a starting point. I like what is happening with Pathfinder, there is so much stuff you use what you want, but I know we'd never see that level of publication here - there is a license and a referral system, much like the was/is with a franchise like Star Wars.

Maybe one official ongoing campaign would be ideal. And then loose adventure kits to set around that or your own campaign. But above all, some guide that gives you s/events/etc. Those are the important things for me.

On top of my list is....

....TO GET IT ALL NOW!!!

I don't really care what supplements they push out as long as they are as shiny and beautiful and lovable as the Core Set... the only gripe I have is that I can't buy them already.



/wolf

TOTAL AGREEMENT

Thirded lol!

I'm all for an adventure book. If it's similar to MERP modules, cool, or even if it's a ready-to-run adventure with pre-gens, that's cool too. I find that GMs can tweak these adventures to match their play group, so there shouldn't be any worries there. I don't always have the time to stat and motivate every single NPC, layout entire adventure sites and towns, and populate them, so adventure books are more than handy. People who find them too restrictive should treat them more like a skeleton work which they're free to skin their-selves.

To my mind a well crafted series of adventures is worth any number of unneeded rules supplements. See WFRPs "The enemy within" campaign, or CoCs "Masks of Narlethotep" for classic examples of product line making scenarios.

Take a look at what you said - a well crafted SERIES of adventures.

To me, well crafted series of adventures is the same as campaign - which I said I'd like to see.

A campaign book like the Great Pendragon Campaign would be awesome, I just don't want loose end adventures

Let's face it, an rpg lives or dies on the quality and the number of adventures available for the product line.

It's difficult for a new rpg to survive when budding GM's have nothing to offer their players.

Rather than releasing a string of adventure only books, I'm worried Cubicle's solution will be to release an adventure in the back of each supplement (aka Black Library WFRP 2e line). Generally both the adventure and the supplement suffers as a result. The adventure fails to deliver because it's too short (being heavily edited to fit within the supplement's page count) and/or the supplement loses relevant material because the space lost to the adventure section.

My wish list is for the initial release schedule being restricted to scenario's only, along with a 'Part 1' of a 3-5 part series. Make them HARDBACK bound, 128 page count with small font, and I will be very happy indeed.

@ Evening - Why do you fear C7 will be doing this? Costs?

I'd also love to see these books hardback...

Let me ask everyone here...

Would you guys who already bought the physical product as it is buy it again if they put together the two books in hardback (without dices and folding maps) ??

I would, definitely.

Perhaps!

The softbacks are well made however and, as long as you don't start folding them flat on the table, should last a long time.

Fortunately, TOR is relatively simple and you should be able to run the game without using the books most of the time, which is a big plus, as I hate interrupting play to look up rules.

Add the fact that they gave away the PDF, which means you can print out anything that you think you'll need to refer to a lot.

I'm sure some groups would find it useful to have spare Adventurers Books though and would buy them if sold separately.

I think everybody who loves RPGs books enjoy hardbacks a lot more than softcover, uh?

Actually, I take as much care of my soft covers as my hardbacks. I've got some soft covers that are almost as 3/4 old as I am (40). I worry about having a slip case that might soon become oversized due to a highly perishable dice tray. Now, if I could buy the books separately then that would be a different story.

Somewhere out there is a sturdy plastic box exactly the right size to hold the dice and fit inside the slip case.

And as soon as someone finds it they should post where they got it from so we can all go out and acquire one!

So, get looking people!

Sorry that, but that is demonstrably untrue. There have been many successfully RPGs without adventures (all of White Wolf would qualify) and unsuccessful ones with them.

What is needed is support for running the game but that can take many forms. The Pendragon approach, which isn't just a series of adventures, is a good one - tried and tested.

I would. I might also buy another slipcase just to have a second set of dice and adventurer's book to hand out to players.

Unfortunately, history has proven you can live quite well on the supplement treadmill, with nary an adventure in sight.

This game, however, is focused on a specific campaign, so we can expect materials that will support us running this campaign. I hope that it will include adventures and campaign setting in detail worthy of its predecessors. The quality of MERP modules leaves very, very large boots to fill.

There is a production secret hidden here that a friend of mine (who is one of the few ever to make a living of producing RPGs in Sweden) likes to tell over and over again:

1. You can only sell a good adventure ONCE, to the GM.
2. Source-books you can potentially sell to everyone in the group.

Me personally, LOVE adventures/campaigns especially ones where source material is mixed in to it seamlessly. I own almost ALL of the OLD WFRP titles for instance, where you always got Setting Stuff bundled in with Adventures, and where even the adventures outside the Enemy Within Cycle had lots of guidelines on how to run it as part of that cycle anyways.

Someone mentioned, CoC... brilliant example of massive campaigns and adventures that we all love.... BUT you can only sell them ONCE.

Glorantha stuff... same thing.

And then we look at brands like White Wolf..... they hardly produced a single adventure (there was some stuff in the beginning but after that... a few city guides plot hooks, that was it.) But MAN they sold books. Everyone and his sister bought the source books.

Now it seems the industry is working it's way back to mixing setting and adventure it seems. WFRP products are including adventures in their support products. DD4 is selling truckload of books to all players AND supporting an adventure line.

Reading the Loremaster Guide for TOR brings me back to the feeling I had when I first started out with WFRP. It blends setting and adventure together. Sure the players can not buy/read it, but I hope they will continue down that road anyway.

The future will tell.

/wolf

Too true; even for a good adventure. (MERP did a lot of great campaign material, and enough good adventures, but also a fair few rubbish ones, IMHO.)

Core books you can sell to lots of GM-types, regardless of whether they ever run the thing. They may or may not even buy the standard introductory adventure (beyond whatever 'taster' the rulebook may contain). Selling expansions to the core books presumably does depend more on people actually running the game.

Decipher milked us well enough with their LOTR RPG without ever publishing anything much in the way of adventure material. I don't know whether that was responsible for the demise of that line, or whether they never intended to do anything but take the easy pickings.

'Splat-books' you can sell to multiple players. White Wolf did pioneer this as far as I know, but it's since formed the core business model of WotC's herculean publication schedule.
I haven't seen any sign that Francesco/Sophisticated/Cubicle7 plan to do that, but heck if they do a book for each Culture which offer more material (including crunchy bits for your character like alternative Cultural Blessings, added spell options, Traits, Specialities etc., etc.) then yes there will be people who are highly motivated to buy it!

I'd surely buy them all.

Cheers!
--Os.

...aand you can of course sell loads of pheripherals, or what I like to call *crap*. Such as miniatures, plastic tokens & dice, cards, a bit more cards, and then loads more of cards. All chopped in incomplete portions, so you need to buy several to get a complete set for a group of 4 to 6 personsa. And you justify selling all this *crap* by inserting a few token rules and scenarios in there, so it will look bigger and more shiny. That sort of thing.



Oh yeas, and in case peeps dont like the merchandized *crap*, then you can also make a hard cover copy of all the rules without the said stuff, except it's most likely printed in the book anyways. Genius, that is. And people buy them all over again because they want it for completeness.

At this point, I've played through the introductory adventure and I'm ready to write more adventures. Yet, the product hasn't even hit the main market yet. So, I am relying on the advice Francesco gives in the Loremaster's Book about creating my own adventures.

If we all shared those adventure ideas, we would have lots of material to work with. Don't worry if you think your ideas are mediocre. They might be the stuff someone else needs for inspiration. Just link to the actual adventure you created, even if its just an outline or type it on the forums.

Hi everybody,
The German Version will be a hardcover! (both Books in One Hardcover+ the. two Maps )

The Publisher her in Germany is " Uhrwerk Verlag" And it will be release in Oktober

The two books in one hardcover? That's awesome. Perhaps down the road C7 will do something similar in English?

I'm imagining having 3 fantastic hardcovers of the core sets on my bookshelf.

The German uhrwerk Verlag also announced a limeted Edition ( 200 )
It seems to be a leather bound hardcover with Metal edges, and something with a real gold Embleme for 99 €

That's just unfair!

I want one!

In English though!

*mumbles angry curses*

... Germans...

/wolf

I believe the same is often true with Call of Cthulhu books!

Germans get all the cool stuff!

Note to self, learn German!

Please note, I managed to avoid mentioning the war or 1966 world cup!

Oops! No I didn't!

Doh!

I'm setting up a WIKI for my group adventuring in The One Ring. I'll post it here when it's ready.

Still, would be nice to have some official word on a tentative release schedule for official supplements.

I did email C7 about the Loremaster Screen and dice.

Dice are due late September.

They are hoping to release the LM Screen (which I hope will have something adventure-ish with it) in December or January.