The Lord of the Rings D&D Books Raise $2.6 Million on BackerKit

Free League Publishing raised $1.7 million on Kickstarter in 2021 to fund the second edition of The One Ring, a tabletop role-playing game based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Free League publishes the tabletop adaptations of Alien, Blade Runner, and Invincible, but its latest The One Ring crowdfunding project has surpassed all their records, raising $2.6 million to fund revised rules, a new bestiary, and a campaign book.

“I played a lot last year, and I found myself asking ‘Why did I do things this way?’” lead designer Francesco Nepitello told Polygon in a virtual interview. “Most game designers are tinkers, so you always change your mind about things. Eight months ago, I was of a mind to go to a full third version, but I backpedaled when I started playing with friends. They were not prepared for some of the changes.”

While he opted to take a lighter touch, the new rules do include a combat initiative system instead of always allowing the players to go first.

“It’s a matter of balance,” Nepitello said. “If you allow the players to go first all the time, by the time the adversaries start doing something, they’ve been cut down to half the size of what they were before, and that’s just silly.”

The new core book will incorporate the Strider Mode solo rules from Shawn Tomkin and Matt Click, which were released digitally in 2022. The rules have since been incorporated into other The One Ring releases like 2024’s Moria – Through the Doors of Durin, where players have used them to make different choices and explore more of the book than they could in a single campaign.

“As an old-time gamer, I find it pretty strange because solo gaming is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about role-playing games, but I actually saw the reason,” Nepitello said. “It’s also a very useful tool as a game master to just come up with stories that you can play by yourself and then present to your players.”

The core book will still include some adversaries, but most will move to a dedicated bestiary that includes updated statistics, rules, and lore for building encounters involving dragons, ents, oliphaunts, and the Ringwraiths. You won’t find any reprints of the adversaries the designers made up for past supplements.

“It’s very much a canonical bestiary,” Nepitello said. “This is something that could also be interesting for Tolkien fans, so you don’t want to find a strange creation of ours, but you are going to find everything that you can find in the stories.”

Intrigue and giant boars

Image: Free League Publishing

Designer Gareth Hanrahan takes players to Gondor and Rohan in a new campaign book, The White Tower and the Hall of Gold. Navigating the political turmoil in the lands of men serves as an opportunity for campaigns focused on intrigue rather than heroic adventure and combat.

“There are different factions who are trying to take advantage of their strife, and the players can align with one or the other,” Hanrahan told Polygon. “We have Tolkien’s timeline of what has to happen, but you can come at it from an unexpected or personal angle, and the Loremaster can decide how much they want to let the players change the setting or keep the canonical timeline.”

Hanrahan dug into the more obscure parts of Tolkien’s writing to come up with new threats like the great boar of Everholt, a beast that killed the 13th king of Rohan. He also found inspiration in books on Anglo-Saxon mythology.

“It’s really hard to do what Tolkien did and create new monsters and adversaries that feel right,” Hanrahan said. “One of my rules is that anything I add has to have some root in Tolkien, either something he wrote or something we knew he read.”

Image: Free League Publishing

The White Tower and the Hall of Gold will include an updated version of the mounted combat rules from the first edition Horse-Lords of Rohan book, though it took some testing to get the balance right. An initial version of the Rohirrim could go into a battle frenzy but had to wait to get a horse until they earned enough money to buy one.

“The other players were making fun of the Rider of Rohan player because you’re a Rider of Rohan and you’re walking like a beggar, so of course we had to change that,” Nepitello said.

Free League released The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying in 2023 to provide a version of The One Ring that is compatible with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. The BackerKit campaign is also funding versions of each of the books based on the 5.5e rules, something Nepitello said fans have been asking for since Wizards of the Coast released new core books in 2024. While most crowdfunding backers were interested in The One Ring, the D&D-compatible books are more likely to get shelf space in gaming stores alongside official products.

“It’s a safe option,” Hanrahan said. “You have the most popular game and the most popular fantasy setting. Put them together.”

Crowdfunding for The One Ring and The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying runs on BackerKit through Oct. 15, with pledges starting at $25 for the digital core rules or $54 for the standard edition books. Orders are expected to be delivered by October 2027.