RPG Review: Adventures in Middle Earth: Erebor Adventures
The mountain smoked beneath the moon;
The dwarves, they heard the tramp of doom.
They fled their hall to dying fall
Beneath his feet, beneath the moon.
Erebor Adventures is the new adventure book from Cubicle7, adapting the One Ring’s Laughter of Dragons to their D&D 5e adaptation, Adventures in Middle Earth.
I previously reviewed Laughter of Dragons, a collection of adventures that cover the region around Erebor, the Lonely Mountain. Since you can read the previous review that covers the adventures themselves, I’m going to dive more closely into the meat and
of the book. I do highly encourage you to read that review, as the adventures are the same, and they’re really fantastic. I’m not going to individually go through the small minute differences in Erebor Adventures and Laughter of Dragons, but there are some, due to the system differences.
The One Ring and D&D have different advancement systems, and Erebor Adventures has a nice system, where throughout the book, you’ll see small green and red highlights. These represent group (green) and individual (red) rewards. This is really useful, as it helps Loremasters quickly identify where they should give out experience.
I really love seeing the Nazgûl in D20 form. Now, I’m sure if I went through more of the Middle-Earth Adventures I would have seen them before, but I hadn’t. Here, they are presented in two forms, as they are in Laughter of Dragons. They appear as Dark Undead, and as Unclad and Invisible. If you think about it in terms of the films, Dark Undead is them as the Black Riders, while the Unclad and Invisible is more as they are in Dol Guldur in The Hobbit. The Unclad are CR 8 and completely invisible, making them difficult to see, and their abilities aren’t physical, just inflicting terror. The Dark Undead have a wider variety of abilities, including the Dwimmerlaik, a reaction that allows the Nazgûl to shatter a hero’s weapon and turn the damage back on them. Honestly, by renaming these guys, you could easily use the statblocks to strike fear into your non-Middle Earth D&D adventures as well.
The appendices are useful to anyone playing Middle Earth Adventures, regardless of if they run these adventures. The Loremaster Characters appendix covers every NPC you’ll encounter, telling you what pages they appear. This means you can more easily weave in the characters into other adventures by finding them quicker. The Places & Things appendix is useful in that you can easily drop in small encounters if you find yourself in the region, or if you need a description of a location.
The book overall looks absolutely beautiful. It matches the style of The One Ring, which I absolutely love. Though I own many of the books for the other system, and a lot of the information is the same, I’m VERY tempted to pick all the books up Middle Earth Adventures form too. This book is highly recommended. I’ll be reviewing the core rulebook for Middle Earth Adventures soon, so that I can get into the mechanics of the game to see how it plays differently than vanilla 5e.
Cubicle7 provided a copy of Erebor Adventures to Dice Monkey for review. You can pick up a copy of Erebor Adventures from DriveThruRPG here (affiliate link).
