“…the One has been found again.”

We’ve gotten a big update on The One Ring 2e. As you may remember, Cubicle 7 announced a 2nd Edition of the game, I got VERY excited for their beautiful special edition cover, then Cubicle 7 cancelled it and gave up the license. Finally, Free League announced their aquisition of it. Well, now we’ve got an update from none other than Francesco Nepitello himself, the lead designer on 1st edition TOR, who has moved over to Free League to work on 2e. The link is here.

There are a few things I want to highlight. First of all, it looks like they have several new ideas. Cubicle 7’s 2e was due to be released in January of this year, so most of it should have been done, but it appears Nepitello wasn’t satisfied with pushing the game far enough into 2nd edition.

It’s a fresh start, a rebirth, but if you know The One Ring already the game will bring you back to a place you love.

Now, does this mean we’ll be looking at a major change that will make our previous books unusable? I certainly hope not, but I imagine they’ll try to make things as backwards compatible as possible.

Let’s talk artwork, though. Based on the two images we see in the post, it looks like the artwork is going to stick closely with the old classical artwork we’ve seen from both John Howe and Alan Lee, two famous artists who worked on shaping the images we have of middle earth today, as well as the artwork we remember and love from 1st edition The One Ring.

One big consternation from fans when 2e was announced from Cubicle 7 was that the artwork seemed too “standard fantasy RPG for a lot of people’s taste. I admit I was a little disappointed, because the artwork for 1e was SO distinct.

Here you can see some 1e art:

and here you can see the 2e C7 art:

I really love the washed-out highly stylized artwork of 1e, and am excited to see what amazing work comes from Free League.

(Side note, if you’re looking for more beautiful artwork for Middle Earth that isn’t tied to the films, check out Fantasy Flight’s LotR CCG. Really good stuff there.)

So we still don’t have many details on the game itself, but I’l definitely be keeping you all updated with further progress and updates.