The One Ring or Adventures in Middle-earth Battle of Five Armies & The Third Age of Middle-Earth The current year for our Middle-Earth campaign is set during the year of 2946 of the Third Age. Inspired By J.R.R. Tolkien

I am such a huge fan of J.R.R. Tolkien and his work with Middle-earth, I am currently reading the novels and have watched the extended versions of all six films more times that I can count. It's such a wonderful world, the people, the ambience, the lore, the history—all of which had me hooked from day one.

What really brought me in all the way was watching the films. I understand the films don't do the novels justice, I get that but the films are such works of art, especially the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Hobbit trilogy was also great but I'll admit, Peter Jackson went overboard on the amount of CGI that he used. So, I decided to sit down and start trying to read the TTRPG books from The One Ring and Adventures in Middle-earth "this is well before the new additions of each system were released by Free League".

As hard as I tried, I never could get a grasp of the One Ring Rules, maybe this is because all of my life (40+ years of playing classic Dungeons & Dragons) and maybe my brained is just hard wired for traditional D&D rule systems. So, I gave up on trying to learn the One Ring system, but I did get all the books for it simply because they are still really good "reads" and I have such a hatred for WotC and 5th edition that the thrill simply wasn't with me reading the AiMe books.

After taking an extended break from TTRPG's "real life stuff and medical stuff", I returned to the TTRPG world in early 2024, I've jumped back into looking at the Middle-earth systems again, finding that The One Ring system is still above my paygrade haha, and I still hate 5th edition so I decided to look at Old-School Essentials to see if I could reskin the system to fit Middle-earth, 5th edition did so I don't see a reason why I can't do the same with Old-School Essentials. Mind you, I've done a major overhaul with making Old-School Essentials fit with Middle-earth, "reskinning races and classes and some mechanics from Adventures in Middle-earth that need to remain intact" so I have started work on reskinning Old-School Essentials and also merging in specific mechanic that need to remain to keep the Middle-earth feel with my modified Old-School Essentials system.

I want to transform my own Old-School Essentials system into something that will not feel like a standard Dungeons & Dragons for my players. Like I said, I refuse to touch anything from Wizards of the WOKE, but Cubicle 7 & Freeleague seem to have made the system their own so it gives me hope that I can mold my system to suit my own needs. It's worth giving a try because Middle-earth has a special place in my heart and I really want to tell some epic stories from this setting.