Cubicle 7, who publishes a well-regarded Tolkien-based RPG called The One Ring, has just come out with the PDF version of Adventures in Middle Earth (AME), combining their licenses for Tolkien's much-loved ur-fantasy setting with the latest version of the world's most popular role-playing game. The result, I understand, is the first time we've seen published support for playing D&D in the world of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
I think Tolkien is a treasure, and I certainly wouldn't mind role-playing in Middle Earth, but what attracted me the most to AME was the prospect of adapting its rules to heroic yet low-power D&D; that is, a world where fairly ordinary heroes meet fantastical challenges, and where the heroes are assumed to be heroic, not amoral murder-hobos. There are some interesting new rules adapted from The One Ring which have some promise for this end, but which I haven't dove into yet; instead the first thing I looked at were the new classes. I love class design more than anything in RPGs, and the previewed class list was very intriguing. So what follows below the fold is a look at these classes. I may do more in-depth reviews of each class, but for now we'll just offer a quick preview of each.
