The One Ring: Tales From the Lone-lands is a supplement to The One Ring role-playing game. Set in one of the less familiar regions of Middle-earth, in this case Erador, it provides rich new details and concepts for use there.
Once again the art is universally luscious and well designed. Each chapter is introduced via a gorgeous two page painting by Antonio De Luca, who also produced the excellent cover art for this volume. A personal favorite is the chapter one spread, which illustrates not only a gorgeous landscape, but has simultaneously a very folkloric and very Tolkienian look. However, the scenes do vary somewhat, including everything from crazy old wizard types to horrifying post massacre views of a village.
The other illustrations are nothing to sneeze at and all are of the very high quality that is this series’s hallmark. Pages that are not gorgeously illustrated, are much more rare than those that have some ornamentation, down to even the end papers, each sporting a noticeably different and useful map of the region described in the book. For those few pages that lack a traditional dedicated illustration, the overall style and design of the book continue the beautiful work. Detailed embellishments adorn three or four sides of each page, the only exceptions being the previously mentioned two page spreads and the initial opening index and the final index as well. The graphic design team of Antonio De Luca, Jan Pospíšil, and Federica Costantini, and the layout artist, deserves credit for this final little detail. Of course, detail comes in more ways than just illustration and visuals; the written word is where Middle-earth began.
This particular book expands on a mostly abandoned and untouched area of the setting during The Lord of the Rings, and as a result, allows significant expansion in a few clever forms. The fact that the area is relatively desolate comes up repeatedly, and indeed, rather than giving strict details of Erador, the volume is divided more story like into a half-dozen areas with likely adventures to happen in them. I particularly liked the third one “Kings of Little Kingdoms,” which introduces a concept that doesn’t get touched on much anywhere else: non-divine wizards. In this case, specifically, the idea is a “False Wizard” and what the presence of such a figure means to an area when he goes around claiming to be something and someone very different from who he is. There are advantages to this of course, and the book goes into those quite deeply as well as finding a good set of examples of how he pulls this off.
While not an art book, The One Ring: Tales From the Lone-lands can certainly be more than appreciated as such. Likewise not intended as a book of lore, it nonetheless serves as a continuation of the most extensive post Christopher Tolkien attempt at fleshing out the world of Middle-earth. As a supplement to a role-playing game it is equally good, providing a half dozen broad but definable adventures to experience in a way that allows the plots to still feel like singular narratives.
(Free League, 2023)
