I bought a starter set for The One Ring not because I'm starting to play The One Ring (although I am, incidentally) but because I wanted The One Ring dice and a nice copy of the map of Eriador, and the boxed starter set contains those items. Confusingly, however, there's not just one starter set for The One Ring. I didn't know this when I bought the box I now own, but the good news is that the Over Hill & Under Hill starter set is a nice box to own, possibly whether or not you already own the core rulebook (as I do.) This is my review of Over Hill & Under Hill (also known as a starter set, but not the starter set.
Incidentally, Free League Publishing is, at the time of writing, crowdfunding a few expansions for The One Ring on Backerkit. I play The One Ring as often as I can, but I only stumbled across this campaign by accident. If you're a The One Ring fan and love Gondor, then check out the Backerkit campaign.
On page 177 of The One Ring rulebook, this statement (in the dulcet passive voice so common to RPG rulebooks) appears:
More detailed information on the Shire can be found in The One Ring Starter Set.
Based on that promise, I hurried out to my friendly local game store and purchased The One Ring Starter Set, which bore the subtitle Over Hill & Under Hill. I didn't know there were 2 starter sets. Had I known, I obviously would have still purchased Over Hill & Under Hill because the subtitle is an obvious and famous reference to the Shire itself. Frodo used it as a pseudonym in Bree in an attempt to avoid notice, because strange folk had been seen in the region and they'd been asking specifically about "Baggins." Originally, Bilbo coined the phrase decades earlier as he described his journey to the dragon Smaug. From chapter 12 of The Hobbit:
"You have nice manners for a thief and a liar," said the dragon. "You seem familiar with my name, by I don't seem to remember smelling you before. Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?"
"You may indeed! I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my paths led..."
So obviously a starter set referring to under hill would contain details about the Shire, right? Well, no. Free League Publishing gets away with it on a technicality. In context of chapter 12, "under the hills and over the hills" refers to Bilbo's journey away from the Shire, through Eriador and into Erebor. So this starter set is technically named for the place beyond the Shire.
Nerd specificity cuts both ways!
Over Hill & Under Hill is the cheaper of the 2 starter sets. It contains a bunch of useful items, though:
The content of the box is really nice, like everything else I've seen in The One Ring product line.
The One Ring is a d6 dice pool system with the addition of a d12 "Feat Dice." It sounds strange, and frankly it is, but it's also beautiful. In the lore-nerd sense, the elves of Middle-earth use a base-12 number system, so using d12 and d6 feel very on brand. In the game-nerd sense, I love that the game master (or "loremaster") never sets target numbers, with players instead rolling against their own stats.
In The One Ring, you must roll over your relevant Attribute threshold to succeed on a skill test, so high rolls are best. Fortunately, when you roll your d6 pool, you also roll a d12, which obviously has the potential of contributing a very high number. However, if you roll the Eye of Sauron on the d12 Feat dice, you fail your roll no matter what else you've rolled. To balance that out, the Feat dice also bears the rune of Gandalf, which causes you to succeed with near-miraculous results.
You can use standard dice for this, but it's frankly inelegant. The Feat dice is actually treated as a d10 with special effects on either end. In other words, the Eye of Sauron isn't the same as rolling a 1. In The One Ring, the number 1 is the number 1. You could roll 1 on your Feat dice and a bunch of 5s and 6s on your d6 pool, and succeed. So on an ordinary d12, the Eye of Sauron is 11 and the Gandalf rune is 12. You can get used to it, but if you're introducing a new player to the game (or to roleplaying in general) then the special Feat d12 is a lot easier to explain: Numbers count as numbers, runes count as runes.
Even the d6 has special markings in The One Ring, both in the form of the Tengwar letter Lambe and numbers that are either solid or only outlined. When you roll a 6 (marked with the Lambe rune), you earn meta-currency that you can spend on special effects. If your player-hero has the Weary condition, any outlined number (1-3) count as a roll of 0. You can fake it with a standard d6, but you don't get the visual reminders of these special mechanics.
The dice, in other words, aren't strictly necessary, but they're definitely nice to have.
In The One Ring, there's a whole phase of the game that is the journey. It's a codified play mode, with dice rolls and fatigue penalties and potential encounters. The toll your journey takes is likely to increase when you travel through difficult or dangerous terrain, and the core rulebook (the big book, not the rules booklet in the starter set) conveniently has a map of Eriador with colour-coded danger levels and an overlay of 20-mile hexes.
However, the core rulebook lacks a convenient player map, which is strange because the players are meant to declare their intended path to the site of the adventure. You can just open the core rulebook and show the players the hex and colour-coded map. It's believable that many Player-heroes would know dangerous regions by reputation, and either way the players must decide whether they want to risk a quicker route through dangerous territory or take longer to go a safer route.
Over Hill & Under Hill solves this problem by providing a very nice A2 map of Eriador. It has no hexes and no indication of threat levels. It's almost an in-world map, except that it's printed in colour for some reason. I'd have preferred a black-and-white, maybe with accents of red, as if the map were something on parchment in-world. Then again, Fer Culorum exists, and it's well worth the $2. I bought it once, and now my players can fold and abuse and scribble all over my A3 print-out, and I don't care because I can just print out a new one for the next game.
There's also a battle map for a key location in the adventure on the back of the Eriador map, which is a nice touch. The One Ring uses an abstract but tactical combat system with zones instead of physical distance to judge who's engaged with the enemy and who's fighting at range, and who's in a defensive stance. The battle map takes this into account, with concentric rings for forward positions, defensive positions, and rearward positions.
I love pre-generated characters, and this starter set contains 5 of them:
These do everything I want pre-generated characters to do: They provide a quick start and they provide realistic examples of a character build. These alone are worth the price of the box.
The Rules booklet summarises the game system into 24 pages. It's hard to say how many pages the rules take to explain in the core rulebook, because they're spread through several chapters based on context. The Rules booklet just provides you the rules for gameplay, from the game master's perspective. There's no character building or stats, there's nothing about the setting. It's just the rules, and it's a really useful reference.
Not only that, there's a cheatsheet on the back cover, giving you a chart of die roll results, sources of Shadow, rolls and roles required during the Journey phase, Journey events, and Wound severity. It's not the cheatsheet I'd have made, but cheatsheets are really hard to do, and this one's definitely useful for some situations (hey, there are a lot of situations in an RPG, so no cheatsheet is ever perfect.)
Worth the price of the box.
The title of the box is, as it turns out, also the title of the adventure inside. Over Hill and Under Hill is a 16-page adventure divided into 3 sections and ideally, as recommended by the authors, 3 gaming sessions.
As an aside, I very much appreciate that The One Ring encourages players to run short sessions. I run 2 roleplaying games each week (a local group, and an Internet group) and they never exceed 3 hours. I firmly believe that good table and game management would enable more people to play more roleplaying games more often.
The 3 section of the adventure are the journey to the adventure, 2 adventure locations, and then a final adventure location and encounter. The book demonstrates the typical, at least in my personal experience, adventure template for The One Ring. It is, not coincidentally, I think, the template JRR Tolkien provided in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings:
In a dnd game, this is completely wrong and almost never works. A template like this in dnd would result in chaos, with player characters getting sidetracked for several sessions just messing around in the tavern, and then you'd skip the journey so you don't have to pretend like long-distance travel is a fun mechanic in dnd, the player characters would wander around looking for distractions and side quests for XP farming, and then finally they'd tackle the actual problem. But in The One Ring, this is the lore-appropriate template and the game mechanics support it.
The adventure content is good, aside from the inclusion of some children as survivors of a battle. Personally, I'm not prepared to address the complexity of how children might respond to witnessing the death and destruction of their entire village. I'm also not sure what the player-heroes are meant to do about the children once they've been found. I guess you're just supposed to cart them around with you. When I run the adventure, I change the survivors to some elderly folks who were out gathering berries and herbs during the raid. They're too old to join in on the adventure, but not helpless, and hearty (or miserable) enough to handle the total annihilation of their community. However you choose to handle the aftermath of a roaming warband, it is a fair reminder than in Middle-earth death is a serious matter. This isn't a game where you run out into the wild and kill everything you see. This is a game where you're fighting the influence of the Shadow of Mordor. Sometimes you have to fight, but other times you must take council (literally, there are rules for that), listen, observe, and contemplate.
Over Hill and Under Hill is a good introductory adventure, not just for the adventure it offers but also for the way it sets the tone of the game system. This adventure deftly demonstrates how The One Ring is definitely not dnd in Middle-earth, but a roleplaying game about JRR Tolkien's world.
Over Hill and Under Hill may be intended as a starter set, but for me it's a convention pack. I can grab this box and take it a convention for a 4 hour session, and I literally have everything I need to run the game.
As an aside, I actually find the box an awkward form factor for this product. The box is 5cm in depth, but it contains maybe 1cm of material. I plan on using it to store my Middle-earth miniatures, because otherwise it's just wasted space on my bookshelf.
Form factor notwithstanding, this is an excellent starter set or ready-made convention pack. I probably wouldn't buy it as a starter set, personally, because it doesn't provide anything to help you do more beyond what's in the box. It doesn't set you up for planning your own adventures or for developing the player-heroes. This doesn't feel like a starter set designed to empower players to thirst for more, it just feels like an adventure module with some extra assets (a map, pre-generated characters, and dice, specifically.) But if you're going to buy The One Ring dice anyway, then you may as well buy this box. If you're looking for an adventure to run, then you may as well buy this box. Just make sure, when you go to the store to pick it up, you know which starter set is which.