A LOTR TTRPG, old-school RPGs, gory comics and textured music

June 06, 2025

A LOTR TTRPG, old-school RPGs, gory comics and textured music

Sleepdrifter's Newsletter #2 📜

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Deep forests, giant mountains & weird dungeons. I speak about TTRPGs, video games, music and what I like.
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Summary :

🧝The One Ring: A Lord Of The Ring TTRPG
📽️The Incredible Youtube Retrospective Niche
📚Read And Listened This Week
🧙What I’m Up To

🧝The One Ring: A Lord Of The Ring TTRPG

For some months now, I've been a player of The One Ring, a TTRPG that occurs in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, just before the whole Lord Of The Ring era.

We are a group of 4 players + our GM Nvaet, with whom I started playing TTRPG back in 2006.

We already share some great moments fighting trolls, bandits and orcs, and exploring the world Tolkien created back in the early 1900’s.

Last friday, we made a long trip from Rivendell to Lond Daer to find something that one of our companions had seen in a trans inducted dream: an island with a glowing mountain.

Speaking of the game itself, the rules kind of confused me the way it's written in the 248 pages core book.
As a rule-lite guy who loves tables rather than a lot of text, I think the book is a bit messy, but I’m not the GM this time, so it doesn’t bother me that much.

Even if I’m not used to being a player (this is my first time since 2009), The One Ring is a fun game.
It has 2 succinct game phases: the adventure one, where we played like any other TTRPG and the fellowship phase, where we can learn new things, get some new gear, and where we can get some info about our next quest.

The whole dice system is also kind of different including :

a Feat Die, a d12 where the 11 is The Eye Of Sauron (an equivalent of 0 as a result) and the 12 is The Gandalf Rune (immediate success).
a Success Die, a d6 where the 6 has an Elvish Rune, which represents an additional level of success.
A roll result that achieves its Target Number (or results in The Gandalf Rune) and produces one or more Elvish Rune icons is an outcome of a superior quality
- If no Elvish Rune icons were scored, the action was successful, but didn’t achieve anything beyond the bare minimum (a success).
- If a single Elvish Rune was scored, then the Player- hero’s accomplishment was out of the ordinary (a great success).
- If two or more Elvish Rune icons were scored, the result was absolutely exceptional and memorable (an extraordinary success).

There are, of course, a lot of things to tweak and modify the rolls.

You can get The One Ring here.

Our next session will be next week, and we’ll go into Lond Daer!

📽️The incredible Youtube Retrospective niche

I’m not that into TV shows, series and Netflix stuff. I’m someone who needs to do a thousand things at the same time to feel better, and watching a long show while doing nothing for more than 1 season is very hard for me.

That’s probably why I’m a lot into Youtube videos, even long ones, because I can easily watch them while playing some video games, writing stuff, eating, doing the laundry and other daily tasks.

And Youtube has a lot of things I love : retrospective videos.
They are often long (from 1 to 10 hours long) but plenty of interesting stuff about one precise subject. The ones that I love the most are those who speak about video games, particularly about RPGs.

Take Majuular for example. He is doing a full retrospective of each Ultima video game title. Each video is easily 2 hours or more long and is more than interesting, showing how the game was made, thought and played. This week, he released his new one about Ultima VII.

And this is more than inspiring, even for your TTRPGs, as it shows a wide variety of settings, stories and creativity. And don’t forget that old RPGs are heavily inspired by D&D and other TTRPGs.

And, there’s a game I've loved since I’m a teen: Diablo, the first one.
The grim gothic setting with ambient music, weird monsters and occult things was a beautiful entry to the dark fantasy stuff I love today.

Some months ago, I finished it on my Android phone (with Devilution X for those asking), and it was a blast.
I quickly wanted more, and searched for that kind of “complete retrospective” video. But there was none.

I was secretly hoping for someone as Majuular to make some, or as Jwlar, another “retrospective” youtuber, who makes some amazing videos of The Elder Scroll series.

And here we are! This week, Jwlar released an epic 6 hours long video about Diablo 1, and this is what I’m slowly watching each day, from time to time.

And oh boy do I want a solo TTRPG with this special eerie, grim and gothic vibe!

I’ve never delved to find any at the moment, even if Mörk Borg can do the trick, and I’ve heard of Ker-Nerthalas by Blackoath Entertainment (I’ll probably try it as it seems very cool).

📚Read And Listened This Week

I don’t usually read this much comics, but this month I’m a lot into it, so, yes, the newsletter is a bit more comic oriented this time 😅

[Trigger Warning: gore, ultra violence, anything you can think of]

Last weekend, my SO delved into our small home library to read some stuff, and found 4 comics I've got for a long time now: Crossed.
She read it and been left utterly shocked by how much this story was gruesome, violent and sadistic.

Crossed is a series of comics started by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows, shortly followed by other scenarists (including the talented Alan Moore) and artists.
As a weird red cross appears on some people’s head, they immediately start to act the most evil way possible: they’ll swear the most insane stuff, and act the most horrible way. All the things you can think of are present in this book (violence, gore, murder, r4pe, t0rture, etc).

And no one and nothing in this comic is spared: men, women, children, babies, animals …
Even the human protagonist can be the most evil scumbag possible.

Be warned, this comic is not for the faint of heart and the art is utterly…graphic.

à la ligne - feuillets d’usine (In english : on the line - notes from a factory) is a french autobiographical book by Joseph Ponthus, but what I read this week was the comic adaptation by Julien Martinière.
The story is simple: Joseph Ponthus was a factory worker, who worked in the fish and meat industry. The whole comic depicted his daily life as we wake up early to go to a French fish factory, cutting fish and shrimp and then later to a meat factory as a factory cleaner.

This book was very peculiar for me to read because that was my life for almost 10 years in my 20’s. I was a factory worker in the meat industry then a manager in a slaughterhouse. And, yes, this was no fun at all.
And that’s what this book is all about: waking up early, physically struggling, being mentally bored because the only stuff working are our bodies, seeing and smelling bad stuff etc.

It wasn’t as cathartic as it was for me to read, as I had the time to think about all of this stuff for a long time now. But I think this’ll be a great comic to give to my friends who never work in a factory and who asked me “How was it ?”.

The writing is great, such is the art, which takes some psychedelic turns from time to time, and I loved that.

“Fun” fact, my very first TTRPG thing released was a game for the anti-capitalist 2023 jam, called Work!, that was heavily inspired by my life as a factory worker. It’s a business card and this is the whole “game”:

“Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.” 🎶

This very Friday, one of my best friends Emet released his tenth musical EP simply called EP X under the name Jinkstraüm.

His whole musical project is very synth and textured oriented as he loves crafting modular synth and organic field recording. The whole vibe is pretty grim and sometimes harsh with a bit of hope.
Feels like being stuck in a strange place that you loves and hate as the same time (and this is probably what is about this new EP)

You can find all of his albums and EPs on his bandcamp with a lot to listen to!

For fans of : ambient / dark ambient / drone / noise / texture / experimental / modular synth

🧙What I’m Up To

Last week, I told you about my Gévaudan project setting. This week, as a simple task, I made a historically accurate table of French’s 1760’s Gévaudan’s first name and last name for characters and NPC.

I also started to delve into the weird economy of this era to understand how it works and how to simply put it in my setting.

Otherwise, I’m working slowly on all of my projects because my brothers and I work on a very personal project as a gift for someone we love: our father. It's something that we will keep private, but it’ll take the whole month to finish and we have a blast making it 😀

That’s it for this week!
Let me know if you enjoyed this article, if you played/read/watch any of the stuff I mentioned this week 😀

See you next Friday!

Cheers !
Sleepdrifter

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