I've been playing The One Ring RPG lately, and really enjoying it, partly because now I have an excuse to buy dice. My old dice bag and dice collection have gone missing at some point in the last few years -- it's possible they're still in the house, but I'll be damned if I know where -- and I needed d6s and d12s in order to play. And needed the other dice that aren't actually used in this game because ... well. Dice.

(If you're not a tabletop roleplayer, you may be skeptical of the need to have the right color of dice for your personality and your mood, and to have enough dice that you can switch dice when one set appears to be punishing you. To which I can only say: go to a gaming store and look at all the dice. Run your hand through the loose dice bin. Feel the stirring of sensations that will make you sympathize with dragons and their hoards.)

We're playing the Darkening of Mirkwood campaign with some other Wilderland content mixed in, with most of the plotlines we’re pursuing centering around Radagast and the elves of the Woodland Realm, although we may head West over the mountains for a while once the Ruins of the North supplement comes out. It's my first time using this system, and I like it; there's a big world to explore, and I'm liking the way the player characters' actions have consequences that shape the setting and future events as years progress.

I'd say it's fairly rules-light, but not all the way to being a freeform storytelling game; many actions require a skill check, but your chosen specialities and distinctive features can give you an automatic success on basic tests (if you have the specialization Boating, you don’t have to roll to succeed at boating unless you’re trying to do something truly absurd, like go down a waterfall in a barrel.)

And I think the game does a good job of dealing with both the challenges and the pleasures of playing in an established world. You can interact with important characters from the books, but they can’t (or won’t) solve your problems for you. The events between The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring are happening as the campaign progresses, and the extent to which you notice or care depends on your party’s background and choices. (Every now and then our party hears news from Gondor. I think there’s only one character in our party who could even find Gondor on a map, and that’s the extent of his interest in it. We’ve heard slightly more about what dwarves of Erebor are up to, but really just enough to make it clear that a party of dwarves would be having an entirely different campaign.)

The difficulty can be a little punishing for a party of new characters, especially a small party -- expect to spend several gaming sessions getting competent at things like “travel from one side of Mirkwood to the other without dying.” By the time you start getting good at fighting and surviving in the wilderness, you can start worrying about succumbing to the Shadow. For a fantasy RPG, the characters stay fairly low-powered, even after lengthy play, which is part of what makes the tone feel true to Tolkien’s world -- Aragorn is a good warrior and leader, but he isn’t Superman -- but means you need to calibrate your strategies for human-scale characters. (If you're heavily outnumbered, it's time to talk fast, create a distraction, or run.)
I’m not sure you need to be a huge Tolkien fan to enjoy this (although it helps), but I would say you need to be able to pick up on the tone of the story -- this is not the system for playing amoral or actively awful people, unless you want to watch them fall to the Shadow and meet nasty ends. Which isn’t to say there’s no moral complexity; one scenario left us debating a moral dilemma for some time, with no easy answers in sight. But the game setting is designed for characters who care about doing the right thing, even if they disagree about what that is and how much they’re willing to risk to do it. And I think you’ll have the best time if you actively engage with those questions as you play.