Imagine a game of War of the Ring. You look at the armies on the map and know the Free Peoples are under increasing pressure; but what truly keeps you from letting go is another, less conspicuous journey.
The Fellowship is advancing. The war draws your attention, and the hope of destroying the Ring makes every delay feel heavier. You have read the novel, and perhaps you have long been familiar with the ending, but at this moment you still cannot breathe easy in advance on behalf of the choices on the table.
This is exactly what is so interesting about adapted games: we have already fallen in love with a story, yet we still want to experience our own decisions within it.
Francesco Nepitello and his collaborators have long been dealing with this kind of difficult problem. From War of the Ring to the role-playing game The One Ring, and then to Dune: War for Arrakis, familiar worlds are reorganized into playable relationships.
But this path did not begin with a huge license. Earlier, in Venice, a child was already making rules for toys together with his brothers.
1. First there were people to play with; only later did he learn he could become an author
In a personal interview at Ropecon 2025, Nepitello recalled that he played with his two brothers from childhood, assigning clear rules to Lego, modeling clay, small animals, and toy soldiers. Later, when they encountered board games and role-playing games, they discovered that this kind of play-creating activity had even richer forms of expression.
A game club near his home also led him to meet the Venice-based game designer Alex Randolph. Nepitello regards this contact as a fortunate encounter: games can be created by people, and authors can put their names on the box.
For someone who loves to play, this change in understanding is very concrete. Before, when you picked up a game box, your first thought was how to understand it; afterward, you might continue to ask why it was designed this way? If another approach were taken, what would happen?
Recognizing that there are people behind a work does not immediately make the first prototype fun, but it does make creation become an imaginable life.
By the early 1990s, he and his long-term partner Marco Maggi entered the path of professional creation. Lex Arcana was an important starting point. In a public Q&A in 2022, Nepitello traced his publishing career back to this 1993 role-playing game, a fantasy Roman Empire that had never fallen thanks to magic.
This also reminds us that he did not first make a Tolkien game before beginning to learn how to organize a fictional world. Before Middle-earth, he had already practiced with his partners how to connect history, fantasy, and player actions.
The official credits of Lex Arcana list Leo Colovini, Dario De Toffoli, Marco Maggi, and Francesco Nepitello; the design and development of the second edition core book are credited to Maggi and Nepitello. These shared credits are a part of his early experience that cannot be omitted.
2. Putting armies and the Fellowship into the same world where choices must be made
War of the Ring was co-created by Nepitello, Marco Maggi, and Roberto Di Meglio. Ares Games' official introduction lays out its two lines very clearly: the Free Peoples need to withstand the Shadow's military offensive while leading the Fellowship toward Mount Doom; the Shadow, in turn, exerts pressure between war and the search for the Ring-bearer.
The change from reader to player happens right here.
A novel can arrange for us to watch a siege and then turn to a journey. Players, however, face the same table: caring about one side does not mean the other side will stop deteriorating.
Let us return to the scenario at the beginning. If you focus only on the armies, the Fellowship's situation may become more difficult; if you only want to advance the journey, the pressure on the map will not disappear because of your hope. What to do first thus becomes a decision you must bear in this game.
These are experiential analyses based on the relationships within the work, not claims that the game requires you to reproduce the novel page by page.
On the contrary, familiarity with the original sometimes makes choices more tense. You know why those places and characters matter, and you also know where a certain road originally led; but once the decision is handed to the people at the table, familiarity no longer guarantees the same result.
In my view, the most attractive part of this kind of adaptation is letting players both recognize this world and yet be unable to secure victory in advance merely by having read it. You come in with memories, and you still need to make judgments about the present.
The thickness of the world comes from the original work, while the situation before your eyes is jointly driven by the people at this table.
3. The One Ring: if the rules change, does the world still feel the same?
Compared with coordinating a war, the role-playing game shifts the camera to another scale. Players do not only care about victory or defeat on the large map; they also play people acting on the road.
In a public Q&A preserved by The Hardboiled GMshoe's Office, Nepitello discussed his collaboration with Marco Maggi on The One Ring. He emphasized that he wanted the rules and terminology to sound as if they belonged to Middle-earth, rather than simply pasting familiar names onto another game system.
This choice also brings limitations. They did not provide the usual freely selectable classic spellcaster class, but instead let certain magical traits enter a character's virtues and abilities. Such trade-offs serve their understanding of Tolkien's texts.
Free League's official introduction to the core rules places travel, combat, councils, and the Shadow at the center of the player experience. It invites players to create heroes and enter a world threatened by shadow, rather than merely watching the adventures already completed by famous characters.
This offers another way of adapting that is worth thinking about.
If the rules constantly reward us for doing a certain kind of thing, then even if the background text is restrained, players will gradually move toward those things. Therefore, whether something "feels like Middle-earth" depends not only on maps and illustrations, but also on what characters ordinarily do, how they treat danger, and what remains with them after a journey.
A work can write a great deal of setting into the book and still make the people at the table feel they are somewhere else; it can also, through a small number of recurring choices, bring the familiar atmosphere of the original into action itself.
From War of the Ring to The One Ring, the camera distance differs, but the question the designers face is very similar: how can the decisions players make still belong to this world?
4. Arriving at Dune, familiar design experience also needs to be tested anew
In the design diary for Dune: War for Arrakis, Nepitello again collaborated with Marco Maggi, while Michele Garbuggio participated in development. In the first diary entry, he proposed capturing the qualities that made Herbert's novel a classic and conveying that epic feel to the tabletop.
Here too there are two forces, but this is not simply giving the Middle-earth map a layer of sand color.
CMON's official introduction explains that the Harkonnen start by controlling the planet, while the Atreides need to use raids and withdrawals to weaken their opponent. Different situations mean players cannot treat their own actions merely as a mirror of the other side's.
In the second diary entry, developer Garbuggio further introduces the action dice: the result rolled each round determines the available actions, and both sides take turns choosing and spending dice; at the same time, systems such as spice harvesting and prescience bring different concerns to each side.
This explanation, signed by the developer, also lets us see another kind of work within collaboration: turning the experience the author pursues into rhythms and conditions that can be repeatedly tested.
From the player's perspective, the dice provide the opportunities for that round, and those opportunities must return to the side you are on. You cannot assume that because you know an action is strong, it must be usable at this moment; nor can you assume that because both sides roll dice, both sides are experiencing the same war.
This limitation means planning needs to leave room. Characters in a novel have their era and resources, and players likewise must find the actions that can happen within a specific situation.
For readers, what is most interesting about cross-work comparison may be precisely these changes. Creators enter a new world with experience, and the new world in turn tests whether that experience is suitable enough.
5. Be faithful to the story, but also leave players a place that has not been finished
In a public Q&A in 2022, Nepitello said that he also feels pressure when facing a deeply beloved world. At the same time, he distinguished the space of official creators from that of players: be restrained with established setting, while players and game masters should be able to explore and expand their own Middle-earth.
Putting these two desires together is not easy.
You want others to recognize the work you cherish, and you also hope they are not merely looking for a pre-written correct route. Too loose, and the original's atmosphere may disappear; too closed, and the meaning of play may be reduced to walking through the script again.
Having read this far, I am more willing to understand his path of adaptation as a constant search for this distance.
Making rules for toys as a child was about letting shared imagination happen; later, making role-playing games and large board games was about providing a stage clear enough for more strangers. The stage has boundaries, relationships the author carefully preserves, and it must also accommodate choices players have not rehearsed in advance.
This experience has always been connected with collaborators and community. The original author provided the world, design partners and developers together turned it into a game, and players then sit down with their own memories and friends.
Sometimes it is easy to see only the familiar logo on the box and forget that turning text into action is another kind of creation requiring judgment and trade-offs. Nepitello's several works make the differences in this work tangible: you can worry about both war and journey on one map, or lower the camera to experience the path of your own character.
Imagine that game of War of the Ring has ended. You still recognize the original story, but you begin to talk about a certain choice in this game, a road not taken, and an approach that might be tried next time.
We know the ending on the page.
The journey on the table is still worth beginning once more.
[chengcheng's interactive topic]
How do you think an adapted game can be considered "faithful to the original": is it the complete recreation of characters and events, or that even if it moves toward a different ending, it still makes you feel you are in that world? Is there a game that made you want to read the novel it adapted once again?
I am chengcheng, and I will see you next time in Designer Story!
#DesignerStory #FrancescoNepitello #WarOfTheRing #TheOneRing #BoardGameAdaptation
Sources and further reading: Ropecon 2025 interview with Francesco Nepitello Lex Arcana official credits page Ares Games: War of the Ring and the three authors Francesco Nepitello's 2022 public Q&A Free League: Introduction to The One Ring core rules CMON: Nepitello's design diary for The Desert War CMON: Garbuggio's development diary on the action dice CMON: Official introduction to Dune: War for Arrakis