The Land of Eem Core Rulebook (2025) does about what you’d expect, and then some more. The back cover has a quote, “The Lord of the Rings meets The Muppets,” and I think that is tremendously apt. Artist/creator Ben Costa’s style certainly has a Muppet-like quality, all wide-eyed and grinning and colorful. The Lord of the Rings bit is also apt, though maybe “the chapters of Fellowship up to when they meet Strider and maybe the bit in Rivendell.” That the illustration in the “What this Game is About” section is a group of adventurers sitting down for tea with a manticore says a lot.

System is d12 based, roll it, add modifiers. There are five possible situational results for most rolls, though some tests are meet or beat. There are four attributes, from which five stats are derived and skills are linked to. It’s all very legible if you’ve played any sort of RPG before, easy to slide right into, though it feels a bit more Year Zero than D&D to me, maybe, in the way the way all these things nest together. Combat is an option, but there are lots of better things to try first. There’s no XP for killing, but lots of XP for seeing new things and building relationships; I like that XP is also a meta currency that players can spend on a range of upgrades rather than one step of class-based progress. A nice suite of tables for drives and interests further reinforces all this.

Much of the rest of the book is built around supporting the GM in running the game in ways that are of high quality, but not particularly surprising. Tables for days. Two last things of real note. First, the crafting rules, which are incredibly robust and fun. Big tables of components, clear ways to mix and match them to create useful things. One table is devoted to cooking! Second, camping. Sort of a mid-game downtime with a focus on inter-character chit-chat and storytelling. I think it is wild how long we have had games where camping is a matter of setting watch and hand-waving the rest. How few systems we have for campfire stories!