I confess, last night happening at all was a coin toss.
I think it’s the slow accumulation of this thing that’s been happening since the first session: I’m hitting all the campaign marks that are in Darkening of Mirkwood but I’m doing them out of sequence, because I’m only reading a year or two ahead. Folks mentioned spoiler problems in a previous post so I won’t talk specifics, but the redacted that they were supposed to face in 2952 last night was something they’d already defeated previously. Not a deal breaker! There are reasons why redacted might have come back. But it means the freshness and surprise aren’t there.
So I sat there transcribing the year, like I always do, and I’m thinking “do I even care about this game now?” I decided to just let it play out, see how I felt afterward.
In any case, it didn’t matter because after I laid out the “so this is how the year has shaped up so far” stuff — it takes about 30 minutes at the top of each session — they decided not to engage with redacted at all and go do another thing. Which is great. The constrained sandbox is working well for this, and it feels a bit more open even than The Great Pendragon Campaign because they don’t have patrons sending the company off on mandatory errands.
Observations in bullet form:
* The elf had her third and fourth bouts of madness, and her player decided it was time to retire her. She ended out Tyrannical, which was badass and terrifying. But retiring as someone with tyrannical urges makes for an interesting NPC opportunity in the future: not necessarily a villain, but not necessarily trustworthy either.
* Instead of heading into the Mountains of Mirkwood to deal with redacted, the company had an opportunity to stay out of the forest and visit Beorn’s people finally. There have been raids and stories of slavery coming out from up there (nice work in Darkening moving folks around to different areas of the map). And that let me finally, finally get into the Kinstrife storyline out of Tales from Wilderland.
What’s neat about the Tales things is that they get enormously more interesting once the characters are a ways down the Shadow track and you’ve turned on the Eye of Mordor rules from Rivendell. They tend to be pretty programmatic, so adding more random inputs helps make the scenarios feel more dynamic. IMO running them straight, without Darkening as maybe a one-shot or whatever, would be pretty boring.
* So we had an amazing little chain of events add up to some difficult shenanigans. The hobbit, who has avoided being miserable for eight sessions, finally slipped over into it as he was pursuing this suspected murderer through the woods (it’s a Kinstrife thing, no real spoilers here). Aaaaand the Eye of Mordor counter had ticked over the area’s chase number (because the elf decided to use her elf-light spell to help set the trap). Aaaaaand the hobbit rolled an Eye in the course of capturing the suspect. So he experiences his first bout of madness just as Mordor decides to pay attention. It was pretty great.
* On that note, I feel like we’re hitting a pretty good balance on working out really interesting bouts of madness and Mordor chases. Sometimes the players have ideas, sometimes I do, and we collaborate nicely on the outcome. Where one player will happily chew the scenery with the bout, another might not have a good head for (melo)drama.
In the case of the hobbit’s break/chase scene, he picked up Idle as his first shadow trait. So he knocks the guy to the ground, looks at the suspect, looks at his sword, looks at the ground, and just plops down. Just…gives up. Fugues out. And because the chase is active, the outlaws with whom the suspect has taken up show up in force and collect the hobbit, bundling him up for a juicy payoff from Beorn or the Woodmen or whomever. He’s known to be a Hero of the Woodmen after all!
In the case of the elf’s Tyrannical break, she’d just wounded/defeated the outlaw bandit in a big battle scene. So we escalated that: she’d beheaded the guy, grabbed the head, and rallied a bunch of misfits and easily-led to her side — Beorn himself losing followers, some outlaws falling into line, Woodmen involved in the battle coming to her side. Then she marched her sudden makeshift army into south Mirkwood to begin inflicting rough justice on anyone she feels deserves it. She’s retired into this sort of pseudo-Mogdred role, but instead of throwing in with the Shadow she’s an aggressive, unreasonable anti-Shadow crusader. Better hope you don’t have any permanent Shadow, or you might get a visit.
* At this point, yeah, at the end of the session I once again felt pretty renewed and excited to play. I kind of wish I could suss out what was interfering with my interest beforehand. Some of it I know is the turnover in the company: now that the elf has retired, that leaves just the hobbit as the original company member. Are they still a company? I love the pseudodynastic quality of retirement, passing along XPs, and having a new character in line. But the game doesn’t really discuss much of what happens beyond that. I’m not even sure what it’d say, honestly.
The first time we replaced a hero, the new character had no direct line back. That may have been a mistake because now we need to start cooking up entirely new storyline for the replacement. The replacement is a Beorning, and this last year was Beorning-intensive (the company received titles, land and standing from Beorn as reward for their help), so that’s already moving forward well.
I know for sure that this week’s orgy of violence in Orlando has made me feel really reluctant to celebrate or fetishize violence.
<- Part 8 | Part 10 ->
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I went to bed thinking it was just the worst session ever, but woke up thinking the game is stronger than ever. Weird!
It’s been maybe 3 weeks since we played. One missed week is usually enough to let the fizz out of the bottle, and more than half the time it’s me having spotted something shiny on the ground (hello Undying). Less than half the time it’s because nobody’s really paying much attention to the storylines, and they’ve got a game-fiction memory the size of a tiny commemorative thimble.
Last night we were down a player, and will be next week as well. We agreed we’d continue, especially since the missing player is also the one who took his Dwarf into retirement after his fourth bout of madness. There’s another character, a Barding, who’s also at his fourth bout of madness and decided to not retire him. Which is great! But on his very first roll, he rolled an Eye and that was that.
Thoughts in bullet form for your bathroom reading pleasure:
When the Barding player hit his fourth bout of madness, I had an idea about how it would play out so, per RAW, I took over the scene. But just previously, when the Dwarf experienced his fourth bout, I let him choose. And I felt weird about that. Lots of conflicting agendas happening: my desire for that scene to play out the way I wanted it to, not super-trusting the player to take the reins and really chew the scenery with his villainy.
Well I was stupid as hell, because that dude chewed the scenery on his fifth and final break! Having smothered a grievously wounded Ceawin in his sleep, the Barding had expected to take over the woodmen of East Bight (because he’s treacherous and scheming and all that). Well, the East Bight families decided instead to have a folk moot and decide among the families who would lead them. So the Barding stands up to make his case and eyeballs the roll. This time I let him play out his final break, and it was fabulous: he made a marvelous villain speech (who else do I have to kill to take the crown? Wasn’t killing Ceawin enough? You fools! etc.), tried to murder the crowd’s favored candidate on the spot, and fluttered away to the woods to continue scheming.
tl;dr let your players do their bouts of madness and give them total license to chew the scenery. It plays out just as well as Darkest Self in Monsterhearts, and if your players aren’t feeling it — you know, they want to mitigate and finesse and edge-case it — this is not the game for them.
Having to create a new character on the spot and shoehorn him into the company, we only had a couple hours to play out 2952. Which turns out to be fine, because it’s a pretty short year: march down the Old Forest Road to help an NPC on a fetch-quest. The fact the game survived a 50% turnover in the company and we had to do chargen on the spot should have been the death blow, but it was not. So yay us/them.The Eye of Mordor rules + everything is blighted = wow, hard game. Mirkwood is just the worst fucking place. We started with a completely fresh character and he’s already had his first bout of madness, having spent three weeks stumbling around in the forest. They had the pursuit run up three times in the forest, which I used to juice up otherwise normal Hazards into full-blown terrifying scenes. My favorite: I drew the Hidden Lair card from Hobbit Tales and it became a freakshow temple built out of Dwarven paving stones in the middle of the Old Forest Road, a honeypot trap laid by the Ghost of the Forest (a nazgul). Nazguls are way bad news one at a time.On the other hand, lengthy trips into the forest are starting to feel a teeny bit procedural, especially when it’s a roll-rich environment. There’s a lot of math setting up the Journey: 18 days in the Heart of Mirkwood in the summer means 3x TN18 Travel rolls and daily Corruption tests. Combined with Eye of Mordor, you do not go into the forest without the Enemy knowing you’re there. You just don’t. But it’s also a fairly heavy improvisational load for me to come up with stuff that frequently. It’s not terrible! But I think I need to brainstorm Mordor pursuit scenes in advance and keep them in my pocket.Last night, I walked away thinking I’d just call this game and start something fresh. I’m so pleased that we’re not, though: we’ve lost two excellent character threads but gained an amazing villain (the treacherous Barding!) and injected some fresh new ideas into the company.
Onward!
<- Part 7 | Part 9 ->
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Scott Kurtz, creator of the PvP webcomic, had a post today about his grandfather, someone who lived through WW2, not letting him play with toy guns (squirt guns in the anecdote) that had me thinking similarly in light of Orlando. So much of the RPG and fantasy stuff I love involves weapons and war… how do I explain this to my kid?
Anyway… also curious why you lost interest in the game between last session and this.
Mark Delsing like I said, I think it’s the fact that the Darkening material is treading over ground that we’ve already covered. Sort of.
But tbqh the more I think about it the more I think I just wasn’t in a good head for dealing with the violence. Happily, the Kinstrife scenario in Tales from Wilderland is predominantly an episode of CSI: Anduin Vales.
We’re finally back into TOR next week after an extended break (inconvenient babies being born right in the middle of Tales). Wrapped up Kinstrife with a big win for the heroes before baby, next up is ramping up the horror of the main Tales arc…
Andrew Kenrick I’m really enjoying running Tales and Darkening concurrent. They can’t do everything but it’s really cool and organic feeling.
Paul Beakley yep, they go nicely together. I’m actually enjoying the opposite – just running Tales by itself. Haven’t decided if we segue into Darkening afterward yet but this is a just a short(ish) run.
.
Social Contract and Practical Play
I think we’ve reached the point in our campaign where there’s really nothing new about the system or the game itself that’s that interesting to talk about. Now it’s just the game we play on Tuesday evenings, aimed into the indefinite future.
I think one thing that has interfered with my ability to run games for a very long time (I know, 10 sessions isn’t that long) is kind of a new development in my gaming life: I run out of things to talk about online! Ridiculous but I’m thinking about it.
Stuff does in fact come to mind, though, after our last session:
* It was a pure sandbox session. Lots of threads to pick up and run with, nothing really special happening in Darkening of Mirkwood year 2954. They could have helped the Woodmen open a safe passage through The Narrows between East Bight and the Black Tarn, but three of the four company members are now new characters, with just the hobbit remaining of the old crew. He’s the “old man” now, eight years a committed wandering adventurer far from home. He’s also got his first Shadow trait — Idle — and has taken to drinking and lazing about Woodland Hall. A minor local celebrity gone to seed.
I like that! I also like the shift in generations. Is the company really the same company? Clearly it isn’t. And the memories of past characters really does add a nice texture to everything. The dwarf who went mad with jealousy and tried to kill the hobbit over imagined slights, well, his replacement (the player was unavailable for three weeks so three years have gone by since anyone’s heard from the dwarf) is a Woodman, Woodwoman?, who’s been told how terrible the hobbit is the whole time by her mentor. But she’s here anyway largely because of shit that went down years ago between strangers.
The other newb is here on orders from the elf who went power-mad and raised an army of vigilantes to “patrol” southern Mirkwood and deliver rough justice: she knows she can’t really live with people any more but she’s still sincerely concerned for the hobbit’s well-being, so she’s sent a trusted Woodman to track down her old friend. It’s really quite lovely.
The only character without a through-line to the first generation is also the one with the most tenuous connection to the Company, and it’s so obvious. Everything going on with him, a Beorning, is cut whole-cloth from the established backstory, and the handwaviest of handwaves between a trusted NPC (Bofri, the dwarf who wants to reopen the Old Forest Road) and the hobbit PC. It’s weak. And in this case, I think it’s actually okay — although he’s kind of a pariah. Hard to be a company with an untrustworthy outsider.
Oh, anyway, since everyone’s new that means nobody but the hobbit really has the Wisdom to tolerate Mirkwood shenanigans. They’ve seen just how fast the Shadow can tear someone’s soul down, so they’re pretty resistant to going in unless they have to. Now they’re finding things to do outside the forest, and that’s cool.
* A really interesting and semi-uncomfortable power struggle cropped up during play between me and, quelle surprise, the Beorning outsider’s player. I’m not even sure “power” is the right qualifier.
The basic situation: we’re in an Encounter with Beorn hissownself. The Beorning PC has Awed his way into an audience, so he’s the only talker. They’re talking about this asshole NPC, Viglund, who has his own little parallel kingdom to the north and has been raiding and enslaving Beornings. Well, the PC thinks he’s gonna single-handedly walk into Viglund’s territory, call the guy out in single combat, and put an end to it. Beorn, who’s been fighting these assholes for years now, is more temperate — he wants the kid (he’s 19!) to gather intelligence.
Anyway, details aren’t important. In the course of the Encounter the player says he wants to talk Beorn into lending him some men. That’s what he says: “Okay, I want to talk him into lending me some guys.” To which I say “Well yeah, but he’s skeptical of striking Viglund anyway so this is gonna be hard. Let’s say TN 18.” And the player pushes the dice away and says “nope, never mind.”
Well…okay so now we’re in uncharted waters. Is TOR a “if you do it you’ve done it” kind of game? Not explicitly, no. Is TOR a “negotiate between players at the table until we settle on something” kind of game? Mmmm no, not explicitly. But Burning Wheel damage has been done with these folks! There is, I think, a constant implication that negotiating is a thing you can do.
Yesssss that’s fine BUT! But but but the cat-and-mouse of the Encounter rules is an important source of tension! Me telling you the TN is an 18 isn’t an offer to negotiate, it’s a courtesy so you can just tell me if you’ve succeeded. But he knows he’s up against the edge of the Tolerance of the whole encounter and doesn’t want to deal with large-scale failure. And so he just doesn’t touch the dice. Pushes them away. Says “no” in a beat of play where “no,” to my mind, doesn’t belong.
It’s weird, right? In one version of the world I suppose I could, you know, just stare him down. Or say he fails, whatever, rocks fall everyone dies. Or I can go along with it, which to my mind sets an unhealthy precedent. I went along with it, but now I’m thinking about precedent. Oh god, the accumulated common law of the game table.
Now, in the future, I won’t announce TNs. But then that raises the specter of “you’re just making up TNs so I fail when you want me to!” To which I then say “Okay then you can make an Insight roll and I can tell you something about the conflict, like what the TN would be for this or say how close to Tolerance you are.” Which is just injecting more rolls, creating more chances to roll Eyes and run up the Mordor track (although they’re negotiating in a sanctuary, so that’s actually a non-issue in this particular case).
But you can see the lawyerly head space this whole thing moves me into. I hate it. It’s one reason, I think, why the explicit procedures of Burning Wheel have worked so very well with some players in my group: they’re predicated on negotiating, on openness, and on mediating player disagreement. That’s hard to set aside even in a purposeful design.
The Encounter rules in The One Ring are specifically built to incorporate gambling, to get them to push their luck. But gambling requires hidden information. It has to be there. It’s fundamentally incompatible with radical transparency.
It’s a problem with few good solutions within the rules themselves. I even brought it up afterward but maybe I need to reframe the conversation a little.
* Hmhmhm nothing else of real interest this session. Just kind of, you know, the shit that’s happening. But if gameplay is going to drift down this path much further — some basic rejection of GM authority — we might have to take a break for a while. Can’t really play a game if you don’t all agree to the rules.
<- Part 9 | Wrapup ->
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Once again, real life has reared its ugly head. We’ve got some big life changes coming for one of our regulars, summer schedules are notoriously hectic, and it’s just been very hard to keep a dense game going in the long run. So I’m putting The One Ring to bed for now. We might maybe swing back around to it but if I’m being honest, we probably won’t. Pendragon and Mutant: Year Zero were both excellent long-form games and we could return to either, but probably won’t.
It’s been a good run! 10 sessions I think? And I have no regrets at all running it. Honestly I don’t even have an especially interesting postmortem. Here’s all I’ve got:
* The traits are the killer app of the game, even moreso than the Hope/Shadow economy. I think my favorite thing about them, truly innovative, is the mechanism that allows the players to roll dice when they normally “couldn’t.” That of course requires some sense of when dice can and cannot be rolled, which the game has (making common skill rolls during combat) but also is kind of hazy on (the GM has hard-framed a scene or consequence, maybe not knowing they’re doing hard framing, and the players intercede via a Trait).
There’s also this thing where a Trait can be used in lieu of a roll (that you could have already made) to succeed with a normal success. That works pretty well, but more than once there was this kind of vagueness about a) did the Trait give me the opportunity to roll? and b) so does that mean I’ve now succeeded? Just requires the GM always stay on top of the logic of the scene.
I like how Traits interact with advancement. I love how Shadow Traits bite you in the ass, actually making the game harder instead of easier as you advance. But maybe the most potent medicine in the cabinet is the fact that they provide such great guidance to play — especially the Shadow traits. There’s something super-powerful in knowing the track you’re on: players feel empowered to play their worst selves, even when motivated by nothing more than the virtue of doing so.
Traits are great. Highest marks.
* I should have paid much more attention to the Company Goal element. It’s so subtle but so important that all the players hash things out among themselves. It’s most definitely the game’s fruitful void: no social combat rules, no leverage, pure negotiating and compromising. It means the players themselves have no tools to go to, so I think quieter and less assertive players get the short end of the stick (the very oldest of table problems), but it is what it is.
It was super interesting to watch the Company Goal fall apart whenever I didn’t step in and ensure that it had been discussed. And it most assuredly did fall apart every time I didn’t specifically stop and make them settle on something. There was one outright argument during one of the sessions, even. Negotiating the Company Goal is completely core to the experience; if I ever return to this, I’ll make damned good and sure it happens every session.
It’s not perfect, though, since the GM (Loremaster whatever) has to spend a good bit of time in prologue before every session before the players have enough information to settle on a plan. Not the worst, not by a long shot, but it’s part of the game’s form factor.
I think if you stick to formalizing a Company Goal every session and you can be a hardass about rewarding XPs based on it, it’s a very solid method of encouraging communal effort. I’ve kind of gotten soft in my old age, though, and don’t love arguing with argumentative players who insist their efforts were aligned with the Company Goal (even if indirectly, obliquely, or by accident).
* Hope/Shadow is a very satisfying play economy. It evokes all the right feelings, gives the players both a sense of safety (I can succeed!) and a sense of dread (but at what cost?!). Solid design.
* There are tons of finicky little things about the game I wish were formally hammered out. True of every game ever published, of course. No “buts” attached to that. It’s just a fact. I do think the underlying philosophies of TOR’s game design are conflicted enough, though, that it’s hard to really nail down what they were going for all the time: trad with some new school gewgaws, with an extra layer of trad assumptions you have to filter for when trying to use the gewgaws. I’ve talked about that in previous threads and I don’t feel like re-litigating any of that. It makes me especially happy to play games where design and mechanical intent is straightforward (Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, Fate, etc.).
* This was the first sprawling game in a very long time where I didn’t doodle up a Relationship Map. I love me a Relationship Map! But the fact that the Company travels around so much meant that I really needed to have lots of community-based r-maps maybe interconnected somehow. Some elaborate 3D thing maybe. Instead, I did up little tent cards for every NPC, with name and descriptive stuff on the front and notes to myself on the back. I’d set those up to indicate who was present in a scene.
This meant that sometimes I forgot about certain NPCs until I reviewed my notes (one sheet per year of play). It also meant that I could sometimes surprise the players when an old face reappeared. Not purposeful, just how it worked out.
* Related to the lack of R-map, kind of: I made a real effort to make all the Free Folk by-default friendly to the Company. Like, they might be suspicious of the Company if they wandered into a remote village, but the Company could reliably not worry about getting stabbed in their sleep everywhere all the time. Kind of an anti-Circle of Hands vibe, you know? I think the Cultural Title rules went a long way toward making this happen: oh hey, you’re heroes of the Woodmen, aren’t you? You’re one of Beorn’s thanes, awesome. And so on.
Sad but true: I don’t think hardly any of my other games feature friendly NPCs that will go out of their way to find, greet and be nice to the PCs. But, like, in our last session, Gierbald the Kinslayer (he’s nicer than his title makes him sound) kind of stumbled back into the Company after several years of absence and they all partied together. It was nice! And I think it helped the players feel not so isolated and distrustful.
That’s something I’m going to bring to future games: not everyone needs to apply negative pressure to the characters. Positive pressure, or even just friendship, is okay! (Duh.)
* I have Opinions on how to run the game as a one-shot. I think it could be done! Like as a convention game or whatever. I may try it. Mostly it involves building pregens that are pre-loaded with a Shadow Trait and maybe some temporary Shadow when the game starts. Get the economic pressures into play a little faster.
Annnnnd that’s it. Hope you’ve enjoyed the TOR posts. Thinking about what to run next!
The AP Series
Part 0Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5Part 6Part 7Part 8Part 9Part 10And this Wrap-Up
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