Hey, Paul Beakley  So, wait. What is the disconnect with the Hazards?  To me it feels very similar to the way Mouse Guard GM phase works, only you have to come up with the Hazard on the fly, when the roll comes up. I love the sample Hazards in Tales from Wilderland. It’d probably be a good idea to copy those and the examples on the book into a table or something, and to model your own on the Tales examples, which seem to be better fleshed out. Hazard triggers, describe what happens and assign consequences of failure if any. 
Just like in Mouse Guard (or Torchbearer), the idea with the Hazard is to deplete player resources on the Adventuring phase, as they can’t be recovered easily until the Fellowship phase.
Is your complaint that they don’t lead to further storytelling? Yeah. I guess they’re meant as short encounters.  Except note that one of the failure consequences is to actually trigger an encounter. 

What did you think of the combat system? It’s a little difficult to get used to at first, but once you get the procedure (check the D12 first. Is it Piercing? Test Protection. If there’s a wound, monster is down. Otherwise, check degrees of success and apply Endurance loss) 
Once everyone ‘gets it’, it just flies. I like the balance of old school hitpoints with possible wounds to end combat quickly. I love that the players decide how to handle the encounter, by choosing their stance. I love the automation of the monsters’ special abilities. 
My only gripe is the fact that the TN’s aren’t calculated beforehand. So I took my pdfs, compiled all the monster stat blocks, printed it out and wrote the TN’s by combat stance for each enemy… 
P.S. Been looking forward to your post game report all day. And I love that you’ve got Ara Kooser    all fired up and posting about TOR too. 😀