Adam D something I meant to mention earlier before I derailed my own thread: I feel like our experience playing The Great Pendragon Campaign was vital training for me, at least, to get the most out of Darkening of Mirkwood. The skill I learned there was how to leverage all the year-end context that got layered on. In GPC it’s procedurally generated, which is very cool but wow it’s a lot of overhead (brain cycles, time, system mastery if you’re using Book of the Manor/Entourage/Battle and so on). In DoM it’s largely delivered in complete form by the campaign.

It kind of makes me want to swing back around on Torchbearer and/or Mouse Guard as well, and see if I can put the town/winter rules in those games to better use. OTOH they’re so relatively crunchy and restrictive that I’m not sure they’d actually prompt new fictional context that much. Maybe! I don’t know.