Paul Beakley Yes, I’ve encouraged players to make a “fellowship belief”. Mostly that works well. The plot has enough traction now that most of the beliefs are heavily tied to the situations at hand (we’re up to year 2962 this weekend).

I did start with Shadow as an emotional attribute, but I soon realised that Grief, Greed, and a slightly modified Corruption for mortals would do the trick anyway, and that seems to be working pretty well so far. It is a slower burn, though, than what has happened in your game.

As far as replicating the accumulation of shadow from journeys within the wood itself, I’ve just made really high stakes for failed orientation rolls. Sometimes I’ll throw specific Greed, Grief, or Corruption related encounters at them in the forest. Usually pretty severe consequences in encounters (a large group spiders are pretty awful to deal with in BW), or by taxing their Health (which really sucks, setting them up for failed recovery tests later). Those things seem to have built a reasonable amount of dread about even entering the wood, but I suspect not in the same direct way as with ToR.

So, yeh, evidently different. It’s cool to see the comparison! I like hearing stories from the same campaign. It’s a cool campaign and your ideas gives me ideas about how it should run. But also interesting from a game design point of view. I’m fascinated by the different experiences the systems might deliver.