Ahhh…that satisfies. Full table, perfect attendance, an early start and a really nice session of The One Ring with good friends.
This was the first session where I needed to be really flexible about where they might go and what they might do. We added a new player with a dwarf character, the sole survivor of the Werewolf of Mirkwood’s attack on his trading caravan. Despite many scary tales and lots of “are you shitting me with this” from NPCs, they’ve decided to go on a werewolf hunt. In the heart of Mirkwood. Oh you sweet innocent children.
Got to play through the folk-moot of the Woodmen in 2948 at Rhosgobel, the second year of Darkening of Mirkwood. Lots of interesting threads there, and it’s kind of a must-attend event (which I hate, but The Great Pendragon Campaign had them as well so what are you gonna do?). They got to finally meet the bad apples from Tyrant’s Hill as well as the various major NPCs in and around Woodmen Hall. Negotiated to begin the eventual reopening of the Old Forest Road, which they’ll scout out while en route to the werewolf. Things played out nicely there. We’ll have lots of leads to pursue.
Oh lord. So this werewolf hunt, right? I mean it’s not like hunting Smaug or anything but it’s not gonna be easy. And their main lead is the common knowledge that it lives in the caves under the Mountains of Mirkwood. Riiiight in the center of the forest.
This was their first attempt at sketching out a travel plan, and with no player knowledge of where the good and bad parts of the forest are, they’ve definitely chosen very nearly the worst instant-death course. Calculating the journey wasn’t terrible. Good reason for everyone to take a 5 minute break.
Hilariously, just 3 days into the forest they rolled a Hazard, which affected everyone, and was a combat encounter. Oh lord. Literally the worst possible outcome. They got to meet another NPC! A leader of a band of outlaws running away from an orc horde. Unfortunately they also got to meet the orc horde. Good fight, very exciting — I’m sold on how The One Ring handles combat. Lots of interesting choices, good sense of drama. Super-tank dwarf in his 5d of armor, oh yeah, that dude got weary fast. I wonder if he’s gonna rethink the armor situation after this? No idea.
They ended up barely defeating the orcs, and hobbling back to the outlaw camp to stop, rest, and restart their crazy journey. There are like 40 days of travel left ahead of them and they’re all gonna end up shadowed out and crazy.
A couple observations:
* I’ve made a mistake by easing up the requirement to earn advancement points. At first I thought it wouldn’t be bad to let players earn their APs in any order they wanted, i.e. if they were able to shoehorn a trait into a successful roll, well sure, no problem, go ahead and fill in the second AP spot. It’s pretty clear to me now that it screws up other bits of math! Specifically, it makes locking in all three AP spots in a skill group pretty easy, which means players fall back on just using their Traits to bang out ordinary successes for things (like their Travel rolls during a journey). That in turn means fewer Hope points get spent to nudge needed rolls. I think the harder AP earning scheme needs to be there to entice folks to just roll the fucking dice already and not rely on their Traits so much.
* Felt super iffy trying to structure the Encounter(s) at the folk-moot. Couldn’t tell when one encounter stopped and if another started. Tracking successes seemed pointless. Tolerance was completely irrelevant. In fact the whole “roll until you run out the Tolerance” system seems…not well thought out. Maybe there were some lucky rolls, but my players just kind of shrugged and stopped rolling once they hit seven earned successes (the most that “matter” in an encounter) and no failures. I think the whole thing cost a Hope.
Well, it was pretty fun and the sandbox has plenty of sand in it now. Pretty stoked to see how many years into Darkening we can make it.
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Finally, after much hemming and hawing and unselling myself last year, we are starting The One Ring. We have four characters done but only three players could make the first session: an Elf warden (who is terrible at being social and she’s kind of a douchebag), a Hobbit wanderer (brilliantly on-point as a curious little fellow who gets everyone else in trouble while somehow dodging misfortune), and a Barding scholar (trussed up as a badass knight, which he totally isn’t in practice).
The session was a complete run through Stay on the Path from Tales from Wilderland plus the campaign-level material for Year 2947 in Darkening of Mirkwood. They started in Lake-Town, got a Barding merchant and his son out of trouble, and were hired to escort them through Mirkwood via the Elf-Path out of Thandruil’s halls. Hilarity ensues!
My goal was to get through the entire journey and have a Fellowship Phase at the end. I did it! But it took cutting the final encounter out of Path. Honestly they were so beat up that it was a good “seriously, Mirkwood is a shithole” lesson without being totally punishing.
Tolkienness
So I’m … not really a fan of Tolkien’s written work. I thought Lord of the Rings made a way-better movie trilogy than a book trilogy. I kind of even liked The Hobbit movies although I was super-bored by the third and its fifteen separate endings. Haven’t read the texts themselves (and never The Silmarillion) since high school. There, I said it.
I went into running The One Ring relying entirely on the system itself to generate the Tolkienness. My working theory is that if the system failed to do so, then it’s just dressing up a plain old traddy game and it’s really not worth my time. For the record, I have the same approach to running Tenra Bansho Zero: I actually kind of hate anime, but the game performs well on its own merits so I really enjoy it (mostly because players are infinitely less spazzy than anime characters).
TOR delivers the goods! There’s this underlying earnestness throughout everything that’s really charming: when you meet with an NPC, there’s always a formal introduction (Awe if you’re bragging about yourself, Courtesy if you’re being polite, Riddle if you’re being guarded). You can sing or cook as the interaction. There’s kind of a basic assumption, certainly ahistorical but very Tolkien, that anyone who’s an enemy of the Enemy is probably okay so let’s put aside our prejudices.
The Journey phase is grindy and stressful and just about perfect, despite tracking only Shadow/Hope and Fatigue/Endurance (rather than ticking off supplies; it’s abstracted out into “hazards”). I’m thus far unsold on the narrative posturing around Hazards, though, I gotta say. You can describe the hunter wearing herself out chasing small game on the Elf-Path, but it really just boils down to the Hunting roll with a Weary consequence for failure. My understanding is that the Hazard scene is constrained to that single roll, rather than spooling off into a whole big event. That said, Combat phases are played out fully and Encounter phases are played out fully (but only when they’re injected into the journey for plot reasons; I don’t think Encounters ever happen procedurally). So I just kind of shrugged and rolled with it. Which is fine! Don’t get me wrong. The vibe is similar to the stalking one does in Mutant: Year Zero but less likely to generate any additional fiction.
We had a big fight against some spiders, an encounter with a mad hermit, and some quality time with the Silvan elves. Session felt complete and satisfying.
Traits
Okay, I definitely experienced the most good surprises around Traits. Traits in TOR are used for three things: earning an automatic (ordinary) success, justifying Advancement Point earns on successful rolls, and narrative interrupts. I totally discounted just how powerful the interrupts would be!
Something all my players have told me they continue to miss about Burning Wheel is that roleplaying problematic character stuff is a way to engage the reward cycle: if you’re Curious and create a whole scene around your curiosity dragging you off to explore something, you get paid. Well, so there is a similar-ish reward cycle buried in TOR’s Traits as well! If you’re Curious (like the Hobbit is), you can interrupt a scene to do something that your curiosity demands (for example). If you’re Proud (like the Barding is), you can interrupt the normal social niceties of elvish courtesy. And so on. That feels more like Burning Wheel than I expected, I have to say: rather than getting a fungible currency for later use, you’re getting fictional benefits right now. You can’t keep score with it (like some players do in BW, via end of session artha tallies) but there’s a similar little serotonin hit for engaging your roleplaying bits.
There’s also this thing where earning Advancement Points gets harder and harder throughout the adventure. It’s very subtle and maybe one of the game’s killer apps: the skills are arranged into six skill groups, and you earn APs by skill group. The first point is just for succeeding at one of the skills in the group, the second is succeeding either with a “great” or “extraordinary” success (ie how many 6es you rolled – it’s totally an intermittent reward, Vegas-style and psychologically very powerful) or if you can point at one of your Traits after the fact, and the third is for both rolling one or more 6es and invoking a Trait after the fact. So if you want to earn AP, you shape your fiction around your Traits. That’s solid and smart, although it also leads to inevitable AP grubbing and trying to stretch Traits too far. GMing this game sometimes means being a strict parent.
Misdeeds and the Modern Mind
My other surprise, not so good as the Trait surprise, was in how Misdeeds play out. Okay so you can earn Shadow points in uh…five ways, right? Bad shit that happens to you (nobody’s fault), wandering around blighted lands (like Mirkwood!), owning tainted treasure, letting your Focus character get hurt, and via Misdeeds. Misdeeds aren’t rolled: if you do a bad thing, you’ve done the bad thing and you get a Shadow point. In the other cases, there’s a Corruption test where your Wisdom can resist the influence of the Shadow.
Okay, so. Many of you probably see where I’m going with this. This system requires the GM adjudicate just what exactly a Misdeed is. In some cases, the list is pretty explicit: threatening people, lying (again that Tolkienesque earnestness!), stealing. You know, basically standard Tabletop Roleplaying Adventurer bullshit. But in other cases, whoo boy. Get ready for some very interesting conversations.
The big one last night was the nature of cowardice. It’s a Misdeed worth 3 Shadow, which is very punitive. The scene basically is: the caravan owner has wandered off into Mirkwood toward some ruins and the Company needs him back. The Elf warden leaps into action! The Barding wants to stay on the path (as ordered by his new bestie back at Thandruil’s hall) and insists the Hobbit stay back as well.
So is that cowardice or sensible? Is cowardice the absence of bravery? Is bravery the absence of cowardice? Does it matter what your motives for a decision are? From the player and I assume character’s POV, staying back with the caravan to protect both the goods and the merchant’s son is absolutely reasonable. From the audience – ie me — POV it looks like self-preservation. It doesn’t help that the Barding is actually sort of terrible in combat.
When I called it cowardice, oh lord the pushback. The player was not happy. He reads my posts sometimes so I hope I’m being fair in my characterization. So anyway, later, when there are spiders fucking pouring out of these Mirkwood ruins and the characters are thinking about withdrawing, and I don’t call out the first one to escape for cowardice, he throws his hands up in disgust. Something along the lines of “oh so he can run away but refusing to run willy-nilly into this is cowardice?” You can imagine, I’m sure.
Ultimately this resulted in a super fruitful conversation. It also was, for me in the aftermath, unsatisfying. Because it feels like modern, rational, materialistic and pragmatic values grinding up against these older, perhaps irrational values. My practical solution is to turn decisions about misdeeds over to the table and let everyone agree that something is cowardice (or an abuse of authority, or manipulation).
Company Goals
Company goals work as advertised. I felt myself wishing for a more robust Experience Point system other than “did you show up” and “did you chase the thing you said you wanted to chase?” Although the company goal did help everyone stay on-task for at least one scene, maybe more. It’s there, a very subtle little nudge.
There’s this rule about “bonus XPs” at the end of an adventure phase but whoever wrote those rules is bad at math: it’s just a multiplier on the number of sessions, which uh…that’s the same as “did you show up?” So instead of 1 XP per session, it’s really 1.5 XP. I don’t know how else to read that so I just shrugged.
Hope: Threat or Menace?
I thought the Hope economy was way loose: the players had 4 Fellowship points (3 characters + 1 hobbit) and they really leveraged the “free Hope spend when you’re helping your Focus character” rule. Which, by the way, I really loved in practice at its most visible – that is, when everyone’s fighting and the Defensive stance folks can spend Hope to pull attacks onto them. It felt like Hope was a slower burn than I expected; only the Elf became Miserable this session, although everyone was close-ish by the time they got to the Fellowship phase.
The players, however, felt like Hope was tight as hell and really scary. One player told me that nearly every spend of Hope was a calculus of “can I reach a Sanctuary in time to take care of this Shadow? How far down can I burn my Hope?” So probably the truth is somewhere in the middle: it’s not as terrifying as it seems but Shadow will creep up on you. Just not within a single session.
Bleeding off Shadow at a sanctuary – the characters wintered at Woodman’s Hall (I gave them the sanctuary for free for returning Wolfbiter to them) – made me realize that more Adventure Phase time probably needs to happen between Fellowship Phases. But I really wanted to run through one complete cycle in an evening, which we did. Future sessions will certainly see more time, at the very least so they have time to actually accumulate spendable experience points.
Final Thoughts
Overall the cognitive load of the game isn’t terrible. Much lighter weight than Burning Wheel, maybe a tad more involved than Mutant: Year Zero. There are enough new-school twists buried in an otherwise old-school game that everyone will take a few sessions to really ease into the game and feel fluent. Every player forgot about or misused their various blessings, virtues and traits at one point or another, and that’s fine. Reaching a Sanctuary and having a Fellowship phase on the first session definitely felt like the right decision, so that everyone can see the full cycle of play.
I enjoyed it! I think actually I enjoyed it more than I thought. And there are now enough leads and ideas after session one that I think it won’t be hard to open the game up a bit and start adding sand to the sandbox.
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The folkmoot is an interesting one. The one encounter that really matters is Mogdred. That worked as my PCs both pitied and hated him. There was also a link I teased out with “Don’t leave the path”. The hermit’s axe belonged to Mogdred, back before he was called Mogdred. One of the PCs now has it, and Mogdred greeted her with, ” That’s my axe!”
Sandplots for the win! My PCs are now taken with the Dwarf Road, and one dwarf has claimed to role of Roadwarden and restored a fort as a Holding.
This makes me want to read LOTR for the first time since high school.
Sounds like you had a great time, Paul. Glad you liked the combat. I think it’s fantastic! Feels empowering to the players, who control positioning, and feels somewhat trad with the Endurance damage, but then you have the Piercing blows, Wounds and armor protection rolls to add in that touch of unpredictability.
I also like how the Enemy’s special abilities trigger off the Eye results. The combat is almost automated, at times.
Great post!
Totally with you regarding combat.
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That sounds like an awesome night of play!
How did the Woodmen vote at the Folkmoot? When we got to that point the PCs were still too new to the Woodsmen so I handed out little character sheets for each of the chiefs and had them play those instead. Worked pretty well!
Andrew Kenrick Ceawin and the Black Tarn folks got upvoted, Mogdred got downvoted. I totally abstracted the moot and just outlined the proposals, allowing the heroes to intercede if they felt like the prevailing opinions were incorrect. Worked fine, even realizing that Mogdred would be a problem no matter what.
This all sounds like RAW. Do your character ever fail? Why? Mine never do, like, ever.
Do npcs push back? How?
Okay but how mechanically do your npcs push back? I get no sense at all that that’s something that happens.
Paul Beakley my guys upvoted the same, but decided to send the company to accompany Mogdred back to Tyrant’s Hill and see what’s what with him, then revote next year. The company are less than happy as they’ve had a run in with him previously.
Andrew Kenrick that’s a great twist! I wish my folks had had a chance to interact with his henchwoman, but they missed out that year. I think they’d have had stronger opinions.
One of the players made an Insight test to see if Mogdred could be trusted. My answer was, “Oh yeah, absolutely, he definitely wants wives for his warriors.” Gritted teeth all around.
Ara Kooser I was following you, no worries!
My curation is kind of crap anyway, so whatevs.
Yeah.
My read of Encounters, and now I’m doubting myself like crazy because it seems wrong, is that it’s the PCs deciding what and how to roll, sorta-kinda “roleplaying” but not really, but it’s always against a TN of 14, racking up successes before they hit their Tolerance.
Now I’m thinking you have to have the NPCs pushing back via opposed tests, rather than just being talked at by the heroes. Then my questions are 1) is losing in an opposed test counted against Tolerance (I’d say so) and 2) how do you work out compromises and not-quite-perfect victories?
Currently in our game, Encounters have devolved to pure math exercises because they don’t have to be anything else. They never fail at their rolls (spending Hope as necessary but only rarely), and it’s entirely an exercise in seeing just how many rolls it’ll take to get to 7 successes, or even that many if they care.
Last night’s session was dedicated almost entirely to hunting and fighting the Werewolf of Mirkwood. Despite being, basically, 2+ straight hours of fighting a single monster, it was a surprisingly satisfying session.
Some thoughts!
* I have moved from being meh about the Encounters system to actively disliking it. It’s dumb. It doesn’t work. Given the extraordinary popularity of the system, I tend to think I’ve missed…something. I don’t know what! OTOH it wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve discovered a fatal flaw in something and stood as the lone voice of reason howling against the fandom hordes.
My gut is undecided on this. My most likely scenario is that my NPCs need to be pushing back in Encounters, making their own personality rolls. The game is totally unclear on how binding or effective NPC social effects may be. Can an NPC Persuade (via “personality”) a PC? No fucking idea. But this would, at the very least, allow for compromises and partial victories. As it stands, between the one-way nature of social conflict in TOR and the stupid Tolerance system, the characters don’t ever face possible failure or even compromise. I hate it. It’s broken.
TOR veterans, please tell me how you’re working Encounters. I need to see how it’s been drifted into something functional.
* I used the Hobbit Tales deck to generate hazards. Works okay. A little generic but also a little faster than rolling on two tables. I’ll use it again. The illustrations are nicely inspiring, at least. Allowing these hazards to play out into full scenes (and not just one-off resolutions, depending on the mood at the table) is healthy and good.
* Everyone’s finally earned enough XPs to up their Wisdom/Valor and get new Virtues/Rewards! Fun. After the godawful beatdown of hunting and killing the Werewolf of Mirkwood, they went straight to Fellowship and just blew off the rest of the year. The Hobbit, who through player bravery and some lucky rolls ended up being the one to kill the Werewolf (amazing, really), bought himself the Confidence virtue, and just in the nick of time: he was down to 2 Hope and 1 Shadow after the fight. Of course he won’t be buying Confidence again for a very long time.
Everyone took the title “Hero of the Woodmen” as their Fellowship action, which is just perfect. I’m loving that they can build and maintain their Standing across multiple locations via Titles, clever and smart. So now they have homes scattered across Woodmen territory. Neat!
Meanwhile, the players think it’s weird that the only thing Treasure is really good for is buying Standing. Since they don’t have any, it’s hard to illustrate the difference in the fiction between having roots in a community and being an untrustworthy wanderer.
Gonna try and get at least a couple of the characters involved in Holdings (per Darkening of Mirkwood). I think that’ll be interesting.
* Reverting the advancement point system to RAW was absolutely the right call. In fact my player who really wanted to just use Traits for everything saw it immediately. “But I like leaning on my Traits!” he says. And I’m like, go ahead, nothing’s stopping you! And sure enough, he looked at his APs and saw the work ahead of him. So, yay, correct diagnosis and an easy fix.
*Also on the Trait front, regarding the extreme ease that players can opt out of the Journey system entirely by spamming a good Trait (i.e. Bardings and their Hearty trait): my ad hoc ruling is that you can use any given Trait once per Journey. That makes for an interesting gamble, especially if they’re going somewhere new on the map and don’t know how hard it’ll be. It also helps mix up the fiction a little more.
* There’s this thing that wears me out, maybe more than anything else at any gaming table for any game: when a player maths out solutions with a complete disregard for fictional consequences. Turning a fictional situation to make a character statement into a math problem to solve just bums me out. Maybe it shouldn’t! But it also feels like taking the player at their word and letting them live with the fictional consequences is kind of passive-aggressive bullshit on my part. I’d prefer my players just talk honestly when these situations arise. But then there’s the investment and the winning. :-/
Ugh, agendas. Also Agendas.
The big one last night was the point at which the company has to decide whether to venture into the Mountains of Mirkwood — the single most evil place in all of Middle Earth, right alongside fucking Mordor — or possibly turn back (which of course is a completely false dilemma: someone else suggested setting a trap and using their brains and, hey, awesome idea). When I heard “well, I can take four bouts of madness and still survive,” I had to scratch my head. Really? That’s your criteria? Your character isn’t saving the world, he’s on a critter hunt. Yeezus.
I mean maybe, right? Do I take a player at their word? Do I stop the proceedings and try to have a heart-to-heart? In the moment, I hate this. As a practical human matter, it’s really fine as long as everyone in the conversation is participating honestly. Boy that last part, though. Hard to know for sure.
The Darkening timeline proceeds to the next year! My feeling is that, like The Great Pendragon Campaign, the passage of years is important enough that I should be keeping the Adventure phases of each year short and snappy, and focus more on the heroes’ lives during Fellowship.
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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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