Hoo-kay! Let’s see if we can’t wrestle this into something workable. Sandboxy, with a little temporal structure and direction. Looking for hooks and leads and shit to do and maybe, just maybe, they’ll stumble into the Darkening storyline here and there.
The more I read Tales the more dismayed I get, but also the more obviously an early work it is. Honestly just stripping out all the special case weirdness fixes almost all of it, and makes it much easier for me to manage at the table as well.
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Doo eeeet!
Honestly, if you’re gonna make it a sandbox, you’ve got more than enough with Darkening and Heart of the Wild… it’s kind of a daunting task, given the sheer amount of material. Looking forward to what you do with it 🙂
Super curious to see how you manage the sandbox! My group is about to start Tales,* but given that it took us like four months to get through the intro adventure in the core book, I’m not expecting much.
I only have Darkening and Heart in PDF, which makes them a bit of a pain to work with, but I love the idea of opening the whole thing up as a quasi-hexcrawl. Hopefully, my experience with the very linear adventures in Tales will give me enough confidence with the rules to try something.
*Edit: just the four linked adventures, I think. I ran the first two for them long ago, with different characters.
For me, the crossover to sandbox happened when the PCs started going on quests on their own volition rather than taking quests they were given. But I did use a couple of more linear adventures as an entrance ramp, partially so they know more about the world.
Now my players are weighing up options of different quests, and have formed close relationships with a few NPCs. It’s become quite easy to manage. I need a few locations and Journeys, along with the occasional “bang” to keep things interesting, all of which I can either take from those three books or use them as inspiration.
I’m also putting together some custom Fellowship undertakings based around the holding one of the PCs has claimed on the Dwarf road, right in the middle of Mirkwood. That location works for the “bangs” too.
Though it might tumble down since owing to circumstances outside the game we’re on a long break. We’ll probably need another long entrance ramp when we’re able to start up again.
Aside: How the heck do you find time to digest TOR and then scour through three sourcebooks to compile a “sandplot” campaign? I’m lucky if I can build a one-shot over the course of three months.
Mark Delsing my wife and I exchange bedtime duties so I get a couple hours to myself every other night.
Also I’m an insomniac. Plenty of reading time.
Sandplot by the way is an excellent turn of phrase. Don’t know if it’s yours or not but I like it! It’s the Other Impossible Thing Before Breakfast, right?
For the record, here’s what that prep looked like last night:
* Reread Stay on the Path in Tales from Wilderland. Rewrite it as a one page outline, including the key conflicts but stripping out all the bullshit special-case rules. Underline NPCs for future reference.
* Reread year 2947 in Darkening of Mirkwood. Add that to my outline. Underline other NPCs.
* In sidebar, note possible new Sanctuaries (there are tons of them, between Darkening and Tales). Pass back through Heart of the Wild for each region through which the PCs will pass. Add more NPCs to my list of maybes.
(At this point it’s feeling like the more interesting “sandplot” isn’t the map features they may run into, it’s the NPCs they may run into.)
* Oh hey, Path ends at Forest Gate, which is the correct side of Mirkwood to continue south with the NPCs to Woodland Hall, where all the important 2947 action takes place. Not sure if this is brilliant design by Hanrahan but whatever, I’ll take it. Make a note and read ahead to 2948 for possible implications.
* Look back at Heart one last time, but now at the second journey the PCs might take if they head south to Woodsmen territory after crossing Mirkwood. That is my only real possibly-wasted research time, if they give no shits about heading south. But if that happens, that means the first few years of Darkening won’t matter at all to them since it’s all in the southern half of the map.
And that’s kind of it for now.
I feel like if I can keep ahead by a year or two, at most, that’s all I really need to do. I’ve already read through Darkening so I get the general shape of the action. I’ve read Tales so I get the general shape of that action. Really, keeping ahead of their journeys and brushing up on Heart content is the only hard part.
I fear this is probably too much prep work for the long term. Ara Kooser, you said you tore down the TOR campaign content for your own purposes, too, right? What are you doing different? Where can I be saving or maximizing effort?
Paul Beakley “Sandplot” was me! Seemed apropos.
That’s a lot accomplished in one sitting. Could be I’m just slow.
Mark Delsing dude you don’t even count as sentient ’til your child is 2. No worries, it gets better!
Mark Delsing One thing I like about refactoring the Tales adventures is that, once they’re boiled down, they’re really not complicated. A lot of that is me looking at sequences, saying “oh bullshit,” and making some calls about what to leave out (example: there’s a whole sequence of stuff in the last act of Stay on the Path that strikes me as really fiat-y or just overcomplicated; leaving out details because spoilers). I may be making mistakes! In fact I probably am.
I’m a master at making mistakes. Been practicing my whole life.
Paul is an inspiration to gamer parents. And apparently, my god I am awful with my time.
Ara Kooser dang…now I feel like I’ve underprepped.
Also really liking your read on Tales. That wasn’t at all my read, but I kind of got hung up on how terrible the elf-dream scenario was and stopped looking for larger overarching things.
Really good call on making sure their cultures and cultural obligations stay tight. We have three non-humans and only one human and I confess I’m a little worried about that — everyone’s shit is happening so far away.
I think I just want to play in your campaign. Man that sounds hot.
So, Standing, right? That’s just a matter of spending Treasure to build that up, yeah? Do other things drive Standing? I didn’t think so.
I’m super torn on what to do with Callings. On the one hand, they feel like just like…packages of tactical capacity. You get your stats and your shadow weakness from them. But are you also using Callings to, what, imply things that need to be done? Wardens should feel obliged to protect folks in the forest, Scholars should feel obliged to do research? How do you do that? Is there anything to that other than framing the fictional leads up in Calling-related ways?
Since I’ve only run the fairly railroady “The Marsh Bell” adventure, I have so-far used Callings to make my players complicit in their own buy-in: “Gloin tells you that his brother and cousin have gone missing; as a scholar, why would you accept his offer to go find them?”
Ara Kooser okay, so I’m not forgetting anything.
After that insane-o flowchart thing I did to tear the system apart, I’m dreading discovering some…interaction or procedure or something that I’ve completely overlooked.
Adam D yeah, I’ll probably go about that far with my players as well. Like, they’re known to be their Calling by their communities. This dwarf is a slayer, that hobbit is a wanderer, and so on.
Oh I totally need to work out the culture/calling matrix. I still have time! Game in 3 hours!
Underappreciated genius Mark Delsing just used the best turn of phrase and I wanted to unpack/restate the conversation for further discussion: Sandplot.
This was in reference to my prepping for a pass through The One Ring over the next few months. I love the idea of a wide-open setting for the players to poke around in! That’s the sandbox, obviously, setting aside varying definitions of “sandbox” play and how it’s experience in tabletop and vidya games because fuck your definition fights.
I also like when fictional events continue to create new play context. That is, or can be, the “plot.” But I also super-hate railroaded plotlines. The Great Pendragon Campaign came pretty close to hitting the ideal mix, except when it fucking railroaded everyone. Maybe the occasional heavy-handed railroad is an inevitable compromise to keep the Big Picture moving forward. Maybe having a plot in a sandbox is the Other Impossible Thing Before Breakfast.
But I don’t think it has to be!
I guess it depends on what we mean by both plot and sandbox. (Haha that’s right, we get to have our definition battle anyway!) The spectrum I’m most comfortable with is the Darkening or Great Pendragon Campaign end, which is that shit happens that’s really big and mostly out of the characters’ hands (barring murdering a major NPC). I feel like that’s barely any plot at all, but at least Big Things are happening in the sandbox that may require the characters change course. Probably that’s what I like about the approach: a static sandbox feels like a beatable/winnable construct, rather than a credible, unpredictable, living thing. But I don’t love that the characters aren’t really making things happen; the big picture fiction isn’t really accreting around them like it would in a more-narrative game (Burning Wheel, PbtA, etc.). Obviously the actual experiences of the characters are accumulating, arguably into a narrative of sorts, but I’m not sure I’d necessarily call it a “plot.” Maybe. Maybe.
So I guess the other conversation worth having is, if the players aren’t going to, or can’t, engage with or don’t know about the Big Things, why bother having them? And here I’m just not sure there are many best practices developed yet. The outside events have to matter and they have to be transmitted somehow, but they can’t narrowly constrain the sandbox otherwise it’s not a sandbox any more, right?
Anyway, I loved the turn of phrase and I’ve been gnawing on it all morning.
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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.
<- Part 0 | Part 2 ->
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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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