A couple weeks off the game but we’re back in the saddle. It was our come-to-Jesus session, where the Company faced a for-real existential crisis and came to grips with the fact that belonging to a Company means sharing goals. The last session, everyone was flying in all different directions and there was tons of (really interesting) Shadow-driven internal drama.
First decision was whether to winter together or apart. Wisely, I think, they went their separate ways, licked their wounds so to speak. One of the characters achieved his first level in Standing! Neat. One of them tended to their holding, the hobbit went back to the Shire and was graced with his culture’s Lucky Armour (terrible name), and the elf continued to withdraw and hold everyone at arms’ length.
Notable stuff that I thought was notable:
* Since rereading The Hobbit, I decided to put that knowledge to good use! So they had a chance to make some Explore rolls in search of ancient ruins and, perhaps, treasure. It turned into a neat scene: traveling through the east nether vales en route to Rhosgobel, they went to visit the Kingstone (+3 Hope! Once! I decided not to make it a Fellowship action since they’d gone out of their way to make the journey), and then continued down to the Great Anduin River to poke around the ruins of a funereal … funerary … hell, I don’t know what to call it. The pre-mausoleum prep area before the ancient Northmen of the river valley sent their honorable dead down the river in a boat. Turned out great.
* Followup to the previous bullet: What’s the carrying capacity of a horse? They pulled a lot of treasure out of that structure, and I love the idea that encumbrance is the limiting factor to treasure-hunting, but if horses can, you know, carry hundreds of Encumbrance then the point is kind of moot. Or more likely, I keep horse-accessible barrows low-stakes.
* I’m really enjoying the existential dread that the Dwarf player is now feeling. He’s got 3 of his 4 shadow traits, he’s at 10 Hope and 18 Shadow (and of course 3 permanent), and every roll is a chance for him to invoke “Murderous” as a trait in a shadow scene. Terrifying. The player kind of bounces back and forth between happy nihilism (yay, I’ll play a different dude) and omg it’s going to shit everyone’s gonna dieee. Good! I think there’s a lot of very effective black magic baked into the particular sequence of shadow traits you pick up. It ramps up expectations really well.
* My Burning Wheel addicts are grumbling that their shadow traits don’t earn them XPs. That way lies madness! I agree that the roleplaying has been really great; they’re more than happy to proactively indulge their shadow traits. But it’s pure roleplay, not an incentivized economic decision. How interesting that that decision is a-ok in BW but I feel like it would be all wrong in TOR. BW wants to reward character-driven play while TOR wants to reward companionship. It is surprisingly and sometimes hilariously difficult to get them all on the same page.
* They just finished the last good year before the Shadow reappears in Middle-Earth. I struggled not to laugh and laugh as they looked at their burned-out husks and said those were the good years? I think my personal take on Middle-Earth is way heavier and grimmer than maybe Tolkien’s, especially in the years after The Hobbit, but whatevs.
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After a week off, everyone was eager to jump back in on their adventure phase. It involves lots of tramping around Mirkwood, which is just this miserably blighted zone. And we stumbled into the game’s corruption death spiral.
Basically it goes like this: when your Shadow equals or exceeds your Hope, you become Miserable. When you’re Miserable, eventually you’ll experience a bout of madness in which you pick up a new bad trait, wipe your old Shadow, and pick up one permanent Shadow. It’s really similar to how Rot works in Mutant: Year Zero.
Well, so, play the game long enough and you see how hard it is to get Hope back. If you’ve had a bout of madness, you’ve certainly burned your Hope down. But then that damned permanent Shadow is right there, waiting to make you Miserable again and again. One of our characters went from zero to three permanent Shadow points (and three shadow traits, and three really terrible scenes played out) in one session. The dwarf started with one and now has three, and the elf went from zero to two.
On top of the ever narrowing window between Hope and Shadow, those shadow traits! They’re for the GM to hammer you with an additional d12 (take the lower of the two), which is the die that triggers the bout of madness! Eventually the H/S window closes, and you’re permanently Miserable.
I found the process to be surprisingly fast. It’s incentivizing! It’s also quite sudden. They went from “let’s push through to Ceawin’s Hall, heal our wounds, and make Thranduil’s hunt in time” to “fuck this, we’re fucking done, we’re totally fucked, oh my god we’re all gonna die” in a couple hours.
Not surprisingly, I think, this session also featured the most interesting roleplaying interpersonal scenes. Two characters had lovely mirrored bouts of madness in the same scene; another alienated Black Tarn’s clan during a freak out; and the human (who is now haughty, scornful and scheming!) decided Ceawin needs to ally with Lake-Town so seduced his daughter. There goes Ceawin’s plans to tie the clans together through marriage (as well as the Beorning woman who’d taken an interest in him).
From the outside, the fiction is suddenly brutal and intense. Good! I can’t tell how it feels from the inside, though. Two of the players have really keyed into their bad traits, a good excuse to ham up how they’ve already been aiming themselves. The third, the dwarf, is checked out now that he’s cruel and brutal, which doesn’t especially map to his internal vision I think. The rules say the GM plays the character through the madness but I opened it up to the players: they seemed to own their situation better when they were part of it. When I took over, there was enough emotional distance that it felt more like inconvenience than horror.
At this point I’m not sure how they recover. Really, really modest adventure phases for several years I guess? Sequential Fellowship phases? Only the Hobbit bought the Confidence virtue, and he is managing his shadow very carefully: no madness! The others got excited with fancy power-ups and now they don’t have the XPs to raise their wisdom. And maybe that’s okay: over the next two to five years, they tend to their knitting, rebuild their internal reserves, and build the courage to go back out into the world.
<- Part 4 | Part 6 ->
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Blargh I just went through C7’s forums and literally nobody has ever described just what all a horse can carry. I guess it’s functionally unlimited! Which isn’t a terrible answer. But it does shut down the “so do you take the Treasure and risk fatigue?” question, which I find super interesting.
Ara Winter you ever come up with a better answer?
Where did you learn about “pre-mausoleum prep areas”?
Mark Delsing from my own brain.
I made it up.
I’m allowed!
Paul Beakley are you thinking perhaps of Egyptian style mummification rooms?
Alana O’Keeve Yeah! It was a vague idea, and I could get away with it being vague because really it was just a ruin along the river bank with a dead troll inside.
I didn’t go full on Mouse Guard checks for the Fellowship phase, but the idea that you had to do just 1 thing I thought restrictive so I worked it so that the one thing meant “one not yet established by the fiction” thing. So if trying to make a location a sanctuary was something they’d worked on during play, it “activated” during the fellowship phase, but didn’t use up the action.
Horses are expensive to buy and keep, get sick easily, and are really difficult to control in any kind of stressful situation. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff as long as you emphasize those drawbacks.
The last point is assuming they aren’t buying warhorses, which are really expensive and have temperament issues.
.
Ralph Mazza I’ve been loose here and there where the fiction made sense. Not in terms of the players getting more actions but in terms of me giving them stuff: a holding, sanctuary access, standing.
One thing I’ve been letting them do is make small treasure spends in their communities, and when they’ve hit a Standing threshold, I just give them the Standing.
Noah Tucker maybe that’s detailed in Riders of Rohan but I don’t have that, and as of now horses are none of those things. If your standard of living covers the cost, that cost is just covered. Injury, illness and death are all good failure complications though.
I found one not-awful discussion of this on the C7 site: http://forums.cubicle7.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1943
It feels like they settled on “horses can carry as much treasure as needed” and also talked about the potential consequences of losing their horses. There’s one angle that says since Bilbo hauled a lifetime of treasure home on a pony, and a lifetime of treasure is 500 TPs, therefore a pony can carry 500 TPs. Not awful but it’s also such a very high number.
Also: I do this reflexive little eyeroll-giggle thing every time someone solemnly invokes The Professor when they’re talking about Tolkien. Oh heavens.
Paul Beakley This is pretty accurate from the thread you linked:
As Dunheved observed, if they’re so obsessed over the treasure, they’re most likely suffering from Dragon Sickness, so I would consider to give them Shadow Points automaticly, instead of having them roll any kind of Corruption Test.
The Hobbit is about a bunch of dwarves who cause huge amounts of trouble, including a war, because of their lust for gold, and their leader finally realizes (on his deathbed) that maybe friendship is just as important as gold, or even more so. If you’re trying to figure out how your characters can carry their treasure home, they’re probably already corrupted. 😛
Eh, at the same time, IIRC the troll-cache is presented as an unalloyed benefit, even though it did pose a logistical challenge to retrieve. I don’t think Tolkien is trying to say “if you want treasure, you are evil” at all, though he’s definitely saying “some things are worth more than gold.”
There’s a pretty big difference between asking “hey, how much of this can I fit in my saddlebags?” and “hey Bill, want to murder Tony so we can keep his share?”
We had what I think was my very favorite session of The One Ring last night. Lots of things worked out really well. And we had both our first retirement as well as our first refusal to retire. Terrifying and fascinating. Notes and thoughts in bullet form as always for your bathroom reading pleasure.
* Our dwarf finally got his fourth and final PC-side dark trait: Murderous. And it was so great. The session was 2951 of Darkening of Mirkwood, with Ceawin trying to appease the uneasy spirits south of his lands in the old barrows. Instead of making it an off-screen NPC thing, I had the dwarf himself actually craft the offering to the uneasy spirits: a beautiful and expensive helm to be placed in the barrows.
So they need to get the helm from the dwarf’s workshop (outside Woodman Hall) over to East Bight, yeah? They’ve figured out that the “short cut” through the Narrows is a terrible idea, so they’ve established a fairly safe route down around the bottom of Mirkwood. It takes like 2 weeks by horse to make the trip but whatever, they’re not getting poisoned by the Shadow along the way.
But they are well exposed to bad apples out of The Toft, this creepy town that was once enthralled to the Necromancer. I build the place up to be like a really creepy rural village you might not want to stop in on a long road trip.
So, anyway, since they didn’t really take any precautions to be secretive about their trip, word gets out that they’re moving this expensive bit of treasure. The hobbit lookout gets 3 great successes to spot the bandits, and I give them plenty of time to make a plan: stand and fight, or try to disappear in the woods (which are Southern Mirkwood, which is pretty much the most evil place in Middle-Earth other than Mordor itself).
Well, when they all made their awareness/hunting/whatever rolls to spot the bandits, the miserable Dwarf rolled an eyeball. And his scene was about his Murderous trait.
Something I’ve always been a bit skeptical about in The One Ring is that the GM takes over for the bout of madness. Ehhh…I’ve seen a couple times that neither the player nor the victims seem to really own their actions. When the elf decided to slit the throats of some of Mogdred’s men instead of bringing them back to Ingomer for questioning, that was me. And sure enough, neither the elf’s player nor anybody else in the party really holds him accountable for that. Weak.
This time, I asked the dwarf player who he felt most needed to be murdered in their company. And it was perfect, perfect for the game because he made a choice and everyone knew it.
He chose the hobbit, who has enjoyed a charmed life all game long. He’s never gone mad, he’s been miserable or weary maybe once each, he wisely took Confident as his first virtue when he had the chance, and he’s been extraordinarily lucky in our fight scenes. So the dwarf, overcome with jealousy, is sick of the little showboat’s bullshit as he once again tries to make (entirely reasonable and smart) plans about these bandits. He dives across the tiny campfire and lays into the character with his axe.
* One thing The One Ring doesn’t really do well is PvP combat. Related to that is that the game also doesn’t really handle non-combat actions that well. There are a few baked-in options (awe, inspire, defend, escape) but if you want to do anything other than stand toe-to-toe, well, you need to get creative if you want to stay within the framework.
We ended up structuring the fight around the Dwarf basically being an NPC, with the rest of the company positioning against him. It worked quite well, actually. And there were some great mechanical/story twists within the fight! Like, the dwarf is actually the hobbit’s focus character! So the hobbit’s player does not want the dwarf harmed, because that’ll mean taking a shadow point. So when it’s the Barding’s turn out in the open to try and wear down the dwarf (hopefully not wounding him but you never know, shit happens in combat), the hobbit in defensive drew the Barding’s attack to himself! I couldn’t figure out why that’d be illegal, so we rolled with it. Totally fascinating.
The hobbit’s plan was to draw the dwarf away from the rest of the company so nobody would get hurt. That’s pretty tricky to do within the Battle rules, which as a baseline offer nothing more than positioning for the company to defeat a group of enemies. But what The One Ring does have is its Trait rules, which I’m now convinced are the killer app of the game.
The most interesting Trait rule, IMO, is that you can use a Trait to make a common skill roll where you normally could not. So that’s what they did, injecting skills into the combat sequence where normally they’d only be allowed to make weapon checks (or the special actions attached to each combat position). This is totally genius! Because, guess what, not everyone’s gonna have the right tool for the job. The Barding, for example, is this smooth talker but has literally nothing available to stop a fight and get some words in edgewise. So trying to talk the dwarf down didn’t work. But the Hobbit, well, he’s True Hearted, so yeah, absolutely Persuade the Dwarf to ignore the rest of the company as you run away.
I have more thoughts on just how powerful the Trait rules are, but for now this is my current favorite thing about them.
* Eye of Mordor rules, wow, the game is fucking grim now. Since the Enemy has retaken Dol Guldur, I’ve activated the Eye rules from Rivendell. They’re fantastic! Basically you come up with a baseline value for the company based on who’s in it (the Eye ignores hobbits but takes special interest in elves, for example), what they’re carrying (oh all those Famous Weapons you’ve been picking up with your Valor increases, yeah, the Eye finds them very interesting), who they are to the people in the area (helloooo Heroes of the Woodmen!), and so on. Then as the game proceeds, that value gets a bump every time the company gains Shadow, rolls an Eye, uses “magical” virtues (elf magic, dwarven “broken spells,” etc.), and so on. When the chase number equals the target of the terrain they’re in — it’s an inverse of the regular terrain TN table, with free lands having a very high chase value and the darklands obvs being very low — there’s a Revelation. The Enemy takes direct action against the company, or the company experiences supernaturally shitty luck, or whatever.
Combined with my “everything is blighted all the time” rule w/r/t Shadow gain from the terrain, that’s a fucking lot of bad-guy pressure applied to the company at all times.
The net result in our game was that the Revelation happened while the Hobbit recovered from his wound delivered by the dwarf. They’re chilling in East Bight and everyone wants to use their two-rolls-per-day option while they’re just sitting around. Okay, cool. So they’re investigating stories of orc attacks in the area, as well as the lights/voices of the uneasy dead. Then the roll an Eye, the Enemy reveals itself, and a Great Orc with a band of soldiers springs its trap on the company.
The game feels really dangerous now, I think.
* Fellowship phase after everything that went down was bittersweet and difficult and actually pretty amazing. I was saying that The One Ring doesn’t really pump me up but I gotta say I’m feeling pretty pumped now!
The Hobbit, having been nearly killed by someone he considered a dear friend, took the “There and Back Again” option from Rivendell: he left the company, went home to the Shire, and spent it with his family. He gained a permanent Shadow but got back like 6 Hope. Really the narratively perfect choice.
The Dwarf, looking down the barrel at his fifth and final bout of madness and with Murderous, Spiteful, Brutal etc on deck, realized he’d be a terrible danger to everyone. Without apologizing or explaining, he’s withdrawn to his workshop outside Woodmen Hall, his adventuring days behind him. Hobbits are not allowed in his workshop. No idea what the player is taking next, but he’s looking at the cool Rivendell options as well as a straight Woodman (which tbh they should have, given the focus of Darkening of Mirkwood).
The Barding, though, whoo boy. Miserable for almost the entire session, he decided to try and heal his Shadow through craftwork at his home in East Bight (where he’s been married to Ceawin’s daughter and now has a kid). Not only did he fail to do so, he rolled an Eye. While miserable. In the Fellowship phase. Boom, now he’s Treacherous. So he snuck into Ceawin’s hall and murdered him, freeing the clan from weak leadership. I think he’s just taken over the clan, actually. But talk about weak leadership! He’s only got status 2, and there are plenty of clansmen NPCs who surely must have higher status than him. Then there’s the matter of answering, or not, difficult questions about the death of Ceawin: lying and deception gets you 2 Shadow, after all. Tick tick tick.
Oh, and where the dwarf knew enough to retire before he hurt someone? The Barding says fuck that. They basically have a villain in the company now. Yowch.
Other stuff:
* Magical Treasure rules from Rivendell are actually pretty neat. I wanted the elven weapon the hobbit retrieved from Dol Guldur last year to be magical thing, so I built it. And sure enough, he’s really anxious to discover/unlock the two hidden weapon goodies. Hard-pressed to find a Loremaster, though, and they haven’t set Rhosgobel up as a sanctuary yet, so… I’ve got goodies built for everyone else now as well.
* Status rules are starting to make a difference. Everyone has 1 or 2 status now, and they’re all starting to embellish the end-of-year stuff quite nicely. The elf, for example, has started formal patrols in Mirkwood of mixed human and elven troops (with her in command, since she’s Arrogant and all).
* The retirement/inheritance rules are ridiculous. We’ve played 7 sessions and they’ve earned, I think, a total of 18 XPs. The dwarf’s successor will only get 2 free XPs to start! The table goes to 250 XP, which by my calculations is about 100 sessions of play. So, you know, two solid years of weekly sessions to max that out. Come on.
* A recurring meta-problem has raised its ugly head again: the fact that my attention span typically limits the game to 10ish sessions. Well, we’re on #7 right now and thus far I don’t feel any itchiness to move on. But maybe! Anyway, that fact kind of fucks up games that rely on loooong reward cycles. For example, the dwarf burning out in 7 sessions: I’m not so sure the game is actually built to do that, you know? But maybe! Dwarves are exceptionally goth in the Tolkien as well as in The One Ring, and he did take the “get a bonus to common skills equal to your Shadow” virtue, so maybe? It certainly played out that the Dwarf blew out first, the human may blow out next, the elf is riding a very fine line and the Hobbit will hold out a good long time.
This happened in our Urban Shadows game as well: one of the players decided to go all-in on gaining Corruption, “knowing” the game wouldn’t last long enough for him to actually suffer for it. That’s kind of a bummer. I have no idea what to do about it. Probably nothing.
<- Part 6 | Part 8->
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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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