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.
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Fourth episode of our TOR game is in the books. It was very satisfying! I’m smiling at myself that “satisfying” is now my benchmark for success; dunno if I will ever have, really need, or should ever again aim for “fucking awwwwwesome!” again. Satisfying. Yeah.
Our company was finally faced with a wide-open “soooo what do you want to do?” Fellowship phase aftermath. I talked through what all had happened through the end of 2948 and the beginning of 2949, set everyone up with stuff-at-home momentum, created a few new NPCs to start tapping into. The plan ended up being “let’s swing south to the Black Tarn and check out the progress on their new hall, look into Ingomer’s “bloody ghost” story, take a long hard look at Mogdred’s setup down there, then swing through East Bight, rest at Ceawin’s, then up north to Thranduil’s royal hunt.”
It’s great! Very open-ended. I love that everyone in the company gets a little of what they care about, and they all stick together and help each other out. Nice.
Anyway, I had a chance to roll out my modifications to Encounters, and I would say they were quite successful. I talked through them all, and the players raised some good concerns. Anyway, to re-outline with additional thoughts:
* Roleplaying through figuring out what the NPC is about = Good! This is pure RAW and will set both Tolerance as well as the best way to introduce yourself. The players ground up against the “awe is for a single awesome spokesman to represent the company” rule, mostly because the Dwarf is terrific at Awe but suuuucks at social skills. So they have to decide, you know, whether it’s worth pulling in Courtesy or even Riddle just so everyone has a chance to talk, even if those are not the preferred introduction modes. That whole system really worked well.
* Setting the high-level intent for an Encounter and holding off until it’s nailed down, that’s good. It’s hard. It’s a best-practice thing that feels an awful lot like “so what can you ask for in a Duel of Wits?” It also intersects badly with the rest of the system unless you bundle in Ralph Mazza’s Boons stuff. I didn’t do Boons but I’m going to try it out next time.
* Secret Tolerance is GOOD, especially when combined with “meeting Tolerance means something terrible happens.” Not RAW I think (Nicholas Hopkins you’re playing correctly), but the cat-and-mouse freakout about nudging up against Tolerance, that’s very nice.
Stuff I want to nail down tighter:
* Probably roll Boons in next time. That reorganizes the system around actual achievables, and sets up compromises. It’s good. In fact I think this is all I need to roll in, because this will fix other issues I have w/r/t the Encounter’s intent, Tolerance, and just what non-talky successes/failures look like. As written, I think, successes and failures of any rolls during Encounter count toward success level as well as breaking Tolerance. It feels very abstract, i.e. you roll Lore to gather info about some new shit that has just come to light, and you fail, and that…looks like it’s pissing off the NPC, even though it’s something entirely inside your own head.
We also had this awkward bit where a failed Lore roll split the company on whether to pursue their original intent — Amadeola helps us hunt the “bloody ghost” versus the belief that Amadeola cooked up the “bloody ghost” story to cover for internal badness (murrrrder?) at the Black Tarn. This is kind of where the Duel of Wits also falls down: you’re committed to this thing, even though your thing may reasonably change shape in the course of argument. I think Boons may fix this as well, esp. if they’re renegotiable along the way.
After a lengthy Encounter at the Black Tarn, they decide to head south into superbad forestland looking for Tyrant’s Hill. Amadeola’s folks never go that far south, because South Mirkwood is a bunch of scary bullshit.
We finally had our first bout of madness, which was pretty wild. The corruption tests started stacking up pretty bad against both the elf and the dwarf. The dwarf took a cultural virtue last session that I’m totally in love with: your standing Shadow counts as a bonus on all Common tests. Holy shit! So he’s up to, get this, 12 fucking Shadow. Oh my food. But he also doesn’t really care, since all, all of it goes away as soon as he goes mad. Meanwhile it’s a really sweet carrot. Who doesn’t want +12? It’s clever.
But it wasn’t the dwarf who broke, it was the elf. Her curse is power, so now her first negative Trait is Resentful. So flexible. So perfect. She also is in the middle of this love triangle with the Barding PC and this Beorning trader lady I introduced over the fellowship phase. They’ve already been catty toward each other, but now with Resentful? Niiiice.
The elf’s bout of madness was marvelous and scary and was entirely the player’s idea. They had stumbled onto Tyrant’s Hill and started evaluating Mogdred’s force disposition. And then someone fumbled their Stealth test and they stumbled onto a small patrol. They had a fight, didn’t kill anyone but did knock everyone out of the fight. The brave little hobbit got wounded, augh! But during the fight, the elf rolled an eyeball.
After the battle, they’re gathering the prisoners they’ve taken to start asking them questions. And the elf starts quietly slitting their throats. And since the GM gets to play the character, gosh yes I start spending Hope to avoid the PCs who are trying to stop me/her! She’s a fucking elf, totally at home in Mirkwood and an unstoppable killing machine when she needs to be. Yeah, they all died. The company is horrified.
So we ended the session sincerely torn between backing off to the Black Tarn and recovering the hobbit’s wound, or pushing forward through the narrows and resting with Ceawin’s folks. If they back off, they’ll miss Thranduil’s royal hunt. If they push on, the Narrows are no treat either.
Satisfying!
<- Part 3 | Part 5 ->
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Your Shadow has ramped up much faster than my group’s – but then they’ve not been into Mirkwood yet.
(Also – is all Mirkwood blighted? I’m away from my books so can’t check).
In terms of Hope recovery, there’s the There and Back Again undertaking in Rivendell, where you go home and recover a third of your starting Hope but also gain Shadow. Might help!
At first this seemed too dark for Tolkien, but then I thought about Boromir, and it made more sense. Once he started on his path, he was an express train.
Andrew Kenrick the instigating event was an expedition into Southern Mirkwood to investigate Tyrants Hill. Yeah, blighted darklands imo.
The closest thing I have to compare this with is Star Wars d6 Dark Side points (which, IIRC, didn’t do anything until you had too many), and BW Grief. How different does it feel (from the GM’s seat, I guess)?
Way faster than my experience. But then our adventures were all on the elf road and just starting South from Beorn’s to the hill country…so never got into the blight.
But that scene from the Hobbit movie where Gandalf et al visit The Place and confront The Thing made it pretty clear that such places are rough, even for the wise…so for a new party of would be heroes…seems legit.
After all, if there are places in Mirkwood so bad the elves fled them and refuse to even go there any more…
But that does leave you in an interesting Role Play situation.
I’d be tempted to encourage some characters be retired, at least temporarily, while a new younger character picks up the burden. Has a very Polaris feel.
My players are just now hitting this spiral — they’ve been chasing spies and orc-cults around Gondor for the past several sessions, so they haven’t seen a lot of corrupted areas. But last time they took a wrong turn in the Paths of Erech and ended up gaining a bunch of shadow, with no time to take a fellowship phase before the campaign’s first big climactic battle. I don’t know that they’ve realized it yet, so I’m very interested to see how they come out of it in the end.
Yeah, so additional details.
First, yeah, new company. Nobody is especially wise! There are a couple 3s.
Second: determining whether a region is “blighted” is so very loose. It’s this close to “GM decides,” and there’s no guidance as to what fictional considerations to make. There’s a table that lets you roll dice but that’s also weird: are The Narrows blighted now but maybe not later? Even on the same path? So instead I just assume everything is blighted, and they make their rolls per the schedule determined by the map.
If I had it to do over again I’d probably do it the same way, tbqh. There’s some merit to throwing the “fuck it, blight everywhere” switch in 2951 per events in Darkening (spoilers!), but that’s when I’ll be switching on the Eye mechanism per Rivendell.
I think there’s something to be said for pushing the system to its limit, as a player. Maybe even let the first company burn to the ground as these poor naive saps play in the woods looking for treasure. This assumes the players are incentivized to preserve their next characters, which you know…not all of them are, or will be. I’m not persuaded that that’s a conscious creative decision every time.
Anyway, yeah, it feels like it’s playing out correctly. It’s brutal! But my Middle Earth is already a pretty rough neighborhood. There haven’t been any bad conflicts of expectations, at least on my side of the table. One advantage of not really knowing the Tolkien!
The way this game handles passage of time sounds really interesting. Are there any specific rules for that, or do you just say “well, how long are you spending at home to recuperate before you head out again?”
Noah Tucker straight TOR as well as Darkening of Mirkwood suggest one adventure phase per year. So you go do adventure phase stuff for as long as you want (typically keeping an eye on fatigue and shadow), then you do a fellowship phase, and then you play next year.
There’s some creative/logistical space there where you can do additional fellowship phases kind of…whenever. And to be honest I’m not sure what the rules say about how long a fellowship phase “has” to be. Like, if you were really hard-nosed about gaming that, I have no idea what the balance is. Like…go do a small thing and then take a break! Burn off that shadow. Now go do a thing and take a break! And burn off that shadow. And so on.
it’s a gap in the game that nobody’s tried exploiting yet, because I’ve framed it as “do what you want all summer, then go winter somewhere and take your fellowship actions.” It’s very similar to the pace of The Great Pendragon Campaign, which they’ve been a good ways into.
My group has done pretty well on not accumulating shadow, but they haven’t hit Mirkwood hard at all. Last session there was lots of talk of dealing with Tyrant’s Hill in some fashion – which will let me unleash the shadow waterfall. We’ll see tomorrow!
Tyrant’s Hill is a cluster fuck. Ditto the Mirkwood Mountains, when they thought they’d go werewolf hunting a couple years ago. Now that they’ve seen the darklands up close, they’re thinking long and hard about avoiding them now. As they should.
Yeah, they’re feeling salty after ripping apart some goblins. They have other options, so maybe they won’t go that route – but if they do, they’ll certainly experience how bad it can get! (Puts on game face.)
Education is painful!
I would like to point out that the spiral was heightened by our resident dwarfs desire to use the cool exploit, in which he uses his shadow as a bonus to common rolls. He was rolling around with 6/8 shadow before we hit the mirk. So when we had two rolls a day at target 20 he went south in a hurry.
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.
<- Part 5 | Part 7 ->
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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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