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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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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If I recall correctly, there is an optional system in Rivendell that makes treasure a bit more interesting, because it lets the GM make special treasure lists that are customized to characters, and allows players to take the special treasures instead of treasure points.
Adam D yeah, I’ve read that. That whole system is a tiny bit confusing to me but I want to swing back around on it. It would be neat to have more of a choice and split up the drive to chase Treasure: some folks want political sway, some folks want swag.
What I do with encounters is:
(*) I skip introductions and go round the table, having everyone play it out and roll (or Trait it once per Encounter). If someone wants to not roll, that’s fine. Skip them, but then they’re “out” and the encounter relies on others.
(*) Going over Tolerance in a tense encounter is a case of nope, you’ve blown it, you effectively have no successes. That way there’s tension if the players decide to push on further or stop before it’s too late.
(*) An Eye of Sauron costs a point of Tolerance, even on a success.
This worked quite well for me in a political conflict the PCs were in to make peace between the Bardings and Dwarves over a piece of treasure. They were down to one Tolerance and didn’t have enough successes for the ideal outcome.
If there isn’t the tension; no failure or partial success conditions, I’ll skip the encounter system. I will do it with Patrons if the PCs want a favour, or the first time (kind of a job interview), but not in general.
Having the Eye cost Tolerance, that’s interesting.
One angle I was considering is that Tolerance is the total # of rolls you get, period, for any given intent. And then stick to the success table: 1 success is basically a near-loss, 2-3 is okay, 4-5 is good, 6-7 is extraordinary. That still doesn’t really give me the scaffolding for conflicts of interest and criss-crossing intents. How do you know when the NPC has earned a compromise of some sort?
And Standing is great! It feeds into interfering with “big events” (though I wish the rules here were more concrete) and Tolerance in your own culture or where you have a title. It’s kind of a big deal in the fiction.
Mind you, my PCs really want to increase Standing at the moment.
Well, anything below 4 successes is a compromise for me, and anything below 6 may be less than ideal. I’m really interested now in trying out your idea of Tolerance being the total number of rolls you get.
The encounter system can feel too easy on the PCs. I’ve considered raising the difficulty above 14 when an NPC works against them. Probably add their Attribute level if they have relevant skills or traits. I’m definitely trying that next time.
Yeah, I wish there was a more direct and obvious interaction between standing and the encounters.
Oh, and holdings are great! I’ve been using them heavily in my current campaign. The players are super invested in them.
Interesting notes on Encounters, Paul. I’ve had little experience with them, and thought I wasn’t getting them right, but it sounds like you had a similar experience… bummer. I feel like cutting those out entirely.
The Math part… yeah. It’s easy to get lost in the mechanics. I’ve had problems with my group in the Journeys, where it all just becomes a series of dry, storyless mechanical mathematical procedure. Soulless.
Funny how Burning Wheel, a game which might have similar problems when it comes to engaging subsystems like DoW or Fight! doesn’t have that problem (at least for me and my group). Engaging those complex mechanics and rolls is fun to us. Probably because each roll is BW is deeply tied to the fiction, whereas in Journey, only some rolls seem to be more important than others. It can feel like just bookkeeping. The actual EFFECTS of the Journey only come into play during a combat encounter.
Good stuff, as always. Keep it coming.
Paul Mitchener yeah, I’d treat anything less than 5, I think, successes as some kind of compromise. And 7+ actually overshooting their intent. With 5-6 basically being the bullseye.
But this leaves out the NPC making their own rolls, you know? RAW is very much built on the assumption that only heroes have anything to say.
sub
Paul Beakley, oh, that’s interesting, the idea of 7+ introducing complications. So not only have you impressed the Elven King, and he’s given you permission to do what you’re asking, but his daughter has fallen in love with you.
NPC rolls would deviate for me so much from RAW that I’d end up writing a new social system…
One place I might be going wrong is skipping the introduction phase. That could be pinch point where only certain skills (and perhaps certain characters) come into play, and makes life more difficult. I didn’t quite understand, and it struck me as some fiddliness which I ignored, but I ought to take a look again at the original rules.
Listening, intrigued…
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♥
TOR is dumb. There are so many beautiful and innovative ideas in that game that makes me want to love it to pieces. But… Every single one of them suffers from unforgivable flaws and leaves a half-baked taste in my mouth.
So, you are not alone Paul Beakley. Not at all. I’ve reached a point where I buy new supplements for the ambience of setting and art alone. If I ever try to play this again I will most likely use another system. Last time we tried FATE. It went so-so. I’m tempted to do a 13th Age hack since I know I love that game.
So I am fine with the player who says “meh, I can go insane 4 more times, let’s try it!” because I think that player is engaging with a lead foot on the accelerator of their character, which I think makes perfect sense in a RPG played by grownups – there’s a strong possibility that this IS going to be the biggest deal thing that they handle, not because of anything in the game or indeed in anyone’s plans, but someone might have a child or might have ANOTHER child or they might move away or someone might get tired of it (I suspect your fellow players can sense your frustrations with the game and may have good reason to believe that the game might not last that much longer), or someone’s work schedule might change, and the game might evaporate. In such a circumstance you are insane NOT to treat the immediate crisis as the biggest one in the game; after all, it might be the last.
Jason Corley You make an excellent point! If that’s the point, I’m totally cool with it. And that’s where I just don’t know whether to treat the player as an honest broker or not. It’s something that is more apparent at the table than in a discussion thread. I just can’t tell, and there’s some history/baggage at work as well.
Ara Kooser Okay so recap my replies from the other thread:
1) Looks like RAW to me. I’m not seeing any major change to what you’re describing.
2) Totally understand that 1 Encounter = 1 Intent.
3) You mentioned that your players actually do fail their Encounter tests, which makes Tolerance matter. I cannot say I’ve ever seen my players fail an Encounter test (and if they do, they typically spend Hope). I suppose if two things were true — if Tolerance is secret (I’ve been lazy about it during our learn-to-play phase) and if the encounter is actually a failure should Tolerance be exceeded — then this might be more interesting. Now it’s a press-your-luck game, and I can get behind that.
What continues to be dissatisfying to me in Encounters:
* The target is always TN14, I think, barring a fiat-y adjustment by the GM for in-fiction reasons. Which I’m not opposed to BUT this is the kind of heavy lifting I don’t love to do in a game without guidelines.
* The NPCs don’t seem to ever roll in an Encounter. Every time I say it I think that’ can’t be right.
* The direction of the Encounter, as written, is always toward ever-greater success. Because it looks like the NPCs never roll, it’s really a test of just how well you succeed, which to me is uninteresting.
* As written, Tolerance doesn’t mean the encounter failed. It just means you can’t propose any further tasks.
Oh wait, there’s also a sentence that basically says “or it means whatever the GM wants.” Oh FFS.
Encounters suck, man. Just writing about them pisses me off now. I gotta fix this.
Ara Kooser waaaait a minute. You’re using landscape TNs during Encounters? Sorcery!
Ara Kooser I. Uh. But why?! Like, what does that even look like in the fiction?
Are folks just more resistant and grumpy out in the countryside? I mean that’s a super interesting take. I’d have never in a million years considered that.
Hmhmhm. Thinking.
It’s a really interesting idea. I was gonna say, at first, that my impulse would be to look at the Shadow rating of the area rather than the landscape, and they tend to be related (but not always). But then again I suppose you could look at the Shadow level as guidance as to how exceeding Tolerance may play out: a polite end to the talks with King Bard in the middle of the free lands, total fucking chaos in the darklands.
Mostly the whole thing feels so slippery and fiat-y at this point that it’s not really a system at all. Heck, it’s barely guidelines.
Ain’t that the truth.
You’ve really got me thinking about this landscape TN thing. You could really apply it to everything everywhere, couldn’t you? I mean the net result is to tweak the Hope drain based on the landscape.
?
I’ll give this a try when it’s out though: http://cubicle7.co.uk/dd-comes-to-middle-earth/
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!
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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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