The introductory adventure I ran for my new TOR group took them north to the Withered Heath, to hunt down the cold-drake that killed Dain I, great-grandfather of King Under the Mountain. It was great. Everybody had a ball and the killing blow was by the dwarf dragon-slayer who threw himself at the beast's head from a ledge with his mattock. Totally epic.

A couple things that have come up:

1) Fellowship Phases can last anything from a couple weeks to a season. Do the characters get one undertaking, regardless of the length? That doesn't really seem fair.

2) Is it mentioned anywhere how much encumbrance a pack pony can carry? It is important when determining how much treasure can be hauled away. I seem to recall that Bilbo said he took as much as his pony could carry and the treasure chart seems to indicate that he took home 500 points worth, but that seems a little steep.

3) Rolling twice a day for corruption is tedious. I think a better way to do it is to keep it at one roll a day, but have a failure give two Shadow points instead of one.

1) By the rules yes. Remember they can narrate all kinds of stuff in that Phase. They just get to choose one that has mechanical weight.

2) No. The only mechanical effect listed IIRC is that they halve the increase in Fatigue due to travelling.

3) Shadow is pretty significant and can be permament. s such, its a big picture resource and any increase should be considered cautiously.

I don't see anything wrong with this. Rolling tons of Corruption Tests is not only boring, it doesn't do justice to how big a deal becoming corrupted is.

My players recently travelled through Mirkwood, and my way of dealing with this was making sure there was a meaningful (or at least roleplayable) encounter for every fatigue roll. This meant:

- we only had to do 5 days worth of rolls at a time
- the players could illustrate how the shadow was changing their characters' temperaments gradually
- possibly flee if they thought the change was too much
- make some rolls and possible have bouts of madness

vs

I definitely think this is the way to go. Reading the Journey rules, you have to place narrative between each of the rolls in order to make them meaningful. You can't just skip over the journey, as it just becomes a tedious roll-fest. If you want the players to start closer to the main action, then have them start the adventure in a sanctuary near by a few months after their last adventure. They travelled earlier, with the weariness and shadow from travel restored by a prolonged rest in the sanctuary. This would assume that no permanent shadow points were gained during that trip.

The concentration on the journey as part of the adventure does fit with the books. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are pretty much all about the journey, with a few encounters here and there, and how the characters cope during it.

I'm not increasing it, I'm just cutting down on the rolls. You still have the potential to gain 2 Shadow per day in these regions, but it is determined by a single roll instead of two.

Unfortunately, that encourages players to take short Fellowship phases, in order to maximize the number of undertakings they can do in a year.

Average of one adventuring phase per game year. The book says that somewhere, I think. Possibly in the Fellowship phase section.

It says one adventure per year, not one adventuring phase. The book is very specific to use the latter term when it means it. Also, it makes more sense that way. The Hobbit only took a year, but it had four adventuring phases. Similarly, the events of the Lord of the Rings took a year.

I don't think the players can unilaterally impose Fellowship phases that way. They happen in natural breaks in the narrative. If they try to skew the narrative then they aren't natural and you probably have much bigger issues to consider.

Cool. Then, I concur.

The players are the drivers during Fellowship Phases. If they can accomplish as much in two weeks as they can in three months, they aren't going to take an entire season of downtime (unless they are dodging winter). I am fine with abstract systems, particularly in time lengths. I've been gaming with "scenes" and "stories" as durations since the mid-90s. In this case, though, the difference is rather remarkable and, I feel, hurts suspension of disbelief.

I think you are confusing what PCs can do and what has a mechanical effect. They aren't the same.

The length of time of a Fellowship Phase will have a huge impact as to what they can get done in terms of the narrative. At the end, players also choose a single mechanical effect.

If the later wasn't the case then Fellowship Phases would loose their nice flexible feel and turn into some kind of turn based resource management system which would hurt the suspension of disbelief even more.

The two are tied together. If they say, "I spend time gardening to distract myself from the horrors of that last adventure," it doesn't mean anything if they don't get the mechanical effect. If they've already said they are spreading some treasure around their hometown, then either they don't get to spend the Treasure to increase their Standing, or they don't get to roll to decrease their Shadow, which means that one of the things they want to do doesn't actually /do/ anything. It's fine if I tell them "you only have enough time for one or the other", but that breaks down when they realize they can get that roll to decrease Shadow if they rest for two weeks or for three months. The obvious (and valid) question is then, "Well, why can't we split the downtime into two six week periods and do both?"

Nonsense. It doesn't hurt suspension of disbelief any more than using turns in combat does. Besides, I'm not asking for a more complex system, just a smaller amount of granularity than "two weeks to a season". One undertaking for every month of downtime would be perfectly reasonable and avoid the problems I have described.

There is a relationship, but it is not a direct one. There is also a lot of flexibility in that relationship. There are many RPGs that have shown that.

I personally find quantifying a set time for all the kinds of narrative tasks assigned to the Fellowship phase to make no more sense than saying you get 1 mechanical benefit for a Fellowship phase. I wouldn't be presumptive enough to call your position nonsense as I understand what you are getting at. However, I think that there is an alternative that works just as well and maybe even better for many people.

As to narrative having no meaning by itself without mechanical support, I disagree about as much as you can to a statement. It is contrary to the very reason i RPG. Given your statement here, I am happy to just disagree and leave it at that. Sorry I couldn't help you out.

I don't see anything wrong with the GM characterising the Fellowship phase as a "long" or "short" one, with players taking two actions in a long one. Or maybe travelling back home and having one action.

Or if you wanted more mechanical, you could tie the length of the fellowship phase to the length of the adventuring phase that preceded it...

vs

Yeah. I would be more comfortable with a call being made if everyone thought that more mechanical effects seemed appropriate for some reason. I think this would be less based on time and more on what was happening in the story. For example, if the story had a patch less about adventuring on the road and more about politicking in the various settlements. TOR seems to embrace that kind of flexible approach.

My main issue is sticking a hard time period to what is essentially a narrative concept.

This is what we did with our first Fellowship phase in my campaign. They finished the first adventure in the spring, then we did a fellowship phase that we decided covered the summer. I had planned to use the gathering of the Five Armies idea from the books, and since the gathering takes place in November, and since my next adventure was going to take a few months of game time, I asked the players if they would rather have a long fellowship phase, go to the gathering, and start the next adventure in the spring, or start the next adventure at the end of summer and miss the gathering. They chose the former, so we had an "extended" fellowship phase that covered about 10 months of game time. Given that it was so long, we decided to allow each character to do 2 activities.

Nothing formal about the decisions, just what worked for us in terms of the story and feeling "right" I agree with Skywalker, the game is pretty flexible and open, and allows the LM and players to tweak things to their liking, but I'd be hesitant to assign any strict definition of how much time is required to get a fellowship phase action. Keeping it loose worked fine for us, and everybody was happy with the way we played it.

John