I want to share some interesting feedback from my campaign, and see what other LMs may have encountered.

I have a fellowship of five: a Barding Scholar, dwarven Teasure-hunter, Woodman Warden, and two Hobbits, one a Wanderer and the other a Teasure-hunter. At first having two Hobbits in the fellowship gave me pause. Needless to say this fellowship's strength isn't necessarily in direct confrontation. A number of posts mentioned burning through Hope out of necessity, Fatigue and Corruption Tests, Encounters, etc. However, I was amazed at how the player-heroes made good use of those extra Fellowhip Points to balance a constant reliance on Hope. Any other LMs have hobbit heavy fellowships and seen the difference it makes on using Hope, and Fellowship Points to replenish spent Hope?

My campaign, "The Flickering Flame of Hope," begins with a planned journey through Mirkwood in search of someone who disappeared in the service of Gandalf. He was returning from Dale with a message for Beorn and Radagast, and it's urgency and the coming of Winter forced him to use the Old Forest Road. Or so that is what the fellowship heard. Because of this, their route took them by necessity down The Old Forest Road. But, our sessions are limited in time, so I broke this into several legs. Each session contained a journey segment followed by an Adventure. At the end of each Adventure they used unspent Fellowship Points to replenish Hope; and, of course, Fellowship Points were renewed at the beginning of the next session. This broke the journey using The Old Forest Road into multiple segments and spread out Fatigue and Corruption Tests. The seemingly insurmountable number of Corruption Tests traveling The Old Forest Road become possible because they were spread out over multiple sessions. In this way, the fellowship had a lot more Hope to draw on for both the Fatigue and Corruption Tests. Anyone else with a similar experience in sending a fellowship down The Old Forest Road?

The last thing I noted was how affective a Fellowship Focus can be for replenishing spent Hope. The fellowship, quite to my surprise really used their Fellowship Foci to great affect as sources of inspiration. Often one would take the blow of another, use Hope and then recover it. This as opposed to the player-hero under assault having to use it on their own. Now my fellowship isn't a seasoned group of players, but they are a pretty tight group of gamers, so it was more their own actions with me awarding them back their used hope. Granted, they caught onto this by the second session and played it into their actions to great affect after that! Also, more sessions covering the journey down The Old Forest Road meant more opportunities to recover Hope when a focus wasn't wounded at the end of an adventure. All in all they spent more Hope than I expected, but also gained it back in good measure for the next leg of the journey. Has their been similar experience with the importance of Fellowship Foci and enabling liberal uses of Hope?

Originally, all those Corruption Tests seemed liked they needed something to offset them or a house-rule to attenuate them. Now I'm not so sure. Thinking back to The Hobbit, Tolkien broke the elven path into multiple narrative descriptions of the journey interspersed with episodes of adventure or some other challenge breaking up his narrative. Maybe the designers had something similar in mind when working out the journey rules...?

I've got a fellowship of four characters, two of whom are Hobbits. We're only 3 sessions into the campaign, but so far everyone has managed to recover all of their lost Hope and all of the characters are still at full Hope scores.

I don't know how they would fare on the Old Forest Road, but they have been pretty conservative about spending Hope, and we haven't had very many combats yet. so I'll be curious to see how the "Hope Economy" functions in the long run. So far it seems to work fine.

John

I have 5 players in my game, none of the characters are Hobbits. Two of the characters are each others focus. In our play test/learning game they spent Hope like crazy (even though I started all of the characters with -6 Hope to help slow the spending). I went over in detail how they could regain Hope after the game. During our first actual session everyone was able to end the game back at their starting Hope.

The key was that some tests they just said "failure is an option". This meant that failed travel rolls meant they had a few extra fatigue points and during combat they missed and had to take a few more endurance hits to finish off the Enemy.

I think the initial problem with Hope is that everyone wants to use it to never fail any roll. This just isn't realistic. Personally I think Hope is there to make sure you are less likely to fail the really important rolls.

I think that this helps portray the struggle the Heroes of the Free Peoples and the hard decisions they have to make, including suffering in the short term, to continue the long fight against Shadow. It also adds a lot of tension. My players really struggle with the thought of spending Hope after that first point unless it's to protect their focus because they know it doesn't come easy.

T,
Thanks for the post. I like your observation and casting the use of Hope in an ongoing struggle. My tie on it in our campaign is similar. The one I'm running is one of three successive campaigns i have planned leading up to the release of the Darkening of Mirkwood.

John,
Thanks for your feedback as well. Following your post has been good for me as a bit o'sanity check with the new game.

Regards,
E

PS I was thinking there might be more posts from LMs with their experiences. Any thoughts on that...?

Thanks for the post Templar72. Those are great observations.
HN