Hi everyone! I've read thru the rulebooks and it looks awesome. Question...in the fellowship phase, is there a way to increase your endurance..ie: raising your attribute of Body? I may have missed how to do this. It would make sense that your "hitpoints" would go up as monsters become nastier and situations more dire. Thanks for any input.

You increase Wisdom and take Resilience Virtue to increase Endurance by 2.

On saying that increasing monster power is balanced in ways other than increasing Endurance, so I don't think I agree that it "makes sense" to have to choose that option.

Thanks Skywalker I missed that. On the same note, is there a way to balance encounters? Or is it more of an experimenting excercise?

No way to balance encounters so far other than experience.

Balancing encounters has been an interesting challenge. Due to this issue I have started the combat off small and trickled in extra bad guys. Because my groups have been focused on the borders of Mirkwood it's been easy to have extra villains "emerge" from the shadows or crawl out a hidden web. I have also had smaller monsters flee if the leaders are taken out or the combat begins to drag on when it's clear the party will win the day.