My group is about half way through Tales from Wilderland and wondered when I can look forward to the release of more adventures for TOR?

I'm hoping my hardcopy of TfW will be within me within the next week (anyone got it as yet?) but wondered if there was any way of getting the Gencon 2012 adventure given that book and pdf's aren't happening? Can it be added as a hardcopy freebie to another product?

Darkening of Mirkwood was scheduled for release (? presumably hard copy) in Autumn 2012 so guessing that this will be a month or two behind the Sept release for Lake town/Loremaster screen?

If you want adventures in Middle-Earth and you need them fast you can always obtain old MERP modules and convert them to TOR.

It's what I do.

Last weekend, I went to my parent's place, and found some of my old, long forgotten MERP modules. I browsed through them, but they were really bad, with lots of useless maps and lists of artifacts. Are there modules that are known for being particularly good?

I have to say I'm very impatient for more TOR modules, mostly because I don't want my own stuff conflict with what's to come. I try to avoid anything that might come up during "Darkening of Mirkwood", but I hope we'll have some info about the general plot and regions involved before it's published, as I don't expect to have the book on my desk before 2013.

There's a comic called Knights of the Dinner Table by Kenzer and Co. that some of you may have heard of.

There was a strip some time ago where one GM was asking another where he got his plots from for a wild west game.

He was told (something like)...
"I use fantasy stuff and convert it. Instead of a princess being kidnapped by goblins and held in their lair, it becomes the majors daughter who is kidnapped by bandits and held in a disused mine."

I thought it was a bloody good idea and, although I have not needed to do that for TOR yet, I will be taking old adventures from any genre and adapting them accordingly.

My source of Warhammer adventures was Call of Cthulhu.
Find a gaming line that match your personal style: this is the difficult step.

Good combination. WFRP is horrific and sanity blasting.

You do have a point. Dungeon crawls won't work well with TOR! Nor will games that rely on miniatures or tactical maps.

Western games might work, with some setting changes obviously, as the west is wilderness with towns dotted around, much like Wilderland.

Post-apocalyptic maybe?
Small and sparse towns, long distances, dangerous ruins, divided and suspicious peoples...
I don't know good post-apoc published adventures. Tribe 8?

Yusei,
For the most part in converting an adventure you're taking the ideas, not the exact content, and definitely not "as is".

So, from MERP's Bree and the Barrow Downs, p28, section 7.11, Trouble on the Homestead, the suggested adventure idea is:

After that are some NPC stats for some trolls (8-10th level, all with 140+ hit points!) along with a couple of named (5-13th level, 82-190 hp) and generic volunteers (1st level, 21 hp).

It's easy to see that converting this adventure seed is really easy if you keep to the quoted text. Once you start dealing with the stats you end up with a can of worms. Make life easy for yourself - don't open the can of worms up at all! Glance at it, note anything that is useful and ignore everything else because it doesn't matter.

So for the above adventure suggestion I would take the following from the stats: 4 trolls named Gwul, Durrick, Edgarth, Hake (listed strongest first). And it's mentioned in daylight they will return to stone. Everything else provided here is useless. Just grab 4 generic trolls of the appropriate type (stone trolls), name them accordingly and you're done. But what about the weapons they use? And their hp? Or there levels? My response... who cares? None of that matters in TOR. If you want to get fancy you can change the generic TOR troll's weapons. Feel free to dress this one in tweed, that one in cotton and the other two in animal skins. Doesn't change their generic stats though. So it doesn't really matter - game mechanics wise.

What about the maps and floorplans for this encounter you ask? Well, at a quick glance (all I'm willing to spare) there are none. Even if there were, I would use them as no more than a suggestion. After all, we're using combat stances, not a tactical display with turn based movement limitations and actions. In other words, we can either wing it entirely or make something up ahead of time that works better for your needs.*

After all, what if one of your players decides to shimmy down the chimney and unlock the door? There's no map for that. Maybe the PCs decide to do a "damsel in distress" act to lure the trolls out? There's no map for that either. Sacrificial goat? No map for that either. This is TOR, to be honest, it's kind of a "map light" game so far as I've seen. Maybe I'm wrong about that aspect but you can always make your own if it seems critical.

* Note: These mapping issues become particularly true when dealing with the more complex adventures in MERP where you're effectively in a dungeon and/or fortification crawl. In these instances keep the map but only as a general guideline of how the place is laid out. I wouldn't worry so much about the exact size, placement, , etc though unless it is absolutely mandatory in order to align levels properly (ie, horizontal and vertical connections relative to each other across multiple floor levels). Even then you might find that it doesn't matter as much as other games have made you think.

Some good advice here! Thanks.

@Corvo - we used to refer to Dark Heresy as 'Cthulhu in space' due to the similarity of adventures and style!

@Zjordi I have some MERP stuff so will look - just nice to have more ready-to-run adventures given lack of prep time for games, and the high standard of TfW.

I'm wondering if any Legends of the Five Rings things I've run in the past could be converted? Honour, family ties, hidden enemies

Well, I never meant I wanted maps or stats, quite the contrary. But that's (almost) all there is in the MERP modules I own. I only own a few of them, so maybe there are good ones out there.

I'm enjoying Tales from Wilderlands at the moment, and have never felt so much "Tolkien spirit" in MERP adventures.

Yusei,
Eh, sorry about that, although you were named specifically, at some point my comments were not to you personally, but you inclusively as part of the greater TOR fanbase reading these posts and looking for adventure material and/or conversions.

But in general you are correct. MERP is very heavy on maps, traps, treasure and some of the other more "bookkeeping" aspects of gaming. Whereas TOR is substantially focused on the narrative. Later MERP products alleviate the problem a bit, but not markedly so.

I know that the MERP scenarios were scanty, but I too would like to see any adaptation notes any of y'all have made.

Thanks,

Jay H