Hi all,

As I said in another post, I LM'd my first proper game of TOR today. Unfortunately I only have one player, so I have to pad out this player's Fellowship with NPCs.

If anyone else is in this position, how do you create the companions for your PC? Do you use the full hero creation process and treat them just like PCs (i.e. use Hope, refresh Hope from Fellowship Pool, gain experience and advancement points, etc) or do you use the stripped-down "Loremaster Character" approach (i.e. just give them a single Attribute score and a few skills and traits).

I played this session today using the pre-gen characters at the back of the first book, but it did get a bit cumbersome managing all these LM-controlled PCs. However, I want them to be like proper members of the Fellowship, so I am not sure how useful it would be to use LM Characters for them. They need to be able to use Hope at least.

Any thoughts on the above would be greatly welcomed.

I have not finished reading the TOR books yet, let alone the played.

But I would suggest the full character write-up. Perhaps even going so far as to create some tough questions for the 'characters' to answer. In this way you will come to better know these personas and have a better chance of staying in-character while playing them.

You might want to give your player the option of running two characters, or a character and one of your NPC party members. Assuming they're comfortable with the extra work.

I would suggest a hybrid method, such as what I did for my Dwarf stat blocks. These well-known Dwarves are traveling with the company, and I'm going to have each of my 3 players control one of the Dwarves as well (for the purposes of combat and rolling), while I retain control of Balin.

A full write-up will be too difficult to keep track of, especially if you're controlling more than one and acting as LM. That's a lot of work, and a full sheet has a lot of extraneous information to "filter out." If you actually make use of that information, you'll likely steal too much time away from the player.

With the Dwarves I used the basic LMC rules, gave them generic rewards for the weapons (included in the numbers), and gave them individual skills instead of skill groups, more to differentiate their personalities than anything. I suspect Common Skill rolls for the Dwarves will be relatively infrequent, with the players mostly just seeing the ranks and getting a good idea of what these guys are capable of (and they're there if it does come up, of course).

Keeping things as simple as possible is always in your best interest as a LM. No need to worry about things like encumbrance, hope, shadow, fellowship points, etc.

I suggested full write-ups for two reasons:

1) If additional players appear, you could hand them an NPC character sheet and they're good to go, instantly, with a character that is already involved in the adventure. No extra work to merge this new character into events.

2) Some folks think better with a pen in hand. Writing questions spurs creativity and in writing the answers you focus the results into the most viable form. Thereafter, assuming you're compfortable doing so, you could reduce the character to a couple of descriptive adjectives which represent that character's full persona.

Thanks guys.

I like the minimalist approach of the dwarf stat blocks - which I can see being useful for some characters. However, the exclusion of things like traits, virtues and rewards does not give you much to work with, given that these will have to be role-played as companions of the PC.

On the other hand, a full write up, so the sheet could be handed to another player at a later stage - which is effectively what I'm doing now - has it's own problems. I found myself hunting through all the sheets for pertinent information, which slowed down the game. We did start out sharing the sheets, so that my son had his own character plus one NPC companion (his fellowship focus), and I had the other two, but before long I ended up with all 3 NPCs as he was so new to the game.

I think some work needs doing to flesh out the Loremaster Character system, which if I recall correctly only receives a couple of pages in the second book. If you imagine The Hobbit being run as a TOR campaign, there is Bilbo, Gandalf, and I think 14 dwarves! No gaming group would have enough players to cover all of them as PCs, and even if it did, it would be too much for the LM to handle unless he had the skills of a committee chairman.

I seem to recall seeing Beorn's character writeup in the Loremaster's Book, which included Hope although I think only 6 skill groups (i.e. Custom, Vocation etc). I may be wrong as I don't have the book to hand right now. I will check this out again and see if it will help.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

The advantage of a hybrid method is that you can add whatever you think will be useful in-game, and only what you think will be useful. If you want traits and hope to play a role with these NPCs, by all means put them in the stat block! Valour and Wisdom values might also be useful (for my Dwarves I just assume they all favor Valour since they all agreed to go on the quest of Erebor, and during the journey it was pretty obvious that Wisdom wasn't their strongest quality, lol. Anyways, since I already have a mental record of that fact I didn't feel the need to clutter up the stat block, not that those rolls will likely come up).

One possibility if you decide to go the full write-up route would be to highlight different numbers on the character sheet with different colored highlighters. Yellow could be weapon attacks with the primary weapon, blue can be parry and protection, etc. Anything to make referencing the more complicated sheet easier in-play.

Another tip that I use even for regular characters is to not worry about printing the 2nd page of the character sheet. The most important information on that side of the sheet are the single numbers in the boxes at the top (Experience, Fellowship, Advancement Points, Treasure, and Standing), and perhaps Fellowship Focus (though that's easy enough to remember that you might not even have to write it down). These things can simply be written on the back of the front sheet (which is left blank), or even in the margins. It's not like any of that information is referenced very frequently. Other notes (like Sanctuaries and Patrons) could also just be written on this blank side as they become relevant, but you might also ask just one player to keep track of "group notes" like this (in your case, the actual player of the game).

Anyways, there are a lot of ways to handle this, and you really just need to figure out what works best for your group.

Tell me specifically what Bifur contributed to the adventure and I'll say "sure, make a detailed character sheet."

Apart from Bilbo, everyone was a hand-waved NPC. They don't fight (see: Trolls, Spiders, Elves), they can't sneak (see: Trolls, Spiders, Elves, Dragon), they sure can't negotiate (see: everyone) and when you need them the most, they disappear (see: Gandalf).

I wouldn't worry too much about detailed NPCs. If you need one to have a skill that your PC doesn't in order to make the adventure work, then they have it. If not, they don't.

Don't allow NPCs to do something your PC can, and only allow them to do enough to let your PC shine. TOR is about making your own stories in Middle-earth, not a tactical combat exercise. NPCs are merely colorful background.

The game is about your players and you, not NPCs.

Beorn can be found on LB p114 - when you get the chance to look.

As for the rest of the discussion... I think we're down to debating "Less Filling! Tastes Great!" Try creating a couple of NPCs (in whatever manner) and determine if the time spent was worthwhile.