I was wondering if anyone had seen the party chopping the poor hobbit's leg in the goblin-caves. I want to be ready to such grotesque thing if the party decides to do it. How should I handle it?

Warn them of a massive gain of Shadow points (5 for torment and torture or murder according to the LM book). Besides there should be a risk of killing the Hobbit due to loss of blood (and what's the point of killing the very person you have come to rescue?!).

However, if after these arguments they still want to do it, allow them. Nothing is worse for a game than the LM telling a player "you can't do that" when it should be the player's choice.

My two cents.

"Argh, no! Chop off my leg? No - the goblins must have a key or something. Maybe you can find that?"

Yes I agree with your points and how do you guys think I should handle it afterwards if it happens? I mean let's say he is survived and they are back at the Easterly Inn. How should the brother react?

If they act as mercenaries with no qualms instead of like heroes, treat them as such. Give them their gold (the brother would be afraid of them) and let them go their way the sooner the better.

Didn't Fingon have to chop off Maedhros' hand to rescue him? Just adding it here as food for thought.

But, I think Mytholder suggestion of ""Argh, no! Chop off my leg? No - the goblins must have a key or something. Maybe you can find that." -works fine.

Indeed. We have to consider though, that Fingon didn't have any other option for the rescue of Maedhros. Breaking or releasing the bonds was impossible (he tried) and he couldn't search for a key (if there was any for that matter). The other two options were either abandoning him altogether or killing him out of mercy - which he originally intended on Maedhros' explicit wish. Especially the latter would weigh heavy and in light of this, severing the hand is a small evil.

It would be similar to what we talked about for Robin Hood-style characters. The amount of evil (and thus Shadow) depends heavily upon the circumstances and not an absolute scale.
In the adventure example, it is suggested that taking this option is taking the easy way out. For Fingon, it was the only option - and despite Maedhros' repeated plea to kill him then after breaking the bond proved impossible, Fingon only cut off the hand.

Cheers
Tolwen

Thanks for all the replies. Another question: if the alarm is raised by the goblin guards, how should I proceed? It is impossible for them to fight with the goblin horde but is it possible to acquire the key after the alarm is raised?

It happened to my group, which was at that time very un-stealthy. The goblins weren't very keen on interrupting their dinner, so they just sent a bunch of guards, so the key didn't move from the dinner room. The group managed to kill the first wave of guards, and hide the bodies before the second wave came.

In general, I don't like making things easy for the PCs. For example, when they got caught (again!) in "kinstrife and dark tidings", I made sure they were enough patrols running after them so that they could not hide and come back later. They chose not to run away, they got caught, surrendered, and it was great seeing them think of ways to escape afterwards. But in the case of goblins, a capture would be unlikely. They would most likely be killed on the spot, and it wouldn't be fun, so I decided the alarm would make things a little bit more difficult, but not completely impossible.

They also wanted to cut the hobbit's leg, by the way, but he fainted and they had mercy.

Lol I am afraid the fainting will be like invitation for my group to cut it... Where are those heroic types when you need them?

What you guys think about my preperations for the goblin caverns?

LOL it just went as I predicted. They wanted to cut the leg. One of my players was against it so I didn't made him roll a Shadow test but the other two got 5 shadow points. Thanks for the advices.