The adventure we played was the first one from the Tales from the Wild. First off, it seems to be a pretty great way to introduce players to an ongoing chronicle. Conceptually, the players enjoyed it and we felt it had just enough mystery (the thing from the well, weird memory wiping water) to set the proper tone - yes, it's classic fantasy and no, it's not just about killing orcs and wargs. But there were also some issues.
My wife played an Elf and she felt slightly annoyed that the fact her character had spent past 250 years living in Mirkwood accounted for very little and she seemed as clueless as a Barding who hardly set foot in the forest. This was mostly brought to surface by the fact there was an ancient fortress some five days travel away from the elven city that she had no idea existed. She felt that was practically their back yard, and located very close to the elf path. In hindsight, I probably should have let her roll something to see if she actually did know about it on account of her having Mirkwood-lore, but it didn't occur to me right that moment and she didn't explicitly invoke it to remind me. So, lesson learned.
Another issue came up due to the fact that we have just three players. Travel mechanics assume at least four companions to fill the four basic roles. In this instance, I went with an NPC (Baldor) acting as a travel guide but that won't work for the next adventure. Does anyone have a good solution for this?
One amusing conundrum happened when the party wanted to return back to the elven city after Baldor lost his memory. They felt it was safer for him that way, rather than to continue the remaining 3/4 of the way. Baldor insisted they proceed, they kept objecting and then I informed them as a GM that they won't be going back, which they accepted. It wasn't a huge issue, but I didn't want to deal with improvising on the first session where it was clear basic mechanics were enough to deal with. Still, I thought their reaction was actually pretty reasonable and if I ever ran this adventure again, I'd make sure Baldor lost his memory when they were closer to the exit so that it seems more logical to just continue on their way.
Encounters are something we're still not comfortable with. There are specific skills that should be used which players still aren't familiar with and the introduction-interaction stages don't seem to come naturally. It turns out two out of three characters don't have Courtesy so that almost means that they can't participate in any of the interactions. This seemed particularly absurd when they met the hermit in the hollow tree and only the Barding noble passed the Courtesy roll. Furthermore, what comes naturally to both players and myself is to just engage in conversation in-character and call for rolls when something non-trivial is taking place. The game seems to want us to just keep making rolls in order to communicate. As written, Baldor wouldn't talk about his past unless a roll was made. This seems odd. Also, the elf (Lindor? something like that) that wouldn't let non-elves out of the basement unless three specific rolls were made, song among them, was a very strange talking companion. You have three adventurers in a basement, one of them an elf, and they are trying to talk the other elf into being allowed to leave the room. I had no idea how to approach this situation aside from explicitly telling them "you have to make three successful skill checks with these skills". What would it look like to have someone grab a musical instrument and sing something in a basement while being told they can't leave? I just let them leave the room if the Barding noble made one successful Awe roll in the end. I think I need a lot of pointers on successfully running social interactions...
Finally, the Fellowship Phase undertakings seemed to not offer that many options to the players. They made their way south to the woodman territory, to give them the hermit's axe head. This gave them sanctuary automatically, so they didn't need to spend an action for that. Out of remaining actions, the only two viable choices were patron and lowering their Shadow rating. One character was woodmen herself, so she took a patron. Elf and Barding characters decided to lower their Shadow rating. The Elf failed both song rolls (eye of Sauron both times...) which, combined with the fact she wasn't even too keen on taking that action but just chose it due to lack of other options, felt particularly like a lot of wasted time.
All in all, there are some sore points but then, isn't that the case with every RPG system? We're reasonably pleased with everything that went down so we'll see how the next adventure goes. My intention is to slowly start transitioning to Darkening of Mirkwood during the second half of the Tales from the Wild - wish me luck!
And sorry about the wall of text
