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"Players are invited to exercise their creativity and find new and exiting ways to spend a Fellowship Phase"
Fellowship Phase Undertakings -ToR corebook p.197

So...
How creative do players get in your game?
Do they stick to the suggested undertakings in the book
or do they get inovative and make up interesting actions and effects?

We have played Ars Magica for a long time, so dwelling-building is a major undertaking of theirs. They find the rules in TOR to be "meh" for this but this is what they are doing. Since we tend to play around the Anduin, they rebuilt a watchtower near the old ford and built a farm around it. The final feeling is a mix between magicless ars magica (the covenant is the important thing anyway), pendragon and LOTR.

Developments have been
1. finding the tower
2. rebuilding it (lots of rtreasure investment)
3. building a farm (MORE treasure still) and attracting laborers
4. Fighting a plague
5. Opening trade links to the south
6. Investigating the old forest road to see its suitability for reopening

A lot of those activities ended in adventures in the adventuring phase.

My approach is about:

• inviting players to tell their tale (what they want for their character in the story),

• trying to find together a general undertaking (I've made a list from across the rulebook and extensions, I've got rid of some official undertakings that I don't like) or a regional undertaking,

• creating a new undertaking inspired by official ones if no one matches

My "general" undertakings provides "general" results to be easily adapted and list the ones in the rulebook with the following (sorry, don't know the original names, I have the french version):

• Look For Answers - Darkening of Mirkwood : now you can take it anytime you time, but you need a patron or a sanctuary to use it.

• Write a Song and undertakings about treasures - Rivendell : don't like the "There and Back Again" undertaking.

Elmoth wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 19, 2017 9:13 am

We have played Ars Magica for a long time, so dwelling-building is a major undertaking of theirs. They find the rules in TOR to be "meh" for this but this is what they are doing. Since we tend to play around the Anduin, they rebuilt a watchtower near the old ford and built a farm around it. The final feeling is a mix between magicless ars magica (the covenant is the important thing anyway), pendragon and LOTR.

Did the company need to obtain permission from Beorn (or anyone else) in order to restore the tower and start their farm?

Yup. That was an adventure in itself, not a downtime undertaking, though. We liked it with the Valten adventure. They also obtained the goodwill of the woodmen to create what is effectively a neutral trading post in Western Mirkwood.