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I'm planning on running a full campaign this summer starting at the beginning (although I'm replacing The Marsh Bell with Richard Harrrison's excellent "To Journey's End and the Eagle's Eyrie"), and running through all seven adventures in Tales From the Wilderland. I'm wondering if anyone who's done this can tell me how long (in RT) it took to run this campaign. I plan on following the suggestion in Tales and having one adventure per year in game time. If anyone has run it the other way (the 2 yrs per adventure scenario also suggested in the book), I'd love to hear how that went and how long that took in RL, too. Any suggestions are welcome (which way you think is better, etc), as I have a few weeks before starting the campaign, so there's time for me to make a few changes to my plans if I need to. Thanks !!

How long is a piece of string?

TBH the length of time taken to play through these adventures is almost entirely dependent upon how long the players take to role play out stuff. They could adopt a Wham-Bang-Thank you style of play and breeze through the material or take a leisurely detour through the byways of Tolkien's world.

Another thing is the length of a session. If you have short sessions (2-3 hours or so) then the refresh rate on the Fellowship Pool will avoid the problem of low Hope and allow the company to rush forward regardless. Changing it to every other session or like Rich H suggests to appropriate points in the story makes more sense.

It matters little if you run one adventure per year or two in so far as that doesn't impact the number of sessions just at what time of year you run each adventure and the season dependant travel times.

Do you have a yardstick by which we can judge your groups pacing? If you'd already run through the Marsh Bell and knew how low that took then we might be able to give you a better idea.

What I'm asking is: if anyone has done this already, how long/frequent were your sessions and how long did it take to run all 8 adventures with your schedule? I'm not sure how the company is going to be, since they'll be new players, so I don't really know their style of play yet.
I'm just trying to get a rough estimate from people who have already done this, so I know how to set up my own Company's gaming schedule. I'm starting in summer to accommodate teacher's and student's free time availability (I'll be teaching again in autumn, too), but I'd like to get a permanent gaming group going. Once school starts up again I imagine it'll have an impact on our gaming, so one of the things I'm looking for is a rough estimate of how far along we'll be in case we have some key players dropping out because of school. I'd also like to get an idea of how other people ran it and what they felt the best structure was for this campaign. This is all new to me, I've only played through The Marsh Bells with my family and had some sort of "home-made" adventures with friends, and some Hobbit Cricket, that kind of thing. Never a full campaign with a table full of players.

What is the gaming frequency per week? How long will the sessions be?

That's kind of what I want to figure out. I'm thinking weekly for the summer months (minus a week or two here and there because I'm sure some people will have conflicts), but I don't know yet how much time I should allow for the sessions. I was hoping others had done this, so I could get ideas based on their campaigns. In summer, I am able to have a weekly session, and I can probably schedule as many as four hours for each session. I don't know if other people will be able to do that, though, so it might have to be changed to every other week .. just don't know ...

I have run Blood in the Water, a 10-page adventure (about 5 pages of actual material and the rest pages of background and scene setting) with a group of five fairly experienced gamers via G+ hangouts of about two hours apiece. It took about 7 sessions to complete that - 12-14 hours. I ran it for a FTF group and it took four two hour sessions but that group didn't follow up on the plot hooks in the same way as the on-line group did.

I've run Marsh Bell in 2 four hour sessions for a FTF group of experienced gamers plus a session for character generation.

Most of the players hadn't much real in-depth experience with the mechanics of the One Ring.

So you can see it's hard to say how long a campaign is going to take as so much depends on the players and how they handle things. TfW is 160 pages long with seven adventures so my guess is that you'd get something between 40 and 100 hours of adventuring out of it and the Marsh Bell adventure.

I'm in the middle of Mirkwood in Journeys End, and we're about four 4-hour sessions in. Still have the rest of Amon Naugir to go before we trek back out of the forest. Journeys End is fairly long though, in theory, in relation to ToW.

Thanks, everyone, for the info. Looks like this will run for a while once I get it started! So probably won't be limiting it to a summer, then, since most people can't play every week. Thanks again.

FWIW, we finished Journey's End in 6 sessions of 4 hours a piece. The time around Amon Naugrim took up two and a half sessions (I had the elves reappear; it was a glorious moment, as a guest player was given Balin and instructions to more or less work against the elves helping).

We have run The Marsh-Bell + Tales from Wilderland in 17 sessions, around 3-4 hours each one. 2 sessions per adventure plus a complete session to heroes creation.