Traveling back home

[Jussi Marttila]

Our first End of The Year saw some players getting back to Erebor and to Thranduil's Hall to spend some time at home during the winter. I figured that since the players weren't pressed for time, their characters took their time to find a caravan to join, maybe one with an Elven escort, so no rolls were necessary.

In addition, I don't make players roll for casual travel in safer lands, when it doesn't affect the outcome apart from a few Fatigue Points that are going to be wiped out at the end of the session anyway.

[Rich H]

If The Hobbit had ever been a campaign then I'm pretty damn sure that Bilbo would have been involved in a number of adventures, played out, during his return home. The novel (re actual play) would have been written up afterwards and the author skipped over those for brevity and because he wanted to focus purely on the main plotline.

In Tolkien's original conception, the slaying of Smaug—by Bilbo!—was only the middle of the story. The second half would have been the "back again" part.

I didn't know that, thanks for sharing.

if the players give everything (spending Hope, Endurance, Wounds, etc) then they are punished for succeeding by playing out the return journey.

They're not being punished; they're dealing with the natural consequences of their planning and tactics. There's no rule that says players are expected to use up every resource they have in accomplishing their goal. They should save some for the return journey.

I do think that's an important point. TOR has character resources (eg, Hope and Shadow) that don't replenish and/or reset at the end of an adventure so I think that players are used to not blowing all their points in things like Hope by the end of one adventure. They should therefore already be tuned into managing elements of their character differently than a lot of games and also be more aware that an adventure doesn't necessarily come to a nice neat end when the big bad is killed. However, it may be that certain official adventures are so demanding that they leave a Fellowship spent after the climax of the adventure - you can go a number of ways here and (a) tweak the adventure so that it isn't as taxing, (b) accept that a tough adventure may mean certain PCs are too weak to make the return journey and it's up to the players to deal with that consequence.

[shipwreck]

I've had players make a roll with the Feat die just to see if anything 'interesting' happens. Really I'm just using the die to represent the off-chance that a hazard occurs on their journey home and back (looking for an Eye).

Nice idea!

I assume the Hazard is not keyed to a role, like with the normal Journey rules. It's just something you come up that affects the player?

Correct.

I've also used it to hurry things up and let one half of the party meetup with the other half on the other side of Mirkwood, so they each made a roll and when a Hazard came up I lifted one from TFTW (the butterfly attack, if memory serves).