An active Fellowship phase

[Dunkelbrink]

One of the many great things with TOR is the shifts in focus, and how the storytelling is supposed to go from Loremaster to players in the Fellowship phase. But I've realized I've run into some difficulties in the Fellowship phase in my campaign. The players choose their Undertakings and spend their XP, but I have to pull any descriptions beyond that out of them.

I guess it can be quite a change coming from "normal" games where you go from adventure to adventure and where the GM is in charge of the storytelling all the time. And if your knowledge about the setting is limited it's probably hard to come up with something creative every time.

I would love to hear how other groups' Fellowship phases have turned out. Do your players take initiative, moving the story forward as intended? Do they have common plans or do they take individual turns? If so, do you have any ideas about making this easier? Do you serve them hooks and "force" them to answer things like where they live, what their families and friends are like and what they are doing while not adventuring? Or does that come naturally?

My players are great, but maybe they need some good examples of how to realize the Fellowship phases's potential.

[jacksarge]

I agree, this is a challenging thing for a group. Some of my players are better at this than others, one of our group has decided that during the winter months he patrols & guards the Northern borders of Dale with a band of wardens. He views this as an obligation that is consistent with his character, so in turn I have rewarded him over time with the title of Marchwarden & had him awarded with a sword from King Bard, as well as having command of a group of these wardens himself. Other players in the group need some guidance and suggestions. One player spent some time learning cookery at the Easterly Inn under the tutelage of the hobbits & crafted some mean pies .

I quite like the idea of obligations as an aide to role-playing the activities of a fellowship phase. This is a concept that is used to good effect in the new Star Wars RPGs - although employed differently. Perhaps in drawing up a TOR character we could factor in some existing obligations, such as family, business, debts etc. ?

[Amargen]

I usually have a pretty good group of role-players. so generally, they develop the character they want to play. I make up the background to suit and if they like it, we're off!

the whole idea meshes: if you make sure they have characters they like, they play them well. as far as fellowship and such, if you provide them with enough hooks they generally follow them. if they come up with something they want, your job is to determine the difficulty and such.

really, your job is to help them make their characters the way they want to play. I have players who want to play high-end take on anything chars as much as those who like the driving of those who can't stand against many orcs and such. guess I'm lucky.

long story short (too late) you need to provide a base for your players, things to hang on to, whether an important heirloom or a beloved (or hated!) sibling. with a little guidance they'll take the hints

[Dunkelbrink]

Ok, so no one else had has had any difficulties with the Fellowship phase and the change in storytelling focus? I must say I am a bit surprised by that. I'd say me and my players are experienced players and good role-players, but that doesn't automatically mean that they are also good at leading the story in character driven play, which is quite different from LM driven play.

Any stories from your campaigns about how the players describe their characters lives in between adventures in your games and hints on how to encourage their storytelling would be most welcome. Do they have building projects, desribe what they do for a living or what their relatives do? Thanks jacksarge for some useful ideas here.

[Amargen]

Here's two examples from my DoM campaign:

one character was a Sindarin poet in the court of Thranduil. His standing was based on how well he entertained the king and court, so he was always running off to various places to read new poetry, see new things... he had a fairly high travel, and as part of his character's background he was allowed to pick a few places he'd been before so he could travel to them during the fellowship segues. being well-known as a poet/songwriter, he would take commissions to write them for people and would have to travel to research and such if it wasn't something he could write off of the top of his head. if he knew the fellowship was going somewhere to persuade someone or gather info he would often take the time to see if he could write something that would help. it actually made for some amusing times... such as when he was banished from the court (Eye result) for a poem in Thranduil's honor that apparently was a bit too snarky for the prideful king. that just created more things for him to do as he had to try and get back into the king's good graces. fun stuff. it worked especially well in that if the player didn't have something they wanted to do it was fairly easy to prod them along.

the second is a bit more standard I suppose; a woodsman scholar-healer. he would take the fellowship phase and travel the woodmen-lands gathering herbs and acting as a heal-all. this also allowed him to both gather good news/gossip, and deliver his own. I utilized renown, as his standing was low but he was well-liked by the vast majority of folks. if he wanted to search for rare herbs I allowed him to do so during fellowship. if he didn't spend time here and there tending to his garden the "standing" of his garden would drop. I used that to determine what sorts of herbs he might have. This player didn't really get into the storytelling part until he'd developed a couple of dozen contacts at the various villages and such, so he had some names of people he wanted to see.

hope that helps.

EDIT: sorry I forgot to mention; generally I provide names for NPC's as I'm good at making up names and most people aren't. I work with them to determine family; the elf above had an unusually large family... two brothers and three sisters, which for elves is a lot considering they were all close in age (at players request). the healer had lost all his family in one of the various sicknesses, leaving only an old uncle. this didn't affect things for the character much as he had so many contacts he had to get a three-ring binder to keep track of them...

[Falenthal]

From what Amargen says, I can detect a mistake I've made with my players:
At character creation, they should think not what kind of adventurers are ("I'm the archer with high hunting and awareness!"), but specially what kind of citizens they are. Or, in other words, what do they do for a living. In TOR, being an adventurer is not a way of living.
By now, the heroes in my campaign seem like a group of rovers who have nothing to do when they aren't adventuring. Little by little we are changing that, as I'm making a lot more emphasis in the Fellowship Phases and in giving them personal hooks. When we've had an adventure in the home region of a hero, I always introduce some person there who is related to the player: his brother and parents, a nephew, a potential girlfriend... It would have been interesting that the players themselves had come up with this NPCs, important to them, but we all (me included) still had some old scholl mind where heroes are just adventurers, not smiths, singers, traders, herders, etc.

The woodman has now developed a bit his family, and his last virtue, the Hound of Mirkwood, was explained as coming from his father. The man of Lake-town has opened a Holding and explains how he trades with the Easterlings. The dwarf only wants to recover the Greydelve, and I'm trying to come up with elements to develop his desire into the campaign. The beorning player, on the other hand, never bothers inventing a history for his character. He just likes the adventure part, not the Fellowship one.
But I still think that our Fellowship Phases are waaay far from how funny and entertaining they could be.

[zedturtle]

Yeah, if I'm honest with myself, my players are active in the Fellowship Phase but don't drive it in the way that Dunkelbrink is talking about. They tell me what they want to do, and I usually end up posting training montages that cover it (which hopefully they react to, but not always).

Some of my players have had reasonable fleshed out families and responsibilities, others have let things grow or never made a big deal about expanding those things.

[Amargen]

many players have been trained to think about things as dungeon crawls, just adventuring, etc. the LM is managing all that... they don't submerge themselves in the roles. with TOR, they need a lot more engagement than they're used to. it can be difficult to pull them from their shells. but it's fun when they do... suddenly they start looking at the NPC's as not givers of quests and burdens, but actual people.

grab one of the NPC's in DoM and make them a distant/long-lost cousin of one of the players. all of a sudden they change their minds about them. what fun.

[Dunkelbrink]

Very interesting. I agree with Farenthal that next time I LM a campaign in TOR I'll have the players create the characters as citizens in the world, not first and foremost adventurers. Amargen seems to have succeeded in the active fellowship phase, that Sindarin poet seems like a dream player to have in a campaign. The rest of us are probably struggling in between, with good players doing their best but not fully realizing the potential.

Our heritage is so heavy. The idea of dungeon crawling, being at best an adventurer without roots, at worst a murdering hobo. I see the fear in the players eyes when the storytelling shifts to them. Even using a trait beyond "I am wary, can I have an advancement point?" is hard, as is telling a story from a hazard or letting the players describing a great or extraordinary success as the rules suggests. But I Think that this collaboration in storytelling, with the players being more active and the LM more reactive is a good thing.

I wonder to what extent Francesco wanted this shift in storytelling. There is a movement in Swedish roleplaying right now, shifting towards character driven, even completely improvised play. I see something of that in TOR when I read the Fellowship phase chapter, so I wondered how it works out for other groups.

I've tried to add people, relatives and Holdings to hang on to. Beorn is currently wooing one of the heroes (a Beorning woman) while the dwarf has agreed to speak for Frar and the exiled dwarves. I guess the storytelling will be easier for the players once they have more things to hang on to.

[Glorelendil]

In Hermes Serpent's online game, we typically post our Fellowship Phases to a Google community in between our live Wednesday sessions. Here's one of my (well, my favorite) post:


Grimfast also goes to see Odo the Smith, an ornery and mean-tempered old one-eyed coot, but tolerated and even loved for the quality of his axes. He walks into the outdoor workshop and waits while Odo works a piece of iron on the anvil. Grimfast knows enough about smithing to see that Odo is deliberately making the task take much longer than it should, probably in the hopes that his unwanted visitor will leave. Grimfast finds a place sit, as a way of pointedly illustrating his determined patience.

"Git off my barrel, lazy-bones!" says Odo, now even more annoyed. "Well...what do you want, anyway?"

"I need some advice on my axe," says Grimfast, "and nobody west of the Mirkwood...or east of it," he hastily adds, "knows as much about axes as you do. It's sharper than the first sliver of the new moon, but it feels...awkward. I'm thinking that the handle isn't quite the right shape and..."

"I'll be the judge of what's wrong with it, pup. Give that here." Odo snatches the axe out of Grimfast's hands and stares at it suspiciously.

"Where'd you get this axe?" he demands. "This is no honest blacksmithing. I smell sorcery. Or...worse...dwarves. Somebody has been stealing my work. And badly, at that."

"Well, in fact, it is made by Dwarves. I found myself in Dale and...uh...in need of a new axe, so the Dwarves were the nearest smiths...."

Odo stares at Grimfast. "What happened to the old axe? Did you bury it in yer own soft-sided skull? You troll-brained ninny, you put this axe-head on upside down. No wonder it feels wrong. Not that it will be worth much even right-side up. Dwarven blacksmithing. Hah!" Yet Grimfast cannot help but noting that the old smith keeps studying the fine steel.

"I'll tell you what, young pup, because I heard what you did to that sow-whelp Beran, I'll make you a proper axe. A woodsman's axe. I've been needing a new door jamb, and this piece of soft iron you've been using to bludgeon goblins is just the right shape and heft, so we'll call it a fair trade."

"Well....." says Grimfast, trying to think, "I appreciate the offer, but truth be told I've grown rather attached to that axe. And, uh, also, I happen to be traveling with a kinsman of the smith, and I would dearly like to avoid causing offense by replacing it. Gifts, you know, can sometimes be mixed blessings..."

"Huh. Well, can't say I didn't try to warn you. First time this mallet bounces off an orc you'll remember my offer. Well," he says, his tone softening somewhat as he forgets to put on his usual blustery show, "let's see what can be done with this shapeless lump of pig-iron. I think we're going to need a different kind of handle..."

Odo roots through his stash of cured hickory, inspecting each piece, until he settles on one he likes. He looks at the axe-head for a while, and arches his eye-brows. "I'll tell you what, pup, you leave this gardening tool with me for a day or two and I'll see what I can do. Oh, get that look off yer face, I won't swap out yer precious Dwarf work. I'm a perfessional."

The old smith turns his back on Grimfast and goes puttering about his smithy, pretending the youngster is no longer there. Grimfast fidgets, loathe to leave his axe behind, but eventually realizes he has no choice.

He returns the next day, but Odo is nowhere to be found. Ranger, his faithful Hound, whimpers mournfully. After an hour of waiting he leaves, truly worried.

He returns again the next day, to find Odo once again working glowing iron on his anvil. "Well, what do you want?" he barks. "Oh, yer probably wanting that old axe of yours, huh? Give me a minute."

The minute is more like 30 as Odo works the piece of iron, at one point staring at Grimfast like he can't quite believe a boy that stupid lived to adulthood, until Grimfast figures out what is wrong and starts working the bellows on the forge.

Finally Odo finishes and unceremoniously drops the iron into a bucket of water, where it vanishes with a hiss and puff of steam. "One minute," grumbles the smith. He goes into his house and comes out with a long-ish object wrapped in an old cloth. Removing the cloth he gazes at the axe for a minute, then hands it over, haft-first. "Now don't go and get yerself killed with it."

The axe has been newly mounted on a piece of...not hickory, but he doesn't recognize the wood. Something tight-grained and dark, sinuously carved. At the base of the haft the wood contains a dense, figured knot, and bound around this knob is an iron band. Grimfast peers at it, and sees a variety of small runes, some of them almost erased by recent reworking, that suggests this piece of iron had a previous life.

He swings the axe, and discovers that it feels lighter. The shape of the handle feels just right in his hands, and the heavy, iron-bound knot seems to balance out the weight of the head. Grimfast can't help but smile.

The old smith winks at him, and goes back to his work...