Shadow from blighted places?

[Falenthal]

The reason the question came up is the Marsh Bell actually requires a lot of travel and searching in a Blighted place and the players were racking up Shadow points pretty quick, and that is an introductory adventure.

My experience is that not every adventure stacks on Shadow points.

So, I think it's alright to gain lots of Shadow points in one adventure if the theme deserves it (visiting Dol Guldur, or entering the Inner Sanctum of Dwimmehorn), while in other adventures (Of Leaves and Stewed, Kinstrife,...) the group won't probably gain any Shadow point unless they misbehave.

After all, the Heal Corruption Undertaking exists for some reason and it makes more sense after a harrowing experience.

[Majestic]

I've got a HIgh Elf character in my game who has been wanting there to be a Blighted Place he could journey through. But his luck has been so poor that - try as I might for a randomly Blighted Place - I couldn't roll an Eye of Sauron, and thus it took forever for him to encounter one. A few days ago he finally got to do his thing when the party traveled through a Blighted Place.

If you're running into them all the time (and provided you aren't hanging out regularly in places like Dol Guldur), somebody might be making their world more harsh than the game intended. An Eye of Sauron only occurs about 8% of the time, and the maximum amount of times the LM should be rolling (to randomly see if an area is Blighted), even in Shadow Lands, is four.

[mirkwoodfalcon]

I've got a HIgh Elf character in my game who has been wanting there to be a Blighted Place he could journey through. But his luck has been so poor that - try as I might for a randomly Blighted Place - I couldn't roll an Eye of Sauron, and thus it took forever for him to encounter one. A few days ago he finally got to do his thing when the party traveled through a Blighted Place.

If you're running into them all the time (and provided you aren't hanging out regularly in places like Dol Guldur), somebody might be making their world more harsh than the game intended. An Eye of Sauron only occurs about 8% of the time, and the maximum amount of times the LM should be rolling (to randomly see if an area is Blighted), even in Shadow Lands, is four.

If I remember right, using the table to determine if an area is blighted is more or less an optional rule... I think the rulebook leaves it open for the LM to manually determine if a place is blighted, or use the table if they aren't certain.

It is left to the discretion of the Loremaster to determine
whether a place is considered blighted or not...

...If the Loremaster isn’t sure and needs a hard and fast rule
to determine if an area currently traversed by the company
is blighted, he can roll the Feat die a number of times as
indicated on the table above.

At least, that's how I use blighted places. Anyone else have a different experience with this?

[Majestic]

I completely agree. Of course, about 95% of the places adventurers actually set foot in (not counting specific, dark places, like Dol Guldur and other fortresses) are just hexes on a map.

Or do you specifically target certain hexes, or areas within a hex (which of course represents a huge area) and determine that your party moves right through a blighted place?

In other words, short of specific, story places (within the adventure you are playing), the vast majority of times this will come up is during a Journey.

I wasn't referencing specific story times - when in the course of the adventure you're telling you know the place is Blighted - but rather those times where they happen upon a Blighted place without intending to (which in my experience happens during travel). That's why I referenced a known 'Dark Spot' like Dol Guldur as being an exception.

[svjon]

There seems to be some confusion about the rules here. I own the original set (soft bound from 2011). In these rules there is nothing about rolling an Eye of Sauron to determine if a place is blighted. There is only a table stating the frequency of corruption tests depending on what kind of region the players are in.

It seems like this has changed in the recent revised set of rules. I only noticed this because in Table 4.1 on the lore master's screen an additional column "Area is Blighted on a [Eye]" has appeared, and I didn't know what to make of this (though the discussion here has clarified a lot). However, in the PDF summarising the revisions of the rules I find no mention of any change here. An omission???

It may very well be that the stacking up of shadow points mentioned in the original post is due to this earlier version of the rule.

[zedturtle]

The clarification is found in the book that came with the Loremaster's Screen, aka the Lake-town book.

And I understand your confusion... it seems like this is one of the rules in the game (and there are a few like this) where there's a spectrum of interpretation... e.g. somebody can read the rule in such a way as to require tests very often (creating a feeling of doom and dread, like Frodo and Sam trudging their way through Mordor) and others interpretations can create tension but relatively few rolls (like Merry and Pippin in Fangorn Forest).