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doctheweasel wrote:Is the timeline/story broken up into sections?

Yes, it's broken down as follows:

The Last Good Years (2947-2950)
The Return of the Shadow (2951-2960)
The Gathering Gloom (2961-2966)
The Years of the Plague (2967-2974)
The Darkening of Mirkwood (2975-2977)

... Each year having it's own mini-chapter, much like the Great Pendragon Campaign is. It means that you can easily play each of the above then have a break before picking up a later period.

Just received mine!!!! Comments to be made later tonight!

Are there any plans to put out a print-friendly version of the file? It would make it substantially easier for me to run these adventures for my group.

In addition to being divided into several periods or phases, the usual schedule of one adventure per year provides natural breaks. The thirty year time span is likely enough for three generations of human adventurers. I am flirting with 50 and certainly am not up for adventure the way I was at 30. I would expect prime adventuring age to be 16-30, probably ending earlier for those who choose to become parents, unless they return to adventuring when their children come of age.

I am quite speechless from reading this supplement. My campaign, The Lord of the Rings: Tales of the North, begins next Wednesday and I am now reworking my campaign to include the material from Darkening. I can honestly say that it is the best material for a campaign I have ever read.

The quality of this product is amazing. The writing is superb and the art is incredibly and really allows for an immersion into the Tale of Years. This will immensely helpful with writing the campaign and I am in love with this supplement.

I return with yet another favour to ask. Whilst we now have an embarrassment of riches in terms of your feedback on our web page for Darkening, (thank you!)the PDF on Drivethru/rpgnow has one lonely rating. Could you help us out?

Just wrote a short review on Drivethru. I didn't have enough stars to give it. Maximum was five.

-Eirik

Well, you chaps have certainly convinced me! I don't usually do pre-written campaigns, coming up with my own tends to suit my GMing style better, but Darkening sounds so damn good.

I can only agree with the choir of praise for Darkening in this thread. I think Tolkien would be proud if he saw how other storytellers continued on and expanded his work. The stories in Darkening are tales of heroism and standing against the shadow, but also of sadness and loss. In many ways I think the theme and tale told surpasses (some of) the professor's work.

If there's one thing I would have different it's the appendix and the information on the beasts that we already had in Heart of the Wild. That book is necessary for using Darkening anyway and this is a waste of space. I would have preferred a few more pages of designer's notes, thoughts about the project and how to use the book as a whole. But, that is really a margin note; overall the Darkening of Mirkwood is one of the best rpg sourcebooks I've hade the please to read, if not the best. And of course even more so for a Tolkien fan.

Magnus

Jon Hodgson wrote:I return with yet another favour to ask. Whilst we now have an embarrassment of riches in terms of your feedback on our web page for Darkening, (thank you!)the PDF on Drivethru/rpgnow has one lonely rating. Could you help us out?

It's the least I could do Jon, just posted this review of Drivethru (and Amazon for what it's worth):

Summary: the best product so far in an already exceptional line of material.

C7 and Sophisticated Game have produced a campaign book that surpasses even the Great Pendragon Campaign in quality of content and support for their respective GMs. This book perfectly combines high production values, consistently glorious artwork, engaging writing, and wonderful ideas into an epic campaign of dwindling hope, great deeds, and the return of the Shadow to Mirkwood.

Despite the fact that this is set within Middle Earth, the time between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and characters will rub shoulders with many famous and powerful entities, they do not lose or have their agency demeaned in any way nor do they play 'second fiddle' to the major NPCs. Anyone who plays RPGs in pre-defined settings (and famous ones at that) will know just how challenging, nay almost impossible, this can be to achieve. The Darkening of Mirkwood (DoM) effortlessly avoids this problem with engaging ideas, plots, and a developing environment that the characters of their fellowship actively contribute to and affect.

Predominantly for Loremasters, in fact I'd recommend that players do *not* buy this product as it would spoil their surprise and enjoyment, DoM provides LMs with enough information to run many game sessions of TOR. Some have criticised C7 for the small line of products that exist for TOR but between this and the other supplements there is easily a couple of years of weekly gaming to be had within their collective pages. TOR already has more content than I'll ever need and with more on the way this is only set to improve. There is no better time to buy into this game for those still sat on the fence.

Buy this product if you're a current TOR GM. It's absolutely essential to running TOR within Wilderland and uncovering the story of how the land declined in the years before the War of the Ring.

Buy this product (and the rest of the TOR line!) if you were waiting for enough material to be available in order to run an involved and detailed campaign to a wonderful climax and conclusion.

Buy this product if you're an RPer that is just interested in reading a supplement that perfectly delivers on its remit and design goals - ie, a campaign world developing and changing over time and how PCs are engaged and interact within it.

Buy this product if you're just a non-RPing Tolkien fan. It's wonderfully written and presented and outlines a story and area not well covered in other available material.

... Just, simply, buy this product!

I type this with a straight face but DoM is more than just an RPG supplement; it's a work of art and the love and respect for its source material shines from every page like the light of Eärendil! Awesome, inspiring, sad, melancholic, epic; it has everything you want from a campaign set in Middle Earth.

A must buy; what a high bar C7 and SG have set for themselves and all other RPG companies.

... Feel like such a gushing fanboy at the moment but I sat up reading 'Darkening' into the early hours and I'm just blown away by how amazing it is.