Running One Ring: Tales from the Lone-Lands

I said in my not-raving review of One Ring that I wanted to comeback to my evaluation of the game once I had finished a campaign. This is that text. It has several spoilers to Tales from the Lone-Lands, so, you have been warned.

We finished our campaign of Tales from the Lone-Lands. It took some 11-12 sessions, and we skipped one scenario.

We played the scenarios more or less in order, with modest changes. I added some material from Realms of the Three Rings, since the company visited Rivendell to ask Glorfindel about Amon Guruthos and became temporarily entangled in one of the plots mentioned there. I also brought in some Hill-folk material from a first-edition sourcebook, to give the journey north a stronger human texture. 

(You can have a look at the campaign log (which misses the first 4-6 sessions), generated from session transcripts. There is also a fictionalised version of the story, in a Tolkien-esque style, much more pleasant to read,  but slightly less accurate to what happened at the table. I would suggest you go through at least the Tharbad section which shows the result of -adapted- Council mechanics at work.)

Overall, I had to change surprisingly little of the published scenarios. That is worth saying. I often change things heavily when I run published material, mostly to iron out plot inconsistencies and prevent railroading. Here, I mostly let the campaign breathe as written, adding some glue in between sections, deepening some situations, and following the players when they pulled the story in unexpected directions.

And it worked. In fact, it worked extremely well.

The campaign felt mythical, harsh, and powerful. There were moments that will be hard to forget.

The negotiations with the captain in Tharbad became far more than a social obstacle. They turned into a tense, shifting exchange of promises, suspicion, and political compromise, where the cultural and historical texture of the world came to the foreground. In their negotiations for the release a prisoner, the characters evoked tales of fallen Numenor to appeal to the cultural heritage of the wife of the captain, they argued about how a leader must show mercy or mercilessness with mentions to stories of the past, while another group member tried to contact a spy... 

In a following session Ranger and a Hobbit trailing a group of orcs became one of the great action/thriller sequences of the campaign, especially when the Hobbit’s fascination with gold got them into exactly the kind of trouble one might expect. In Imladris, that same Hobbit asked immortal Elves how he might become less greedy, and heard from them tales of Feanor and Thorin Oakenshield.

Then came the journey north. The cold and the pressure. The sense that the world was becoming older, emptier, and more dangerous. They met an Avari whose loneliness touched them deeply, and whose question lingered over the remainder of the campaign: “Why do you continue to play this game of good and evil some god created for us to suffer?”

And then they got to the Hill of Fear.

The company was hunted by a powerful, stealthy, intelligent orc. They were exhausted, wounded, frightened, and increasingly aware that this place might simply consume them. One of the great moments came when the Dúnedain Ranger, always the specialist, the cool one, the efficient one, looked at the others and said something like: “Maybe our quest here is just to survive this place.”

That line landed because it was not just narration. It was not just atmosphere. It came from the sheet. Fatigue, wounds, Shadow, and dwindling Hope had all accumulated until the players could see, mechanically, that their characters were near the end of themselves.

That is where The One Ring worked beautifully.

I have complaints about the mechanics, as menioned in a previous post, but Shadow, Hope, fatigue, wounds, and the slow attrition of the road did exactly what they were supposed to do. They made the quest feel gruelling. They made the players feel the cost of continuing. They made heroism feel less like power and more like endurance.

The final confrontation carried that weight. One hero, alone, facing the orc, knowing that failure would probably mean the death of the whole company. And then, at the end, the sacrifice of one of the heroes to destroy the Hill.

That is the sort of ending you hope for when you begin a campaign, but cannot force. It has to emerge from the players, the scenario, the pressure of the journey, and the willingness of everyone at the table to take the fiction seriously.

So yes: great players, a — ahem — terrific gamemaster, and very well-written scenarios. That combination did its work.

My doubts are mostly mechanical.

The Journey rules still did not convince me. In practice, I often felt that I was rolling dice and then being forced to invent situations on the fly to justify the results. That is not satisfying. It makes the rules feel backwards: first the abstract outcome, then the fiction invented to explain it.

So I dropped much of that structure.

Instead, I prepared several dangerous encounters in advance. Then, depending on the journey roll and the role affected, I assigned the encounter to the relevant character. “This happened while you were guarding the camp.” “This happened while you were hunting.” “This happened while you were scouting ahead.”

Each encounter was then a full scene that posed a problem to the character and was fully role-played. Any rolls were a consequence of the fiction.

That worked much better. It kept the pressure and uncertainty of travel, but gave me concrete material to run. It also let the world feel dangerous in specific ways, rather than as a vague consequence of a failed roll.

It was not really the rules as written. But it was closer to what I want from travel in Middle-earth.

When I run my next campaign, I will probably formalize this. I want to take something closer to hexcrawl procedures and adapt them to The One Ring: prepared locations, encounter tables, terrain, weather, signs of danger, and player choices that matter spatially. The system already has excellent tools for fatigue, Hope, Shadow, and endurance. What I want is a travel structure that gives those tools more concrete ground to stand on.

The Council rules fared better, especially in Tharbad, but again I changed them a bit and used them flexibly.

I did set a maximum number of rolls the players could make to obtain concessions from the captain. But I allowed the goals of the negotiation to change as the conversation developed. I also counted successes separately toward different objectives, rather than treating the whole council as a single abstract pass/fail structure. The players did not need to see all the accounting. I handled it in the background.

That worked because it let the negotiation remain a conversation. The mechanics gave pressure and limits, but they did not strangle the scene. The captain could shift. The players could change tactics. New objectives could emerge. The rules supported the drama, as long as I refused to treat them too rigidly.

The Combat rules are something you do not really write home about. They work, but they are clumsy and because they are asymetric (ie, Player Characters and Non Player Characters use different rules), they are difficult to remember. 

The game is at its best when its mechanics create moral and emotional tension: Hope running low, Shadow creeping in, fatigue accumulating, wounds making every decision more frightening. It is weaker when it tries to proceduralise fiction too abstractly, especially in journeys. But the core emotional economy of the game is strong. It understands that Tolkienian heroism is not about combat tactics. It is about carrying on and hoping when carrying on has become almost unreasonable.

And that is what our campaign felt like. A hard road north. A company growing tired and afraid. A lonely immortal asking why they still believed in good and evil. A Hobbit treasure-hunter trying to become a better person. A dutiful Ranger wondering whether survival itself had become the quest. A hero alone against the dark. A sacrifice at the end.

For all my complaints, that is not nothing.

In fact, that is almost everything I can expect from a fantasy roleplaying game.