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Session 2

 I started the session with a change of policy concerning rogues and surprise attacks. For some time I had not been happy with the way we had played with the way rogues can hide and attack, usually every round. This is especially true with hobbits who can hide behind other creatures... hide shoot, hide shoot etc. I had been reading a few articles here and there about it, and recently I found one that had a more reasonable explanation, which is the concept of not only being unseen, but also unknown. The idea is that just because a rogue hides behind a rock or a corner doesn't mean the viewer doesn't know about them, and when the rogue emerges from cover they are not unseen because they are known and expected.  The gain unknown you have to distract the target or make an effort to remove yourself from their awareness.  The argument here is not about sneak attacks, they can get that fairly easily. We are talking about having advantage every round. Anyway that is what I explained to
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 Old blog is open again, so moved everything back to that... https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/7566600868433602340
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Session 1.

 So I spent some time going over the idea of the game with the players, that they would be a decoy party trying to help the real party succeed. I emphasised to them that we would follow the books/movies to some degree, but there would be some variances.  Reminded them that there would be situations that maybe pre-determined to some degree... like they will not be killing Smaug, even if they can. Some events and facts are written in stone. We started off with where they left the last campaign, completing the task they had been doing for Elrond - gather the Regalia of Cardolan. This campaign had been centred around Bree and those characters had progressed to 11 th level. The restart saw them go back to 10th level and a few characters change to fit the story (extra hobbit for Samwise etc).  They left Rivendell and were returning to Bree, deciding to rest on Weathertop along the way. When they climbed to the top they discovered 13 dead dwarves. One of the dwarves was clutching a scroll of
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 We suffered a delay starting the game, but with luck things will begin in 4 days. I hope to do a post after each game session talking about how things went. I have been reading up on the AiME books to try to absorb background and adapt it to the story we will be building.  For now we are going ahead with the player group (built on the structure of the Fellowship) playing as a decoy team for Bilbo. The first adventure being the destruction of another decoy team by a RingWraith, and the players taking up the mantle at the behest of Elrond and Glorfindel. Plotting out The Hobbit story line is fairly easy, thanks to a book and three movies. The same applies to The Lord of the Rings. What I have found is that the 70 years between those two stories needs to be filled. I was pleasantly surprised with the way The Mirkwood Campaign book treated this. Single main adventures for each year with events occurring around the adventure. What I really liked from this, as I was trying to absorb all of
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Starting again, returning to...

 Well it looks like my old blogspace got out of date, or something. On to the new. So I was playing an AiME (Adventures in Middle Earth rpg) game over a year ago, and it was very good.  We stopped that because I was waiting for a specific book in the series to come out (Moria) and also I was excited about a new campaign book I had purchased thru a Kickstarter - Odyssey of the DragonLords. This was a classical greek setting, which is a subject area I really like (along with Egyptian). By the end of last year (2020) I was growing tired of that game, so it was great that christmas and new year gave us a break. During the break I had a great idea. Lets return to AiME and lets run the game as if the players were the Fellowship of the Ring, or at least a parallel copy of them. Then I watched The Hobbit movies and wanted to include that story in the sequence as well. Sadly there is a gap of over 50 years between the two stories, but what's the point of fantasy role playing if you can'
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