You’re going to see the elves and everything!
The first thing I noted when I ran my very first journey with The One Ring rules was how the gameplay mirrors Tolkien’s writing. Though I’m mostly all-in for the immersion and rules-in-the-background, the clear transition from the exploration/interaction to travel evokes the sense of “setting out” so common throughout The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
Second, the journey itself actually takes some time. There’s no “fast-forward” button that the players click to get to their destination. There are events and hazards, and there are tests for various travel roles. The rules encourage the Loremaster to play with narration (e.g., the Eye Awareness tracking) and account for the passage of days. Finally, there’s Travel Fatigue. All of which makes the journey feel more tangible. And speaking of tangible…
Narration and worldbuilding during The One Ring journey
If you love Lord of the Rings, chances are that you also love the setting’s depth – and how that’s conveyed in the books. But this particular aspect of the Professor’s style actually doesn’t play out very well at the table. I mean the long-winded expositions, ones that are a major turn-off for many readers. I, for once, love them! But I learnt to let them go. I know it’s hard. It feels like it’s against the spirit of what TOR is supposed to be about, especially during journeys!
Do we walk in legends or play in a cozy basement after daylight?
Look, the point here isn’t to read aloud Tolkien’s flavor text (though doing it sparingly and within a tight wordcount! – can be a real treat). It’s about having your journeys in The One Ring RPG feel to your players like they are taking part in what they’ve read in the books or seen in the movies. So, instead of writing or improvising pages of narrative exposition, boil it down to the essentials: What do the characters see, what do they hear?
Mountains or forests in the distance don’t have to be labelled immediately. You don’t have to tell the stories about who built the ruins they’re passing by. Instead, just hint at peaks covered in snow even in the heat of summer. Or at the stone columns that they heard to be already old when the first grandfathers of the Northmen settled in the land. That will make the players ask questions. And in answering those, you’re no longer performing a monologue. You’re pulling your players into Middle-earth.
What happens on the road – the journey events in The One Ring
Now, the worldbuilding doesn’t mean much if there’s little happening in the world, right? That’s why there are events along the way. But they are a totally different beast. In the core rules, the events on the journeys come in the form of very dry, abstract snippets, a rules’ scaffold, really. I’ve seen many Loremasters resolving them, just like that, as if the rules were all that there is to the journey events. And I’ve also seen it becoming quite bland quite quickly, too. The “why?” is as plain as it comes here. But the solution isn’t.
First, the role/skill test and event type/consequences pairs are just that – a scaffolding to build upon. There are some hints in the TOR RPG core book, p. 114, for the journey events narrative already. But those also are just suggestions and idea seeds. The supplements contain a complementary type of event descriptions, covering only the narrative parts. To make the journey feel like one, you’ve got to merge those two parts – the rules and the narrative – together. How?
The game and the narrative come hand in glove
The dice rolls, skill tests, Fatigue points, and all the mechanics described in the rules are the engine making the whole “game” part of the RPG happen. But alone, they aren’t very attractive or inspiring. Sure, there’s a tension of whether the party makes it to the destination and in what shape. But that’s just secondary. It’s the story that makes it so interesting, so much worth it.
For each event, you have to know how to resolve it. The party finds signs of a bandit attack and wants to try and rescue the captives while, unknowingly, walking into an ambush (see “The Tree of Sorrow” event, Ruins of the Lost Realm, p. 64)? You better have those enemy stats at hand – and some tests to follow the trail and sniff out the trap before! For a “Look-outs/Explore – Ill-Choices” event you rolled up on the table from TOR p. 112, you’ve got to have a logical, realistic reason for asking the test. And it’s not “Because the book says so”.
Plan your journey ahead
This might not make you happy. In my experience, the best journeys aren’t ones resolved step-by-step at the table, following the rules as the action unfolds. Because it gets very procedural and predictable after just a few sessions. But I don’t want to get to the shortcomings of The One Ring journey rules (today).
To really bring out the dynamics of exploring Middle-earth, you’ve got to actually plan your game ahead. That might mean making a mid-session break for you to work the whole thing out. I’ve been there myself, and I’ve seen Loremasters looking up table after table and asking for a roll after roll, overwhelmed by the amount of information to include in the narration, provided there even was one. Because improvising a third narratively credible reason for a skill roll in 10 minutes, with the party progressing through a ruin-dotted landscape, and interacting with NPCs, can overbook your mental space for the next several hours.
The breathing space
Instead, you can take a 10 to 15-minute break after establishing with the players how they intend to travel – the roles, the route, etc. Then, get yourself the map, something to write on it, and any tables you need. List all the predicted rolls and events on some notepad, and then try to picture the whole journey happening like a movie trailer. You’ve already got the content of all the scenes. But with just that little pause, you can tweak things like the place where a shortcut can actually fit on the map. Or when an ambush might make more sense. Where is the party likely to camp? You don’t need to write anything down, though marking the spots on your map might help a lot!
Now, having your journey prepared, you can move on to the actual gameplay. But instead of asking for skill rolls out of the blue, you can tie those to the narrative. Remember those hints that pull the player further into the setting? Now’s where they truly shine! Will the players try to find alternatives to the skill tests the rules’ table asks of them? Even better! That means they’re engaging with the world not as a board or computer game with pre-programmed buttons to press. And you can play with tones and pace, too! You can make a long, toilsome leg of a journey feel like one by dragging the narration a bit. You can foreshadow things in the distance, because you now know when and where they’ll be happening.
Follow the Road, if you can!
So, it’s just these three little things I did to really step up my journeys in The One Ring RPG: swapping hints and interaction for exposition monologue, making sure I’ve got both rules and a piece of narrative for each journey point, and not running the travels totally off the cuff. Well, that last one isn’t wholly true… I mean it is true in general, but you’ve got to get a bigger picture.
Some journeys in TOR take some time, both in the game’s world and in the real one. Some adventures are just long journeys all by themselves. So, naturally, you’ve got to improvise a healthy dose of those. But “travel 4 days north-west of Bree to rescue some hobbits from bandits” isn’t the case here. So my final tip here is to assess the scale of any journey first. If it’s a short escapade through a well-known landscape, you can make it without a mid-session break or preparing too much of a narration. If it’s going to take a dozen in-game days, on the other hand, you’d better look at that map for a while and come up with something – either to wrap up the long trek fast or to intersperse it with some events.
So, enjoy being swept off your feet by the Road!
