Question abut AiME's "Don't leave the Path"

I was running my first Adventures in Middle Earth game last night, and got slightly confused by the journey rules.

In the short adventure "Don't Leave The Path", where does the journey begin and end, and when do the journey phases take place?

I assume the first boat ride but with the elves is a freebie, and doesn't count. So the journey rules kick in with Embarkation after the Elf Kings hall.

So I roll Embarkation, and get 2 encounters during the journey.

I then run those two encounters. And ask for the two Wis checks to avoid Shadow Points.

Then, partway through the journey, some scripted encounters take place - spiders, hermit, well. These are presumably in addition to the two random encounters.

And then the party arrives at Forest Gate and I roll for Arrival. Then the adventure ends, so presumable nobody cares much about the Arrival step.

I feel like I've gone wrong somewhere. How do the Journey rules interact with the scripted events in the adventure, especially given that the whole adventure is the journey? Anybody run this can help me out?

Nobody played this adventure, then?

Morrus said:

Nobody played this adventure, then?

Click to expand...

No I haven't but found this http://forums.cubicle7.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=8440

There's a fair bit of discussion about it on those forums - I think it's about of an anomaly maybe, 5e journey rules aren't as well integrated as The One Ring rules.

I think you did what was expected from the adventure, even it sometimes the Journey rules leads to some quirks like having to many encounters in a small time frame because of scripted events + random encounters mixed with the rules that prevent long rests while on Journey and such. I wouldnt worry too much. If you go through all the adventures in the book, you notice other strange things about the rules as written in AiME and their application with the adventures as written, especially with the Journey and Audience rules where you expect to roll such and such, but the campaign tells you to roll completely another thing instead. It sure can be confusing some times, specially for non-English speakers like me who need to re-read many time the same passage to understand why they make you roll X when the rules usually tell you to roll Y in the same situation.

In the end, that's one of the few quirks of AiME (others being ''un-winnable deux ex machina fights'' and ''how the hell would my players figure that clue out''). Still I think this is a wonderful system and hope your table loves it as much as I do. Good luck for the rest.

Oops! Somehow I missed this thread...

So, the most basic thing about Journeys in Adventures in Middle-earth is that they're a game structure to make sure something interesting happens along the way, as part of the adventure.

They're not there just to punish characters for traveling (although bad stuff can happen). And they're not there just to reward folks for exploring (though good stuff can happen).

As you mentioned, the journey begins with "The Journey Begins" on page 11. For the earlier trip, the heroes were escorted by a sizable number of Elves and not directly responsible for themselves so there's no need to roll it out. Any time you like, you can narrate a journey like this... we only care about journeys when they're interesting.

The Embarkation might be affected by the earlier Audience, but otherwise you will have 1d2+1 Journey Events. And this is where it gets interesting...

As said above, what we really care about is something interesting happening along the way. Since we know that we got all kinds of prearranged scenes ahead of us, we could ignore those Journey Events, and swap in the prearranged scenes. If I had a time crunch, that's how I would do it.

Or, if we want to spend a lot of game time in Mirkwood (and impress upon our players truly how massive it is) then we could add those random Journey Events in addition to the prearranged scenes. Since Journey Events can be positive or negative it doesn't imbalance the game (in theory, of course any particular group might have really good luck or really bad luck).

[[ Vague Spoiler Warning ]]

If I wanted to mix things up a little bit, I could combine the random Journey Events and the prearranged scenes. For example, if I got "In Need of Help" then I might ask myself "who would be in need of help? Ah.... The Hermit!" and then do a scene with him... maybe it will lead into the prearranged scene or inform it later. Or maybe it will replace it entirely, if the heroes do something really good or really bad.

As you mentioned, the Arrival Roll could be made at the Forest Gate, especially if you're wanting to give folks a Fellowship phase. But if you wanted to keep a tight pacing of adventures, you might have Baldor have heard rumors of a new Inn that has been recently built in the area and is staffed by half-high people (perhaps kin to some of the folks who have helped him through Mirkwood?). Then you could extend the journey a little bit until you got to the Easterly Inn.

Of course, in either case the Arrival Roll will likely just be for flavor. But another time they might be rushed to meet with Beorn or have to sneak into the enemy camp that they just discovered and that Arrival Roll will mean a lot more at that time.