The Mirkwood Campaign
In the following blogposts, I will briefly inform anyone who
is interested in what I did to make running the Mirkwood Campaign for ‘Adventures
in Middle Earth’ (5e version of The One Ring’s The Darkening of Mirkwood) as
enjoyable and straight-forward as possible. But first of all, a little bit about me/ my background/ needs which influence my decisions
My background
Who am I? I am an A level teacher (Politics and Sociology) and also
have a 3 year old son…. Thus…. I am pretty busy and time-poor.
Gaming-wise: I used to run a lot of games in the past (ie before
my son was born!), primarily Call of Cthulhu and D&D/ Pathfinder. Have also run other systems (Fading Suns 1e,
Deadlands 1e). Biggest campaigns I have
run: Masks of Nyarlathotep(CoC), Carrion Crown (PF), & Kingmaker (PF). More recently I have run some Eberron (using
the Cypher system), as well as some Delta Green (with plans for more once I get
the GMs book)
Since becoming a dad, I have struggled to run many games,
and utterly failed to run a campaign style game. All the changes to A levels (the return of
linear A levels – thanks GOVE!) have exacerbated my lack of time….
And to make matters slightly more complicated, one of the
original members of my current gaming group has been very busy juggling 4 jobs
and he is now only an irregular attendee… plus we have all had times when
gaming is temporarily sidelined by real-life events.
Why choose the Mirkwood Campaign (in 5e)?
It is a fantastic read. In my search for a fantastic campaign to run, I read some excellent reviews of The Mirkwood Campaign. Particularly at the Mindlands blog & Antonios S at RPGNet - so thanks for those reviews! I bought it and wow - excellent work - thank you Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. Your Magnum Opus. :)
Out of the tin. I have been very keen to find a campaign I
can run ‘out of the tin’ without any tweaks/ changes, and which is well supported – The Mirkwood Campaign
seemed to offer many things I was after. Otherwise, I knew I would fail if I had to do too much.
Heroic rpging. Life has taken things out of me of late. I needed something a little more uplifting
than the sanity blasting of Delta Green / CoC.
Thus 5e can scratch that itch.
Theoretically. But which 5e
campaign?
Role-playing over
roll-playing. I had other 5e
campaigns: Tomb of Annihilation has some awesome bits….. the first half of Out
of the Abyss looks a blast…. But I wanted to run some heroic 5e which was heavy
on the roleplay…. When I read the Mirkwood Campaign, I realised from the go
that this was an epic campaign which sucked players in to a desperate struggle…
and made them make difficult choices, ones which would have consequences for
them and for their communities…. This immediately appealed to me…. Lots of roleplaying, verbal encounters, the
centrality of Audiences in the game, and the way they have taken ideas from TOR
and reimagined them for 5e, making it far more like the structure of a
Pendragon Campaign….
‘Structured’ Sandbox. I had just played part of a campaign from
Mutant year Zero base on the OSR premise of the sandbox hexcrawl – but it didn’t
work for me. Pure sandboxes never
do. It lacked any narrative urgency. Then again, I did not want to run a game which
was a pure rail road….(have done that with various Pathfinder Campaigns)…. I
was after a sweet-spot of a game which had enough of the pre-scripted cinematic
high points of a linear campaign, which interacted with player choice/ agency
which drove the story where at all possible.
Rather than let the player’s randomly discover the plot, I wanted them
to discover it very soon in, and to be able to make choices based on their
current knowledge of it…. The Mirkwood
Campaign is exactly that.
Parallels with the
Great Pendragon Campaign. It has the
upside of this mega campaign: a structured timeline of events. Lots of key npcs. Epic themes and narrative. Really well written…. Yet in my opinion TMC
does it better: it allows for player choices from the get-go. Not perfectly – but it allows for far more. Like the GPC it has one main adventure a year,
with a ‘fellowshhip phase’ in winter, where pcs are back on their manor/
base. It focusses on roleplaying and
social interaction, with only small melees.
Unlike D&D which is nearly 90% combat at times. (I ran some of the Great Pendragon Campaign
ages ago – we only did about 20 years of it – but it always suffered with my
group from the problem of a lack at times of player agency… they joked about
kidnapping the young king and placing their own child on the throne (but I had
to forbid them…. Something I did not like)… plus the Book of Manors created an
insane accountancy system which bogged the game down, and other quirks of the
system made some knights very rich/ too powerful due to lucky rolls and
over-shadowed others…..)
Bad experience with
TOR. I had briefly played some The
One Ring but had come away disappointed with its system…. Our pcs spent most of
the time wallowing in sadness….. and wanted to see if the 5e version was
slightly more heroic/ cinematic/ fun….. Admitedly
this bad experience may have been more down to the fact that all there was at
the time was the core rulebook (1e)…. A linked issue with TOR was its lack of
depth/ diversity of options/ adversaries in combat which made it a little flat…
bringing me to…..
Cinematic and varied
combat. The Cypher System didn’t
seem to create exciting combat. Pathfinder
is too like an accountancy exercise by 9th level and needs too much
prep. I am aware some would argue 5e is
too simple, and lacks enough choice/ options…. But I think it does enough to
have options, whilst not overwhelming the GM.
13th Age has more tactical options for players, and keeps
things simple for GMs, but it requires all players to play their pc and its own
minigame well otherwise the party get their butts kicked…… I wanted to give 5e another go, and play it from
Level 1 to 20. I was also aware there
were few critters for TOR whereas for 5e there are plenty – though any porting
of critters from 5e to Middle Earth would have to be done with caution. But I am aware that when it comes to combat,
it is good to have some variety in combat.
Familiar with 5e. I am also familiar with 5e. I have played the 5e Starter Boxed set, and
run a couple of games of 5e myself…… It is a relatively simple system at its core
and it is well supported. I was also
keen to run it again, and see how it handles 10th level and beyond.
Resources I needed for play
Here are some core ingredients I gathered before starting:
Middle Earth
resources: Players & Loremasters book; Rhovanion Guide book (pdf) –
printed to annotate; Mirkwood Campaign
book & pdf printed (to annotate); Wilderland Adventures – pdf & printed
to annotate; the LM screen and adventure; The Road Goes on and on map pack;
pre-gens onto a dropbox so folks could choose one/ design a pc around them…. The
Bride was the only one chosen.
5e resources:
Players Handbook; Dungeon Masters Guide; Sly Fourish’s guide to encounter
design http://slyflourish.com/5e_encounter_building.html
); Monster Manual; DM screen (for the conditions in combat, not on the
Loremasters Screen, D’oh!)
Miniatures: my
boxes of Bones from reaper were packed into a bag (orc, goblins, spiders,
wolves, undead, heroes, & men at arms for now)
PLUS…. Chessex
wipe-able 5’ squre combat grid and pens.
Initiative Tracker. Dice.
Next post:
Next week - I will review pitfalls and my musings on how to solve them in the Mirkwood Campaign. No campaign is perfect - and each Loremaster (LM) has to tailor a game to suit their needs. The Mirkwood Campaign is an awesome campaign - but to make it a successful one, the LM will have to put some work into making it so first. Certainly I think more LM advice at the start of the book would have been very useful.
So I will attempt to post soon.
And after that I will then post in more detail on each 'phase' of the campaign as my group work their way through it.
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