A Thong and a merry dance

The party face off against the marsh dwellers.
Note the system battle mat which shows the combat stance and
not the physical position of the character

The conclusion of the introductory One Ring adventure was played out last night, with much enjoyment all round again. We actually managed to have all the players round at the same time which was a bonus! The Party managed to blunder and flounder our way through the Mirkwood forest before being forcibly drawn toward the final showdown area, what appeared to be a dis-used temple.

It never seems to amaze me how we all manage to fail what seem to be the most mundane of dice rolling tests. One such episode of head-in-hands rolling left Paul, who has only played 3 RPG sessions in his life, wondering what to do as the rest of the party wandered trance-like into a fetid pond leaving him on his own in the hostile wilderness. It's certainly keeping our GM on his toes thinking of awful consequences as we roll the "Sauron" symbol with alarming regularity. Conversely we seem to roll the hallowed "Gandalf" symbol for completely improbable innocuous searches, leaving him with coming up with a suitable, but not game breaking results. A fine example of this is one of the dwarfs rather optimistically searching for a mythril shirt in a treasure pile of gold coins. The player rolled a Gandalf (which guarantees a success) and a six in his dice making it an extra-ordinary success. So the dwarf spied a glint of mithril in the pile, but far from being the mail shirt he was looking for I think it's suffice to say that the hobbit now has the best protected "crown jewels" in the land!