Journey & Council: Making Travel and NPC Interactions in Your D&D game Epic Like J.R.R. Tolkien With 2 Simple Mechanics From The Lord of the Rings RPG

“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Greetings, 3WD-verse. DM Chris here! Since the moment I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the world of D&D has, for me, always been lensed through the subtle magic of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Every wizard is Gandalf, every fighter or ranger is Aragorn, etc. Hell, I’ve secretly wished to call Halflings by their true name for decades. Imagine my joy at finding out that there was a D&D 5e conversion of the popular One Ring game in the works. But what I didn’t expect was a new take on familiar phases of the game that we often leave to old, outdated methods.

The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Sourcebook by Free League contains new races, classes, rules and generators for D&D 5e to help you bring the world of Middle-Earth to life at your table. It’s available in both hardback and digital copies, but be forewarned that you’ll need access to the rules of 5e as well. The sourcebook only contains the new information and lore, so the basic rules and combat are still handled in the traditional fashion. 

Taking the same general tact, I’m only going to be talking loosely about the specific rules from the new material. If any of this inspires you, I recommend purchasing the sourcebook. Content creation is one of the hardest jobs in the business, and the least we can do is reward the creators.

Once the digital copies became available, I began crafting an epic 5e Middle-Earth campaign for our gaming group using the new sourcebook, but like any DM I wanted to see how some of the newer rules they’ve created worked in a real-world setting beforehand. Nothing stalls a game faster than you not having a good handle on a new mechanic that you’re dropping on your players. 

Fortunately, DM Dave’s Birthday OSR Dungeon Crawl presented me with the perfect opportunity to playtest 2 of my favorite new mechanics — Journey & Council — from The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying in a fun, one-shot session. With a little tweaking to fit the Basic Fantasy RPG rules, of course.

Journey

We’ve all tried the myriad ways to simulate travel and the inherent dangers in our campaigns. Random encounters quickly become predictable. I’ve used the Montage system to enhance the collaborative story side of it for the last several years, but there is still something missing. What I like about the Journey mechanic is that it provides a nice balance between the two. It makes travel much more character and story focused, while providing the appropriate threat level. And you get to give out Journey Roles to all the members of your Traveling Company, so everyone is involved rather than focusing on one player for survival.

• Journey Roles: There are 4 different types of Roles players can take when beginning a Journey — Guide, Hunter, Look-out, Scout. Each of them participates and adds to the story of your Journey, but we’re going to focus on the Guide. The Guide makes the initial Pathfinding Check during each leg of your Journey, while the other Roles resolve Events during the Journey. More on Pathfinding and Events below. For Dave’s game, I printed out handouts with the Role name and a brief description to help everyone keep track. Let your players lean into the story of their Journey through their Role choice.

• Set Journey Path: Here is where the party will decide on a path between their current location and the destination. The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying uses a hexcrawl system, but that can be easily adapted to any travel style. The important part is how many legs will the Journey have? The simplest way to think of it in 5e terms might be how many random encounters would you use for the length of the Journey. For the Birthday game, we used a narrative style of travel so I went with a leg being about a day and a half of game time and one Event per leg to keep it relevant but not repetitive. Now comes the fun part…
• Make Pathfinding Checks:- In The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying, the player who has the Role of Guide makes a Pathfinding Check at the beginning of each leg of the journey to determine how far the party travels before encountering an Event. To convert to an OSR-style game without a hexcrawl, I tweaked them to be DC 15 Wisdom Check that affected the other Role’s Events — success providing advantage on the Event roll, and failure providing disadvantage. 

• Resolve Events: This is the part of the Journey mechanic that really grabbed my attention. I’ve already professed my admiration for the Montage system, but when I first glimpsed the Journey Events table it was love at first sight. Now, instead of just collaborative story challenges, there could be actual consequences. There are saving throws and other goodies, but what inspired me the most were the little story prompts to help explain why the Scout lost his footing and ended up in need of some medical attention. Sometimes, that’s the difference between a good session and a bad one. For Dave’s game, I tweaked the Journey Events to use Hit Points instead of Shadow Points (you really need to check out the sourcebook). 

• Ending the Journey: We often end long travel sequences without much ado. The party arrives in the village/temple/ruins at some point in the day or night and proceeds accordingly. Neat and tidy, but what about all of the walking, short sleep, and danger they’ve experienced over the last few days of game time? In The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying, your players might experience levels of exhaustion after an arduous Journey. Even cooler, Events during the Journey can affect the Constitution Saving Throws of the party. I left this part out of the OSR game, as giving players with 2 hit points a level of exhaustion felt like I might as well just fire arrows at them from behind my DM screen. 

Council

NPC interaction, like travel, has long been a staple of our games. There are tons of resources for how to enhance that facet of the game, but what I like about the Council mechanic is that it takes the important interactions and focuses it back on the character’s skills and abilities, versus the player controlling that character. It also adds a touch of distinction to audiences with game changing figures.

• Introduction: First, a spokesperson for the party (or Traveling Company) must be chosen. Probably going to be the face character, but let the players decide. In The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying, the spokesperson makes an Introduction with a Charisma Check, choosing from Persuasion, Deception, or Intimidation. For the Birthday game, I went with straight Intelligence checks. A level one face character in an OSR game probably dies before you get to this encounter.

• Set Required Successes: Next, you’ll need to decide how many successes does this request require. Reasonable, Bold, or Outrageous requests have rising success levels, which frame the next step in a Council, Interaction. For Dave’s game, I set the required successes at 2 out of 3 Intelligence checks for a Bold request.

• Interaction: Think of it as a social skill challenge. Here is where your players will make their choice of Charisma, Intelligence and Wisdom Checks to fulfill the required successes from earlier. Your challenge will be to set a DC appropriate with their audience, being either Reluctant, Open, or Friendly. 

• End of the Council: Depending on how the players did in the Interaction step, the end of the Council will bring one of three possible outcomes — Success, Success with Woe, or Failure. Success and Failure are fairly easy concepts, so I’m going to focus on Success with Woe. This provides players with a way to turn a Failure into a Success, albeit at a steeper cost. Great spot to add side quests or recurring villains.

Final Thoughts

The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying, in addition to being really freaking cool because it’s about Middle-Earth, also contains some welcome new mechanics around time-worn practices that with a little tweaking can be used in almost any campaign setting. Pick it up and try the Journey and Council mechanics in your games. ‘Nuff said, I’m getting back to constructing my epic Lord of the Rings 5e campaign.

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