Messy Review: A Troll Hole if Ever There Was One (Tales From the Lone Lands)
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A Troll Hole If Ever There Was One is the first adventure in the Tales From the Lone Lands adventure anthology for The One Ring 2e. I recently finished up this one with my group in our ongoing The One Ring campaign, and this will be a review of the adventure as well as a bit of a play report and review of my thoughts on The One Ring overall so far.
As a disclaimer, this is coming from my perspective as someone who prefers OSR-flavored playstyles, so my criticisms will largely reflect personal preference rather than objective judgements of the quality of this stuff. Iβm sure plenty of more trad-minded folks wouldnβt have the same issues and would be perfectly happy with this.
The Adventure
The adventures in Tales From the Lone Lands are all structured with one or more adventure location and some narrative components to move players between the locations.
In this case, players meet a dwarf trying to find a party to track down his uncleβs lost treasure and a sad man tagging along and trying to convince others to join too. The titular surprise is that all that waits on the other end is a group of trolls forcing the dwarf to find victims for them and holding the sad manβs family hostage.
A large part of the text is devoted to some set piece narrative encounters at the Prancing Pony and along the journey as information would trickle out to possible reveal the plot to players before the reach the trolls.
After this is a location-based structure describing the troll valley and how they might use various elements of it to ambush or fight the party, as well as how the players might succeed against them.
As an OSR-head, the more railroady setup and information reveal along the journey irks me in how itβs presented, but the adventuring location itself is functional and not overly prescriptive. Thereβs also a helpful section of extra tips and optional NPCs and encounters in the end that I appreciated with how they could be worked into it in multiple ways.
Play Report
We played through this in two sessions. In the first they met the dwarf and man and through a series of good social rolls got the truth of the situation before the night was over at the Prancing Pony. This obviated all of the rest of the narrative setpieces, but I was honestly fine with that, and the adventure is still robust enough to work even if straying from the structure the authors intended.
At the valley the fight with two trolls was a brutal slog, killing an NPC, knocking out a few other NPCs, and knocking out a PC.
After that, we went through a skill endeavor (like the 4e skill challenge or a BiTD clock) to rescue hostages from a raft in a lake while avoiding the mother troll who lives in the water. This was honestly the most intense and interesting part of it.
Later, after some downtime in Bree, they returned and spent an entire session fighting the mother troll, eventually killing her and taking a bit of treasure.
My Thoughts
I overall would just prefer less hard structure and a bit more of a toolkit approach with options to randomize or fit in where I could see best.
It worked in play, and everyone had fun, but that was really in spite of how the adventure is written rather than because of it. It has good bones overall, but suffers from the more trad elements of the presentation in my opinion.
As for The One Ring overall, itβs also a mixed bag. It has some really good elements to capture the vibe of Lord of The Rings, such as the option to create songs that provide boons and the focus on journeying as a key element of gameplay. Combat can really bog down though, and essentially becomes a waiting game a lot of the time until someone can roll a piercing blow (critical hit), which is a lot more likely to kill an enemy that wearing them down with regular attacks.
While I like the idea of the Journey mechanics, which uses a roll to determine how many and when encounters will take place along a journey, potentially adding fatigue and making activities on the other end difficult, I have issues with it. The actual table of journey events isnβt quite specific enough to be useful and requires more work from a GM to create less interesting scenarios than having adventure or region specific random encounter tables would do. It more or less boils down to mechanics around making checks and taking fatigue, and would be nice to have a stronger narrative element.
All that said, weβre still having fun and will keep playing. Iβve got higher hopes for the Moria book and the more location-based adventures in Ruins of the Lost Realm that weβll be tackling next. Iβll also see if I canβt houserule some more OSR flavor into it.