Clipping my Nails Gatha

Gathas are short practice poems that we can use to bring mindfulness into daily activity. I wrote this for clipping my nails, but really, this could be used for any form of body care. Including trimming my nose hairs and ear hairs, two new activities I find myself having to undertake in middle age.

Clipping my nails,
I am aware that this body
is always changing
Impermanence is the way of the world

My Waking Up Gatha

For many years, I recited several poems immediately upon waking:

  1. Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Waking Up” gatha
  2. The Dalai Lama’s “Today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life…”
  3. Haim Ginott’s “It’s my personal approach that creates the climate, it’s my daily mood that makes the weather…”

I tried to combine the essence of these three into a single practice poem.

Gatha

Waking up this morning,
I smile.
I am alive,
I have a precious human life,
and I am not going to waste it.

I will use my energies
to heal myself,
deepen my connection with others,
and build a beautiful continuation.

I will offer peace to others.
I will not lash out or attack others.
I will benefit other life as much as I can.

Flossing my Teeth Gatha

Flossing is a difficult habit for me. My parents didn’t model good tooth care (my father died with no teeth), and it’s always been a slog for me. Which is why I have developed several different practice poems!

Flossing My Teeth I

This is the first one I came up with and taught to my young children.

Flossing my teeth 
and strengthening my gums
I improve my overall health
I know that even the smallest detail matters

Flossing My Teeth II

Between each tooth,
space for patience.
By caring for this body,
I care for the Earth.

I deeply want to care for the Earth, and my body is not separate from the Earth, and so it deserves my patient care too.

Gatha Practice

Gathas are short practice poems. They can help us bring mindfulness, concentration, and insight to daily activities.

Practicing with Gathas

The basic form of practice is to: pause before you undertake some action, come back to your breathing, recite the gatha in your mind or out loud, and then initiate the action with mindfulness. Another method is to keep the gatha flowing through your mind while you perform the action, tying one line to an in breath and the next to an out breath.

I find that gathas, especially when practiced regularly, can wake you up to things you take for granted, expose habit energy, and steadily retrain your inner voice. I also find that my days are more beautiful when filled with poetic reminders of the practice and the wonders of life.

My Gathas

Writing your own gathas is a longstanding Zen tradition. I take great inspiration from my teacher in this, using gatha-crafting as a way to personalize and deepen my practice. Writing gathas makes the practices meaningful to me, and it helps me to reclaim areas of my life that I am less present to (for me, flossing is a great example of a rich area of practice.)

Here are some of mine:

References

Articles about gatha practice:

Sources of gathas from Thich Nhat Hanh:

  • Present Moment, Wonderful Moment
    • A gatha-focused book, containing 49 gathas and Thay’s commentary
  • The Energy of Prayer – How to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice: See Appendix 2, “Buddhist Prayers and Gathas,” pp.145-155.
  • Stepping into Freedom – An Introduction to Buddhist Monastic Training: This book is not just for monastics but is for everyone. It begins in Part One with 68 gathas.

Other sources of gathas:

Phillip’s Notes on The One Ring 2e

I’ve been cleaning up and publishing some of my notes from running The One Ring (2nd edition). This page serves as a place to collect and organize the various posts.

Table of Contents:

  1. For Players
  2. For Loremasters
    1. Regional – Eriador

For Players

For Loremasters

Regional – Eriador

Where Can a New Party Start in Eriador?

I would say the majority of games I’ve played in and observed start at The Prancing Pony in Bree. Nothing wrong with that, of course, it is an iconic location for Lord of the Rings fans and a great meeting place for multiple cultures.

But sometimes we like to mix it up. Here are some suggestions for other starting points:

  • Bilbo’s house in the Shire
  • The Summer Smoke Ring Festival at Staddle
  • The Dwarven House outside of Mithlond
  • The Halls of the Dwarves (detailed in Realms of the Three Rings), particularly Clearweather Market
    • I called the inn in Clearweather Market “The Bedrock”
  • The Bridge Inn at Tharbad
  • The Queen’s Hall at Lond Daer
  • The Last Bridge or Sarn Ford, with a crisis already underway
  • Weathertop, with Rangers asking for help with a crisis from those traveling on The East Road
  • In media res – traveling on The East Road or south on the Greenway, with a destination already in mind

These are suggested with the idea of being a newly formed mixed-culture party. Other locations might be suitable with a more restricted set of cultures.

References

Running The One Ring 2e for Two Players

I’ve been running a campaign of The One Ring for two players for over a year now. Questions about adjusting TOR for two players seem to come up surprisingly often, so I wanted to share my notes.

In short, I recommend giving 5 extra experience points, adjusting the fellowship pool amount, and playing as you normally would. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be!

Table of Contents:

  1. Character Creation
  2. Fellowship Pool
  3. Fellowship Focus
  4. Situational Difficulty
  5. Combat
  6. Benefits of Two Players
  7. References

Character Creation

I do not recommend reducing the attribute TNs (i.e., calculating from a base of 18 instead of 20). While it makes things initially easier, players can ramp up to a power level where it’s difficult to challenge them. Starting with base 18 makes this happen much sooner.

I do recommend adding 5 extra starting experience for each player.

Players need to be aware that in a two player game, not all combinations of cultures and characters will work. I recommend some extra hand holding here to make sure that there’s good coverage of the necessary journey/council/combat/healing skills.

We have not used the Strider distinctive feature in our game, and this hasn’t been a noticeable difficulty for the party. It is an option though.

You could start the characters at Valour and/or Wisdom 2.

Fellowship Pool

DanW uses (8 – player count).

“I sometimes calculate the base pool = 8 less number of heroes, rather than just number of heroes. It boosts small parties and debuffs larger ones, with no impact on a typical party of 4.”

We play 1.5 hr sessions, I gave them with an extra +1 to the baseline (i.e., 3 points per session before cultural and patron bonuses). The end result is effectively the same as DanW’s.

Fellowship Focus

With just two players, we don’t play with fellowship focus. No shadow point when the other takes a wound, only +1d when assisting.

Situational Difficulty

My personal approach was to start with mimimal adjustments, tell the players that we might have to adjust things along the way if we find there’s a balance problem, and then just dive into the game.

I think the big pitfall to avoid in a two player game is making things too easy out of worry about difficulty. I observe my own tendency to pull punches and give extra rewards when playing with two players. And this does help in the beginning, but it’s also easy enough to get yourself into a spot where it’s hard to challenge the players.

I recommend remembering you have the option to offer Success with Woe instead of a Failure in many circumstances. This can allow the players to push the narrative forward instead of getting stuck, while having fun, awful setbacks accompanying it.

Combat

Fights are definitely a place where I worry – I don’t want to make every fight easy, but I also don’t want to wipe the party unexpectedly. In the first combat roll of our campaign, one of my players took nasty wound and I thought it was going to be a TPK. But since then, they have gone better than expected.

It’s fine for parties to struggle with combat. My players have gotten wise about recruiting help, using situations to their advantage, and finding alternatives to combat.

Moria warbands are a good way to model help from multiple NPCs.

I recommend giving one of the players the Cleaving quality on a piece of treasure – this helps keep the momentum up in fights.

I’m open to Skirmish stance from Strider mode, they haven’t reached for it yet. But it’s something to consider.

Benefits of Two Players

We focus so much on the adjustments needed for smaller parties, I just want to talk about some of the benefits I see from my small group:

  • Scheduling is so easy – we played 44/52 weeks in 2025!
  • Each player gets plenty of spotlight time, and they also get plenty of breaks
  • Splitting the party is easy to manage – switch back and forth between players.
  • Decisions get made quickly

References

Crime and Punishment in Eriador

Something that has come up in several different games of The One Ring has been the topic of taking someone prisoner and delivering them to justice in some settlement or other. This comes up especially often in relation to a certain published adventure with a despicable dwarf, but has also happened in other situations as well. I wanted to capture my thoughts on this matter, and how I approach this type of situation in my games.

I understand the drive to do this. We are roleplaying Tolkienian heroes, oriented to the good, and non-Orc enemies should be captured and tried by those with more authority. The problem is that the sense of justice and judgment that holds in our world doesn’t really hold in Eriador. We have a “justice system,” and we put punishment and locking people up out-of-sight and into the hands of “qualified people.”

But the towns and villages that remain in Eriador are small, disparate remnants of an emptied, collapsed kingdom. There is no central authority. Each settlement makes their own law. Nobody wants to take prisoners off of your hands. Nobody wants to lock up prisoners for long periods of time, continuing to feed and care for them in the meantime. People certainly would not appreciate you to bringing problems INTO their homes!

In fact, what we think of as “jails” or “prisons” are (mostly) non-existent!

  • Different villages might have a lock-hole to keep a drunk overnight or to briefly hold a criminal awaiting trial. This would be the most that you might find, and even this might be something that doesn’t exist!
  • Bree would likely have the above, or even a small jail of sorts. But a 1e adventure notes they would have to construct a gallows for an execution, they don’t have one ready.
  • The Shire is not a place I would take prisoners for justice…
  • Perhaps the Halls of the Dwarves are similar to Bree here.
  • Tharbad is probably the one place with a proper prison, but conditions are grim and justice is wanting in that place. Also, why would the Master want to take in an external prisoner, unless he was someone who escaped from the city that will be publicly executed as a warning to others?
  • Why would the elves appreciate you bringing a bandit to their borders to deal with?

If you bring a prisoner to one of these places, the first question that should arise is what do these people care about the alleged crimes?

  • If you take a dwarf to the Halls of the Dwarves (where they were already exiled from!) for troubles in another land, what do you expect these people to do about it? It didn’t happen in their land, you were the one who brought him back.
  • Perhaps you’ve taken a problematic dwarf to Bree for the Reeve to dispense justice. But the relevant crimes in Bree, at best, might be a failure to pay for goods and services. You probably had something bigger in mind for punishment!

In many cases, the people are likely to not be interested, and if they can be persuaded to care, they’re going to offer lesser punishments than what the players are expecting, including the prisoner’s likely freedom.

Because the nature of punishment is not quite the same as what the players are expecting. If you’re not keeping prisoners long-term, you are left with a small set of outcomes. These outcomes are not oriented around an ideal of “justice” as much as maintaining social stability and limiting the possibilities of vendettas and revenge cycles. Execution is extremely unlikely as an outcome, though if crimes were heinous enough it might happen. That means you’re left with:

  • Financial settlement (e.g., paying a fine, weregild for a death)
  • Another form of restitution, like a period of indentured servitude or manning a necessary-but-unenjoyable position for a time
  • Exile or outlawry (declaring them outside the protections of society, free to be hunted down and killed)

This judgment is likely to be decided by a local leader, a council of leaders, possibly involving a neutral arbiter to set the terms of settlement among the parties.

So, for the most part, nobody’s going to help you take prisoners off your hands and serve them justice (unless you’ve been asked to do just that). If they do, it’s not going to be the “justice” you’re wishing for. They’re likely to be banished at best, and that means their freedom to do the same elsewhere.

What options are left?

  • Make the prisoner swear an oath before releasing them (which should be taken very seriously, very Tolkien-esque)
  • Try to scare someone straight
  • Hope that the hard life in the wilds will care of killing them eventually
  • Eat the misdeed shadow and dispense your own justice

A tough set of choices for the heroic players who wish “justice” to be served in a more “civilized” manner!

References