"A conspiracy most cracked" starts off with the characters having to cross The Water. The suggestions for this in game terms are:
- Using athletics to swim across (with special successes being used to help people who fail).
- Using scan to find a hollow log on the other side. Then potentially either swimming across (with athletics) to get the log, shooting an arrow and rope over, or using rope and a grappling hook to get the log over (using craft).
First up, using athletics is nigh impossible for the characters. Paladin has athletics 1 (and it is a favoured skill). Esmerelda has athletics 1, and Primula has athletics 0. So that's pretty much a non-starter. All of them spent hope and still failed. I let Esmerelda and Paladin use their Eager distinctive traits, which I thought was generous, but they were unlucky. If one didn't let anyone use a distinctive trait, then this would be a complete non-starter.
Scan wasn't much better. None of them have the scan skill, so even with hope, that wasn't much use.
Even if they had succeeded at their scan roll, at this stage of the story, nobody should have a bow (they get armed in the second adventure). And in terms of craft skills, the hobbits in question have only 1 rank there, and it runs off strength, so it's hard for them to do.
I handwaved past the encounter by letting them go back to town for some rope and letting them use the bow skill to throw it across the river.
Later, I looked at the characters they *hadn't* chosen. The scan roll would have been eminently do-able by Lobelia (who has scan 2, favoured, and the keen-eyed distinctive feature) or at a pinch by Rorimac (scan 1, keen-eyed), but nobody's got the athletics skill to pull off swimming the river. And nobody's any good at craft. And nobody's got a bow (or a grappling hook, for that matter).
It seems like a dreadful mess of an encounter, so I'm curious what other folk did.
To be fair, after that, things seemed to pick up. Riddling the yokels in Waymeet was easy pickings, as was dealing to the owl (where we finished up). I suspect moving forward that the stealth part of the adventure should be well within the characters' skills (all of the hobbits have 3 levels there). It just seems that that first encounter showcases what the pregens *can't* do.