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October 10th–11th, the Berlin International Roleplaying Convention takes place in Berlin/Germany. See: https://bircon.berlin/
It describes itself as a "two-day pen and paper, tabletop roleplaying game extravaganza with a ton of games, vendors, panels, an epic raffle, a special afterparty, a welcoming atmosphere, food and drink, and more." Inter alia, several Free League RPGs will be played, but TOR is so far not listed.
I do not write this prologue to this post IOT advertise BIRCON, but to ask for ideas, which TOR adventure you would suggest to play with 5 strangers in 3,5 hours?
Last year at BIRCON, I was the only Game(Lore)Master offering a TOR Session and that went all in all really well (you can discover our table in the gallery with some effort) - but had its challenges. We (3 gentlemen and 2 ladies) played The Star of the Mist (because at that time it was the only adventure in English that I had at hand), using the pre-generated characters from the FL website (btw: the players loved them and everyone took theirs home) - and needed already 1,5 hours to have the player heroes acquaint each other in the Prancing Pony, meet Bilbo there (and the Hobbit girl character right away tried to steal from him, can you believe it...), and accept the mission to find out what that eery blue light might be that can be seen at the southern Blue Mountains. Traveling there took us another hour because there were some substantial encounters on the Greenway and the player heroes really took their travel log entries serious.
Encountering the Brigands then and dealing with that lot needed another 45 minutes, and in the last 30 minutes they entered the entrance of the forsaken dwarf mine... and that was it then. Time and Game over.
So we really had fun - but did not accomplish the mission. I mean - one could say "the journey is the destination" and again, everybody enjoyed getting to know TOR (the player heroes all did not play TOR before, but loved Tolkien and therefore joined the session). But it left us somehow in limbo.
That leaves me to repeat my entry question: any ideas, which adventure is better suited for 3,5 hours with 5 people that are strangers to each other and have no clue of TOR?
If no suggestions come forward, I probably go with the "Fort Arlas" Landmark from RotLR and will put everyone immediately into that river boat and skip the get-to-know-each-other / receive a mission and the journey parts.
Last point: in 2025, when I provided a TOR session as Loremaster at BIRCON, 14 people listed for joining as player heroes, but only 5 can actually join a session (the other 9 went to different tables to play randomly chosen RPGs). So there seems to be a requirement for additional TOR Loremasters that provide TOR sessions. So if you happen to be around or always wanted to travel to Berlin, you could make some player-heroes happy by joining BIRCON as Loremaster (see here for how to submit a game to BIRCON: https://bircon.berlin/games/).
To clarify: I am not part of BIRCON nor do I have any commercial interests in that event, I just think these are great opportunities. Let me know what you think about this (and, dear forum moderator, whether it is appropriate to post such events here).

Personally, I really like The Old Dwarven Mines or Shrouded Islets from Ruins for this kind of play.

Linklite,
thanks for the suggestions, very appreciated.
For the Old Dwarven Mine: do you have any idea whether some enthusiast made a PDF of that mine plan and put it somewhere for downloading?

Do you mean a player safe version of the map on p54? If so, yes, they have. It's on the unofficial TOR Discord Server. Go to Resource library and search "player safe maps", the post by Veiu has one.

Awesome, thank you very much for that information!

Do you mean a player safe version of the map on p54? If so, yes, they have. It's on the unofficial TOR Discord Server. Go to Resource library and search "player safe maps", the post by Veiu has one.

Linklite,
coming back to the Player-Safe maps: I found them on Discord. This Veiu guy really deserves a medal for that work!!
Thanks again very much for the hint, this will greatly deepen the game experience of our TOR group and allow new players at BIRCON 2026 to get into the scenario easier!

The first submitted games at BIRCON 2026 are now to be seen on https://bircon.berlin/games/ , and there is still demand for Gamemasters, respectively for Loremasters!

@Runang, thanks for posting about BIRCON. I will look at the link you shared and see about steering my way to Berlin in October to LM a game. Does the TOR adventure I run have to be one published by Free League?

Rafamir,
that is really great news! Surely you can loremaster any kind of TOR (or other) adventure, be it an "official" one from FL or a "homebrewn" one. Or one from a totally different system, adapted to TOR. I can't imagine anybody monitoring this.
The only advice I can give concerning selecting an adventure is that it is surely helpful to choose one that can be accomplished within the timeframe you choose as LM (I believe maximum time is 3:45 hrs for the whole session) and one that is in itself interesting / fascinating enough to "speak for itself", i.e. that does not need any strong atmosphere-support, like certain background music, certain light, and so, since the overall setting is necessarily in a sort of hall with many other tables and groups of players, creating a great gaming atmosphere, albeit a quite busy one, I imagine (and recall from BIRCON 2025, which took place in a different location).
Don't forget to make sure you get that free Raffle ticket and the 10,-€ food & beverage voucher, that every GM (LM) is entitled to, and in case you are up for a coffee / tea / beer during the breaks, give me a sign so we can chitchat about TOR . And of course you are more than welcome to join the session I have the pleasure to loremaster.
Best, Runang
P.S.: if you want to be totally (i.e. legally) sure on that question concerning which kind of TOR adventure to run at a convention like BIRCON, I guess the best way would be to send an email to FL customer service / events and just make them aware of your LM session. I did so with my LM session at BIRCON 2025, also because I used the CRB picture (in line with the respective rules on the FL website addressing this), and they were totally fine with that.

@Runang, my update is that I gave the plan some thought and have begun fleshing out a self-contained adventure to run at BIRCON. Now I'm impatient to hear back from the organizers and confirm my plans