Basically what you need to know is that Hope is not an easily renewable resource. It does not auto refresh each Fellowship Phase!
I suggest everyone take a second (or first) look at page 104 of the Adventurer's Book about Hope and Fellowship. I'm going to quote some of it here for us.Hope is a character's reserve of spiritual fortitude and positivity. A hopeful character can keep going when physically stronger heroes have already succumbed to despair.
Hope is an ever-dwindling resource: to overcome the many formidable challenges he is going to face, a player-hero who has just started his adventuring career is bound to count on it quite often (veterans might come to rely more on their own abilities).
Heroes may recover Hope during a game session spending Fellowship points, and possibly through their Fellowship focus (see The Fellowship below for details).
To recover their much-needed trust and self-confidence, player-heroes should look no further than their own companions. Points taken from the Fellowship pool can be spent to refresh a character's Hope, while the company of a hero's Fellowship focus can allow him to recover points for free.
That's key. So you can dip into the Fellowship Pool to refresh your hope, and then the Fellowship Pool refreshes. I know Sessions is a hard thing to manage in Play by Post, but we'll figure it out. Works out to about 3 or 4 per Adventuring Phase.FELLOWSHIP POINTS
Members of the company may recover spent Hope by tapping into the Fellowship pool: for every Fellowship point spent, a character may raise his Hope score by one. To do so, a player must get permission from at least half the other members of the Company: If this consensus cannot be found, he may either agree not to spend any points, or spend them anyway and gain a Shadow point for each Fellowship point used. Players may recover any number of Hope points up to their maximum Hope score, as long as there are Fellowship points left. A player may tap into a company's Fellowship pool at any time. This means that a character can recover some of his lost Hope even as he exchanges blows with a hostile creature or as he bandies crooked words with a cunning diplomat.
A company's Fellowship pool is completely refreshed at the beginning of each new gaming session.
Players may take advantage of their entire Fellowship pool of points, of use just a part of it, or not at all. ‘Unused' Fellowship points do not carry over to the next session.
This doesn't mean if they loose Endurance or Gain Fatigue. That's just normal actions, but "otherwise harmed" could be something more dramatic like being poisoned and wrapped up by a Giant Spider, or being mauled by a horny Beorn.FELLOWSHIP FOCUS
Fellowship focuses represent the strong ties between brothers in arms, close kinsmen and compatriots. Fellowship focuses have two effects in gameplay, as sources of Hope or as sources of inspiration.
As a Source of Hope
The presence of a Fellowship focus affects the way a character recovers Hope: A player-hero recovers one point of Hope at the end of a session if his Fellowship focus wasn't wounded or otherwise harmed during play, and is in the same location as them.
A character gains one point of Shadow at the end of the session if his Fellowship focus was wounded, or three points if the focus was killed.
So how much Fellowship Points do you have? 1 Per Character, +1 Bonus for each Hobbit so that is a 5 total right now. Up to this point no one has dipped into Fellowship Points since we never used up Hope because we were doing this wrong. I expect that to change. I am not about to go back and try and figure out what your Hope should be, we will assume you managed your Fellowship Points and Fellowship Focus just perfectly up to this point. We will start doing it right from here on out. So don't spend those Hope Points too willy nilly.
When the Hope score of a hero decreases to reach his Shadow rating, the hero is considered to be Miserable. Check the Miserable box on the character sheet, and apply the effects to the character.
If a character's Miserable box was already checked, then losing Hope doesn't provoke any additional effect.
If a character finds his Hope score reduced to zero points, he is spiritually spent. A hopeless hero cannot bear to continue a struggle of any sort, and will flee from any source of danger or stress, by escaping from the field of battle, for example, or storming out on a debate.
