My players are just now hitting this spiral — they’ve been chasing spies and orc-cults around Gondor for the past several sessions, so they haven’t seen a lot of corrupted areas. But last time they took a wrong turn in the Paths of Erech and ended up gaining a bunch of shadow, with no time to take a fellowship phase before the campaign’s first big climactic battle. I don’t know that they’ve realized it yet, so I’m very interested to see how they come out of it in the end.