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Great effort here guys, really enjoying reading all of this. Dunno if I'll ever get to play the scenarios due to lack of group, but they look pretty balanced to my eye.

Cheers. If you do get to play any of it then let us know how it goes, but if not, then thanks anyway for the kind words!

Just a minor update, typos fixed and rules corrected:



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On a a side note, I posted this on The One Ring earlier and the posters there seems very happy with what we've come up with here! The feedback so far has been good (although apparently we rather significantly undercosted the Ramriders, comparing them with a Knight of Dol Amroth they should be about 19ppm, not 15!).

Oh cool, glad it is appreciated! Are you a regular to the One Ring, as I am also part of that community.

Only joined up there today with this, same username. I have a LotR WIP thread over there as well now.

Oh right. I'm relatively new as well and don't post much, frequent The Last Alliance more. Username on both is Melkor the Mighty. Will check out the WiP!

Made a few changes to the rules this morning; various points costs moved up/down based on feedback from OR. Someone on there also had a 4500-point mega-battle version of BoTFA written up, and have let me add it as an extra. Probably something no one will ever play, but if I stick in a note about scaling it down then it might be fun to have an all-in-one alternative.

And some playtest notes on the Dwarves:

First game, One Warband with a Captain, 8 Pikes and 3 Kingsguard went up against 2 Orc Warbands (total 2 Caps, 8 Shields, 9 Spears, banner) and slaughtered them for the loss of 2 Dwarves. They managed to remain in formation and limit the oncoming attacks to facing a 3-Dwarf-deep pike block.

BUT in the second game, against 200 points of Uruks (Cap, Beserker, about 15ish Shield or Pike warriors) it was a completely different story; wiped out by the Uruks being able to match them attack-for-attack with pikes. I need to refight this one, as there was some appalling luck for the Dwarves (with F4 everywhere there were many ties, I think Dwarves won the roll-off on about 2 of them!), but my earlier theory was proven true; break the Dwarf formation, and they then become very expensive for what amounts to a single Dwarf Warrior in combat. So Monsters with Hurl and Barge should make a mess of them, too.

For their next fight they'll be up against some Elves, fewer attacks but a lot of shooting. After than, I'll see about Cavalry, monsters and uber-hordes. If anyone has any suggestions for forces that would make fair tests I'd be interested to hear them (ideally 200-210 points, sticking to Warband rules unless that skews them too much).

Just realised i haven't finished doing the maps yet! So much for the weekend! Will get them done by this afternoon.

Interesting results on the play testing. I originally thought they were a bit op after the orc massacre but it seems they are quite vulnerable in the right circumstances.

Cavalry could be interesting, what about archer cav and general skirmishing army (woodelves, grey company etc.) due to their less movement being a weakness. Also a seige engine would be fun. Trebuchet a big rock into the middle of the formation

I'd try them out against something MASSIVE as well, thinking like Sauron or Balrog or Watcher, just to see how long they last as most infantry should crumble before the big guys.

Good work, look forward to seeing a batrep! Hopefully i'll de some playtesting of other stuff when i gat home in a few weeks.

Oh, and how do the knigsguard fair?

Kingsguard for the most part I were alright; they fought like a cross between the old Khazad Guard and Iron Guard, and racked up a few kills in each game, but they did remind me why I so rarely use 2-handed weapons (It seems univrsally true that if one of my models swings 2-handed, the enemy WILL roll a 6 and beat him).

I'm thinking for the next few tests, I'll go with:
Knights of Minas Tirith/Dol Amroth
Gondor mixed Inf/Cav
Old-school Grey Company (all bows, just to see how they fare)
Rohan skirmishing force
Goblin Town horde

Sounds like kingsguard are a sort of unit to go and cause damage amongst minor troops or go monster hunting, especially with the Bodyguard special rule. The two-handed gamble is the decision i get most flustered about in a game, forget about whether to spend that last Might! The trick i guess is to have a banner close by, and/support them with models that don't suffer to their duel rolls to assure the two-handers hit. But his of course uses more points and models that could be used elsewhere. As i said earlier their main use will be surrounding a monster with a few doing two-handed to make sure you win a fight then choppy choppy.

The tests looked well balanced and should provide a wealth of different situations for the dwarves. Interested to see what happens with the grey company. Have you thought about throwing a hero at them (circa 150 points) with support to see how they fair against higher fight and more attacks and how much damage they can do. And they will defo come up against a hero in the game.

Yeah, Wrecking-ball Heroes are on the list to be tested, both with and against. I want to see how they fare against someone like Boromir, or being led by someone like Dain or Thorin.

The Kingsguard are certainly OK for their points, against chaff troops like Orcs or Goblins they'll cut them down well enough (especially once I have more than 3 and led by a Hero). I'm interested to see how they fair against Trolls and the like.

I guess with an enemy with low strength you don't need to worry about going two-handed as with such highe defence it is unlikely that you'll get wounded. Especially if they get surrounded by mobs, as they can use the Whirl attack. Six or so led by Dain would be like a hot knife through butter cutting through hordes of goblins. Wel, more like a sledge hammer being used to cut butter!

My thoughts exactly. For a 600-ish army I'm looking as Dain with 6 Kingsguard, then two 3x3 pike blocks with Captains. Very low model count, but in theory an unstoppable force flanked by a pair of immovable objects


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Alternately, for a completely horrible formation, you could do the following:

Hero
3 Kingsguard
8 Pikemen
Banner

Expensive, but you get 4 attacks per guy on the front rank (so swing 2-handed and still have two normal dice), D7 all round, with Banner rerolls, and generally be far more offensive than the standard pike block! Might try this evilness out later...

Ooooh nasty. Maybe i don't want to play that anymore!

That is pretty evil, but correct if i'm wrong in saying a model using a two-handed weapon can't be supported? I might be making this up though.

I reckon a mix of Kinsguard and pikes working together could work really well, either with the kingsguard in front to soften the enemy up a bit, round the flanks to sweep round and surround the enemy, or at the rear to fill any gaps with a nasty surprise!

What about: front rank Pikemen, second rank Kingsguard, third rank pikes. Third rank can fight through as kingsguard won't be fighting, kingsguard can throw weapons before charges and then move forward when the front rank dies... Could work nicely, like dwarf skirmishers!

The pike/support rules changed a bit with The Hobbit. You can now support models who are swinging 2-handed () but can't support 'through' a model not also using a pike(). So I'm not sure that exact setup would work Kingsguard on the side to swoop in and take out Supporting enemy models/go for trapping is how I've been using them so far, but I'm going to test them as front-rank fighters and see if they do any better there. I'll probably still run Shieldwalls and the KG with Dain for fluffiness, but I can see the other version doing well.

Oh right, i get confused with the two editions as i play both with different people! In that case them on the front doing two-handed with two extra attacks from pikes behind could be VERY deadly, especially with dain in there... Do it, you know you want to!

Just went Round 2 with the sam Uruk force, and again the Dwarves were wiped out. They did take nearly half the Uruks with them, and their luck was less horrendous, but as with before, as soon as one or two cracks appear in the formation the Dwarves got overwhelmed (even with the KG in the front).

Next up, they'll be going against some kind of Cavalry.

Interesting... I suppose uruks have quite high Strength as well.

Cav should be good as once they lose their charge they could probably be surrounded with all those pikes.

finally managed to get to my pc to get this downloaded and have a look over it

It looks pretty sweet, the rules appear balanced enough, if i get a chance to try them out I will report back with my findings.

I did notice the refugees ? don't have a shoot value written down

Thanks! Good spot on the militia, I'll add it to the list of things to fix!

No problem at all, it is my small contribution to the community effort
I would have contributed a lot more but having recently crushed my foot at work I've not really been moving around much and I hate replying on my tablet.

Also I did notice the gundabad orcs aren't the heavily armoured ones ? I thought they would be judging by how much armour they have in the film. Or am I getting missed up with the different orcs ?

Yeah, I made the decision to make Moria Orcs (Azog's ones) the heavily armoured ones while Bolg's Gundabad Orcs have lighter armour and more aggressive weapon options (2-handers, throwing spears). It's an abstraction for the sake of variety, really.

It was mentioned elsewhere that this is pretty much the opposite of the Gundabad profile from the DoS book, but of course you can feel free to add that in (I can't put it in the doc, though, for copyright reasons). Or, you coud just use the Moria Orc profile for your Gundabad force if you wanted them in heavy armour.

well, I have been pretty unproductive today and only managed to finish one map: Dol Guldur.



I have nearly done Dale as well, though that will probably be tomorrow's job along with Thorin's charge which won't take too long. I've decided not to do a map for the final scenario, a it would get quite complicated, and there are no deployment rules or layout specifics so people will have their own arenas anyway.

hope you enjoy, of course if think anything should be changed do say, though please don't make it too big for my sanity's sake

That's epic, mate!

No worries about not doing Ravenhill, I can see how that would be complicated!

Oh snap awesome map fella ! Looks like the real deal.

I see what you did with the Orcs now, it makes more sense to me now. If only the gundabad orc models were cheaper !

Cheers mate, was pretty fun to do as well! There is another one on the previous page if you are interested. It is for the Battle of Five Armies scenario.

Got some additional content done. Appendix I is the maps, which look great. If and when you get the others done then let me know, there's no hurry!

Appendix II is notes on including this stuff in other armies. I've included an amalgamated list of Elrond's Household from AUJ and the Rivendell Free Peoples stuff, an All-Of-The-Dwarves list (Iron Hills, Erebor and Durin's Folk from TFP), and then just added stuff like bats, trolls and War Beasts to the Mordor list.

Any other ideas on extra stuff we could put in? Any profiles that need fixing/could use alternate versions but don't fit in the main army list? Thranduil needs a Elk, for sure.

I know i have been gone for a while and some of these mistakes are on things i suggested but i just had a chance to really rip through these.

The biggest thing is that we should NOT replace anything that has already been done but we should be reusing gw profiles. Those should just be refered to, NEVER copied. Listing the book and page the profiles can be found on is ok.

I went through and highlighted the issue and put a note next to it with suggested updates and things we should refer to when writing these rules. I did this because it was easier then putting it all in a post. Let me know what you guys think and if I am way off on some of these.


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Top notch stuff guys. This is something that will be printed out and carried around to be used.

 namiel wrote:

The biggest thing is that we should NOT replace anything that has already been done but we should be reusing gw profiles. Those should just be refered to, NEVER copied. Listing the book and page the profiles can be found on is ok.

Can't download the document on my tablet so I'll take a look at that later, but as to the part quoted above, if you're saying what I think you are (that we should cut things that GW have already done, like Gundabad Orcs, Laketown militia) then I disagree. Ideally, this supplement should be useable entirely on its own/with the free GW stuff from BL, so I don't want people to have to go out and buy DoS/Mordor/Free Peoples/whatever books to be able to use the main rules in here. In the new draft I'm adding some 'expanded army lits' that adds stuff to already-in-print books, but that's just as an extra.

Of course, if I've misunderstood and you think we should just add in a box saying 'may also take X, Y and Z from Sourcebook A', then yeah, that's fine.

 Paradigm wrote:

 namiel wrote:

The biggest thing is that we should NOT replace anything that has already been done but we should be reusing gw profiles. Those should just be refered to, NEVER copied. Listing the book and page the profiles can be found on is ok.

Can't download the document on my tablet so I'll take a look at that later, but as to the part quoted above, if you're saying what I think you are (that we should cut things that GW have already done, like Gundabad Orcs, Laketown militia) then I disagree. Ideally, this supplement should be useable entirely on its own/with the free GW stuff from BL, so I don't want people to have to go out and buy DoS/Mordor/Free Peoples/whatever books to be able to use the main rules in here. In the new draft I'm adding some 'expanded army lits' that adds stuff to already-in-print books, but that's just as an extra.

Of course, if I've misunderstood and you think we should just add in a box saying 'may also take X, Y and Z from Sourcebook A', then yeah, that's fine.

Thats exactly what im saying. I dont think that laketown militia should ever have 2 profiles. They are just laketown militia. Also they will need other books regardless. The only one that needs to be paid for is the desolation of smaug this last one is a free pdf.


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Also if profiles are already created for these things then they should be used as referance