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I had a read of Oathmark while my internet was out for 6 weeks. I don't love the rules themselves (they're fine, but I dislike rank and flank that specifies base sizes for the models) but the campaign rules look pretty fun, and also easy to implement. I've done a variety of campaign styles over the years and these look like something that you could feasibly run.

So I obviously started to think about how I could run these rules with the LOTR SBG. I think it's relatively straightforward to port the rules across and just sub in units. But I think that mixing the Orcs and Goblins into all the other kingdoms is a bit unsatisfactory.

I had the idea that instead of having a table for each faction, you could have a table for each terrain type. Then the "good" faction has 8 entries and the "evil" faction has 8 entries. When you occupy a territory, you gain access to the corresponding territory for "your side", corrupting or liberating the land as you go.

If you were going to do this for "pure" LOTR, it would make most sense to divide into geographical regions. You would have Arnor/Angmar, Rohan/Isengard, Gondor/Mordor, perhaps Fiefdoms/Harad, Moria/Khazad Dum, Lothlorien and maybe something like Dol Guldur or what have you. I think this could work pretty well, but it is a bit difficult to come up with 8 locations for some factions because of lack of unit variety and then other factions are absolutely stuffed with options.

I decided that my preference would be for a Middle Earth inspired fantasy, but to mix in some other fantasy factions (I've posted some of my efforts in that regard elsewhere on the forum, but I've been working on adding some more and also taking the feedback on my first draft into account). This has the advantage that it's easier for everything to be relatively generic, and you can add in units which are thematic to bulk up rosters.

Below is an example table for Mountains. I've chosen it because it maps pretty clearly onto the two SBG factions, and doesn't have too much of my invention in it:


The biggest deviations are giving the Dwarves access to some mages, actually a Gundabad Shaman for the "earth mage" and Saruman with his Voice and rule about disliking Gandalf stripped away for the "arch mage". The "Stone Giant" is a Gundabad Troll. One of the "more or less decent Giants" Gandalf mentions in the Hobbit.

The other terrain types I've got are:
Forests (Wood Elves/Beastmen)
Hills (Rohan/Mordor)
Realm of the Old Kings (Gondor+Arnor /Undead)
Northlands (Vikings/Dark Elves)
Southlands (Haradrim/Lizardmen)
Realms of Magic (High Elves/Chaos Warriors)
Unaligned

I might post them up here, but I've included in my own version a restatement of Joe McCullough's Campaign rules so I'm a bit hesitant to post the whole thing up. Anyway, I thought someone might find my thought process interesting.

I'm working on getting Mountains, Forest and Hills units painted up so me and my friend can have a small campaign - Men, Dwarves and Elves vs. Beastmen, Goblins and Orcs. I've got a fair bit done already!

We do it a little bit from the other side - we use our lotr minis (and some other historical and fantastical stuff) for an Oathmark campaign, in which we do the occasional Mission with MESBG rules. So, like army Engagements use the Oathmark rules, smaller skirmishes lotr. We don’t have a straight conversion table, instead we add profiles to the Oathmark regions that the game lacks, like heavy armoured spearmen or two-handed weapons with Light armour.

That would also work really well. And I think just agreeing that you're going to theme your forces appropriately (evil men ally with orcs, not Gondor or Rohan) then it would work really well without all the effort I went to!
As is often the case, I wanted to do it this way so that there's no ambiguity for my opponent because he's not an experienced wargamer - giving him a 4 page document with everything in it is better than two books and telling him we're gonna squish them together!