Age of the Ring (LOTR) - Fantasy Skirmish Battles

[spencer]

The Lord of the Rings miniatures game was what originally got me into miniature wargaming, so I will absolutely give your rules a try, when I return from traveling. Thanks for this!

[guitarninja]

Any thoughts on rules are appreciated! And if you need me to throw together any army lists I'd be happy to. So far I've just done the lists my friends and I have so we can get stuff on the table.

[spencer]

guitarninja I most certainly will! My wife and I used to play LotR SBG, and when I told her about this last night, she was super excited to help test. I mostly played River Elves, Deep Wood Elves, those other elves, and White Keep (we kind of ignored the whole good vs evil).

Regarding factions, are you thinking to break it out in the same way that the original game had their factions broken down? E.g. for various elven factions, you already have River Elves for a certain 'dell. Do Deep Wood Elves represent a certain King's Halls or the Forests of a certain Elven Queen? I am assuming the King's Halls. If so, then I would love to see a list for "Elves of the Golden Wood".

River Elves questions:
* Are you still working on the spells?
* Would a Stormcaller be represented by a Captain + Wizard(1) upgrade?
* While I know OPR in general strays away from named characters, I think it would be really cool to have something to represent the Twin Sons in the River Elves list, specifically their special rule about one of them dying and the other going to avenge him. Could you craft something like that as a special upgrade? Thinking through it, I almost wonder if it ought to be a special unit of two models that have that rule, so that 1) no other unit can take that rule and 2) so that you do not have to take two separate heroes + upgrades in your list, just to represent the Twin Sons. Conversely, having it be one unit would force you to always take them together.

Something that may be helpful to you in coming up with all the different units is this list builder, which does not have rules or profiles, but does show all the possible combinations and types of units. First link at the top of this page: www.lonelyknight.0fees.net/?i=1

I will give you more thoughts when I start creating some rosters, next week.

[guitarninja]

The plan is to do most factions in some aspect. I have ideas to combine some like different kinds of spiders into one faction, and Mordor and Barad-dur are one faction for example. I will explicitly spell out who can ally with who at the end of each doc saying you can take units from x armies. Right now we're still in the testing phase, so it's mostly free for all when combining lists.

So at the moment River Elves are Rivendell, Deep Wood Elves are Mirkwood, and I have a prototype list for Forest Elves (Lothlorien). Haven't given them enough love to release yet. I have some pretty nice guidelines for converting statlines from the SBG to this game as well, so it's pretty easy to stub out what they should be. Calculating the points and accounting for upgrades takes the longest.
For River Elves:
* Yeah the spells for a few factions are still being worked on. With smaller unit sizes, and overall a bit less lethality, I had to rework some spells from Age of fantasy.
* Yes the captain + wizard(1) is the mage. I noticed there was very little difference in equipment and statline between them so I could collapse them into one unit.
* At the moment, I took a look at the named characters and what I've done for most of the lists so far is provide the statline for the named character with a generic captain, or if they're extra special, they get a unique one with Regeneration (soon to be named Fate). The plan is to have unique(1) upgrades for the captain to represent their uniqueness rather than have many different copies of the same statline to represent different heroes. So for those two characters, they'll likely be the captain statline, but I can have an upgrade that applies to 2 captains that ties them together like the Twin Brothers etc. I've been focusing on getting the lists playable and close enough before I get to the fun special rules of individual characters.

The other nice thing I've been trying to do is create some new units using existing models or models that you can easily convert to represent things to flesh out some of the rosters atm. And I can cover things from the lore that are just not represented yet

Feel free to DM me on the discord, same username if you have suggestions also. I'm happy to look at stuff that could be added. I could use a lot of help just stat-ing out units for the various lists since there's a lot to cover.

[spencer]

guitarninja, I just came back to this thread to start buildling some lists for testing this weekend, and your post with the rules and such isn't showing up. Did it get deleted?

[spencer]

Re-reading the rules v1.4 and have some initial feedback:

• Defensive Stance - the way this is written, you might want to make it more clear that this choice to strike back needs to come before the attacker rolls their attacks? This mechanic feels a bit awkward, as sometimes (when playing GF), I like to wait and decide whether I am going to strike back after I see how many wounds are dealt to my unit. 
• Fatigue feels like a useful mechanic. Heroic Inspiration might be a bit overpowered. I will intentionally build my lists for this weekend with heroes to try this out.
• What was the thought behind the movement distances? The 3" move with shooting does feel very much like MESBG, but then there is no shooting penalty for having moved that half distance. 
• Have you tested the army lists with standard Age of Fantasy rules? Outside of Fatigue and the options for Activation, it seems like they could be played interchangeably, though I have not tested them either.
• The Unique(X) special rule is missing from the main rules.
• Deep Wood Elves (and maybe all of the Elven factions) ought to have a standard unarmored warrior stat-line. I would imagine it to be similar to the Deep Wood Elves Armored Elves, but with 5+ defense
• What does Slippery(1) do?

[dreddfett]

Can someone please re-post these rules? They are missing from the top of the thread. I would love to try this out. Thank you very much!

[deetisaac]

Anyone know where these rules are?

[MrCrow]

Aug 13, 2021 2:05:30 GMT deetisaac said:

Anyone know where these rules are?

It seems they've been scrubbed from the internet. I remember when they were up and it was only half finished (but looked very promising). Unfortunately GuitarNinja seems to have disappeared from the discord (at least before I left it as well) and the forum.

Perhaps someone else has the time to make an adaption? It would be cool to see! Though I would recommend not calling it LOTRs as I wonder if that's why this disappeared? Don't quote me on that, I'm just speculating.

[dreddfett]

In the OPR Reddit, SDJohnnyAlpha was nice enough to share his Fellowship of the Ring list:

Frodo: Halfling Lord, Lance, and my model has him riding a donkey but you can call it whatever

Sam, Merry, and Pippin: Halfling warriors with dual hand weapons

Gimli: Dwarf Veteran with a great weapon

Legolas: Wood elf lone watcher

Aragorn: (forgot what I ran him as, either a bounty hunter or a champion from the humans list)

Gandalf: Human Wizard with the casting upgrade

The post can be found here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/onepagerules/comments/r2bl9l/lord_of_the_rings

[torogo]

Hi i made some custom armies and document for sharing and adding new ones so feel free to use to use it and add to it.
Link to document