There and Back Again

When I was but a little nerdling, the Lord of the Rings was one of my favorite things. My father - also a Tolkien buff - had a beautiful annotated and illustrated edition of The Hobbit, which I spent hours "reading" even before my skills were up to truly reading the book myself. When I finally did, it was a revelation. I had to sneak around in order to read The Fellowship of the Ring, which my father insisted I was too young for, though I suspect that my virulently anti-speculative-fiction mother had something to do with it.

Fast forward some more years. I continued to explore fantasy fiction in middle school and high school - I even tried my hand at writing some myself. I got to understand how the Lord of the Rings wasn't actually the pinnacle of literature, but it still had a very special place in my heart.

In my adult years I became estranged from my family. I'm not going to go into all the reasons right now, but we had intermittent contact and lots of conflict. Throughout it all, speculative fiction - especially fantasy, especially the Lord of the Rings - remained a touchstone for me and my father.

Last year, my father passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly. Since then, I've found myself dwelling more and more on Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. I spent a lot of time looking at the models online, reading about the game, and generally obsessing. I'd never had any interest in the game before.

Any that's how...

happened.

And of course, a few more things happened, such as...

and...

This it Litko, if you can't tell

because I'm not the kind of guy who gets his ducks all in a row before pulling the trigger.

If you're familiar with LotRSBG you may notice a couple of oddities:

1. I've bought two command teams.
2. I've bought movement trays.

If you aren't familiar with LotRSBG you might not know why those are oddities. LotRSBG is currently pretty much exclusively a skirmish game. Games Workshop isn't supporting the mass combat version anymore: the rules aren't available, they don't sell movement trays, etc.

For me, however, the Lord of the Rings is inextricably linked to huge battles, so I'm going to give the mass battle game a shot. I've read the rules - I got them for $10 from an online used book seller - and I think they've got a lot to recommend them.

In comparison with WHFB, it's a lot cleaner. Bases of guys (always eight, makes it a lot easier to acquire the right movement trays) operate as models, with the individual models acting more or less as wound markers. You don't have to count up individual guys or noodle around with the width by depth of a block of troops - it's completely obvious. Heroes don't hang out on separate bases - when they join a unit, they displace one of the troopers, who simply reappears when the hero runs over to another unit. I've heard that there are balance issues, but I'm confident that the gamers in my area can work out some house rules to plug any holes we find.

And, of course, I'm not adverse to playing the occasional skirmish!

So that's a new thing I'll be doing. I'll be sure to post pictures when I make some progress.