Rampant Hobbits - Lion Rampant LOTR

[matiec]

We have been playing Lion Rampant this year like so many, but as one medieval retinue isn't quite painted yet I set up an afternoon of Lord of the Rings Lion Rampant over Easter. Luckily I have plenty of LOTR figures to make up four reasonable retinues for Gondor, Rohan, Mordor and Isengard. As I haven't worked out a way to cut and paste from my blog to here I will simply drop some photos here. A run down of the retinues and the battles which ensued can be found on my blog. http://wargamesinthedungeon.blogspot.com/

The Retinues 24 points each ..............







the battles............

[commissarmoody]

Sweet

[chrisw]

nice looking game.  I am starting my collection of Lotr figures and am hoping to try them with a variety of rules.  Your game looked a lot of fun.

[matiec]

Thanks guys, I have always been a Tolkien fan. Have played quite a bit of GW skirmish rules and the War of the Ring both have there good and bad points. CollectIng of course becomes a bit of an obsession.

[Little Odo]

Nice set(s) of minis. Does the game have a Lord of the Rings feel to it, or does merely using the minis give it that flavour? Like ChrisW, I am just starting out on painting my large LotR plastic/lead mountain and was wondering where to move onto after SBG, as I don't really fancy War of the Rings as a larger scale battle game after the couple of games I played own at my local GW.

[matiec]

Thanks for the positive comments....I guess like many we have played LOTR now with four different sets of rules. GW skirmish! War of the Ring, SAGA and Lion Rampant. All have their benefits. If starting out I have to say I would go with the original skirmish rules which have then been supplemented with army books etc.... They give probably the best feel of small numbers of Heroic good guys fighting loads of baddies, but without giving a big advantage to one side or the other. They are a simple rule set and once you get the basics easy to follow. Because the other rules set work on generally more similar sized retinues or warbands it seems to work better on well matched groups. You can/could adjust Lion Rampant and Saga for things like trolls but they are really well covered in GW rules. At the other end of the scale War of the Ring is fun but you needs loads of stuff to make it feel and look right. Somewhere on my blog I have a couple of pictures of a massive battle we put together last summer.

[audrey]

Thanks for Sharing. Using LotR with Lion Rampant is on my To Do list. Those rules are what got me to finish up some holes in my LOTR collection. Are you using the unit stats straight from the rules or do you have an alternation? For Trolls I was thinking of just treating 2 or 3 trolls as a normal 12 sized unit. 2 would probably be best so when the troll unit hit 6 wounds you remove 1 troll and then the lone troll fights at half strength.

-Audrey

[matiec]

Thanks we used the stats pretty much straight from the rule book, and they feel reasonable, mounted serjeants for Rohan etc... Men at arms for armoured gondorian knights, fierce foot for berserkers. I think the 2 trolls in a unit would work fine, but somehow you need to reflect they are stronger than a normal sized figure. Should be able to work a way to do this. Perhaps an armour of 5?

[sukhe_bator]

I've had the same experience. In lieu of my as-yet-unfinished GOT forces I've been using my proxy Gondorians and Harad in a few Lion Rampant skirmishes. I have to say it seems to work well for them and the feel is very much reflected by the game mechanics. So much so I find myself wanting to pit my Uruk legions against the forces of light on their own merits and not as stand-ins.

I had the same experience when I first tried out DBA which is also a flexible historical ruleset which lends itself well to different fighting styles etc., though more restrictive in the use of fixed base sizes for different formation sizes/troop types. It is still my go to ruleset for 15mm. I feel LR has the edge on flexibility in 25mm, fitting neatly between skirmish and large scale battles...
I will certainly be trialling LR for all my games in the future, and DR for the more fantasy aspects...