Tolkien - The War of the Ring

A Scenario for Warlords II Deluxe by Stephen Coleman

Design Notes:

ARMY SET

This scenario uses many army types that are extremely familiar
to most Warlords players, but beware! Many of these units have
been modified for this army set. Thus archers are stronger, 
Spiders are weaker, Pikemen are faster etc. Look carefully at 
the army bonuses before playing the scenario.

FORDS

There are many river fords on this particular map. This is 
places where two anchors are placed side by side crossing a 
river. Land units may move across these fords without movement
penalty rather like a bridge. However, units that are
fortified on the ford receive no combat bonus. Otherwise the
anchors operate exactly as normal.



Notes for readers and fans of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien:

MAP

I placed the map on the area of middle earth in which most of
the action in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings occurs. 
However, some areas were excluded in order to keep the
distances between major features reasonable. Including the
entire map of middle earth while maintaining the scale would
see Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul too close for any river to 
pass between them. Thus I was forced to limit the map to exclude
the area of the Shire. While I attempted to remain as faithful
as possible to the original map, there were some problems in
converting the map for use with Warlords. Since the scenario 
builder will not allow cities or ruins to be placed within 5 
squares of the edge of the map, where important feature ran
foul of the scanario builder, the scale had to be fudged. 
This is most noticeable in the north-west corner of the map, 
and in the distance between South Gondor and Harad, but does 
also occur in other areas of the map as well. There were also
some places where the terrain had to be modified for
playability reasons. Thus I was forced to add an east west road
through Harad, and a road south from the Iron Hills towards 
Rhun. I was also forced to add a passage through southern 
Mordor into Harad, and a pass through the Ered Nimrais from 
Dunland into south Gondor. I console myself in these cases
with the knowledge that if the map extended as far as I would 
have liked in an East West direction travel would have been 
possible around the edges of these mountain ranges in any case.

The layout of the cities is faithful to the start of the war
of the ring as far as was possible with some extra cities 
added in strategic locations, and in locations that were 
mentioned in the books as densely populated, without the 
mention of actual cities. (Thus there are three cities
located in the area of Dunland which do not appear on any
of Tolkien's maps, as this area was heavily populated enough 
to supply large armies to Saruman.) There is one exception 
to my practice of placing cities as they were just before 
the war of the ring, and that is in my preference for 
Esgaroth over Dale as a city near the Dwarven capital. 
Sorry if this offends anyone, it just seemed to work 
better that way.

Playbalance:

I wanted to write a scenario that had eight players, but I 
ended up with only seven. Putting in an eighth player just
messed up the playbalance too much. I tried having Saruman
in the game, but both Isengard and Rohan had no room to move,
and kept burning themselves out killing each other. So I left
Isengard out an simply made it a vital city, able to 
manufacture very strong units. I also tried putting Arnor in, 
with a capital at Fornost. But then the Elves and Arnor had 
no space to expand into, and were left much weaker than the
other sides. So I settled for what I could do, and left the 
scenario with seven sides.

Why no Hobbits?:

I know that both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are 
based around the heroic deeds of a few hobbits, but I found 
that it made no sense to include them in a Warlords scenario.
They are quite simply too weak. The only way to include them
would have been to rename the Scouts as Hobbits, but as so 
many cities have to be able to manufacture Scouts, it would 
have meant hobbits living in the most unlikely cities, so I
was reluctantly forced to leave them out altogether.

A note on Hero names:

All the names of heroes included in this scenario are taken
from the works of Tolkien, (with a little fudging in the case
of the Orcs and the Dark Lord) with the exception of the 
heroes of Harad. As far as I know, Tolkien makes no mention 
of the names of any people of Harad, so I was forced to simply
make them up. If you notice that they are all named after 
members of the Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan cricket teams 
of 1996, well done. If this offends anyone, I'm sorry.




I hope that everyone enjoys playing this scenario, and can 
cope with the liberties that I have taken with the works of
Tolkien. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel 
free to E-mail me at scoleman@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au

Stephen Coleman   18th February 1996.