If any of you are dakkaites, I'm Manchu from that board. I've been into 40k and some WHFB for a while but long before I'd ever heard of GW I read, re-read, and loved Tolkien. I've been thinking of getting into LotR Strategy Battles Game and/or War of the Ring and have heard that this is a great place to lurk and learn. It's my pleasure so far, gentlemen (and ladies if there are some around.).

Hello and welcome, hope you enjoy your stay here.

I'd suggest starting with SBG, as everything you get for that can be used for WotR, and in fact, any WotR army will actually contain several armies worth for SBG. Do you have any particular army in mind yet, or are you still undecided?

'm so utterly new to the concepts involved, it's hard to say. It's astounding to me that even on first blush everything is so refreshingly (although I don't mean to cast too critical a light on my other hobbies) different from the Warhammer games. I think what attracted me t SGB was the idea of setting up specific scenarios. As to army choice--wow, that's definitely a hard one. One of the reasons I love 40k so much is that I could play almost all of the armies given how interesting their background and lovely their models are IMO. I'm having the same reaction to the LotR lines. They're all so damn pretty! I don't know how to decide. I figure I might just pick a small scenario from one of the journeybooks to work on and then try to get a friend playing. Either that or try to find some players around my area, which will be a mighty challenge indeed.

Well, a good idea might be to start two armies - one Good and one Evil, and that way you can get your mates interested by running a demo game for them. A nice small game of 250pts should only take an hour or two max, so you can easily get in a couple in one evening, plus most armies only require you to buy one box of troops and one command blister to get to that level. For example, one box of Warriors of Minas Tirith (commonly reffered to as WoMT for short) and one of the new command boxes gives you 314pts and a box of Morranon Orcs and a box of Morranon Orc Command gives 304pts (with the banner bearer left spare due to Morranon Orcs not having access to them in the SBG). All this will only set you back about £60 and you'll have 54 minis with which to play with (although, you'll still have to buy the main rule book and the Mordor supplement).

Alternatively, if you want to focus more on pre-written scenarios, you may want to think about buying Mines of Moria, which is basically the LotR equivalent to Battle for Skull Pass and Assult at Black Reach. It comes with 24 goblins, a cave troll and the Fellowship, aswell as a starter booklet with scenarios designed to help you learn the game and an A5 paperback rulebook which contains all the core rules and most of the profiles (the hardback rulebook contains more profiles, although it lacks the profiles for the Army of the Dead which are present in the MoM rulebook O.o ). All this cost the same as the hardback rulebook if I recall correctly (or at least it did when it was first released).

I reckon I'll take your advice as to building two little armies to start with. I had considered Rohan and Isengard, actually, although those Galadhrim are quite enticing. I have thought about MoM but I'm not really up to painting a cave troll at the moment much less the Fellowship. I'd want to get my bearings with a bit more freedom on models with less pre-established personality, if you take my meaning.

I notice this a smallish community. Is it quite new or perhaps composed of refugees from another board? Also, is it more heavily British/Commonwealth or North American?

Welcome to Might of Middle-Earth Alfirin!

Hope you have a nice time here.

Thanks very much, Gree. That's a familiar avatar, by the way.

Welcome to the site Alfirin! If ye like, we'll be hosting an year-long army painting contest...though it isn't really a contest...more of a challenge to ourselves to paint a whole army. It'd be nice to have a few more people in it besides Dinadan, RC and meself

Enjoy yor stay on Might of Middle-earth!

I barely know what a SBG army consists of but I wouldn't mind giving it a try.

Don't worry too much. SBG is fairly free in what you can take in an army. Most people use LoMe (Legions of Middle-earth) which is a supplement containing most of the army lists, but it's gradually being replaced by updated lists in new supplements (most notable is the Far Harad list which got revamped when the Harad supplement was released. As I recall the points cost of all the warriors doubled from what LoMe predicted they were going to be ). Generally the only restrictions are that each part of your list must be able to ally with any other the others, each must include a hero to lead them and each may have no more than 33% of models armed with bows barring special rules (e.g. the Grey Company can have all bows, but have only a single warrior choice and are limited to how many they can take). WotR is a lot more restrictive, but it merges some of the lists into one (e.g. SBG has 6 or 7 lists for Gondor/Numenor, but WotR only has one and also includes the Arnor list), so it's not too bad.


As to your question on the age of this site - this site is fairly new, but this is MoMe 4. We were on a different server until a few months ago when we decided to move to this one, and we had another before that, and our founder (RC) ran another prior to founding that one, although most of us have come from TLA and OR (although we haven't forsaken those sites, just frequent this one as well due to enjoying the atmosphere here). Not 100%, but I think most of our members are British and Commonwealth, although we do have a couple of Americans.

I wonder if now would be a good time to do anything with Rohan or Isengard, now that I see that both armies are supposed to be getting some new things fairly soon. Or perhaps that would be a good time? (I'm only familiar with the 40k model--if something's about to get an update, you wait.)

You might aswell start now. Unlike 40k, most pre-existing stats don't get revamped. The only time I can think of is that Knights of Minas Tirith had shields added to there wargear choices in Gondor in Flames. Most updates are either new models (which are compatible with the old ones) and new profiles. Starting now will give you a baseline and you'll also be able to familiarise yourself with the rules ready for the update

Very good then. I'd like to get underway now when there are some extra holiday funds about. Well, I'd best look over the old GW site and think of what I'll need.

Hello Alfirin,
Welcome to the site, hope you'll enjoy it and find it useful

Hello and welcome to Might of Middle Earth!

I hope you enjoy your stay on the website

Welcome. I hope you enjoy your stay.