Monday 30 March 2020 – After the assault on Helm’s Deep, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli realize that they are needed in Gondor. Aragorn will go to Osgiliath to delay the assault on Minas Tirith, while Legolas and Gimli will travel with Gandalf to Minas Tirith to warn the Men of the White City of their impending doom.
In this scenario, Gothmog leads a host of his elite Morannon orcs to assault Osgiliath. Meanwhile, Aragorn and a small force of Rangers and Gondorians protect the river bank, suddenly aware of orc boats coming their way. They sound the alarm while the orcs speed up their pace. This scenario is found in BGiME magazine #41 and is played as described, except I’m using the new 2018 profiles and the participants are different.
This scenario is played on a 4 ft by 4 ft board (120 x 120 cm) that represents a section of Osgiliath connected to the river Anduin. The orcs enter in four boats, while the Good models are scattered around the ruins of the city. The special rules are:
- Starting in turn 4, a D6 is rolled every turn to see how many Good reinforcements arrive on the Osgiliath board edge (opposite of the water board edge). The result is the number of reinforcements arriving. Another D6 is rolled to determine if the Good (4-6) or Evil (1-3) player decides where to place these forces along this edge.
- For every orc boat that is moving, roll a D6. It can move up to 2 * X cm, where X is the rolled D6 result.
- The participants are different, as described in the campaign section of the BGiME books: it’s now 400 vs 400 points. Aragorn with bow, 1 Captain of Minas Tirith with Shield, 6 rangers (of which 3 with spear) and 6 Warriors of Minas Tirith with Shield and 9 with Spear and Shield are pitted against Gothmog, a Morannon Orc Captain with Shield, 6 Morannon Orcs, 11 Morannon Orcs with Shield and 10 Morannon Orcs with spear. At the start of the game, Aragorn, the 6 rangers and 4 Warriors of Minas Tirith are present on the board, the rest will arrive as reinforcements. The orcs are evenly spread out among the four boats.
Good wins if 25 orcs are slain, Evil wins if 13 orcs move off the Osgiliath board edge.
The orc boats move up, while the Rangers kill an orc by using bowfire. For S2 bows, the shields on the Morannon orcs make no difference, a 6 to wound is always needed.
In turn 2 and 3 the boats advance more and another two orcs are slain. The pace of the boats is still relatively slow for most boats, despite the orc leaders shouting orders to hurry up.
In the fourth turn, 6 reinforcements for Good arrive! However, Evil gets to choose where they appear. The first boat docks at the shore, which has only about half of its crew remaining after successful shots by the rangers.
Another three reinforcements arrive and two more boats dock at the shore.
The orcs quickly get into fights and Aragorn comes down from the first floor of the ruin he was on. He killed two orcs with his bow so far. The man of Gondor in combat holds his ground, though he doesn’t wound the orc he’s in combat with. Gothmog slays his foe.
The objective for Good is to kill as many orcs as possible, while not letting many escape. So Aragorn charges two orcs while ignoring Gothmog for now. The reinforcements from earlier have made it down to the action. There are now two fighting hotspots, left and right. Meanwhile, the fourth and final boat has docked.
Aragorn kills his two orc foes with ease. Elsewhere on the battlefield, the Morannon Orc Captain has to spend 2 Might points to win the fight against the Captain of Minas Tirith, but fails to wound him. So far, 3 Warriors of Minas Tirith and 10 Morannon Orcs have been slain.
Aragorn decides to do the thematic thing and charges into Gothmog. Slowly over the next couple of turns, more soldiers of Minas Tirith are slain than orcs, which is to be expected given the Morannon orcs superior strength. Gothmog proves to be a worthy match for Aragorn and after a number of turns both Heroes have zero Might left.
The fighting continues on a bit longer and the fights go pretty evenly. There are about 7 orcs from the final boat that have almost free passage to Osgiliath, seeing as the men of Gondor are caught up in fighting. Two are shot down by the rangers atop the ruins, but 5 can go on. Considering Evil has to have 13 orcs escape, I didn’t really pay much heed to this and proceeded with the slow killing of orcs.
Right before the escape of these 5 orcs, I realized there was a problem. If they made it off the board edge, the maximum number of orcs Good could kill would be 24, 1 short of their victory goal. In the next turn, Evil got priority and the 5 orcs escaped.
Nevertheless, the fighting continues with Good gaining the upper hand. Aragorn finally slays Gothmog and the number of orcs dwindle.
The men of Gondor regroup, after having slain all of the orcs remaining on the board. Neither victory condition is met.
Aftermath
I rule that Good won the scenario. The forces of Evil were decimated and the army of Good fought valiantly. Only 5 out of 29 orcs escaped (17 %), while 24 orcs were killed (83 %). So that is much closer to Good’s victory condition than Evil’s. This means Faramir isn’t sent off to his death in a desperate mission to reclaim Osgiliath and the next scenario will be the Siege of Minas Tirith (a.k.a. the battle of the Pelennor Fields). Because Good has more time to fortify their defences, they’ll get an additional 250 points to spend on enhancing their army. Gothmog died in this scenario, but not permanently. Aragorn recovered a large chunk of his M/W/F points.
Post-game thoughts
It’s a bit problematic that the participants were changed for the campaign (as instructed), while the victory conditions did not. Now neither side won and a Draw was not a legitimate outcome. So it doesn’t really feel like a Good victory, even though I ruled it so and it very likely would have been had the victory conditions been altered to take into account the change in participants.
I also find the requirement for the Fellowship’s champion (in my case: Aragorn) to be present, rather than Faramir, a bit odd. I guess it’s not completely unreasonable, but I don’t think it really matches up with the timeline? After Helm’s Deep Aragorn goes to protect Osgiliath, then rejoins with Legolas and Gimli to travel to the Dimholt Road and then come to the rescue in Minas Tirith? In any case, theme aside, it was pretty cool to have Aragorn present. I was pleasantly surprised by the decent Good shooting, but even more by their combat abilities. This is the first time I’ve ever used Morannon orcs and I always thought they would just walk over the Gondorians with their superior Strength and high Defense. But the Gondorians did manage to hold their own. Especially with the support of the Rangers that have a superior Fight value. So it was a good test scenario for the large battle of the Pelennor Fields.
Moving the boats was fun and I found the scenario to be reasonably enjoyable. I think this scenario would be more fun with 2 players than solo though, because I had to keep making decisions of balance, theme and competitiveness. With an opponent I think it would be easier to react and cling to a certain strategy, without wondering if I made the right choices for both sides. I also wish they had altered the victory conditions to represent the change in participants. Currently my outcome of this play doesn’t feel totally legitimate.
I was happy to see the Gondorians do well and enjoyed playing with the Morannon orcs. They are strong, but they can definitely be killed. I’m looking forward how the big battle of Pelennor Fields will play out.
In the next scenario of the Return of the King campaign, Sauron unleashes his army on Minas Tirith, trying to destory this bastian of hope for the Free Peoples. Will he succeed?