Re: WotR / TLoU

If you're looking at old SPI games with armies, leaders, magicians, etc, try Albion. It was an issue game for the original Ares Magazine, and had a much deeper development of the leaders/heroes/magic users system that first made its appearance in Sorcerer and was developed through WotR and S&S. It also had an army system (and a naval system) and actually might be a lot better developed in terms of using as a basis of an army game for TFT. For some reason it never got very popular at the time, but that might also be because SPI folded not too long thereafter, so it never received any errata or further development afterwards.

Interestingly, a guy did an expansion for it called Fornaldor which basically added new species (mermen, giants, dwarves, etc.), a few new spells, new magic items, and a map that covered Sweden, Norway and Finland. Not much development on the rules though. The same guy said he was developing yet another extension that would have added Iceland and its mythology to the game, but as far as I know, nothing ever came of that. A game publisher picked up Fornaldor a few years ago and, I think published it (maybe even kickstarted it?), but I already had several copies from the original author and didn't like how they re-did the counters, so I never purchased a copy. I'm not sure what, if any, problems they might have had with Decision Games (who probably own Albion's copyrights), but since it was a completely different setting and you can't copyright game rules, probably nothing.

On Thursday, October 21, 2021, 02:55:20 AM CDT, David Bofinger <bofinger.david@gmail.com> wrote:

The game does at least have the concept of army plus leader, so that the army's performance is affected by a PC at its head. (Another SPI game, Sword and Sorcery, had a similar idea.) That's a natural sort of mechanic for a TFT mass combat rule system.

David

On Thu, 21 Oct 2021 at 10:27, Rick <rick_ww@lightspeed.ca> wrote:

Hi Craig,
This was SPI’s ‘War of the Ring’?

I’m not sure why that game would make a good mass
battle game for TFT armies. It is a pretty generic hex and
counter war game, and it didn’t have unit differentiation.
(It was designed for newcomers to war games and they kept
things as simple as they could.)

Perhaps you are thinking of a different war game based
on the Lord of the Rings?

Warm regards, Rick.

On Oct 20, 2021, at 12:37 PM, Craig Barber <craigwbar@comcast.net> wrote:

Hi Rick;
" I keep thinking about making a simple “create companies in

a RPG and then fight them in a simple war game”, but I have so

many projects, I’ve no idea if I’ll ever get to it. (My next project is

expanding SPI’s “War of the Ring”. Again.) "

Funny you should juxtapose those two, a few years ago I suggested WotR to someone as a better battle expansion for TFT. (That was on the facebook page Henry runs, I think?) Never heard back if he adopted it. WotR was pretty straightforward once you figured out the unit types.

Going to go take a look at your new rules asap!

Warm regards, Craig