Mat Ward

Mat: As with Siege of Gondor, the intention of The Battle of the Pelennor Fields was to pick up where the film left off. As fantastic as the film is, it leaves some areas of the story unexplored. Being gamers, we all want toy soldiers to fill in the gaps. We already knew that many of the planned releases were focused squarely on the forces of the Haradrim. Accordingly, we wanted the content of book to concentrate on them. We'd already covered Pelennor Fields in great detail in the main The Return of The King rules manual. Thus, focusing on the Haradrim seemed like a very good direction to take and would open up all kinds of possibilities that we could explore. While Siege of Gondor relied heavily on the film, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields draws much of its inspiration from elsewhere.

When we committed ourselves to this path, we were aware that we were setting ourselves a rather large challenge. What Tolkien wrote about the Haradrim can be written on the back of a postage stamp (in big letters). Nonetheless, we were committed to this course. Siege of Gondor and Shadow & Flame concentrated on grey areas dotted here and there in the main texts of the book, and there were literally chapters of reference material where Tolkien had gone into vast degrees of detail. Pelennor Fields, on the other hand, is a very different story indeed. Even in his extended works, Tolkien never truly explored the land of Harad. In essence, he left it as a great big, fuzzy, grey area. Naturally, this vagueness doesn't make for incredibly interesting reading. Thus, we needed to piece together everything that we could. From offhand text references to obscure mentions in the "Tale of Years," we knew that we had to let nothing escape us as we tried to re-create the history of Harad from what few scraps we had. Even with this reconstruction done, we were left with an awful lot of gaps to fill.

For a start, everything that we had found was from the point of view of the traditional enemies of the Haradrim and thus was likely to be coloured by their own biases. Thus, we set out to build Harad from the ground up. Of course, there's always a risk involved in creating such a large swathe of material, but it's been a real labour of love. As Tolkien wrote in so little detail, we had the freedom to create more or less as we wanted to, which made us all the more determined to ensure that what we were writing fitted in with what had gone before. As we started to pull everything together, we were left with a series of notes and ideas, not only for the history of Harad, but also for elements of its language and culture. Wherever we could, we tied what we created to elements that Tolkien had written. As a result, there are very few places where we out-and-out constructed something entirely new. In fact, many good ideas were discarded early on, not because they weren't any good, but because they didn't quite fit with what Tolkien had written about Harad. What we were left with was a huge resource of what, why, when, where, and who – as a matter of fact, too big a resource for a 64-page book. Sadly, many elements had to go or became condensed for want of space, but you'll be able to see most of these concepts in the forthcoming issues of White Dwarf.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE MÛMAK

Alessio Cavatore

Alessio: Writing the rules for the Oliphaunt was not easy. I knew from past experience that such a huge and different gaming piece was bound to create trouble when it came to writing its rules (do the words "Steam Tank" mean anything to you?).

I was aware that it was impossible to please everyone with these rules, but still it was such an exciting project that I couldn't resist taking that responsibility myself. It had to be mine! My own! My Preciousss Oliphaunt! The challenge was great. Just by looking at the mock-up, it was evident that, for example, an oval base like the Mûmak's was unique in the entire game system and presented an entire new set of problems. You see, round bases have the great advantage of allowing maximum freedom of movement, as they don't suggest any polarity to the movement (ie, there's no front or back). An oval base is different. People immediately feel that forward and backward moves should track the longer axis of the ellipse, and rightly so. If we required players to point the base in the direction of movement, the problem would be in rotating the base without gaining or losing movement in the process. Thus, I asked for a round base or at least one that had a hole in the centre to allow players to spin it around with the centre fixed in place. In the end, I had to agree that a round base would have been too large – the size of a small pizza ("And what's wrong with that?" said my Italian blood) – and that the base Alan Perry had sculpted looked so spectacular that ruining it with a hole would have been a great shame.

We did come to a compromise, however, and you will notice that the centre of the base is conveniently marked by a Rohirrim shield. Players can place a finger on it to achieve an almost clean spin and at the same time get a model that is worthy of a space on the mantelpiece!

I haven't completely given up on the hole in the base, however, as you will see later in a future White Dwarf.

Once the dynamics of movement were sorted, the rest of the rules followed easily. It was just natural that such a huge beast should trample models as it moved, and it was just a matter of tailoring the Strength and number of hits inflicted to make it hard but not invincible. The aim was that any normal trooper caught by a charging Mûmak should stand very little chance of surviving but that a great Hero should, on the other hand, be able to take its charge and fight back (at least as long as he or she is still fresh).

I tried to keep the rules as easy as possible, but because of the very nature of the Mûmak, they could not be too simple. After all, we are talking of the biggest plastic kit ever made by Games Workshop! It's a model that is far larger than anything else in the game. The Balrog's body is more or less as big as the Mûmak's head! Plus, the Oliphaunt transports up to 13 other models in a wooden tower on its back. I'm sure you understand that, with such a model, the temptation is to add a lot of rules to cover every detail of the many complex situations that it could trigger. This complexity would result in a very heavy set of rules, and eventually, I forced myself to stop at a certain level of detail in favour of playability. Already, as they stand, the rules for the Mûmak are more complex than those for any other single model in the game, and I really didn't want to make them even more complicated.

To give you an example, I'd originally written rules allowing Good Heroes to jump on the Mûmak by spending a point of Might (à la Legolas) and then to fight in the howdah. This concept was very cool, but it was such a huge can of worms that begged so many questions and needed so much explanation that I eventually decided to drop it. Keep your eyes peeled, however. You never know what might appear on the pages of White Dwarf.

I hope you agree with my choices of what to include and what to leave out for the sake of slick play. I also hope that you have endless fun using your Mûmak to stomp those Good guys very, very flat!

Next: The Haradrim