Mat Ward

Mat: Following on from Shadow & Flame, Siege of Gondor is the second in what promises to be a long and varied line of supplements. Most probably the first thing that you'll notice is that it's a substantially larger book than the first (64 pages rather than 48) which has given us room for more of everything, whether hobby guides, scenarios, or new rules!

As with its precursor, this book focuses on a particular area in time and space, but where Shadow and Flame concentrated on events that occurred 'between acts' in the tale of The Lord of The Rings, Siege of Gondor throws players straight into the desperate struggle for Minas Tirith in the closing days of the Third Age. As before, it was a very careful path I trod through Tolkien's works (one thing Alessio and I are in complete agreement on is that we shouldn't try and rewrite Tolkien) and although I know the books very well, there were all kinds of little details tucked away in the corners of appendices which I hadn't fully considered before. After immersing myself in the chronology of the period we were looking to cover, it became clear that to really represent Gondor's plight the book would have to cover much more than the siege of Minas Tirith – after all, Sauron's army is only there for a matter of a day and a half! This really gave me the opportunity to cast my net considerably further, and soon the span of the book grew to engulf other events in the assault on Gondor, including the doomed struggle at Cair Andros and Faramir's courageous, but ultimately futile, defiance towards Sauron's army. What I ended up with was an epic struggle that ran from the banks of the Anduin in Osgiliath, to Rath Dínen in the city of Minas Tirith...

THE TALE BEGINS

For me, the real joy of writing something like this is getting the tale to flow through from the very first page until the last. The Lord of The Rings is, first and foremost, a story that treads in the wake of not only wars but the individuals that take part in those wars. Following that tale (and the paths of individual characters) properly was an incredibly challenging, but also very rewarding, experience. After all, in The Lord of The Rings, we see much of the struggle for Gondor from Pippin's perspective. We know what happens to the realm as Pippin is told of it, but we never see Faramir's efforts to repel Sauron, or the desperate fighting at Cair Andros. If I've done my job properly, even those amongst you who know the book inside and out will have difficulty telling which bits of the storyline are from Tolkien's original work and the parts that are my bridging passages. In any event I hope it will help drag you deeper into the world of Middle-earth.

FIGHTING THE WAR

Of course, the scenarios are the heart of any The Lord of The Rings book, and Siege of Gondor is no exception in that regard. As I mapped out the story I wanted this supplement to tell, all manner of suitable confrontations presented themselves but, alas, there was only so much space in the book and some of them had to go. Trimming them down, I was left with a tight core of diverse and interesting scenarios that, taken together, tell the tale of the Siege of Gondor. You can play them as stand-alone engagements if you wish, but they have all been bound together to form the campaign that is the Siege of Gondor and I'm sure experienced players will love to get their teeth into this. Of course, once you've played them through a few times, you'll want to play sieges of your own and, to accommodate this, each of these scenarios has been specially designed to give players a feel for several different styles of siege warfare. By playing a 'Points Match' game on any of these scenarios you can create a whole range of new sieges.

Mordor War Catapult.

THE SIEGE BEGINS

Naturally, it's a little difficult to conduct a siege without rules and, as we couldn't fit them into The Return of The King, there was an opportunity to refresh and revise those that had been originally printed in The Two Towers. This couldn't have come at a better time because I had several shiny new things that I wanted to add. A side bonus to reworking these rules meant that I could break them down into more manageable chunks and dot them throughout the book. This way, as players work their way through the book, they'll be gradually introduced to everything that they need to play each section – there's nothing more difficult than trying to keep pages and pages of new information in your head as you're trying them out for the first time!

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