Optimising for Enjoyment: Building a Fantasy Fellowship Part 1

 

A great example of the quirky things you can do with Fantasy Fellowships (Drawn Combat)

The Fantasy Fellowship rules contained in The Quest of The Ringbearer are truly delightful, and have already given my small gaming group much joy. However, they are also broad enough to create a whole raft of potential pitfalls for the unwary gamer, capable of sucking some of the excitement out of the campaigns. Whether your Fellowship is so devoid of combat power that every passing Orc is killing a member, or whether your Hobbit-era Dwarves are so lethal that the Balrog turned and ran the other way, there are some key risks to be aware of when creating a Fellowship. To that end, I’ve come up with a rough guide to doing so that focusses primarily on how to make a fun grouping that will have you excited all the way to Mount Doom. Let’s jump right in with arguably the most important step, which is…

 

Check your group’s vibe

The key point here is working out how powerful your Fellowship should be. For some groups, including mine to a certain extent, part of the appeal of the Fantasy Fellowship rules is creating a brutally well-tuned group that is comfortable massacring every Goblin in Moria. For such groups, part of the excitement is trying to create a powerful and synergistic team that functions like clockwork, and seeing them slaughter a horde of Uruk Scouts is a joy in itself. If this is the case for your group, then you can basically ignore the rest of this article, but come back next week for an analysis of which models to bring/avoid when you’re trying to add some power to your companions.

Generally speaking, if you're bringing these guys then your Fellowship will be pretty scary

On the other hand, most groups want the scenarios to be relatively balanced and for the Fellowship to really feel under threat. If you do your job too well when building a Fellowship, you can easily end up preventing this entirely. Assuming your group falls into this latter category, then you actually have to pay attention to the balance of your members. Before we get to that, however, we’ve got the most exciting step.

 

Figure out your initial theme

For some players, theme is too strong a word for this process; a lot of the time, you just want to start by fitting in the models you think are really cool. Honestly, that is an entirely legitimate way of going about this process, and I often enjoy this way of starting when writing my own Fellowships. In many cases, the inclusion of certain models inevitably pushes you in a certain way and gives you a theme to work with. My last full playthrough, for example, started with me deciding I wanted to include Thorin, Thandruil and Aragorn as the Three Kings (a definite upgrade on the Three Hunters). This gave me a strong royal theme that I could carry through into my Wizard and Hobbit choices. Alternatively, starting with something decisive like a Hobbit-era or even Gondorian theme gives you some immediate ideas as to what sort of models you’d like to add. This gives you a good core to the group that you can add to or modify as needed in the next steps.

This Fellowship has a strong but somewhat unconventional theme going on 

Check your Saviour:Damsel ratio

Some themes can just hamstring a Fellowship too much to produce fun games. A Fellowship made up entirely of Hobbits sounds great fun, but you’ll swiftly find that losing every game is no fun for anyone. In contrast, a theme of Thorin’s Company can actually end up pummelling your opponent a bit too easily. The key factor that’s normally at play here is your Saviour:Damsel ratio. What this means is the ratio between the number of heroes that can stride through the enemy ranks to rescue a beleaguered companion, and the number of companions that are likely to need rescuing. I’d also like to apologise for the gendered language; I genuinely can’t come up with a non-gendered synonym for Damsel that works here! Obviously, both male and female characters can be Damsels if they’re likely to need saving.

Clearly Tauriel is more Saviour than Damsel, a few embarrassing moments onscreen notwithstanding (Existence_Is_Paint)

 In the original Fellowship, for example, Aragorn, Gimli and Boromir are all perfectly capable of smashing aside enemies to relieve pressure on the others, while the Hobbits and Gandalf are all prone to losing fights and getting killed. This gives us a ratio of 3 Saviours to 5 Damsels, with Legolas fitting into neither category. On the other hand, a more optimised Fellowship can easily end up with six powerful Saviours and only Bilbo in need of saving.

The reason that this ratio is so important is that it’s the key relational dynamic of the films/books, and also the key gameplay mechanic of most of the scenarios. If you’re fighting in Balin’s Tomb with an all-Hobbit Fellowship, every single one of your models is going to be in need of rescue with no one to provide it. In the original Fellowship, in contrast, the Hobbits never had to fight alone for long before one of the big-name heroes swooped in to save them. What you really want from your Fellowship is for there to be enough heroes that need saving, and enough heroes that are capable of doing so. Get this ratio right, and your opponent will have to be cunning to whittle down your Damsels while delaying your Saviours. Get it wrong, and you’ll rapidly find yourself with scenarios that just don’t feel like the movies anymore.

This Fellowship has 1 Saviour and 5 Damsels by my count. Ouch. (Warhammer Community)

I think that a ratio of roughly 1:1 is normally appropriate to avoid this. That will generally mean making sure all of the Three Hunters and Boromir are fairly powerful combat pieces, while no more than one or two of the Hobbits + Gandalf is capable of looking after themselves in a fight. To explore this in a little more depth, let’s take a look at The Fellowship of the Kings.

Frodo: Frodo

Sam: Farmer Maggot

Merry: Haleth

Pippin: Éowyn with shield

Aragorn: Aragorn

Legolas: Thandruil with twin blades

Gimli: Thorin, King under the Mountain with Orcrist

Boromir: Dori, Champion of Erebor

Gandalf: Círdan

 

The gang, shortly before they absolutely butchered some Wargs

Starting from the top, we have a Ringbearer who will need saving (almost always the case), a Sam who can probably handle himself with the assistance of his dogs, a Merry who tends to want rescuing and a Pippin who can hold off most foes quite happily. All of the Three Hunters and Boromir are pretty lethal, but Círdan absolutely does not want to fight anyone for long. That gives us a ratio of 4 Saviours to around 3 Damsels, which is likely a little on the high side. This is compounded by one of those Damsels (Haleth) actually being alright in a lot of fights, and three of our four Saviours being extremely powerful. Thorin and Aragorn’s free Heroic Combats mean that they can perform double work as Saviours a lot of the time, while Thandruil and Dori are still very dangerous combat pieces. Coupled with some other factors like Círdan’s Aura of Dismay, and it’s no surprise that this Fellowship has won a lot of games fairly easily. If I was to run it again, I’d probably trade Éowyn down to another Hobbit and use the leftover points to ‘boost’ Dori into Theodred. I’d then have a 4:4 ratio, which feels a lot more vulnerable to good play by my opponent.

But what to do if you’re really set on a theme with an uneven ratio? If your theme is making your Fellowship uncomfortably weak, then my advice is to compromise big in as few places as possible. That all-Hobbit Fellowship would be quite miserable to play with or against, but would be redeemed by having Aragorn, Glorfindel and Elrond shepherding them along. The theme is still very much there, but now you’re likely to actually win a few of the scenarios. In contrast, a Fellowship that’s too strong needs to compromise a little bit on quite a few models. A Thorin’s Company Fellowship is a great idea, but you’ve really got to make sure you include a lot of the weaker models like Ori and Óin, and that some of the heaviest hitters like Glóin and Dwalin are downgraded to lesser equivalents like Nori or Dori. Because your Damsels (like Ori, Balin and Óin) still tend to be less vulnerable than the equivalent models in the original Fellowship— as well as bringing powerful benefits to the rest of your team— you’re likely going to need to scale down your heavy hitters as well. Whether your Fellowship is too strong or too weak, of course, this ratio is a mere guide; don’t throw a great theme out the window because you can’t get exact Saviour/Damsel parity. The key is just to eliminate the huge imbalances that will make the campaign less fun for you and your opponent.

Not fielding the armoured versions of these guys can also make them a bit easier to deal with

One final note on this: don’t assume that because a model is more or less expensive, that makes it a better or worse Saviour/Damsel. Points costs are balanced for Matched Play, and the sort of models that are powerful there are not always good in Fantasy Fellowships. You’ll notice that I included Gandalf as a Damsel, and excluded Legolas from the Saviours category; this is because neither has much in the way of raw combat power, and what they do bring is often less useful in the scenarios listed. Gandalf has a vast array of spells, but most of them don’t really bring that much to Balin’s Tomb, for example. And he’s probably only going to get a handful of casts off before he’s mobbed by Goblins, at which point he is genuinely in need of support from one of the other characters. Nor is Legolas well-equipped to provide that support, because he’s only A2 and won’t get to use his ranged prowess very much. On the other hand, little old Dori is an absolute monster in Fantasy Fellowship, because he brings incredibly efficient close combat power and can even replace Sam if you brought Bilbo along. At the end of the day, the scenarios of the Quest are almost always about close combat; where a hero sits on your ratio ultimately comes down to that.

He's awesome, but he's unlikely to be saving your Hobbits once the lines clash (Gareth Nicholas)

If you’re looking for more on that last point, come back next week for a full article on assessing models’ power in Fantasy Fellowship games. However, there’s one more step in this article first:

 

Tie it all together with a story

Probably my favourite part of the process, this is where you go back and justify how everyone ended up in the Fellowship. In the Fellowship of the Kings, for example, here was where I started to integrate my Rohirrim refugees and Círdan through the medium of Farmer Maggot; where I decided that Thandruil’s pride would compel him to accompany the Fellowship when Thorin did; where I thought of Dori attending his king to look out for old Bilbo’s nephew. It is this story that finally ties together your members into a Fellowship, ready to embark on their epic Quest. Don’t skimp on this step, it’s where the magic happens.

 

An obvious and excellent story with this Fellowship (Drawn Combat)

I hope you enjoyed this article, and are as fascinated by Fantasy Fellowships as I am. There’s an awful lot to say on the topic, I think, and probably a huge number of ways of approaching them. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed reading about mine, and I’ll be back next week with a much deeper analysis on what sorts of models are good/bad in Fantasy Fellowship.

Until then, may your ratio always be right!