The Slopes of Mount Doom

Saturday saw me make the journey down to Wellington, to meet up with Andrew and Bryan at the Warlords... We had planned to play the Battle for the Slopes of Mount Doom - the titanic final clash at the end of the Second Age, which sees the Last Alliance march into Mordor for the final confrontation with Sauron...

It's an epic scene from the Prologue of the movie; The Fellowship of the Ring, which sees some the of the mightiest heroes of Middle Earth pitched against each other in a final cataclysmic battle...

Gil-Galad, High King of the Elves and Elrond lead their Elven host in alliance with Elendil and Isildur leading the might of the Numenoreans.

Against them, Sauron is drawn out to fight against them, in the foul depths of Mordor, with a vile host of orc soldiery at his command...

The scenario is in the old and new Mordor supplements. We tweaked the game slightly, allowing Sauron to deploy from the start...

Andrew and I had tried playing the scenario at the KWC on Thursday evening, but had simply ran out of time to complete the game. The game pitches two forces of approx 1200pts against each other, with several powerful heroes to command, so there is a fair bit to manage. The scenario also has special rules for playing in Mordor - managing volcanic eruptions in that blighted land....

Also the force of Good are immune to break tests in this battle! They have come this far, they will fight or die! The orcs are led by Sauron, they will only break once they reach 50 casualties! This game is going to go down to the wire...

Hence the decision to try again at Warlords who have an all day Saturday session...

Deployment

The forces of Good deploy first, up to 12" in from their board edge. The the evil forces then deploy within 12" of their own board edge. In the original scenario, Sauron is not deployed at the start but only comes on when a good model moves within 12" of the evil sides board edge. However, we decided to play him from the beginning. He's a cool model and we wanted him on the board - in part to attract attention from onlookers...

Andrew took command of the Numenoreans and deployed these to one side of the board, and Bryan the elves on the other side. From my brief experience against these troops on Thursday night, I had found the Numenoreans a little easier to deal with, so decided to mass my force against these, and make the Elves move to engage...

Deployment

To War

The game was rather epic in game play, we played for about 6 hours... and a lot happened, which I will have to summarise in the following pictures and highlight commentaries, as best as I can remember...

 To start, the Numenoreans held their ground..., then decided to withdraw, drawing the orcs forward...

 ...as the elves started their advance towards the flank of the evil forces...

The orcs begin their advance towards the Numenoreans...

...ever onward they come... the warg riders looking to sneak round the flank...

The battle lines finally clash in a crescent shaped line ... an orc captain on warg has led the lead elements against Isildur on the Numenoreans right flank. Isildur also took the initial evil attention from Sauron, weathering Sap Will and Chill Soul on him and his formation. This weakened that flank for the numenoreans, allowing the orcs there to gain the upper hand... Isildur also suffered a Transfix but still resisted the orc captain...

Both the orc shamen had channelled Fury, and this kept kept many orcs from falling...

Meanwhile Elendil was hacking through orcs, and Elrond and Gil-Galad joined the fray... Gil-Galad fluffed his earliest attempts, a lowly orc keeping him constrained for a couple of turns, but I guess this was just Gil-Galad just getting 'warmed up'...

Elrond also fluffed his earliest attempts, attempting to Channel Natures Wrath, and fluffing the castling roll and having to spend all his Might to get it to work. This left the dilemma of a shaman trying to resist it, but this would then blow his Fury... I was concerned that I would lose a banner if the spell was successful, and attempted the resist, but blew the roll anyway, and lost the banner and Fury! In hindsight I should have just kept Fury in play, and sacrificed the banner...

Channelled Natures Wrath from Elrond flattens many orcs and kills several... 

The orcs continue pushing against Isildur's formation, looking to wrap the flank and swing round behind the elves with their fast moving warg riders and plenty of spear armed orcs lurking to support...

The Elves and Elendil press on trying to fight through to Sauron...,

A tied priority roll results in Volcanic activity in Mordor,... and with an explosive blast from Mount Doom, rocks come crashing down, landing behind the elves and men, knocking many off their feet, and killing several... They manage to recover with a heroic call, getting back to their feet before the orcs can charge and trap them prone on the ground...

Volcanic blast knocks the elves and men flying...

The fighting continues back and forth, taking a steady toll to both sides... Isildur, with one wound remaining and no will left, is felled by a Chill Soul from Sauron, and wargs and orcs attack, and destroy the remnants of his command...

The orcs now look to swing this flank and come down behind the elves and men...

The battle rages on, Elrond, Gil-Galad and Elendil continue to slice and dice their way through the orcs. The Orc flanking move has stalled , caught up with a handful of elves and men, who despite being outnumbered and charged by cavalry refuse to die, and thus the flanking move is held up for several turns... bringing parity back to the battle.

Another volcanic blast this time knocks the orcs and even Sauron off his feet, but once again a heroic action get the orcs and Sauron back to their feet before the elves and men can charge.

Volcanic action knocks even Sauron off his feet...

Finally what is left of the outlfanking move breaks through but its too little too late, the majority of the orc line has been cut down, but at great cost to the elves and men. Only a handful of orcs remain to defend Sauron and he is now in battle with the Good Heroes.

Sauron and Gil-Galad engage, Elendil is about to charge in, Elrond fights the warg mounted orc captain.

As had to happen, eventually the last of the orcs are cut down, leaving Sauron in his wrath left upon the field, surrounded by foes on all sides.

Sauron quickly realised that his main adversary is Gil-Galad, who is as skilled in combat as Sauron and carries the mighty spear Aiglos. Thus Sauron directed all his attention against this foe, ignoring the others, even though they charged into the fight as well, effectively trapping Sauron if he lost the duel roll...

And so we went round after round... in a nail biting series of priority rolls and duel rolls... if Sauron won priority he would transfix Gil-Galad, giving him a greater chance of winning the fight if he could still roll high enough on three dice to win the duel roll.... Twice he achieved this but on one occasion rolled three 1's to wound (needing 4's), and then followed this up with another go, and rolled a 1 and two 2's...ARRRRGGHHHHH! Interspersed with these attempts, when the Good Heroes won priority it was a different story making Gil-Galad far more effective, and Sauron was struck several times... eventually dropping him to one wound remaining, now only the power of the ring could sustain him...

Twice more the Good heroes won and struck Sauron. Being trapped by several foes thus doubling their attacks, Sauron was getting nervous to say the least! One round 5 saves were required; of 'Anything but a one'.... the dice were rolled one at a time, bouncing across the board... he survived! Again the good heroes win, this time 4 strikes getting through... 4 more dice bounce one at a time across the board, and still Sauron survives, the power of the Ring sustaining him!

Sooner of later though something had to give, and in the final round of combat we managed, Sauron won priority, transfixed Gil-Galad, won the fight with a 6, (as Elrond and Elendil do not have enough Fight skill to compete with Sauron) and struck Gil-Galad down once and for all...

Final positions, Sauron strikes down Gil-Galad

And with time virtually exhausted at the club and everyone else packing up around us, we called the game there... We had played our hearts out, 6 hours of battling!

At this point, Andrew and Bryan felt their chance had gone, as they could no longer compete with Sauron's fight skill, and didn't have the might of Aiglos (+1 on all dice rolled to wound) to help strike Sauron down.

I wasn't so sure, it still could have gone either way with Sauron still just one more wound required to 'kill' him, eventually he was bound to fall to the 'Anything but a One' curse!  But with less foes to strike at him, the odds were getting longer against them. If Sauron wins again, there is a good chance he could strike down a good hero each turn, or start using his Unstoppable special rule where he can strike once at all against him, including spear supports!...

... who knows what might have happened it we had played to the very end...

It certainly proved Sauron is a serious handful, especially when empowered with the One Ring, he is nigh on 'unkillable', and in any average game, will dominate. He is probably best reserved for such scenario match ups like this one...

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Thanks again to my opponents Andrew and Bryan for a very enjoyable, if somewhat nerve-wracking game at the end, I think we all enjoyed playing it, and having the chance to recreate this momentous Battle of Middle-Earth...

Thanks also to Michail and the Warlords for hosting us... it was good to see another table playing alongside us of another LOTR SBG game played by Alan and Thomas, featuring Goblins led by Durburz against Prince Imrahil of Dol Amroth and his knights... good to see people breaking out and dusting off those LOTR figures again...