Is Lord of the Rings reactionary?

A bit of a departure today, prompted by a line from this blog post:
http://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/star-wars-as-counterfactual-history.html
It's well worth a read if you're interested in an interesting and somewhat provocative take on the Star Wars films. But what drew my attention was the description of the Lord of the Rings as a "reactionary fantasy", which left me wondering how true that was.

Certainly Tolkien himself was an instinctive conservative, to the point that when the Catholic Church switched the liturgy from Latin to English, he carried on reciting it in Latin regardless. Though, interestingly, Tolkien characterised his own political views as a combination of anarchism and monarchism. As far as I can see that means a King with ultimate political power who is wise enough not try and use it to actually do anything. This attitude is certainly reflected in Tolkien treatment of the Shire, in many ways Tolkien preferred idea of society. The hobbits elect a mayor, but his principle role is to preside over banquets, while the closest thing the hobbits have to a police force, the shirrifs, are mostly interested in wondering about gathering news and gossip. When the someone tries to actively change things in the Shire, it all goes horribly wrong.

In many ways this is the instinctive conservatism of the comfortably off, thinking that the world is just fine the way it is and everything would be okay if everyone was just left alone. This allows you to ignore the fundamental injustices and inequalities in the world and insist that everyone would be better off if they understood their place.

However, despite Tolkien's overt political views, there is an undercurrent in the Lord of the Rings that works against this. The principle goal of the characters in LOTR is the destruction of the One Ring, but the overall theme is of the last days of a heroic and magical age. Along with the destruction of the Ring and the Dark Lord Sauron, the more magical races, the elves, the dwarves and even the hobbits will go into decline, with humans becoming ascendant, the Wizards will also depart and the more magical and fantastic elements of the world pass away. This dichotomy is most firmly stated by Galadriel

"Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlorien will fade, and the tides of time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten."

The Lord of the Rings, Book 2, Chapter 7, The Mirror of Galadriel

In spite of this, there is never any question that the destruction of the Ring is anything other than a good and necessary thing. Discussions of trying to hide the ring are quickly glossed over and its emphasised again and again that the ring cannot be used for good. When the ring is finally destroyed the tone is entirely celebratory.

"This is the ending. Now not day only shall be beloved, but night too shall be beautiful and blessed and all its fears pass away!"

Frodo, The Lord of the Rings, Book 6, Chapter 5, The Steward and the King

So the passing of the old magical world into a new more mundane but safer one is regarded as a good thing, despite the loss of the positive aspects of the old.

Tolkien's attitude to the hobbits is similarly ambivalent. The hobbits are treated as peaceful and harmless but, with a few notable exceptions, parochial, prejudiced and xenophobic. A humorous touch in the first book of LOTR has the inhabitants of Hobbiton repeatedly describing the people of Buckland, on the other side of the Shire as "queer folk", but as soon as Frodo and his friends reach Buckland they hear the Bucklanders using the same term to describe the people of Hobbiton. Frodo himself sums up this contradiction.

"I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I feel as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again."

The Lord of the Rings, Book 1, Chapter 2, The Shadow of the Past

In spite of this, Frodo ultimately fails. He is not able to stop the War of the Ring touching the Shire and returns to find it ruined. And yet, the hobbits rally round, defeat their enemies and become a broader minded people as a result, albeit in a small way. If you read the Appendices to LOTR, it is revealed that following the events in the main story, the hobbits expanded the Shire, settling to the west and that the King ultimately visited, setting up his court to the east of the Shire for over a year. If the hobbits didn't exactly embrace the outside world, they at least grudgingly accepted its existence.

Tolkien disliked the the term allegory, preferring the term applicability. But if we apply the ideas of the Lord of the Rings to the real world, what does it say? That, ultimately, we have to deal with problems and can't just ignore them and that we cannot defend the status quo regardless of the consequences. That change will occur, but that this is not inherently negative. I'm not sure this can be regarded as a reactionary message.

On price and quantity

The new Hobbit film is out and with it Games Workshop's latest batch of Hobbit miniatures. Though this feels less like a release and more a kind of grim obligation, like an annual visit to an increasingly racist elderly relative. The comments have been largely predictable, ranging from shock bordering on disbelief at the prices GW think they can charge for this stuff, to the increasingly shoddy finish of even the display models.

I'm not planning on wasting any time defending £15 price tags for finecast miniatures, especially when they're of Legolas apparently falling off a log, but the plastic boxes gave me pause. I can't say I'm much of a fan of the Palace Guard, who may or may not have beards, depending on the angle from which you look, but the Mirkwood rangers are actually quite a nice collection. It helps that they have plenty of detail and there are ten different sculpts.

As easy as...

At £25 for ten models they're comparable to most of Games Workshop plastic infantry boxes, which most people, including myself, tend to think of as over priced. But this price is pretty close to that of the new Malifaux starter boxes which are also hard plastic and which give you fewer, if slightly larger models. For a similar price you can get a Warmachine or Hordes starter box or a unit box, which, again will give you fewer models. A Bushido starter box will set you back £5 more and give you only five models, though these also come with cards. Turning to sci-fi, Infinity will give you six models for about the same price.

I pinched this image from the GW website. I don't think the set comes with a present

Of course, other than Malifaux, these are not hard plastic models, but I think we have moved on from the days when plastic is automatically considered a cheaper alternative to metal, at least for sci-fi and fantasy models. There are things you can't do in plastic, but then there are things you can't do in metal or resin, its about choosing the right medium.

I have long maintained that the problem with Games Workshop's pricing isn't the cost of the individual models but the number you need to play the game. If this was a Warhammer boxed set you would need two to four to make a decent regiment or which you would probably need four or five to build an army, plus a couple of characters. For the Hobbit/LOTR this box plus a couple of characters (preferably some left over metal ones) is enough for a decent game. Maybe add a couple more blisters and another box, but that's about it. But we're still only looking at prices comparable to most other Fantasy or Sci-Fi skirmish games.

Games Workshop's other big release if Warhammer 40,000 Escalation a supplement that allows you to bring the super-super-heavy vehicles previously restricted to Apocalypse battles to a smaller scale.

On the face of it, this is simply smart marketing. There's little point releasing a range of miniatures that cost between £70 and £100 plus and then requiring players to already have several hundred pounds of models plus a games room the size of a barn before they can even think about using them, especially in the run up to Christmas. Plus there's the fact that where once every army need a £30 - £50 model, now you need to double that figure.

However, there may be something more significant about Escalation, in that it represents the relaxation of a trend that has been going on since at least the release of Warhammer 8th edition. Since 8th edition's serious accident waiting to happen of a rulebook was released, GW marketing has focused on bigger and bigger games. A kind of battle-level scale creep if you like. White Dwarf battle reports have shifted from being 2000-3000 points to 3000 minimum and larger for preference, while featured armies and promotional materials have shown larger and large collections of models. Every time a new giant monster or vehicle is released a battle report shows at least two of them in action and this is accompanied by a one click bundle on the Games Workshop website. Seriously, is there anyone who really needs three Lords of Skulls?

I'm not sure if these two threads are really related, but it's worth considering that Games Workshop prices may only be considered unreasonably high because of the quantity you need to buy and that, for the first time in a long time, Games Workshop may be suggesting it might be okay to play with a smaller number of models. Food for thought.

License to Game

Since Mantic's open day news has got out that their first line of licensed miniatures is going to be Mars Attacks. Certainly an unexpected development. My initial reaction was to wonder 'why?' It doesn't strike you as the most obvious license to pursue. Apologies to devoted fans, but it isn't exactly the biggest name franchise around. But it does have a very distinctive look and it's retro sci-fi looks seems reasonably popular at the moment.

Thinking about it some more, it occurred to me that the most obvious licenses don't necessarily make the best wargames. Take Lord of the Rings for example, thanks to Tolkein's obsessive attention to detail we know about pretty much all the major battles in Middle Earth's history as well as the personal history of most of its heroes. We also know that a lot of major characters we're only involved in very specific conflicts. The Army of the Dead and the Mumakils were only seen at one battle. The Fellowship was only together a group for a brief period and fought as a group on only one or two occasions. This limits the value of your shiny new 'Fellowship of the Ring' boxed set if you think about it.

Lord of the Rings players are essentially stuck either replaying the same scenarios, trying to find plausible encounters that fit into Tolkein sanctioned history, playing 'what if' or alternate universe scenarios (what if Gandalf had been evil instead of Saruman, what if Boromir had survived the Orc ambush, what if Sauron had attacked Helms Deep etc) or just ignoring the background entirely and just playing it as a game. I know plenty of people are happy with the last option, but I always felt that if you were going to ignore the background, why bother playing a Lord of the Rings game at all?

So the popularity of a particular license doesn't mean that it makes a suitable game. Which brings me to a license that has been on my 'most wanted' list of games for a while: Avatar - The Last Airbender. To clarify, I am not talking about James Cameron's smurfs in space mega-epic or the dismal M Night Shyamalan travesty of a film. I am talking about the original Nickolodeon, strongly anime influenced cartoon series.

Picture by Allagea on Deviantart.com

For the unfamiliar, Avatar (as I insist on calling it, it got here before James Cameron) is set in a world somewhat influenced by medieval China in which  individuals are able to manipulate or 'bend' the four elements, Water, Earth, Fire and Air, by performing sequences of martial arts inspired manoeuvres. The titular Avatar is the one individual capable of bending all four elements and who is reincarnated throughout history. When the series begins the Fire nation has been engaged in a 100 year war against the other nations (Earth Kingdom, Water Tribes and Air Nomads) Avatar is a 12 year old Air-bender, the last of his people whom the Fire Nation wiped out in a failed bid to get rid of him. The story focuses on the Avatar and his friends attempts to end the war.

So we have four distinctive factions each with their own signature powers and looks. The world is on the cusp of an industrial revolution, so the series introduces us to steam-powered ships, tanks and airships, as well as stone vehicles controlled by earth-benders. The series also has a nice line in animals that are a combination of two real world animals, but usually a different size. So we have a cross between a komodo dragon and a stag beetle that is the size of an elephant and ridden into battle by soldiers who can throw fire balls. The Avatar gets about on a six legged flying buffalo.

The series is open ended enough that there's plenty of scope for 'further adventures' involving the main characters or, alternatively, there's one hundred years of war to play with. As well as opportunities for some very distinctive and colourful armies, I can also envisage some interesting game mechanics based on the way element-bending works.

Then there's the spin-off series Legend of Korra that ups the technology level bringing in planes and robot suits.

Of course the fact that its owned by a Children's TV channel means a wargame is very unlikely to happen Games companies would likely ignore it as being too far removed from the major demographic and Nickelodeon would probably not be interested in a game based on full-scale warfare. That said, there was a CCG a while back and if the Kickstarter ever happens, I'll be first in the door with a pledge.

But it does make you question whether the licenses that end up as games are necessarily the ones that should.

Re-forging the Ring - Updated

After a period of rumours, the news is officially out that Games Workshop is re-releasing its Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. With the Hobbit movies on the way that this would happen sooner or later is hardly surprising, though GW's rapid move suggests they want everything sorted out and in place well before the official Hobbit miniatures are due for release.

One interesting shift is that War of the Ring is, apparently, to be more or less dropped from sale. Shuffled off into the Specialist games hinterland with the focus on the old Strategy Battle Game. Presumably GW have concluded that it has run its course, whether that means it failed or simply that they had gotten as much out of it as they could is less certain.

The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game has actually been a remarkably stable rule set by wargaming standards, let alone GW's. Technically it is still on its First edition. Although three rule books were released in quick succession, one for each movie, these were really just expansions of the original rules rather than new editions. The current rulebook essentially consolidated the same rules with only a few small tweaks, has been around for seven years and is not due to be replaced now. As far as I am concerned this is very much a good thing as the essential rules work well at what they are designed to do and don't need re-writing for the sake of it.

That said, I am much less enamoured of the new that the current run of source books is due to be droppped, with the exception of the Lord of the Rings Journey books, and replaced with five "army books" covering the major forces of Middle Earth. I am sure some people will welcome the news, particularly Rohan or Isengard players who have been left without a dedicated supplement since the release of the new edition. And the existing books are hardly a coherent collection, some focus on regions, others on conflicts and some on armies or races.

However, the move to, what sounds like, a more Warhammer/Warhammer 40,000 model of army books, albeit ones that cover more than one army list, is, I think, unfortunate and threatens to undermine some of the unique characteristics of Lord of the Rings as a game in contrast to its Warhammer counterparts.

As a relatively rare licensed war game, LOTR is set in a world that was not created to be a wargaming back drop. It is not a world of eternal warfare in which neatly defined races, each with their own distinct armies can be neatly picked out and pitted against one another. The story of Middle Earth is one of intermitant warfare, punctuated by conflicts between specific forces and nations. What that means is that certain combinations of armies never fought one another and others fought only briefly. The full army of Isengard, for example, was only ever employed in one battle, Helm's Deep.

Of course some players, quite reasonably, ignore this. They take their favourite armies and fight against one another without consideration for the background or history that inspired them. And their is absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, others, including myself, prefer their games to be grounded in the setting, preferring to play games that recreate battles that Tolkein described, or ones consistent with the world he created.

In some senses LOTR is actually more like an historical wargame than a fantasy one. Like an historical game it attempts to reflect defined conflicts that were defined outside of the company producing the game without consideration for its use as a game. Both use a wide variety of army lists, many of which blur together, covering a long period of history. Also, as with some historical armies, some LOTR armies are drawn very firmly from the source material, while others are more speculative, based on only partial accounts.

The other feature that sets LOTR apart from Games Workshop's other games was that it was designed specifically to support scenario-based gaming with heavly unbalanced forces. The Hero rules were written so that namd characters would behave quite differently from regular troops and that the most powerful characters from the books, Gandalf, Aragorn etc, could fight single-handedly against a horde of nameless enemies. In that sense, LOTR is entirely unlike an historical game.

The three supplements that most supported this approach, and which are, thankfully, still being kept in print, are the three Journey books that cover the three volumes of the Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Ring supplement, in particular, is one of my favourite gaming supplements, because it combines rules, scenarios and scenery building workshops and presents them in the order that they are needed. This means it is possible to work your way through the book from start to finish preparing models and scenery as you need them for the scenarios. Of course some compromises have to be made to suit the narrative of the source material. So it is necessary to tackle the comples Weathertop project quite early on.

Sadly, Games Workshop quickly abandoned this approach with their supplements not based directly on the books. After Fall of the Necromancer scenery building ws dropped and scenarios became less and less important. By the time of the Mordor supplement, Games Workshop had even abandoned location or conflict based supplements, creating what was, in effect, an army book.

And sadly, that is where we find ourselves now. Five supplements books are to be released covering the different LOTR armies. These are themed not by conflict, narrative or location, but simply by sticking the armies that seem most similar together. So we have one for Men, one for Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits, one for Mordor, one for Moria and Angmar and one for all the other evil armies (or the fallen realms, as they are calling them). The design of these books is looking less than inspiring, with single stills from the Movies on standard blue covers. They will, at least, contain scenarios, but it is hard to escape the feeling that this is an attempt to produce Warhammer style army books to allow gamers to pick armies to agreed points values and with only a limited interest in the Middle-Earth back drop.

I can't help but feel that this is another  missed opportunity from a company unwilling to be creative or take risks any more. Despite War of the Ring not proving successful enough to keep going as a mainstream game, Games Workshop still seem determined to Warhmmer-ise LOTR. This requires them to play down all the elements that make it distinct from Warhammer, a setting not designed for Wargaming, unbalanced narrative scenarios, a strong role for heroic characters and a game that could be played very comfortably at a number of scales.

Time will tell whether this move proves to be a success or not, but, personally, far from rekindling an interest in the game, all they have managed to do is put me off it.

Update

Since writing the above, Games Workshop have released some more information about the new books on their blog.

I'm not very reassured by this. The scenarios are welcome, but the examples they cite are either generic or essentially re-prints. The new army list format also seems to add an unneeded layer of complication to what was a very simple system. It is now a requirement to include one hero for every 0-12 regular fighters. It isn't a major restriction, but it does feel unnecessary. Why add a restriction where none is needed?

Tipping the Scale

A while back I wrote a post in which I commented on the price and perceived value of Games Workshop's miniatures versus other company's. Eventually, I concluded that the price of a model was less important than it's value within a game. I have been trying to come up with a way to quantify this and rate various different games.

Today, I'm going to write about 'scalability.'

This can be defined as how easy it is to start and collect miniatures for a particular game, or how scalable it is. I will subdivide it into three areas:

1. How much does it cost to get enough bits (miniatures, rules, scenery) to play the game?
2. How much does it cost to add a new element to your army/ gang/ crew/ squad?
3. How big can the game get?

When I refer to cost, I don't just mean in purely financial terms, but also the time cost in collecting assembling and painting the necessary miniatures.

A game with good scalability allows you to start from nothing and expand your collection as far and as fast as you like.

The first element is the most straightforward - how much does it cost to start playing? How many models do you need and how much will you have to pay for them? As I have mentioned a few times before, Warhammer has high start up costs. You now have to spend over £60 on rulebooks, never mind the miniatures. Games Workshop has attempted to soften this with a high value starter set containing as many plastic models as can be sensibly squeezed between two sheets of cardboard. But this is of limited value if you don't plan to collect the armies included in the starter set. Mantic's Kings of War does a good job in reducing the cost of the models, but still scores quite low in this area because of the amount of time you have to spend painting them.

In contrast, skirmish games like Malifaux, Helldorado, Anima Tactics or Infinity can be played with as few as two or three models and a decent sized force may be no more than half a dozen. Anima and Infinity have expensive rule books, but both compensate with free downloadable startup rules (which actually cut out very little of the detail in the main books). So, while individual metal miniatures may be a lot pricier than plastics, you need very few to play the game and can devote more time and effort to making each one look that bit better.

Warmachine and Hordes, although based on larger armies than the skirmish games, make good use of starter sets and quick start rules to draw players in. It is at least possible to play a game with the contents of two starter sets, even if these games are a bit limited in tactical options.

My second criteria is slightly harder to explain, but in essence it's about how much it costs to add a new element to your army or force. By an element I mean the basic number of models that has to be added to an army to make it viable. In Anima Tactics or Malifaux that will usually be a single figure, but in Warhammer you need a whole unit. Anima Tactics and Malifaux miniatures cost a lot, but each one operates as a separate individual within the game, in contrast Warhammer and Kings of War use models in groups.

What this means is that although Games Workshop and Mantic's models are comparatively cheap, you need to buy them in large numbers. For Warhammer you now need two or three boxes , costing £30 - £45. For Anima, you can have a miniature for £8 and have it assembled, painted and on the gaming table the next day. So although the cost of a Warhammer miniature is lower, so is its value in the game. This means that Anima scores higher on criteria 2 than Warhammer.

Warmachine and Hordes sit somewhere in between. They sell units in boxes, which means one box usually gets you one unit, but the boxes are often very expensive at £30 or more (though the UK does seem to suffer due to the exchange rate here).

My final criteria is how big a game can get. How well does it support large armies? Or at what point does it become pointless to buy any more models? This is where the Games Workshop games, and Kings of War score highly. Games can get very big, very easily without becoming unweildy and Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 even have rules specifically to support extra big games.

Most skirmish games start to become unweildy when they get beyond twenty or thirty models, creating a natural cap in your collection where models can only be swapped not added to your force.

So skirmish games tend to score well for criteria 1 and 2, while mass battle Warhammer scores better for 3. Warmachine and Hordes score moderately well on 1 and 3, but not so well for 2 and sit as something as a compromise.

Companies have tried several ways to address the scalability problem. One approach is to produce 2 or more games to cover different scales of conflict. Games Workshop have tried it with the Lord of the Rings strategy battle game and War of the Ring and the late Rackham, famously, had Confrontation and Ragnarok. The idea is that you start with the skirmish game and, as your collection grows, you naturally progress to mass battles.

The problem with this approach, is that skirmish games tend to require only 1 or 2 of any individual miniature, while mass battle games require units, usually of at least five, if not ten or twenty. This means that the progression is rarely natural. Looking at Lord of the Rings, 1 or 2 plastic boxes is likely to give you as many of one particular trooper as your likely to need for the strategy battle game, but for War of the Rings 4 - 6 is more realistic. Meaning that you will probably have to double the size of your collection to make it viable for War of the Ring. This is simply not a natural progression.

So, what is my point here? Well essentially, creating wargame rules is a compromise and creating a game that scales well is very difficult. Games Workshop plays to its strengths by pushing bigger and bigger armies, while the skirmish games listed above are newer and benefit from a pool of players who still have plenty of models to get before they exhaust the possibilities of the smaller scale. In the end, perfect scalability may be impossible and it a company has to make the most of the rules they have.