This is the next step in my playthrough of the Return of the King journey book scenarios for Games Workshop's Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game. It more or less picks up where the last scenario left off.
Here the gate of the White City has been knocked open, and Witch King moves in to be confronted by Gandalf the White. The goal for both sides is to reduce the other side's numbers down to 25%.
(Click on any image to see an enlargement.)
The Good forces are led by Gandalf the White, Pippin, and Imrahil. There's the usual two sprues of Warriors of Minas Tirith, plus a banner bearer and 9 Men at Arms of Dol Amroth. Oh sure, they look like Citadel Guard ... but they're Men at Arms. Why the substitution? Well, I never liked GW's Dol Amroth foot models much, so I never bought any. Though I must say the the new Dol Amroth troops look great. Unfortunately they are not available yet. So Citadel Guard figures it is.
By scenario special rule, the Good forces begin the game broken, and so will have to take Courage tests each turn or be removed. Fortunately, Gandalf has Courage '7' and Imrahil has Courage '6', so they are pretty sure to pass their tests and using their Standfast ranges they can help keep the warriors from bolting.
The Evil forces are the Witch-King of Angmar, an Orc Captain, and an Easterling Captain, leading contingents of Orcs and Easterlings. Orc being Orcs, the Morannons and the Easterlings with their slightly better stats will no doubt have to do most of the work.
The Witch-King and Gandalf each start at least 6" away from the destroyed gate. The rest of the Evil troops begin another 6" behind the Witch-King, while the Good troops prepare to defend the gate. Imrahil and his Dol Amroth troops begin on the wall due to scenario special rule. Good chooses to put his archers on the wall as well because he's likely to win a shooting contest due to cover and heavier armor.
Good starts with Priority on Turn 1, as always.
The special rules for this scenario will have the Witch-King leaving the battle on any turn with a 2d6 roll less than or equal to the turn number. I didn't work out the math exactly, but I suspect that means the Witch-King will usually be gone by turn 6 on average, and in the worst case he might disappear on turn 2! So his Might and Will resources can be spent profligately. After all, any points remaining when he leaves are going to be wasted.
With all this in mind, and knowing that Gandalf is likely to try to immobilize him, the Witch-King expends a Might point and calls a Heroic Move. Fearing a Your Staff is Broken! attack, Gandalf counters. Unfortunately for the wizard, Evil wins the roll-off. And, sure enough, the Witch-King tries to break Gandalf's staff with four Will points, and gets his '6'.
Gandalf faces a tough choice, but he really needs that free Will point each turn, so he uses his staff and two Will points from his store, but gets only a '5' highest on his three dice. It's a pretty easy decision to use a Might point to bump that to a six and hence to save his staff.
Evil advances except for his bow contingent. The Good heroes pass their Courage tests with flying colors, and Imrahil and his troops descend the stairs to get where the action is.
Shooting sees one Easterling fall and all the Good targets intact.
Casualties: Good 0, Evil 1
Good Priority, 6-5.
The Witch-King holds his breath and rolls the dice. His '5' result means he's still committed to the battle.
The Good heroes all easily pass their Courage tests. Imrahil and his men-at-arms continue downstairs. Gandalf moves out of sight of the doorway and so can no longer be targeted by spells.
Evil continues to advance, prepping for the melee which should begin next turn. The Witch King hurls a 3-die Black Dart spell at a bowman, but his dice are a disappointing '1', '2', '3' and the bowman survives.
Shooting sees another Orc fall and the Evil archers continue to hit the battlements instead of their enemies.
Casualties: Good 0, Evil 2
Evil Priority, 6-4.
The Witch-King rolls a '6' and continues to stick around.
He then throws a two-die Transfix on a defender in the gateway, getting a '1', '6' and so paralyzing the unfortunate fighting man. The Easterling Captain then moves up to engage him. The gate is only wide enough for two models to fit, so spears are at a premium and both sides make sure that everyone engaged has a spearman buddy to help out.
The Good heroes all pass their Courage test.
Evil shooting continues to be useless, but the Good return fire is absolutely deadly, with 3 Orcs and an Easterling going down. There's no doubt who's winning the archery war.
In the tunnel, an Easterling swordsman slays his warrior opponent. The Easterling Captain fails to be inspired by this success and loses to his enemy warrior, '3'-highest to '6'-highest, so it's unfixable by Might. Worse for Evil, the Good guys roll boxcars for their Wound rolls and the Captain takes two hits, one of which is saved by Fate.
Casualties: Good 1, Evil 6. This rate of attrition is going to have Evil losing pretty quickly.
Evil Priority, 5-1.
The Witch-King rolls '12' and definitively stays on the battlefield.
Wanting to deny Evil the opporunity to exploit the hole where the slain warrior was, Imrahil calls a Heroic Move. The Easterling Captain counters (the Witch-King being too far away) but Good wins the roll-off and the Evil models in the tunnel are swarmed.
The Good heroes all pass the Courage tests.
The Witch-King throws a 4-die Black Dart at the cheeky warrior facing the Easterling Captain. His '4'-highest doesn't cut it so the Witch-King uses another Might point to make the spell succeed and the subsequent Wound roll takes out the brave man. This lets the Easterling Captain gain a slight foothold outside the tunnel.
But Gandalf uses his free Will to Immobilize the Easterling Captain, rolling a '5'. The Captain uses his only Will point to resist, rolling a '4' and using his last Might point to successfully resist the spell.
Shooting sees two more Orcs go down at no cost to the Good troops.
Evil wins both combats in the tunnel, but can only manage to kill one of the defenders.
Casualties: Good 3, Evil 8
Evil Priority, 6-2.
The Witch-King rolls a '7' and remains. It feels like it's getting close to his exit, though.
Pippin calls a Heroic move to stem the Evil tide, but the Orc Captain counters and wins the roll-off. The Witch-King moves up to the wall (where he should have been all the time, giving the Good heroes -1 Courage) and Compels a warrior out of the way of the Evil bridgehead, spending his last point of Might to do so. (The victim is the guy with the white marker.)
Evil moves to exploit the opening, and then Good countercharges, swarming the Evil troops. As you can see from the second picture, Evil is having a hard time breaking out of the tunnel.
The turn is remarkably unlethal, though, with a single Orc falling to Good shooting and a Dol Amroth man at arms falling to the Evil shock troops.
Casualties: Good 4, Evil 9
The Witch-King failed his roll on Turn 6 and with him went any reasonable chance for Evil to win the war of attrition.
The game went on until Turn 18, but I stopped taking pictures because the lines remained static, so there wouldn't be much differentiating one turn to the next.
Evil's only real chance seems to be killing the Good heroes so that the warriors will run away. At one point Pippin did get a snake-eyes and he ran off, but he's not really the important hero. Imrahil never came close to failing, and Gandalf had only one turn where he rolled a '3', but with Courage 7 and the Witch-King out of play that was still a passing roll.
There was one bright spot where Evil got Priority and was able to charge Imrahil, who got tired of seeing his warriors unable to wound their enemies and had moved to engage the previous turn. That meant Gandalf had to cover the rest of the army ... but since he was off to the side there were maybe a dozen Good models out of his Standfast range and five of them ran away. Gandalf was smart enough to get everyone in range after that.
With the Witch-King gone and the Captains committed in the front line (and eventually dying, due to Gandalf's Immobilize spells) the Evil side was in trouble once broken and within three turns Evil went from 50% of his troops left down to 25% and so lost the scenario.
Victory for Good!
Final Casualties: Good 14, Evil 30
That wasn't particularly satisfactory. Since Evil has no way of getting over the wall here (what happened to the ladders from last scenario?) everything gets concentrated in the tunnel which means that there isn't much movement and it's just a slugfest.
The order of battle here more or less follows the scenario recommendations but it seems to me that the Evil forces really need more than two heroes in addition to the Witch-King.
Throwing in some Trolls would be true to the movies but there's no hope of getting more than one Troll into the archway of the model. Were I entirely building the walls myself I think I'd use bigger dimensions.
I suspect that if you combined this scenario with the previous one and threw in some rules so that Gandalf and the Witch-King arrive after a few turns in that you'd get a scenario that was better than either taken individually.