Hi all,
I am joined by Patrick today as we explore the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game (MESBG) event at the LVO this year. I am not terribly familiar with this game system and so I am eager to hear what he has to say!
1. Tell me a bit about you and the other organizers, what armies do you play? How long have you been playing and what are some past events you have organized?
For myself, I have only gotten into MESBG fairly recently compared to my contemporaries. It was about 2021 that I started to learn about and dive deep into this game, while the group that I cultivated has been playing since the game first released about 20 years ago. I fell in love with Amdur the Lord of Blades and the Easterlings and expanded my forces until I had one of every race (Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, Men, and Hobbits). This is my second year running LVO for MESBG though on a local level I have been running events since I got into wargaming with narrative 40k, Warhammer Fantasy, Age of Sigmar, Star Wars Legion, etc. My favorite I have run recently was a Middle Earth Campaign where I Divided up the map of Middle Earth and had the players fight for territory in a battle of Good vs Evil with bonuses from conquering certain areas of the map and having all their factions start in their local regions. Evil did end up dooming the world in the end as the forces of Saurman and the Serpent Horde trounced their enemies time and again.
2. How do you structure your events? How do you try to involve players in the story?
When I am designing an event the number one principal I build upon is that the event is fun to participate in. I do my best to support fun and interactive play over winning and losing even in the more competitive events I run. I will often have more prizes for hobby and sportsmanship than for winners. So I will throw in some pseudo goals that go on top of whatever scenarios we’re playing. For example, my LVO event, I am throwing in a headhunter prize for the person who kills the most heroes/characters throughout the entire event. And at the beginning and the end I always try to get some clear feedback from my players on how to improve.
3. How do you develop your ideas for these events? Do you have the stories build on past events or start fresh every year? What is the latest narrative hook?
I always try and start fresh with story ideas and hooks. The main driving force behind that is for one, it keeps things fresh for me and other organizers that we can continuously bring new ideas to the table without having to be conscious of how it interacts with what we did last year. More so, our events are constantly expanding and with newer players coming into the hobby, we want to cultivate an environment that is good for them to hop in and join these larger events without being intimidated by a backlog that they aren’t aware of. The Middle Earth events for LVO have doubled since last year and I know other Middle Earth events are on the horizon with Adepticon selling out its 90 tickets in under 3 hours.
When it comes to developing those ideas that we bring to the events, there’s a very good basis for us to build upon by either using the Games Workshop narrative books such as the newest one (Defense of the North) or by using other Tolkien inspired works to make a story out of. With such a rich basis to work out of, it is very easy to develop and run fun events for this game.
4. Age of Sigmar has the Path to Glory rules and 40k has the Crusade system, is there something similar for MESBG? Either official or fan made?
For building up and creating your own forces and characters with stories written by the battles and trials they face, we have the Battle Company supplement by Games Workshop that works wonderfully. The game starts off very small with a handful of models taken from whichever faction you want to make a basis out of and as you play more games with the Battle companies book giving you 18 different scenarios to play out who will be able to forge your own heroes and warriors to bring to battle. After building them up, you can begin to bring that war band into battles with or against mighty heroes of the third age. Depending on what kind of story or narrative you’re using them in.
5. Are there any ways you try to balance armies or units?
I find this is one of the more balanced tabletop war games I have experienced. The sheer amount of factions in the game make it so that if any particular play style starts taking dominance there are factions that will rise against it. This leads to a lot of ebb and flow in the meta between various different factions. There are some models in the game that were created with a pure narrative focus in mind. (Looking at you, Tom Bombadil.) So depending on the nature of the event, models such as those will be disincentivized or even outright banned from being played. But that is roughly three or four models out of the several hundred that we have access to. So overall I find a little need to balance the game myself.
6. Why should players attend this event compared to the many other options at the LVO?
I try my best not to think of LVO as a competition between events. What I would say makes us different from the other events is our fluidity. There is no force you can bring, no model that you can play, that would make you “that guy”. You can bring what you love and play what you love. With the only barrier to how well you will do in the event being your knowledge of the game of which all of our players are happy to share our knowledge with you. More than anything, we all understand that this is a game or meant to have fun and enjoy our time together whether we are long friends or new acquaintances. And with all those new people come new armies, models, play styles that keep the game fresh every single time.
And remember, Frontline Gaming sells gaming products at a discount, every day in their webcart!
Great read! Very excited to check out MESBG at LVO – maybe I’ll get into it.