We're back! This time out we're looking, as promised, at Lurtz and his New Zealand rugby team of halfling kidnappers. This was an LL I were looking forward to very much for two reasons. The first being that Ugluk's Scouts is a very characterful LL that gets a lot of utility out of a very limited selection of profiles and great fluffy special rules- much like the recipe we discussed last time was my view on what makes a really great LL. And the second is that my first book in this hobby was the original Fellowship edition of Best of White Dwarf (in my opinion the best of those books there has been). In the back end of that book was a custom two-part scenario which began with the 3 Hunters fighting through Uruks to escape off the board edge as quickly as possible, and then a linked scenario where Boromir had to protect Merry and Pippin for as long as possible before the 3 hunters arrived on the board, which just so happened to be the turn that they escaped in the first scenario! I built a custom board for this Amon Hen duoscenario and spent many happy teenage years playing through it with friends.
Competitively, limiting yourself to Lurtz, Mauhur, Ugluk, Scout Capt, Drummer and Scouts would be plenty themey but unlikely to win 6 games over a weekend. I have been schooled by Martin Seed before using such a list due to his excellent tactical play, but I wouldn't expect it to challenge a top table player or meta-geared list. You just forgo so very very many of the excellent range of options in an Isengard list that makes it one of the most versatile in the game next to Mordor. So how did the Quest sourcebook get on with capturing the terror of the Uruk pursuit whilst making a spearless, low defence horde viable?
Special/Additional rules:
1. Relentless March
Just like Ugluk's scouts, if you have Mauhur then everybody gets mv8 including Heroes for free, as well as the woodland creature rule. Unlike Ugluk's scouts though, the whole army can benefit which means you have one of the most mobile armies not just on foot but in general. You can stack drums and HMarch to achieve a 14" move, 40% over cavalry, whilst going through woods at full speed. That's up to 7inch move and shoot, or 5.5" with just a drum- so you can kite goblins and shoot them until they break without taking a casualty. But on the flipside, the Army Bonus for Isengard already gave these models (and Vrasku the dual-action xbow monster who can't be taken in this list) the Woodland Creature rule. However, the other half of the Isengard Army Bonus (the bit people remember), means that you don't take courage tests for breaking until you lose 66% of your models instead of 50%. It's understated, but really, really good value in Matched play. So essentially, the trade-off is 2" extra movement for everybody not already in Mauhur's warband for free, but no broken test help. When you have drums and so much access to HMarch already, and Mauhur can still be taken in a normal list with just 12pts on his warband of faster Marauders, I'm not sure it's worth it. So the other rules need to pull a bit of weight to balance it out.
2. Lurtz
To say that this Legion puts its eggs in one basket really would not be an understatement. Lurtz must be taken and is your leader. Then he gets two rules: A Worthy Foe, and Shield Throw.
A Worthy Foe allows Lurtz to call Heroic Challenge on ANYBODY regardless of Heroic Tier. If the target refuses, Lurtz gets his Might back. To remind ourselves, as this Heroic is one of the least used in the game, if they refuse the Heroic Challenge their troops may no longer use their Stand Fast!, and their friendly models may not benefit from their Heroic Actions. So potentially, a great tool. The issue has always been that you cannot call a Strike the turn that you call the Challenge. So, your opp can Strike in retaliation on the first turn and potentially get almost a free set of strikes on you for your trouble. Then your two Heroes must charge each other for the rest of the game until one of them is dead and the winner gets D3 Might back. Note that you are not prevented from using spears to support after the first round of the Heroic Challenge, which this Legion has none of. Due to a specification in the wording of Challenge, it is also possible to deny your opp the D3 Might by simply Stabbing yourself for the final wound, shooting your own Hero (Evil tactic), or even in a good old Isengard list if Lurtz or Snaga called a Challenge that is going sour (or any of your other Heroes get one called on them), you can use a Demo Charge to deny your opp the D3. Tad extreme, but I'm just illustrating that this is probably the coolest, fluffiest Heroic in the book which I love...but it doesn't really work. Usually. There is one strong proponent of the Challenge in the game currently, and that is Shagrat. He has 3s in all the right places (unique to Evil!), D7 to last out most opps, 3A with S5 and knockdown to kill, F5 with Strike, Blood and Glory to recover Might "wasted" on Challenges, and most importantly of all: Fortitude Tier. This means he can, if he wants to, run around and bully weaker captains without Strike and mine them for Might points. See last week's Cirith Ungol review for details. Now to cycle back to Lurtz, being able to call one on any Hero at all means he can run into a myriad of weak Independent Heroes and Challenge them. If they refuse, they still have to complete that fight (common misconception that they escape the combat by refusing the Challenge) and if they somehow survive their Might is now much less useful (until they get one of their stronger friends to do your Challenger in) and they can't use Stand Fast! at all. So by having a rule to regain "wasted" Might on refused Challenges, Lurtz can now run into any mid-low Tier Hero and mess with their ability to impact the game. It's not quite being able to automatically mine D3 Might out of any weaker hero, and it's not even Blood and Glory, but as a psychological tool and tactical option most opponents won't have much experience dealing with, it's there to use. There is also one other additional benefit to Lurtz using Challenge: if it is accepted it keeps him safe from being run over by a nastier killy opp Hero. For now. So you may make your opp hide some of their lesser captains etc behind lines and that removes threats to your comparitively middling Heroes and your squishy troops. The main issue is that Lurrtz just doesn't have the killing power to make good on this ability. He's got no knock-down, no rerolls, no +1, he's just S5 and 3A. When the vast majority of Heroes are D6-7, he's averaging 1 Wound a turn, and that's if he wins. You can run the risk of locking Lurtz into one location with your opp Shielding or otherwise stalling for days. So, we need to make him a bit more killy, and that leads onto his other special rule, and this Legion's last one.
Shield Throw works fairly straightforwardly: Lurtz has a Once per Game Throwing Weapon- his Shield. S4 hit, and man-sized or smaller that is hit is knocked Prone. Then the Shield is gone. It doesn't affect his Defence value, but the option to Shield on your Leader is still very, very valuable. So, firstly no other Throwing Weapon works on a Once per Game basis. But it's the fluff- he pins Aragorn to a tree and nearly decapitates him and then no longer has the shield, so how do we represent that? I imagined they might have a requirement that the target had to be within 1inch of terrain and be in between Lurtz and the terrain, and they then become paralysed. A scary as hell prospect for even the biggest of Heroes (and this list really will struggle to kill the bigger threats except by wearing down through numbers and the 6 available Strikes). By making it within 1inch, it forces the opp to not hug the terrain and lets you get more of your spearless horde to wrap in around for traps and Duel dice. Perhaps it could have been limited to a scenario rule but it's here and it's cool so let's look at how you can make the most of it.
But the second issue: it's man-sized or smaller. So this has no effect on mounted Heroes. You'll have to put in some work and have a bit of luck shooting your opps Heroes off their horses before sending Lurtz for the kill. And finally, this is a Throwing Weapon, and therefore is not automatic. Lurtz has a 3+ shoot value, which is pretty decent, but there are two problems with this. If you want Lurtz to take his shot at knocking a big bad Aragorn to the ground and then having a turn of hacking him, you either have to hang back and get a shot at him in a shoot phase before combat (if you shoot into combat, there's a chance you'll pin your own guy instead), or you'll have to charge Lurtz straight into Aragorn and hope really, really hard that you hit. You can use Might to ensure the hit of course, but now you've got a new issue: you have to win the fight or Aragorn just jumps straight back up and your big chance is blown. Lurtz might have a banner to help, but so might Aragorn. But Aragorn can have a spear support, at his Fv, and you can't. Then it's a Strike-off, and most big bads will be F6 or higher so you're already at a disadvantage. But after all that, if you hit, if you out-Strike, and if you win the combat, you can do your 6 S5 attacks. And if the big bad has D6 or higher, you're averaging 2 Wounds, which is not enough to trouble any 3W and 1-3F big bad. Then next turn, if they win the Heroic Move-off, big bad is now back on his feet, and right in front of your not-very-big-bad-Leader, who now can't Shield.
So to get the most out of this rule, your timing has to be absolutely immacculate. You'll want to engineer a situation where big bad has become somewhat isolated, Lurtz can reach him (the 8mv helps) and you can get at least another friend or two into big bad as well, possibly even Ugluk as a second Striker to put the pressure on or Mauhur to help finish them off. But even after all that, there's a lot of luck involved.
And I've only alluded once in all that discussion of Lurtz to just how fragile he is. No HDefence, a Shield (some of the time) that doesn't improve his Defence due to being unable to drop his bow, only F5, and then D6 with 3W and 1F. Any big bad that only costs 50-60pts more will follow Aragorn and the Black Knight's examples and divide Lurtz into many seperate pieces in as little as one round of combat. But this Legion has 2/3 of its rules focussed entirely on him. If/when you lose him, you're back to having a Legion that exchanged an incredibly restricted list and no Break Point courage help for slightly faster Shieldwall fodder.
Playstyle tips and example list:
Because this list has so little in terms of options, as well as tools for dealing with big threats, this Legion will probably do best in low point events (a running theme for Quest Legions). That way you reduce the risk of dealing with a big bad, a strong spellcaster (all your Heroes, including Leader Lurtz, only have 1 Will point), or Siege Engines to force you to split up and be taken apart. It also means that very little will be able to match your potential mobility, and so you may find yourself winning the Scenario objectives but not the main fight quite often. With these ideas in mind, this list leans on mobility, numbers, and cheap Heroes to run around the back of an opponent and overwhelm whilst stealing the objectives (traps are really important to increasing the kill output of this Legion in the absence of spears, Hatred, or Ugluk's Animosity).
Lurtz with Shield
10xScouts with Shield
5x Scouts with Bow
225
Ugluk
7xScouts with Shield
4xScouts with Bow
164
Mauhur
7xScouts with Shield
2xScouts with Bow
2x Scouts with Bow and Alternate Weapons (Maces for knocking Heroes off horses to make way for Lurtz's Shield Throw or Axes for a cheeky bit of S5 to help with fairly prevalent D7)
161
Total pts: 550. Might: 8. Numbers: 40. Bows: 14.
Almost a full 50% over the Pts/20 guideline, this is a horde where everybody is 8mv, F4, S4, and a passable C3. I have spread the bows around the warbands mainly to keep the threat spread out for Scenarios with random deployment. But do not forget that in those Scenarios Lurtz counts as rolling a 6 for his warband, so you can either bring numbers to bear (and save Might) in Maelstrom deployment, or help you to deploy further back in e.g. Capture and Control to use your large amount of S3 bows to full effect before using your superior movement along with Heroic "Slingshots" to secure objectives later in the game. With the amount of S2 shooting, and S4 Strikes in the game, I always like to opt for D5 if possible. Additionally, you can pair up objective sitters with one with Shield to push back objective stealers, and one with bow to hide behind him and still influence the board whilst behind D5 cover. So you can opt to drop some or all of the Shields in exchange for up to 3 more Scouts but the ones you do have will just die faster. If you need help acquiring additional Shields for the 1/3 of the box that come without additional wargear, I strongly recommend blue stuff press-moulding, or else look for Dirty Deeds facebook page who makes a huge array of spare bits for SBG models to fix up your broken favourites.
The shooting superiority will be important to pull your enemy forward away from surrounding terrain so that you can encircle their Shieldwall and bring your numbers to bear whilst getting the traps you will need to get kills. You can keep your archers behind a wall if terrain is kind, or behind your Shields for a D5 in-the-way. You have 8mv, so the vast majority of infantry opponents will not be able to make the initial charge. In fact, even without March or Drums you can move 4 and shoot and your opp will only be able to gain 2" on you per turn or else be forced to use their precious Might on Marches (at which point you can run full away and only lose 1" of line-gain). You can split your archers to the sides evenly to threaten spears and banners (who should be one of your top priorities to kill), or Heroes hiding their mounts (or themselves from Lurtz!) behind the shieldwall. Alternatively, you can have your main line be archers (or mix them with the sheilds), and retreat whilst shooting whilst the other parts of your army get the manoeuvrability around the sides and if you're careful you can bring it all to bear at once. And don't forget that all Heroes have Heroic Shoot, which can really put the pressure on your opp and with your relatively plentiful Might it will likely cost them more to counter it than is worth it, allowing your to remove their archers and the threat they pose. But the nastiest shooting ability? Evil shoot into combat. Take away your own guys to deny a Heroic Combat, take out a big bad's horse, or even the big bad himself. 14 S3 bows is an average of 7 hits, 3.5 hit big bad, 1.75 hit his horse, roughly 49% chance of taking away the horse. Combat will not save his Heroes, and your troops are cheap, so rain your arrows on them!
Don't be afraid to Shield when 1v1, by staying alive in one place, you're keeping the press there because his model is still there trapping his friends, and your model is still there giving you options for next turn and meaning he can't move away and relieve the pressure. Try and think like the Shieldwall press from Game of Thrones' Battle of the Bastards, except you have no spears, but you do have the Shields. But whilst spears aren't an option, Banners are- Banners can be added (and maybe should in more numbers than your usual army!) but they take away from your numbers. It's 3 scouts you're giving up per banner, not including the model who's carrying it and having to hang back with it (so give him a bow if you do take a banner). Then potentially you've got yet another model stood next to the Banner Bearer unengaged (again, bow), in case he gets sniped and the banner needs to be passed on. In the right context, Banners can make your Heroes more consistent, double your no-spear line's dice to win their fights, and count for VPs in 1/6 of the Scenarios. Very much down to personal taste, and if I was going up to 600pts I might even just add two to the above list rather than go for another Hero or Drummer. But at 550 I'd tip towards just straight-forward weight of numbers.
Drums can be added but for my money they're a 1F warrior for 35pts. Based on Battle Company pts value allocations (not the most consistent system but it's all we've got to work with), you've got a basic scout for 8 pts, add +1 D and C for 10, Fate for 15, meaning the drum is about 20pts, which is 5pts more than an Easterling War Drum but you also gain a Stand Fast! on an Uruk Drummer so there's that. So you pay for an additional March, which can stack with regular March, and has a 12" range rather than 6". You don't have to finish moving in range of the Dummer like with a March, but you can't be selective with who uses the Drum-March and who doesn't, so you'll have to be very, very careful with measuring movements and ensuring you only "get" the models you want to, but you have to declare it at the start of the move phase which makes it harder. You may therefore try to leave him further back so that the front can charge but the further back models can move around the back for traps, or else have a very speedy flanking manoeuvre for the next turn. But by leaving your dummer in the open, your 35pt investment is one lucky arrow and a 50/50 fate roll away from popping. In the Special Scenarios Pool, they become an outright liability. They're too risky for me, but a very skilled player could use one to good effect with practice.
And a final word to the Heroes. Ugluk has a 12" auto-standfast which affects friendly Hero models as well as the troops, at the cost of beheading one friendly warrior within 2". You have large numbers so don't be afraid to make the most of it. This does help make up for your losing the Army Bonus somewhat, but Ugluk is even squishier than Lurtz and so may be hard work keeping alive for those late stages. Especially given that he is your only other Striking option after Lurtz, so you may be tempted/need to put him in situations he may not survive. But if you use him to call the Heroic Shoots, you carefully use him to Strike against Heroes that can't do Strike back, the Might has been used and break point is coming up, maybe look at retreating him from the front line to safety to ensure you stay in the fight until the end. Don't be tempted to over-reach with Mauhur- 3 attacks is great but 2W 1F and no Strike means he's an easy target for traps such as an enemy Heroic Combat or just simply spaffing his roll against warriors. You'll want to charge two enemies every turn, but for longevity and consistently pulling 1 guy off the board per turn I prefer to play him safer. At the same time, if you can find an opp model that's just a bit isolated on the flank, go at him with a Hero and as many bodies as you can get, and call a Heroic Combat. Sling them all off on an extra move to get more bodies and traps in combat. Finally, the Scout Captain is there as an option, but he's more or less the same pts as the named Lieutenants (who are just better), and all 3 of the named Heroes have March so he doesn't bring anything unique to the table, so the list kinda naturally caps out around the 600pt mark anyway.
· Numbers
· "Good" Evil shooting
· Plenty of Might and useful Heroics
· Manoeuvrability, including underrated Woodland Creature
· Solid F4 S4 C3 basic warriors
· Lurtz bullying Heroes
· Courage: Terror-causing opps will prevent you bringing your numbers to bear. Somewhat mitigated by extra move but comes back to the no spear problem.
· Harbinger of Evil: In conjunction with above, you're completely stuffed.
· Elves: Not many of them but usually have D6 and S3 and 24" range and sometimes Blinding Light into the bargain, so your shooting superiority is probably gone.
· Siege Engines: If you have to space out, you'll struggle to bring numbers to bear. You don't have many valuable targets, but it's a different problem posed. Use your speed and bows to take out the crew ASAP.
· Spellcasters: 1Will per Hero is your lot. Use speed and bows to get to their Wizards fast.
· Big bads: Your options are really, really limited. Drown in bodies and arrows until they run out of Might, then send in the Strikers.
· All-cav armies. You're outmanoeuvred, without spears, and very likely at a lower Fv. You'd better hope you get an outstanding shoot phase (or if you're lucky with 18" bows and a HMove, two shoot phases).
· Squishy Leader: With so much focus on Lurtz for the special rules, he's very fragile. Could be easy VPs for your opp. Be careful not to bite off more than he can chew or leave him open to being run over by a big bad.
Legion suggestions for improvement and conclusion:
With the Isengard Army Bonus literally being named for Saruman's speech to Lurtz's scout party, it's a bit weird that the 66% breaking rule hasn't carried over. Especially for an army that in all likelihood will take a lot of casualties and will be pretty spread out as opposed to concentrated in a Shieldwall. Perhaps it was for a balancing issue, but honestly, I think this Legion needs a bit more help and it wouldn't be OP for having that rule.
The Shield Throw rule I'm not a fan of. I discussed above how I thought it was going to be written, and I'm a little disappointed how lucky you have to get with using it especially as it's one of your precious few tools for taking out big threats. If it was an auto-hit, that would be a reasonable amount scarier. If it enacted the Stun special rule, it would be a much better tool for one-shotting big bads. As it is, it's inconsistent at absolute best, but also comes with the drawback of losing the ability to Shield on your squishy Leader. I wouldn't be surprised if players get to the end of a day tournament and either haven't used it or forgot they had it.
Staying with the fluff, A Worthy Foe allows Lurtz to bully all Heroes. Except that isn't what he did in the film- he sniped Boromir (in combat) with 3 consecutive on-target wounding shots, and then went toe-to-toe with Aragorn for longer than almost any other adversary across the trilogy, severely bloodying him in the process. Then from a practical point of view, it centres on possibly the least used Heroic apart from Resolve, and on a Hero that doesn't really have the Combat ability to take advantage of it. But he does make a point of licking a dagger covered in his own blood- Blood and Glory rule for Lurtz to lean on this Legion's Might advantage and even compliment this HChallenge focus and Shield Throw's potential to take out Heroes? Or even the option to drop the bow and go to D7 like he does after being tackled by Aragorn? To emphasise his proficiency with the bow, perhaps he could have Heroic Accuracy to help with the Uruk shooting? In the books Boromir dies to a cloud of Uruk arrows, so it would make sense. Given his 3 in a row dead-eye-shots, perhaps he counts as having accuracy and can re-roll hits and in-the-ways? That would even help with the Shield Throw rule! It would also make this Legion the real kings of shooting into combat as a tactic, something a bit unique.
Or to move away from the focus on what Lurtz can do, what scouts with no spears struggle with is winning combats, so perhaps you could have allowed named Heroes who have charged to count as banners? Reflects the aggression, makes the troops a little more consistent. Or to transfer the angle of Lurtz bullying minor Heroes, it's really his troops that are charged with kidnapping the halflings, so perhaps you could give the scouts an option to knock out Hero models rather than wound them and like a spider web it requires a fate to avoid. This then applies a pressure like a Morgul Blade does where your opp might take wounds as opposed to spending fate because they want to avoid being knocked out, which can mean getting Leader wound VPs. And then you have an option to carry Heroes away from objectives, or the troops they give effects to, etc. But maybe that kind of mechanic is better suited to staying in scenario play?
On balance for me, this Legion doesn't provide a viable alternative to an Isengard list for Matched Play, and it's not even close. But if you were going to do a pure scout army anyway, you may as well use this. Ugluk's Scouts has better fluff and better viability, but no Lurtz. At the same time, if you go for a pure Isengard list, you can also take Vrasku as another Scout Captain option and he also gains the Woodland creature rule, and as discussed you get the 66% break rule, and access to everything else in the Isengard list. And in that comparison, I think that's where my disappointment with this Legion lies: It's almost no better than if you just took these exact models from the pure Isengard Army List, so you're not really rewarded for limiting your profile selections. You get one fluff rule that's an inconsistent gamble, and another that doesn't really reflect the character *that* well. But I hope people will find tricks to use with it that I haven't thought of, and most importantly I hope people have a lot of fun with this with friends or at casual tournaments.
Lurtz's Scouts LL score: 2/10
Next time: Depths of Moria
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