I've created this list based on a pure Arnor "outpost" theme, I'm still using 4th for a number or reasons, I've also kept this smaller in order to expand later by adding both gondor and high elves for the final battle in the north between the WK and the allied armies which will probably be about 1500-2000 points.

This particular list is about as accurate as I think I could come up with based on what is roughly known about Arnor and it's organization, I would say this could reflect almost any point up to the battle of fornost and probably 100-300 years before that, in terms of a "generic" outpost of troops.

We have to keep in mind here that while it's true Arnor did fall and it's people eventually became the "rangers of the north", it certainly DID have a respectable standing army, fortifications and outposts of important worth even during the the final battles when Angmar took the seat of fornost. These locations would have had some kind of troops defending them, perhaps not hundreds but they easily would have had at least 20+ and probably closer to 30-50 men with some archers/rangers being part of those garrisons.

Obviously it had nowhere near the kind of might or troops that Gondor did at that point, but Arnor itself easily would have had THOUSANDS ( probably about 10,000 ) of troops, certainly not handfuls and given that understanding I believe this would be fairly accurate in terms of an outpost garrison perhaps around Evendim or Weathertop type locations.



Arnor Outpost Main Garrison

Captain
Shield

13 Warriors of Arnor
Banner

North Road Patrol

Dunedain
4 Warriors of Arnor
4 Rangers of Arnor
Spear

South Road Patrol

Dunedain
4 Warriors of Arnor
4 Rangers of Arnor
Spear

Lookout Scout

Dunedain
Spear

398 points 33 Models 11 Bows

You have one warrior too many In your first company. No more than 12 in a warband

It's 4th edition not 5th ( the hobbit ), technically the list is illegal under the new edition because GW in their downs wisdom made dunedain and rangers of the north ( the later not existing even till the grey company since duedain are simply rangers of arnor ) indy heroes who can't lead *coughs* warbands of rangers when that is what they would have done, they would have had some kind of mini leader ranger as a scout/ranger party, so this is exactly why I've gone back to the one ring rulebook army build, rather than being forced to take stupid 12 man warbands that had heroes who were not even born then.

If I was running this under hobbit I could not even make the list as a legal theme, it would look like this poo...but hey...we can haz aragorn and his daddy in teh wurbandz wit cool new rulez kay!

Hopefully Adam T considers my requests in my message to him and we get some new generic heroes or units.

Leader

Captain

w 1
8 warriors of arnor
4 rangers of arnor
spears

w 2
dunedain

w 3
dunedain

w 4
dunedain
spear

This is exactly why GW dropped the ball with the hobbit warband rules, it sucks it kills the lore and creates problems like this due to indy heroes and other stupidity, Arnor suffers about the worst for this but some other army lists do too because of the 12 man comedy bs.

Outside of a few mistakes with allies ( since moria DID have black uruks of mordor ) who def allied/were part of armies in the books, sbg 4th kicked the poo out of warbands for accurate themed builds.

I don't know what you mean 4/5th ed. Warbands have been around since the thin LOTR army books came out. What you're trying to tell us is that your list is pre-warband rules, so the big blue book?

Additionally, there has never been "timeline rules" in any edition of this game, only unspoken gentlemen's agreements. So you can haz any1 you want in yer armies (no mixing good vs evil of course).

There def has been timeline rules in SBG maybe not written as such but both the sourcebooks and legions of middle earth set that down, it's exactly why arnor was an army list and the grey company was an army list. It's why certain armies can't ally and some heroes because they never existed.

The hobbit brought that in basically with the new rules and armies, I'm pretty sure the current "army faction" books came out then right ? because the one ring blue rulebook was 4th edition, which had no warbands it had specific army lists through legions of middle earth.

Pre "kingdoms of men" arnor was: Arvendui, Malbeth the seer, captains of arnor and dunedain as heroes, none of them were "indy heroes". With kingdoms of men it joined both the grey company and the arnor army list into the downs system we have now where for example, you can take arnor warriors with aragorn and his dad and all sorts of comedy that makes no sense.

On top of that both rangers of the north and dunedain ( basically the same thing just one has armor for 1 point more ) are BOTH indy heroes, meaning the only generic heroes arnor has is captains of arnor now, unless you take the two named heroes, you can see where this creates tons of problems and I don't play sbg with heroes who never existed in the timeline, unless it was a total joke game where we agreed lets just go full out stupid fun crazy.

Other than aragorns dad ( being able to be proxy as a duendain chieftain ) even the rangers of the north the armored guys did not exist in arnor, they were part of halbarads group, the 30 of them that went with him were all he could gather at the time, but there was def a group of them still left most likely in the angle ( probably about 300-500 rangers in total some if all were grey company are not is hard to say ) which is mainly accepted as their "camp" where most of the women and children and so on would have been.

I build my armies in sbg sticking to tolkiens lore as much as possible.

The army faction books came out before The Hobbit, or 5th edition. Warbands was a part of 4th ed at the end. I understand what you mean though.

There is a few good things about warbands but I would say it's more to do with the freedom of some of the lists from the final end of 4th sourcebooks cause I'm guessing they brought these out with the upcoming hobbit rules in mind since hsbg follows the same structure.

It's situations like this though that I find extremely frustrating to deal with, I'm not against others having for example one off or fun "cheese" build lists if their goal is simply to play sbg as a skirmish game to win with middle earth tacked on as an afterthought. On the flip side for those of us who are Tolkien/ME fans and wish to try and recreate battles in an accurate way, and "unwritten" battles that def would haven taken place over hundreds and hundreds of years, being able to do accurate themed lists for us is an enjoyable thing and one of the reasons we got into SBG.

Few examples here

1 Moria had actual mordor uruk hai orcs sent there, before the fellowship got there. In 4th/legions moria could NOT take mordor uruks. They can take them as allies now and you can actually take more moria goblins than you could under 4th/legions model limit.

2 Floi was in fact named ( and died even before entering moria ) with Balin's expedition to moria, when he came out for WOTR and his sbg profile rules, he could NOT be taken under a Erebor list...only KD...which was really stupid.

Of course another dwarf would have taken floi's place when he died near the east gate, as someone wrote the final pages of the book in the chamber the fellowship found. But even if using him as a proxy, it would be illegal since he was KD only, not erebor or durins folk list, now of course dwarves ( other than the hobbit faction ) are all rolled into one.

3 In the case of Arnor as I've pointed out a bit, previously Arnor had generic "captains of arnor" and "dunedain" to lead those troops, since malbeth and arvendui sure as hell would not be teleporting or at every small outpost or battle, the later was his king and he would have generally fought only at the most important battles.

During the massive final battle in arnor the king was dead, and you basically had a massive gondor army, a ton of rivendell elves ( including glorfindel ) and along with what troops remained in arnor, probably a few thousands warriors of arnor and rangers, who after this battle eventually had Dunedain chieftains ( like aragorn and his father ), along with what seems to be nothing but rangers of arnor and eventually that turned into the grey company, if all those rangers were grey company or not is hard to say based on what was written.

Given how limited the arnor list was when the ruin of arnor came out...and with legions, this usually was compensated by adding in elf allies quite a bit or gondor and it certainly fit the theme, but at least you COULD make a pure arnor army even without the king and malbeth if you wanted to.

You can and can't really do that anymore, at least theme wise, due to the dunedain no longer being able to lead troops, so basically you would be forced to take nothing but arnor captains, which does not really make sense because outside of my "road patrols ie a few warriors and rangers", it def would have been a head "leader" ranger in command of ambush type ranger groups.

This is why I messaged Adam T discussing a bit of arnor because outside of numenor, arnor suffers about the worst of all armies for selection with it's timeline, it's not that the troops suck but we are so limited that there should be at least 1-2 more generic type heroes or some kinds of units that can be added in that work but help expand the army. At the very least I think they should FAQ dunedain being NON indy heroes again.

I think they should combine the rotn profile and the Dunedain profile. Just add a horse option and an armour option.

For quite some years now many people have wanted mounted grey company/rangers of the north. They existed in the books that way, as far as I recall...the OLD sculpts of the grey company are more accurate than the WOTR potaoe face cloak and spear blister packs.

So if I recall this correctly, they were armed/colored like the rangers of the north, ie green overcoats, grey cloaks, chainmail, helmets, sword, spear and bow...and I think...think they even had shields during the "passage of the grey company", but I'm not 100% sure on the shields.

Now that's for GC itself, that is def what I think FW/Citadel should come out with.

For Arnor...I think there is room for a couple of generic named captains, I think there is room for a few generic named dunedain also, that would help expand the hero selection because in the past and probably even with warbands, most people tend to take Arvendui and Malbeth, that's really only because of arnor's weakness, this can be tweaked by adding a few heroes that might buff them a bit.

I don't think Arnor should become some uber powerhouse army, far from it, what I think they need is a bit of an expansion on heroes and variety of troops, maybe adding some kind of Arnor royal guard would be ideal since rangers would most likely take over their archery role, however...the numenorians...who turned into arnor ( it was a mirror kingdom of gondor basically just over the years it declined into ruin through plague and war with angmar ), were notorious for their hollow metal bows.

For example gondor has the fountain court guard, the citadel guard ( both of these were the same in the books actually ), osgiliath veterans, and both rangers and warriors of arnor plus the knights.

Some being suck or not that's quite a bit of variety.

Arnor basically has warriors and rangers, in fact they HAD hobbit archers ( which were really only at one battle and about 500 of them ), there would have been some hobbits here and there in Arnor itself too, but you cannot even take hobbit archers anymore due to the hero/warband rule meaning you have to take a hobbit hero ( who never existed then! ) AND hobbit melee troops in order to take archers! With only 3 heroes to lead and only 1 who is generic who can be taken multiple times to make a larger pure force.

So basically Arnor suffered the most in terms of getting screwed over when the blue all in one army books came out, they may have new options in terms of other faction heroes that existed in the future, but that is a huge poo tradeoff vs what we used to have and really makes no sense, I mean it would be like taking heresy era marines in the 41st era alongside modern marines...you could maybe do it but other than for pure laughs or utter cheese nobody would really want to, unless they are "that guy".

GW has the rights to the appendix I believe, and it would seem they will work on some of that in the future...which is great news, but since this is middle earth...and a certain respect/reverence exists for tolkien and middle earth itself ( rightly so given the history of fantasy and what was birthed from all this ), there is a number of players, fans and so on who feel similar over some of this type of stuff, and I think given all that GW itself should at least do some research on making accurate army lists and troop options to keep within that...but still having fun and creative lists.

Some stuff is tolerable or even well done....some stuff is downright moronic and shows a lack of even some basic understanding of the history and troops existing in middle earth.

I got my ruin of Arnor book today. I would like to see the Dunedain and rotn retconed to how they were in that book. I love the idea of a Dunedain running around with four rangers. I know one can do this, kind of, in warband, but it isn't the same.

I thought about this long and hard and based around some of what Ithilien ranger groups and patrols would be.

There is two ways I could do it and in the context of a garrison...and road patrols I came up with:

1 Dunedain who acts as a lone wolf scout farther away from the main force but is lumped in with the 3 dunedain to fill out generic heroes and points.

Then the two patrols being

1 Dunedain to lead the patrol

2-4 warriors of arnor as sorta road patrol and just in case some heavy backup is needed if the patrol does run into say some orcs etc.

4-6 rangers of arnor

The alternative to my original list would be to simply lump the full 21 or so warriors together, and have all the rangers and dunedain together, but I like the idea of small patrols based around the main fort, I will probably expand my warriors to 30 strong in a month or so anyway.

I like to think of arnor in its "close to end days" to resorting to more abush tactics rather than full on military might. GW I think overplayed their "ruin" a bit due to hunting down all the sources for written history of arnor during this time, but it's generally accepted that even when fornost fell they had roughly 8,000-10,000 troops. This is small compared to Gondor but it's still significant.

At the final battle where gondor and the elves aided arnor and utterly crushed angmar, as even a conservative guess arnor probably had at the least 3000-5000 troops.

Over a period of hundreds of years this would have eventually turned into rangers as they dwindled more and more. I highly doubt as soon as the final battle happened all the warriors said hay guyz lets all become rangers now.

During the war of the ring, since this is not really discussed much by tolkien, but what has more or less been figured out is:

There was probably about 300-500 rangers of the north, if all of those rangers were grey company is not known, halbarad could only muster 30 in such short notice. Now lets say 300 even that when scattered around is quite low really, for example we know sarn ford had a ranger camp as they held off the nazgul, some of them fled, some of them were killed and some of them even held their ground as others left, perhaps this was 10-15 rangers.

Let's say the angle had roughly 20-30 rangers. Then Halbarad had 30 so that's aready about 75 so with perhaps 225 left scattered all over eriador and possibly even other regions, with some of those 225 being younger or still in training, then it's really not all that much. They would have had to have a certain number up around the north downs too in case gundabad decided to rampage all over eriador also, even 20 or 30 rangers is not that much when we are talking hundreds or thousands of orcs and other nasties.

The main camp of the rangers of the north/remaining dunedain people would have been in a place called the angle, which was sorta between the ettenmoors and rivendell, this also makes sense as the twins and rivendell took care of the dunedain to a degree over the centuries. The area of land also was farmable.

Naturally there would have been women children and elderly too, however while they were a "wandering people" these 3 types would have probably moved around a lot or resided in the angle or other "unknown" safe locations. 300-500 may sound on the surface a good number, but keep in mind certain real world factors would exist too, such as if it was far lower than that ( say 100 ) you would start to encounter some serious inbreeding haha.

Lastly at least some scattering of rangers of the north ( perhaps 10 to a family or clan ) would have remained behind, either on scouting missions or as protection in a just in case aragorn and halbarad and co died at the final battle to continue on the line. This naturally would have explained their withdrawl from bree and the shire when the ruffians took over.

I have always assumed there was a lot going on behind the scenes of the war of the ring. Not everything centered around the nine walkers. In fact Elrond was pretty adamant about the fact that stealth would be key... Or was that gandy?

SBG I think sets up and executes a lot of those "behind the scenes" scenarios and battles. It does this perfectly as a skirmish game and around the 1500 points mark.

You can have some decent sized themed "small armies", since armies and battles in middle earth really did tend to be quite large, at least in what is "practical" with miniatures. To get around some of these truly epic scale battles I tend to think of when fielding say...a 750+ army that all around or behind that force is your hundreds of cannon fodder troops, because let's be honest it would be absurd to literally have a 1000 troops.

That was in fact the outlook I had going into the game back around 2006. I had thought it cool to "replay" certain events around the main story, but my main goal was to create armies based on those unknown heroes and events.

Through the appendix this is a wellspring of great source material, it's something I truly hope GW puts a focus on now that the movies are over. Some examples of material to focus and work on here:

1 Lothlorien was attacked THREE times during the wotr, eventually Lothlorien ( and with the help of mirkwood ) ended up finally throwing down Dol Guldor. Keep in mind there was at least 3 nazgul stationed in DG AFTER the hobbit, one of them being Khamul who was the only other "named" nazgul, the other obviously being the witch king.

2 I'm pretty sure Erebor was attacked by a number of easterlings and both laketown and the dwarves held up inside, and after Sauron was defeated they sorta scattered and I think the free people ended up pushing forward and driving them back/out.

3 All over the free peoples lands you can put money on the fact there would have been plenty of small scale battles. There is so much rich background with what is written...and what is 100% within the realm of that lore, that easily we can come up with prolonged storylines and themes for SBG of those battles.

Then there is all the small skirmish scenarios we can come up with, such as perhaps Aragorns hunt for Gollum, I think it would be great fun to come up with a few scenarios based around his journey hunting him, he probably would have had a few rangers he met up with traveling through rivendell area, then through mirkwood where Gollum was held prisoner.

With gandalf's age we can come up with scenarios and battles from hundreds of years ago where he lent his support, we can come up with scenarios of the rangers, the twins...some high elves, encountering wargs and trolls in the ettenmoors, having to fend off those attacks to protect that region.

Or what about converting an aragorn ( head swap basically ) onto both a rohan body or gondor captain, and coming up with scenarios during his time known as Thorongil. He certainly served under both gondor and rohan, and we can still use "aragorns" profile just do up the model to represent him at that period of history.

It's these sorts of things I love and am very passionate about with SBG.

Lol, funny you should mention Thorongil, I made one just for the reasons you described above.

That one is a good pose for him as the conversion. I think whats fun and cool about Thorongil is we can easily theme an army around some non written about heroic battles he took part in.

I think he may have spent time in the east also...this is something I want to find out more about though, was it just aragorn who traveled and trained in this manner, or did all the remaining dunedain take part in these types of activities.

Based off what I know of Gorn, he most likely went alone to the east. However, for the sake of the game, making a small company and even using the battle companies supplement would make for a fun campaign.