I finished the next scenario in my all-too-infrequent playthrough of the Return of the King Journeybook, The Walls of Minas Tirith: http://davetownsend.org/Battles/LotR-20180702/

This one needed a lot of prep time but I'm hoping the next few RotK battles can be gotten through more quickly.

Thank you for keeping up with this. I enjoyed reading through it. Do you think that using the new rules with channeled spells and all had an impact on the outcome of the game?

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"Draw your sword with a heavy heart, but swing it with a heavy hand"

Thanks for the feedback, Wan Shi!

I suspect that, if anything, the Channelling rules worked to Evil's advantage. They ended up costing Gandalf all of his Might points, meaning he had no ability to interrupt Evil Priority with a Heroic Move. The Terrifying Aura never mattered because no one ever got close enough to him to charge. The Blinding Light encouraged the Catapult to shoot elsewhere, but the Catapult alone isn't likely to take out Gandalf in ten turns of shooting anyway. (Two shots / turn * 50% hit probability sans Blinding Light * 10 turns = 10 hits; only 17% of those will land on target, so on average Gandalf takes two S8 hits, which hurts -- but with three wounds and three re-rollable Fate points, he's going to live.)

Either way it's still a tough scenario for Evil.

Always enjoy your battle reports, I wondered if GW ever tested all their scenarios. Hard to balance playability with what the book/movies showed.

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"Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer."

Thanks for the support, Mapper! Much appreciated.

Some of the books definitely seem to have gotten more love than others in terms of scenario quality. I'm fairly certain that many (if not most/all) of the Hobbit scenarios were slapped together with little interest in whether the result was an interesting game.

The lack of specified forces in the RotK Journeybook help make that book seem unfinished. Which probably contributes to how rarely you see the scenarios "in the wild". That's one of the reasons that I'm tackling it. :^)

But of course my particular armies might unintentionally skew play balance. In "Walls", Evil would probably have done better exchanging some warriors for a Captain. Or perhaps they just need 600 points of troops instead of 300? It's pretty unusual for an attacking force to be equal to a defending force defending an obstacle and to be expected to succeed, and GW isn't immune to typos / cut-n-paste errors.....

Your point about making a balanced game vs recreating the "history" is a good one. And even if each individual scenario is more or less balanced, then a campaign joining them is going to be skewed against Good (the historical winner, right?)