Hello everyone!
For the past months I have been thinking of and writing down updated rules for Battle Companies. I like to call it Battle Companies III, because first there were the original rules, then the redux, and this is a third version of the rules.
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After playing Battle Companies for a long time, it got a bit dull because in the end all the heroes would have the same skills and stats, and you would have a ton of influence points that you could waste on stuff like giving everyone in your company every equipment option available. With these new rules, my two main focuses have been these things, though there are many other small things that have been changed and added to, for example, there are now more types of equipment, and all company types have updated lists. For a Haradrim list, the options are no longer only warriors and raiders. You can now use Serpent Riders and Serpent Guard, and Watchers of Karna and Abrakhan Guard.
To make heroes more unique, I have created a class system. You may choose the class of your starting heroes, but you must roll for the class of warriors promoting to heroes. The classes are the Fighter, Archer, Leader, and Medic. I kind of ripped off the classes from Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The Fighter is based on the assault class, the Archer on the sniper class, the medic on the medic class, but an engineer would not have been very useful for Lord of the Rings, so instead I chose to include the leader class. All of these types of heroes already exist, except for medic, though Elrond and Radagast do have a renew spell. There are also magic users, but those are included in the special classes which I will talk about now.
In addition to the 4 basic classes, each type of Battle Company has their own special class. This is usually based on what makes that race or culture unique, or what kinds of units or heroes it has. For dwarves there is a Shieldbearer class who has very high defense and a lot of defensive abilities, making it ridiculously hard to kill him. This is based on the high defence of the dwarves and the shieldbearer and the riot shield guys who I like to call the S.W.A.T teams, you know, the guys with the huge sheilds and defence 9? The Haradrim on the other hand, have an Assassin special class, who has low defence, poison, stealth, and the like, which is based on the Hasharii, and has the greatest weakness of Harad: low defense.
With the new rules influence points are rarer, and will take more work to get them and keep them. This is because with the new rules you will lose an influence point on the D6 roll of a 1 or 2 every time a model dies in a game, and again if a model dies permanently. Influence represents the amount of aid your patrons give to you, and if you keep killing off warriors, they will be less likely to send you more.
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Those are the basics of the new Battle Companies 3 rules. The basic rules are all finished, but what still needs to be done is make all the different company types and create more special equipment and scenarios. So I made this post because I need help finishing it all. I have made a list of all the different things I need doing. I will of course still be working on it myself, directing the whole project, and working on the same stuff as everyone else.
I need:
--People to proofread and playtest the exising and future rules.
--People to help write the different company types, including writing rules for all the special classes.
--People to write new scenarios.
--People to make up cool new equipment.
--Someone who is good at graphic design, to create titles, backgrounds, etc. for the website
--(EDIT) Also, people who can take pictures of their minis to put on the site would be good!
I have created a website where all the rules will be, as it will be too big to post everything as 1 article or forum post. The website is not online yet, I have all the html files on my computer. I will be putting it online in the next few days, but for now, post here or contact me at
jessehkosonen@gmail.com if you are interested in helping me in this project.
Sorry for the long post, and thank you!
Jesse Kosonen.
Maermaethor.