Hi all,

I absolutely love the rules of the Hobbit Strategy Battle Game and the way the game feels. However I love the Historical gaming scene too. I have looked at games like Hail Caesar or SAGA and they just don't seem to appeal to me like how HSBG does. I want to copy/convert the Hobbit Rules to apply to a historical setting with factions like Rome and Carthage. I was wondering if legally I would be allowed to share the rules with others, crediting Games Workshop fully in the rules and everything. I want no profit off this idea just taking an amazing rule set to another genre.

If you look about 14 years into the past, you will find that GW in fact made its own rules set for historical wargaming. Warhammer Historical features game play similar to LoTR. The rules are long out of print, but secondhand copies should be relatively easy to come by.

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"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a rock." -Will Rogers

Without knowing much about the exact boundaries of copyright laws, I think it rather depends on what it is you want to share.
If you create your own profiles and special rules, even if made to fit into the SBG ruleset, you are of course free to share these however you wish; they are your own creations.
If, however, you are copying the game's core rules verbatim and share those, you would simply be distributing free copies of their property; definitely not allowed.
Anything in between (as this will likely be) is more difficult to establish, but anything still very closely resembling the source material would likely constitute some form of copyright infringement - you are after all sharing their work, not yours.

Have you tried something smaller first? For instance, create a Roman Battle Company and see how that works with the SBG rules.

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

Reading all the replies (Thank you all so much btw), I think what might be best is to create profiles and army lists rather than redistribute the rules which I totally get, I will also just make a note to ignore the magic rules and any sort of monster rules as the closest thing in my take on the Hobbit SBG rules would be an Elephant.