Oliphant Rampant

I have been thinking about giving Middle Earth Dragon Rampant a try fro a while now, and decided that we could give it a bash and use my Haradrim to see how the game copes with them.

I have Oliphant's, picked up from various places and have only used them on the table once. This is largely due to the Strategy battle Game making them virtually impossible to kill, making for some very one sided games.

So I opted to do the charge of the Haradrim at Pellenor fields, from the Return of the King.

I decided that the Oliphant's would be greater war beasts, with a missile attack to represent the archers in the Howdah, and cause fear to represent their size and impact. This brought them up to 10 points. In the end the Haradrrim forces looked like this:

2 Oliphants

1 Heavy Riders

2 Oliphant

2 Heavy Riders

1 Elite Riders

The Rohan force also consisted of two commands, led by Eomer and Erkenbrand:

Elite Riders

3 Heavy Riders with Bows

Elite Riders

3 Heavy Riders with Bows

1 Light Riders

The scenario was very straight forward.  It was a pitched battle, last man standing wins. We included no terrain as the battle was to take place on the Pellenor Fields just outside Minas Tirith.

We made a couple of minor changes (ie I got the rules wrong!) before we started.

We decided to randomise initiative at the start of each turn, with each side then alternating between commands until everyone was finished. We also decided that is an Oliphant started the turn battered and failed to rally rather than retreat it would rampage in a random direction, attacking any unit it contacts.

Early game and the Haradrim Left flank and Rohan left flank were both fairly well behaved, with an orderly advance. The rest of the forces were a bit more scattered though, with a disorderly advance from both sides right flanks.

Mid game and the forces of Harad managed to get the drop on the Rohan inflicting some heavy casualties, mainly thanks to the Oliphants and the Serpent King.  there were a fair few failed activations during this part of the game, and in end Eomer and his forces were removed from the game, as were the Haradrim force containing the two Oliphants.

Late game saw the Rohan make a sort of resurgence, with them inflicting heavy casualties, including the death of the final Oliphant. Alas it was not enough to save them from the Serpent King, who managed to remove the last vestiges of Rohan resistance, meaning a Harad victory.

So the Rohan lose (again!). I don't think my Rohan have actually won a game in years.I think everyone enjoyed the game, and it was quite close in the end, however I don't think Dragon Rampant is really suited to this pitched battle sort of game and it would benefit from some other objectives and terrain to liven things up a bit.