Gondor Designer's Notes

This Strategy-Note article was written by a anonymous person and was published first on "Lord of the Rings Online (lotrtcg.decipher.com)".

As the design team got down to business with Two Towers design, one of our first orders of business was dealing with Gondor and some of their cultural definitions. Most important of all was determining these cultural characteristics and bringing them to life onto the Gondor cards that would come out in the set.

We felt that Gondor already had some strong themes developed from Fellowship block. Take these Fellowship of the Ring cards shown below.

With these ideas in mind, we wanted to expand on them in the new block.

Roaming and that weird statistic nobody cares about

Ever since I started designing LotR, the site numbers on minions have been screaming "Manipulate us!" to me. Can you think or a reason why we couldn't? A flaw among Fellowship block cards that affected roaming minions was that they were only good for half the game, then became dead. What good is Eregion's Trails if you draw it when you plan to move from site 8 to site 9? By increasing a minion's site number and creating an "artificially roaming minion," those cards could become useful again at any time.

A problem we hit early on was this little issue of roaming minions costing +2 when you play them. By enlarging a minion's site number during the Shadow phase we were actually inflicting a cost increase on Shadow players, which was something we didn't want on the menu for this block. The ultimate solution was to isolate site number increases during skirmish phases only. Looking back, the solution seems ridiculously easy, but back in the day it took us a long time to come to this conclusion. Things seem so easy sometimes when you look at a finished product.

Our in-house playtesters continue to tell me we can't make cards that affect a minions site number outside the skirmish phase. As I continue to learn more about design though, a big lesson I've learned is that you can pretty much do anything as long as you cost it correctly. As we continue the roaming debate here the office, I'm sure Gondor will have lots of room expand on their roaming abilities in very large ways in the future.

Defender +1 and Healing

The two abilities above are just simple abilities that Gondor happens to do well. Take the two cards below.

You'll be hard pressed to find better healing and defender +1 cards in Tower block. Why? Because Gondor was slated to be as good as they are with these types of mechanics.

Knights and the story about "nothing"

Fellow designer Tom Lischke and I tend to talk a lot about weird things now and then. One day he just blurts out, "What if there was a group of companions who actually don't rely on possessions?"

"What do they rely on?" I replied

"They rely on nothing!"

"How can they rely on nothing? They have to rely on something!"

"No! Everyone relies on something, they'll rely on nothing!"

Ok, so maybe the conversation wasn't the above word for word, but the idea was there. A subset of companions who relied on other permanent-based methods of winning skirmishes. Welcome to the world of knights and fortifications.

The elegance of placing the strength and vitality modifiers on the left side of the card gave the space we needed in game text to explain how these conditions transferred around the board. We gave them the keyword Fortification for two reasons. One was to give them a little story flavor, and second so that we could identify them easily in game text on other cards. Originally they only worked with knights, but then the question was raised from our playtesters: Why shouldn't they work for all Gondor Men? Not only did it make sense so the culture as a whole could feel cohesive, but also so they could still be playable in draft format.

As a result of placing this new mechanic in a subset, the knight cards left me feeling like we left them a little incomplete. There's always a place to make more cards though! There are lots of new fortifications currently in the works, working in much more different and unusual ways than what we first introduced in The Battle of Helm's Deep. So be on the lookout for those, and for now I hope you've enjoyed this tour through the culture of Gondor!