Hi One Ring-ers!

For the last couple of years, I've been working on my own set of campaign rules. It first started of as some extra house rules for these excellent Campaign Rules, but it soon started to lead it's own life and it's now becoming an entire Fan Rulebook of my own.
Anyway, I'm at a dead end for something. I want to present people with rules to play very realistic campaigns: not just moving around armies on the board, but also putting off battles because of bad weather, raiding towns, politics but also putting prisoners to work and sending Messengers to communicate with other players. I want players to have a very basic campaign system, while they can just choose to play with any or all of the extra rules to make it more realistic.

Now, first some basics. The rules I am making are for this kind of campaign:

Here, players move around little banners (representing armies) on a map, initiating battles and besieging cities. All players can see where all armies are. Movement is done much like in SBG, where armies move X inch and initiate a battle or siege when moving into contact with an enemy army or settlement. I don't like to abstract movement too much and therefore I chose not to use region-based movement (where armies can move from one region to the next).

At the moment, I'm really looking into making some rules to represent the lack of information that the leaders of Lord of the Rings usually had. They might have had information about what their armies where doing, where they were etc, but they would not know so much about the enemies movement (at most they would know that some armies moved through an area). For example: Denethor might know that an army of Harad is moving to the Black Gate through Ithilien, but he would never know that Sauron is sending an army of 100,000 Orcs from Barad-dur to Minas Morgul.

Now, how do you overcome this? I don't want to use a computer program obviously, and I would much prefer to have a campaign map without regions (with the regions, you could just write down where armies are or something). Also, I want to have rules that even 2 players can use, so that they don't need a neutral Game Master.

So this is where you come in, hopefully. I am looking for ideas on how to represent hidden movement on a game board, without regions, and without the need of a neutral Game Master. I might be asking an impossible question, but I think there must be a way.
What I want to achieve is something along these lines: every player will control 1 Realm (Gondor, Rohan, Mordor or whatever). This player can see the entire map and would thus know where all settlements are, but he can only see their own armies and all armies within their own Realm's borders.

Now how should this be represented? I know it will be hard to achieve, but I am really hoping some people on here can think with me, share some thoughts and hopefully come up with some ideas to solve this problem.

Any feedback will be very much appreciated, and you can ask anything if something is unclear.

Cheers,
Koen

One option would be that each player needs to keep a log of their movements so that it can be reviewed after the fact if any questions come up. Then you can put numbers on the Army flags and the players would mark in the log what forces are actually part of that army. You could (should?) allow 'decoy' armies as well, but maybe limit how many a player can have, such as one per real army. If an army passes within a certain distance of one of your own armies or held locations (or perhaps you could introduce scout units as well) then they have to reveal what the real composition is. If it turns out to be a decoy then the decoy flag is removed and the army that was being decoyed would need to generate a new one if they so choose.

This is a rough view of something I've used before and it's worked out fairly well. Simply having the forces logged on paper not only helps create a better feeling of trust but also helps with record keeping and recreating what was done in narratives if you so choose. You may need to tweak for your system.

_________________
Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

http://TacticsInMiniature.com

Have co-ordinates on your map, everyone writes down their movement (from co-ordinate to co-ordinate) and hands it to a player, that player then hands their paper to another player, who reads theirs, just like a game of diplomacy...

Thanks a lot for your idea.
The armies (banners) in my rules already have a certain sheet stating all the models that are in the army. This list is unknown to other players and can also include other things, such as Prisoners, workers, or whatever.
Using decoy armies could work, although I'm not sure if it will feel right for me. The thing is, though, that people can already make a sort of decoy armies in my rules. People are free to split off any number of models from an army to create a new one. Therefore, people can already make a new army with 3 Rangers of Gondor or 3 Warg Riders, quickly engaging an enemy to find out the composition of the army (surely loosing the battle, but gaining information).
Normally, if an army is engaged, it may not move any more that turn. Sending only a handful of models would then make it possible to tie down that large 60 models Orc horde. To overcome this, I've also made rules that if a battle takes less than X turns, the winning army may continue his move.

Anyway, I guess my point is that those decoy armies can already be achieved with my current rules. This, however, does not change the situation that players can only really see anything within their own borders.



Thanks for your idea.
Having coordinates though, would practically be the same as having a region-based map (which I do not want). Only difference is that the regions will probably be smaller and a different shape.