Farmer Maggot wrote:
At the moment, SBG and WoTR both sit under the banner of Lord of The Rings. But that doesn't work too well with the release of The Hobbit.
I can't see GW spending resources in splintering the "Lord of the Rings" brand further by making The Hobbit a third strand. Maybe we'll see a rebrand the main umbrella as something like Battle Games in Middle Earth or Legions of Middle Earth (or maybe even just Middle Earth) and then have the skirmish and mass battles sit under there.
We could then have rulebooks with the main rules and army lists for each plus journey books that span both systems.
Your idea totally makes sense--even if it is a prequel, The Hobbit is not The Lord of the Rings; there is a naming and branding issue here. Will they unite the two under a Middle-earth title, will they simply indifferently label Hobbit releases as LotR, or will The Hobbit have its own naming? I think, like you, that they will likely just put them all under the same name.
Browsing some other GW-related forums, it seems to me that a large amount of Warhammer and Warhammer 40000 players do not like LotR. I think these faithful gamers to their respective systems are reasonable for not liking LotR--we complain that LotR doesn't get enough attention from GW, but every attention it does get is attention being taken away from their games--GW's "true" games, and that is especially true for when LotR SBG was first released and introduced. WHFB and 40K players felt and continue to feel robbed. I was browsing a forum the other day that was suggesting that a group of WHFB and 40K players make their own magazine to replace White Dwarf, and one of the bullets for doing so read, "We don't care about LotR." Ouch. That was an important enough complaint to go alongside all the universal issues everyone has with WD! I say all that, in combination with the news that GW is going to have a better handle on things this time around, to suggest that GW will likely try to keep LotR and the Hobbit under one name, in order not to fracture the increasingly smaller LotR base, and to not tick off the 40k and Warhammer fans who don't much care for any attention that GW gives to LotR.
Right now I've decided to stop buying things from Games Workshop until the Hobbit comes out. When it does I will definitely want at least a figure or a box of figures to paint--I'm hoping there's a "13 dwarves plus Bilbo plus Gandalf" boxed set, and some chance to get an awesome display plinth like the BGiME Balin's Tomb base. I've at this point stopped gaming. I never had enough miniatures--or money to buy the miniatures--to fully play through any of the LotR journey books. The Hobbit is a much smaller adventure, and I feel like maybe, just maybe, I would buy the miniatures to play through a journey book, if they were to release one, and, to save money, just play the Battle of Five Armies as per their Warmaster iteration.
And, on a different scale--if they were to make The Hobbit, say, 54mm, I expect it would be more of spin-off, Specialist Game version of LotR SBG, maybe an RPG like Inquisitor. It would likely only have support for as long as the movies were popular. Each mini would be super, super expensive, and I would likely just get one and paint it up for display.
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