LOTR Warhammer Army List review: Host of the Dragon Emperor

My likes, dislikes, and verdict about my favorite Army list from the Lord of the Rings Warhammer.

Good day to you, my readers! Yes, this is a review of the 2025 Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game army list, Host of the Dragon Emperor. The above image is from the official blog of Games Workshop, or Warhammer, as they’re now known. That’s why the title and subtitle both refer to that game as “Lord of the Rings Warhammer”. To do this, I read the Army List and the profiles in it many times, the vast majority of which are in the book, Armies of Middle-earth. Only two of them are in the other book, Armies of the Lord of the Rings, Easterling Captain and Easterling Warrior. But I bought that book anyway, this way, I could get a feel for strengths, weaknesses, what I like, what I dislike, and how I feel about this army list overall.

Strengths

In this Army List, I see many strengths! For example, the mandatory General and title character, Dragon Emperor, is a beast! His helmet makes him immune to all magical powers, and his glaive is of Elven make, which, in this board game, means that he has a 2-in-3 chance of winning the Duel roll. That’s the dice rolled to see who wins the duel between two miniatures, though he only has that 2-in-3 chance if the enemy’s weapon is not Elven-made. He is also one of the bravest and smartest Generals in the entire game, passing Courage and Intelligence tests if his roll of 2 dice adds up to 4 or more! There’s a reason you cannot build a Host of the Dragon Emperor army without its title character as General, and that’s because his in-game stats warrant his Generalship being mandatory.

Another strength I noticed in Host of the Dragon Emperor is the lengthy list of additional hero model options. One of whom, Rutabi, is written tacitly to hit really hard! Her tendency to redo Wound Rolls, which are dice rolls that decide if the losing model in a duel gets removed as a casualty, on enemies that are backed into a corner? Holy heck, is that ruthless! Another one of whom, Brorgir, can summon a stinkin’ Earthquake under enemy models! And then, you know, there are the nameless Captains, Dragon Knights, and War Priests that you can take as many of as your points budget, or Participant List, will allow. All of whom have higher Intelligence than most - if not all - of their respective counterparts from other Army Lists.

Quick side-note: there are two ways LOTR Warhammer can be played: Narrative Play, which is where you have a Participant List; and Matched Play, which gives you and your opponent a points budget.

Back to the review, though. Another strength is that the Warrior list is quite packed with options! The most basic of them, the Easterling Warriors, are smarter than any of their equivalents in the World of Men and in the Forces of Darkness! Plus, they can take an Easterling Halberd, which can be used either as a pike or as a two-handed battle-axe! And these Men can use Halberds with shields at the same time and never lose the defense bonus provided by the shield, thanks to the Phalanx special rule! Alternatively, they can take a shield on its own or a bow and arrows on their own, for they come already equipped with heavy armor and single-handed sabers. Then you have the Cataphracts, heavy cavalry sword and shield champions on armored horses. Being among the toughest cavalry in the game, I can only think of three cavalry models in LOTR Warhammer that are potentially more useful: Dol Amroth Knights, Morgul Knights, and every Elven Cavalry model in the game.

Other options include the Black Dragon Warriors, who are braver versions of Easterling Warrior swordsmen and pikemen. And, if they are within 3” of a Dragon Knight, their Fight Value - the stat that tells you their combat skill with a blade - spikes from 4 to 5! Yeah, the higher that number, the more skill any miniature in LOTR Warhammer has with a blade. Plus, there are the War Drakes, alligator-like beasts who are armored and whose bite is Venomous, with a Slow-acting venom that reduces the bitten model’s Fight and Attacks values by 1 point per turn, to a minimum of 1. Lastly, there are the Army Special Rules: one of them allows Heroes to re-roll a dice in a Duel Roll if it doesn’t score well. The other allows a model from this list that’s supported by two others to add 1 to their Wound Roll score if they win the Duel Roll.

Weaknesses

First of all, the biggest weaknesses I see in Host of the Dragon Emperor are No Monsters, No Siege Engines, and No Chariots. The latter two make no sense from a Tolkien Lore perspective, while the first weakness makes it harder to push siege towers in a Castle Siege. A weakness of something that’s actually in the Army List is how idiotic the War Drakes can potentially be with their Intelligence of 9. Another weakness is how strenuous many of the models can be on your Points Budget in Matched Play! Dragon Emperor, for example, costs 200 points just so you or I can follow the mandate of him being the army’s General. Easterling Warriors with halberds and shields cost 10 points, and the Black Dragon equivalent is 11. Speaking of Black Dragons, their biggest weakness is that they cannot be fielded as Archers or as Cataphracts.

Verdict

Overall, and even though this Army List is my favorite, I give it an A-. I love most of what is official and true about this Army List; the only weaknesses that really make no sense to me are the first three I named. Luckily, there is no rule against seeking and receiving an opponent’s permission to use Unofficial units made up as Addons to the Army List - or at least, not that I am aware of. Therefore, I thought up ideas for Easterling Chariots as a mount, Easterling Charioteers as a warrior option, and two siege engines straight out of the Warhammer Old World game’s Cathay range: Grand Cannons and Rocket Batteries, as depicted below:

As you can see, the images are from the product page for both of these siege engines in a box. More importantly to this Review, I need to get each of them an 80mm round base, don’t I? And, I need to write rules for using them in the game! I mean, I already wrote rules for Easterling Chariots. As for the Monster slot, I wrote rules for Steppe Trolls, marking their base size as 32mm, as I envision them being smaller LOTR Troll models than anything that’s actually on the Warhammer online store. Speaking of which, human infantry models in LOTR Warhammer are 28mm tall and mounted on 25mm round bases, as the entire board game is in 28mm scale. If I get a 3d printer, then I’ll design and print out 36mm tall LOTR Troll miniatures to represent Steppe Trolls, for sure.

In the meantime, the Host of the Dragon Emperor army list, as it is, makes me excited to get to play it against a fellow LOTR Warhammer collector/painter!

Wrap Up

Thank you for reading this article! And going forward, I will do my best to write a new article every month, while making and posting a new video on my YouTube channel every month!

Feel free to subscribe to that using the YouTube link above and to this using the orange button below! Subscribing to this journal is your choice between totally free and dirt cheap! You get to choose between $7/month, $50/year, or $0 lifetime!

Naturally, I cannot thank you all enough for reading articles here and watching videos there.