Tales from the Age of Men Turns Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Into a Full Free Middle-earth Campaign

A Lord of the Rings mod for Bannerlord has apparently arrived, and it pulled in over 100,000 views in a single day on a video from Jackie Fish titled "the Lord of the Rings mod for Bannerlord is finally here." That kind of number for a mod video made me stop scrolling, and then I read the comments. One of the top ones said, "Jesus, modders are so incredibly talented. This looks like a completely different game." Another read, "I love the Bannerlord community modders. They really blew it out of the park with this one." No arguing, no gatekeeping, nobody explaining why someone's take on the Battle of the Pelennor Fields was technically wrong. Just people going, look at this.

What actually caught me is that it's built in Bannerlord, because Bannerlord already does something almost nobody else does. It's part RPG, part strategy game, part army management game, except when the battle starts you're not sat safely above it moving little units around, you're down there with them. Twenty minutes of carefully positioning infantry, archers, a clever cavalry flank, and then getting hit in the face with a javelin. That's exactly my sort of strategy game, and now somebody has taken that whole sandbox and asked what if all of this was Middle-earth, with proper factions, proper armies, and locations straight out of Lord of the Rings. Importantly, the mod itself is free.

Bannerlord's sandbox is the perfect base for a total conversion

If you've never played Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, the basic idea is this. You create a character, wander around a massive fictional medieval world, recruit a few blokes who look vaguely capable of holding a spear, and eventually convince yourself you're qualified to run a kingdom. You trade, do mercenary work, enter tournaments, join a faction, build an army, take castles, start wars, and eventually try to conquer the whole map.

The reason it works so well is that you're not just looking down at this from a strategy map. When the battle starts, you're in it, which is exactly why my perfectly planned battles keep falling apart the second I ride off somewhere. There's nothing actually Lord of the Rings about the base game though. Bannerlord is just the engine and the sandbox, and that's where a total conversion mod comes in. This isn't someone adding a Gondor helmet and calling it a day. A total conversion means a group of fans rebuilding almost everything on top of the original game: new world, new factions, new maps, new everything.

Tales from the Age of Men rebuilds Middle-earth's Third Age faction by faction

The easiest way to explain Tales from the Age of Men is to imagine somebody decided to build an entire Lord of the Rings strategy RPG inside Bannerlord and then gave it away for free. It takes Bannerlord and builds it as Middle-earth during the Third Age, and they've gone properly stupid with it rather than sticking to a couple of Rohan helmets and a sword that looks a bit like Andúril.

• On the good side: Rohan, Gondor, Rivendell, Lothlórien, Mirkwood, Arnor, and the Iron Hills
• On the other side: Mordor, Isengard, Dol Guldur, Gundabad, Moria, Rhûn, Harad, and Dunland
• Umbar and Khand are still being finished

It's made by a relatively small community team, which makes the scale of it slightly ridiculous. This isn't a menu where you pick Gondor versus Mordor and scrap outside Minas Tirith. It's the actual Bannerlord sandbox: a full Middle-earth campaign map, recruiting troops, building an army, taking settlements, fighting wars, a proper campaign just set inside Lord of the Rings.

The download is around 25GB, and I'm starting in Rohan

The current download is something like 25GB for a mod. There are entire retail games I've paid sixty quid for that apparently contain less Middle-earth than some bloke's project. If I'm choosing where to start, it's Rohan, absolutely no hesitation. Bannerlord already does cavalry ridiculously well, and if I'm given a game where I can command hundreds of troops and then personally ride into a charge with them, I'm spending the first evening pretending I'm one of the Rohirrim.

There's something buried very deep in the brain of anyone our age when you hear the Rohan music. Several hundred horses coming over a hill and immediately you think, yeah, that's what I'm doing. I could tell you I've got some clever first campaign as Gondor, carefully defending the borders, rebuilding the kingdom. I won't. I'm letting my hair down, finding the biggest horse available, and charging directly at Mordor with absolutely no consideration for the wider geopolitical situation. That's Bannerlord.

Why this release feels different from years of unfinished Lord of the Rings mod projects

This mod has appeared from nowhere in one sense, but there have been earlier builds since 2025. This release is the point where it's gone from promising mod project to something you can actually sit down and play, and that distinction matters because we've all seen incredible mod trailers, beautiful screenshots, massive roadmaps, and Discord posts saying huge things are coming soon, and then three years later you're still looking at the same picture of an elf standing next to a tree. This one has actually shipped. Mod DB recognized it in 2025 as one of the year's best upcoming mods, so this isn't just one person finding something cool, the wider modding community has been waiting for this to turn into a proper game.

There have been other ambitious Middle-earth total conversion projects that people have waited years for, and one gets mentioned constantly by commenters. One comment under Jackie Fish's video pointed out that it has been in what it called hibernation for eternity, which felt harsh but fair. I think I'm probably a bit cynical about this stuff now, having spent years getting excited about things that never quite become what I thought they'd be. Knights of the Old Republic is the obvious one for me. I loved those games, and then Star Wars: The Old Republic came along, which I've played and enjoyed, but there was always a part of me thinking, imagine if we got Old Republic 3.

Nowadays, when somebody announces some enormous fan project that's going to recreate an entire universe, my response isn't immediately "this is going to be amazing." It's more "brilliant, but give me a shout when I download it." I've reached a point where a really exciting plan does nothing for me. I've seen enough roadmaps, early access promises, and cinematic trailers to know that until I can actually press play, it may as well be concept art. Show me when it's out, show me somebody actually playing it, show me a bloke getting chased across Rohan by twenty orcs on wargs, and then I'm interested. Tales from the Age of Men isn't just a trailer or a roadmap or a Discord full of screenshots, it's actually here. It's not finished, there are still factions being worked on, but it's real, you can download it, and for a fan project that alone puts it a long way ahead of things I've been looking forward to for years.

Installing it is not simple, and it is PC only

Quick flag before anything else: this isn't a click one button and you're in Middle-earth situation. It's PC only, and it doesn't work through the Xbox Game Pass version of Bannerlord. Install instructions exist with far more detail to help when it inevitably goes wrong, because for me it went properly wrong. None of that put me off, though. I'm weighing the inconvenience of installing a mod against somebody giving me an enormous fan-made Middle-earth for free, so I'll cope. I'm going into it knowing it isn't a polished sixty pound release that's been QA tested by hundreds of people. It's a group of fans building something ridiculously ambitious in their spare time, and they've already built enough of it that I'm considering losing an entire weekend to Rohan.

What it actually costs, and why that matters more once you're older

Here's the bit I like most. Despite jokingly imagining a starter edition where Gondor costs money, the mod itself is genuinely free. You download it and you play it. The only thing you actually need already owned is Bannerlord itself. I checked, and the price I'm looking at right now is £43 on Steam, though that could change by the time this comes out. I wouldn't tell anyone to rush out and buy it purely because I got excited about a mod, but Bannerlord has been around for years, it regularly gets discounted, and there's a decent chance plenty of people have already bought it in a Steam sale and forgotten it existed. If it's already sitting there, your cost to turn it into a massive Lord of the Rings game tonight is nothing.

Coming from the tabletop side of the hobby, that's refreshing. No army to buy, no rulebook, no codex, no paint, no discovering the little plastic men you bought six months ago have been replaced by slightly different ones. Once you're in your thirties, you also don't have to organize anybody. No four adults finding the same free Saturday, no hosting, no message in a group chat waiting for three people to say they're up for it and then never mentioning it again. You install it, make a character, and disappear into Middle-earth for the evening.

I haven't stopped loving this stuff, the hobby around it just got harder to organize

One of the things I've realized as I get older is that I haven't really stopped liking any of this. I still want to play Warhammer, I still want to play D&D, I still want to spend an evening disappearing into Middle-earth. The problem is increasingly everything required around the hobby: money, time, finding people, working out that one friend is free on Tuesday but another can only do Thursday, until you've organized something more complicated than the Council of Elrond just to roll some dice. That's why this appeals to me. You take something you might already own, spend an evening setting it up, and suddenly you've got an enormous Middle-earth sandbox sitting on your PC, built by people spending years on it purely because they love the same worlds we do, and then they just give it to us. I'm about a nine out of ten on wanting to get stuck into this.