We made it to our 1-year anniversary! Huge congrats to everyone involved with the mod! Honestly, I never would have thought we would be as far as we are. Onwards to the updates for this month!

Please vote for our mod for Mod of the Year for 2025 on Mod DB

Link: Tales from the Age of Men mod for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord - ModDB

Tales From the Age of Men Discord
TAOM Discord

3D Environment, Kitbashes, Prefabs - Gondor + Mordor

KEYforce and Solus have knocked out a Gondor and Mordor individual assets that make up an environment. We have imported these models into Bannerlord and the team is hard at work creating kitbashes and prefabs for sceners to use to create scenes.

There has been a lot of questions on this process, so let's step through it below:

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COMPLETE 3D WORKFLOW: ASSETS → KITBASH → PREFAB → SCENES

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STEP 1: MODEL INDIVIDUAL ASSETS

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📐 Blender/Maya/3ds Max

Create individual models:

  • walls.fbx

  • towers.fbx

  • doors.fbx

  • windows.fbx

  • props, decorations, etc.

Total: 50-100+ individual assets

Time: 2-3 months

↓ ↓ ↓

STEP 2: EXTRACT & KITBASH

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🔧 Mix & Match Existing Pieces

Take pieces from your environments and recombine:

Example:

Tower base (from Gondor walls)

+ Windows × 3 (from houses)

+ Roof (from small tower)

+ Door (from barracks)

= NEW Watchtower Variant

Create 20-50 new unique combinations from existing assets

↓ ↓ ↓

STEP 3: SAVE AS PREFABS

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💾 Convert to Reusable Templates

Turn kitbashed creations into prefabs:

- Prefab_Watchtower_01

- Prefab_House_Variant_05

- Prefab_Outpost_Small

- Prefab_Corrupted_Building_03

Total: 20-50 reusable prefabs

↓ ↓ ↓

STEP 5: RAPID ENVIRONMENT BUILDING

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⚡ Drag & Drop New Locations

Use prefab library to build new scenes FAST:

- Osgiliath ruins

- Border forts

- Villages

- Battle maps

Hours instead of weeks per new location!

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TIME COMPARISON:

❌ Without This Workflow:

Building 5 different locations from scratch = 10-12 months

✅ With This Workflow:

Initial setup (Steps 1-2): 4-5 months

Building 5 different locations (Steps 3-5): 1 week

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THE POWER: Invest time upfront to create a reusable asset library that lets

you generate new content quickly.

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(Kysaro loves rocks so KEYforce made him rocks and trees)

Scenes

A huge shout out to Timber, Legolas and Kysaro who spent a lot of time understanding the process to get custom scenes into the mod. It isn't an easy process or a well-documented process. A lot of hair pulling was accomplished but now we are able to have custom scenes on our campaign map and in our custom battle.

Battle Scenes:

  • Dead Marshes

  • Black Gate

  • Fords of Isen

  • Rohan Plains

  • Gondor Village Battle Scene

Town/Castle Scenes:

  • Goblin Town

    • Not implemented yet, Kingdom not created

    • Scener: Comprehend

  • Lossarnach (WIP)

    • Scener: Comprehend

  • East & West Osgiliath (WIP)

    • Scene: Kysaro

  • Pelargir

    • Scener: Comprehend

  • Dol Amroth

    • Scener: Comprehend

  • Generic Gondor Town A

    • Scener: Comprehend

  • Minas Tirith

    • Scener: Swan

  • Minas Morgul (WIP)

    • Scener: Swan

  • Isengard/Orthanc

    • Scener: Hart

  • Cair Andros

    • Scener: Comprehend

  • Generic Gondor Castle A

    • Scener: Comprehend

Fell Wargs

Kronos has created fell wargs for the mod. We are still in the process of implementing them into the game.

Race Updates - Dwarf

Adding some things into the mod for Dwarves like female version, beards, hair and civilian clothes. Dwarves have a custom skeleton that we implemented. This means that they have to have their own armor for everything that is rigged to their custom skeleton.

Elf Basemesh

Working on hammering out the Elf basemesh/race. KEYforce is priming it up.

Creatures

Working on adding some creatures. This is work done by KEYforce and Nova! This is just basemeshes. Animations is a whole other issue.

3-D Armor & Weapons

Custom Elven Lord Weapons - Solus

Mordor Nazgul Unique Armor - Mattia

Mordor Orc Armor - 3D Smiths

Mordor Horse Armor - Sorush

Mordor Orc Shields - Artanno_Evelord

Umbar Kingdom Concepts

Concepts by Joshua

December - February Focus

Patreons have recently voted for the focus of December to February development cycle and have chosen the following:

  • Kitbashes

  • Scenes

The Future:

  • KEYForce

    • Rhun Kingdom Armor

    • Dwarven Kitbash

  • Solus

    • Mordor Kitbash

      • Cleanup/Fine-tuning

    • Mirkwood Kitbash

    • Dale Kingdom armors

  • Leovsilva

    • Mirkwood Kingdom Armor

    • Lothlorien Kingdom Armor

  • Swan

    • Map revamps

    • Planning 1.3.X new map

      • Remaking the map to be significantly smaller

      • Our map is 16X the size of vanilla.

  • Timber

    • Rohan Kitbash

    • Rivendell Kitbash

      • TBD

  • Scenes

    • Huge shout out to Kysaro who has been a pioneer in this arena for the team

    • Significant shout out to ComprehendNubnes who constantly lends his talents and knowledge to the team

    • Shout out to Legolas who is always looking to help/improve the mod

    • Gondor Scenes

    • Mordor Scenes

    • Field Battles

  • Coding

    • Stability

  • Animations

    • Zekes - Harad and maybe Spider

When will the mod move to 1.3.X?

Whenever Taleworlds decides to stop updating their new DLC. It makes NO sense to spend all of the resources to upgrade to 1.3.X and then continuously fix it as Taleworlds is constantly pushing out patches. I'd rather do it once rather than consistently. Our mod works pretty well on 1.2.12 and we will remain on that version until Taleworlds finishes with their updates.

Additionally, I have heard many reports from modders that the modding tools are not what was desired. Many not working as intended.

Community Release

I have addressed this point quite a bit. The next community release is to be determined. I wanted to shoot for the end of December; however, we need to focus on making the mod as stable as possible. That may not be able to be accomplished in this time period.

Our team spends a lot of their time and resources helping the community out with their problems. We tend to have to answer the same 5 to 10 questions numerous times no matter what we do. Many people in the community do very little to use search features in discord or troubleshoot on their own.

I feel that releasing a semi-stable mod anytime in the near future is a disservice to the time of our team members who will have to take on more (during holiday seasons) in order to answer old, current and new questions/crashes/bugs. The great thing about this is you now will have even more content to enjoy when it is released to the community.

If you wish to gain access to the development build or even to support the mod, please grab a membership from Patreon.

We appreciate the love and support.

God Bless.