A little confused with this board. I've played the colossal crusade and civil war, but this is the first time I've done a board with strongholds. It seems like strongholds defend with dice that have 8 sides (d8)? And normally it's 6 sided die (d6)? Is that correct? Also, as I explore the board, I get green, red, and white arrows from each territory to another. What do these mean?

Lord of the Gears is Kjeld’s board, but I think I can safely answer for him here. You are correct in your assumption on defending dice. Red arrow means the territory you are attacking has defensive dice advantage. Whit arrows mean normal dice (whatever the board’s default is, which is typically d6 for both attacker and defender. Green arrows means the attacking territory has the dice advantage.

Pay attention to the max unit counts allowed on strongholds as well (15), whereas other territories have no unit max.

Yep, Thingol got it in one. Keep in mind as well that Lord of the Gears has a couple of different scenarios. The Classic (default) scenario should be pretty similar to normal risk rules apart from the defensive bonus for strongholds and the unit cap. The Enhanced scenario also adds a factory bonus for strongholds (if you control one, it will automatically increase your unit count there by 2 at the start of each of your turns), and grants the strongholds an attack bonus as well (7v6). Check out the About section, too -- it will have all the special rules for the scenario.

Vinny - things like that are what's great/frustrating about this site. Board designers have a number of rules they can change to create games that work different from standard RISK. Unit caps, defense/attack bonuses, view/artillery borders, return to attack/fortify, reserve units, factories, etc. all provide opportunities for different strategies.

A lot of good stuff in this forum:

http://www.wargear.net/forum/listthreads/Strategy_and_Tactics

And many of us are happy to help -

Vinny, are you related to Ming?

also note that the in-game board explorer sometimes does not display the arrow colors correctly. need to go to that board's page to get the correct showing.