[Child of the 7th Age]

I have gone ahead and placed a save for the character of Willow. This is for her to respond briefly to the question that Arinn raised. She can place the post on the discussion thread or submit it by pm, and Pio or I will paste it in.

Arwen is having some trouble getting in contact with Araréiel, but we hope to be hearing from her soon. Meanwhile, the save will let us go forward with the action.

A general comment. Everyone has done a great job with their posts so far. Since this game is just four weeks long, we'll need to post regularly to push things forward. A good beginning, everyone!

************************************

I've done another post and gotten Elanor home. I also took a good, hard look at the region in Fonstad's Atlas of Middle Earth. If you have a copy of this book, there is a great view of things on page 110-111. If not, I've tried to give a little description in my post.

The one thing that really struck me is how close Dale was to the mountain itself. Two of the ridges of the mountain reach out and encircle the town on three sides. Not a good place to be at the moment. Also, Dale is on the west side of the Running River that spills down out of the mountain and encircles the town towards the east.

According to most of the sources I read, there is already a town called Esgaroth on Long Lake about twenty miles south. This is where we will eventually flee. However, the sources indicate that the new people from Dale likely "remade" this town when they came by setting it out over the lake and actually building on top of stilts. By doing this, they used the surrounding water as a means of defense.

Maybe we can pick up on this idea at the end of the story....