Everyone please read this.
This is how I see the setting for the game:
Villages:
I’d really like the two villages to remain where we’ve put them. They are both small, fairly isolated places. They are not wealthy villages, but have managed to scrape a living from the Wold and the Brown Lands. That is one of the reasons their village leaders wish to bring them in closer to the more defensible, larger towns – eg., moving toward Edoras.
The Bregoware group has chosen the name of the village in this way:
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Since our village is just outside the eastern boundary of Rohan, that would put us on the other side of the Anduin. How about we say our village is near a ford in the river. Old English for "ford" is "ware".
And just to tie us into Rohan proper - we could have some old story of how one of the early kings of Rohan used the crossing to for . . . well, something important . . . "Brego" is the Old English word for "ruler or lord".
And Brego was the second King of Rohan . . . so stretching it a bit, our village could be called:
Bregoware
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And yes, Tolkien never actually mentioned ‘King’s Ford’ but he did say, in
Unfinished Tales, “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn”, Appendix C that:
Quote:
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. . . [T]he great loops of the Anduin (where it came down swiftly past Lorien and entered the low flat lands before its descent again into the chasm of the Emyn Muil) had many shallows and wide shoals . . . especially in the two westward bends, known as the North and South Undeeps.
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I’ll grant that the river still moves at a fair pace and could be treacherous if trying to cross on horse or foot.
Therefore, I propose that the Bregowarians have a ferry at their ford, with a ferryman and his family who run it. Since the villages are few and far between in this part of Rohan, I can see the outlanders ferrying across their goats and sheep (the smaller flocks) to pasture often along the empty western side of the river – especially if those with cattle and horses used most of the good pasture land on the Outland side of the river.
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The attacking Orcs and Men of the East:
This is not a big invading army that is marching westward into Rohan.
From the timeline for the game:
Quote:
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This game takes place in the Third Age, very late autumn, of the year just prior to the start of the War of the Ring. (The War of the Ring begins in June of 3018 TA)
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What I see for the game are
small parties of invaders making more and more frequent incursions into Rohan. They can be gathering information, simply marauding the outlying and less defendable villages, carrying information, etc, between Isengard and Mordor.
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About the two groups meeting up:
Here’s how we can handle this problem.
Since the two groups are completely discrete entities at the beginning of the game, we do not need to assume that both groups leave on the same day.
The Wulfhamers will have left their village say{
EDIT DONE} 3 days prior to the Bregoware group. That should leave enough time for the Wulfhamers to come within range of the Bregowarians as they travel south.
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Can we all work with these ideas?
-- Arry