The Fellowship of the Fourth Age: A New Beginning Planning Thread

[Durelin]

I'd be willing to consider a female as healer or teacher (but not the other roles, I think). Is that possible from your angle? I would dearly love to see interaction between a female Orc and a female human, if we include female Orcs in the story.

Yes, I was thinking along the same lines as that. And that would be too fun to pass up.

I am assuming that the Mannish slave group has to be 35 people or so. Could you really start a village with anything smaller? (Persuade me otherwise if I am wrong.)

No persuasion here; I think you're absolutely right. And a smaller Orc group is better on several accounts. One because of their strength, and two because of the likelihood of Orcs doing what they are is still, I imagine, not all that much. I'd say they're a rare bunch of rebels, right?

As for the number of ex-slaves, a large group is definitely conceivable, but perhaps for our purposes we could say that they perhaps took part in the rebellion that was such a disaster, and lost a good chunk of their group (who were either killed or captured and made slaves again)? But then we would have the ex-slaves and slave escapees escaping together, I imagine, instead of the escapees meeting up with the ex-slaves. I don't know; I'm just trying to see if we can keep the numbers small so that the ex-slaves are a realistically smaller presence. Is that necessary, though?

There were times in that story when we had to refer to other characters in a vague way. I am also assuming that would be possible as long as there was a very brief profile put up, and the device wasn't abused.

Would we perhaps allow one or two use (as in they show up in the story once, perhaps fulfilling a simple puprose of one line of dialogue, relaying a message, dying or something) NPCs without the need of brief bios for them? Obviously ones that get more use, and so have a little more character to them than a name, would need to have a bit of information on them.

If we have 10 posters, then we conceivably have a total of 20 characters: everyone does a major and a minor. I would encourage people to do one from each group: Aragorn's group versus everyone else. As far as the "major" characters go, I am leaning towards 2 slaves, 1 ex-slave, and 2 Orcs. So we'd have atotal of 11 major characters, and 11 minor ones. The minor ones would be a mixture of slaves, ex-slaves, and Orcs.

To make this possible, we would need someone to play to major characters? Sorry, I'm just trying to stay on the same page as you. If that is so, I would be fine with doing that, I think (loves playing musical characters).

Really, I think the numbers will work out fine. As long as we have some kind of representation from all the groups, since all the groups will be interacting together, we should be fine. If they groups were split up for a good portion of the game we'd be in bigger trouble.

Thank you so much for the resources, Pio! I'll look at that map and a couple others I have more carefully in a little while, I hopefully be back with something in that area...

[Child of the 7th Age]

Pio,

Thanks for the map!

Durelin,

I am going ahead and transferring the relevent portions of the character list to the proposal.

[Durelin]

Sounds great.

So, for characters needed, if I were to play a Man of Gondor and you were to play Lindir, that would be:

2 Men of Gondor
1 Hobbit
1 Dwarf

and

1 Ex-slave
2 Slave escapees
2 "Rebel" Orcs

Right? *wants to make sure*

[Child of the 7th Age]

Yes, you're right about the original list.

I have thought about my own characters and decided I'd rather stick with the two that I had originally thought of when I first conceived this game: Lindir the Elf and Radagast. That means I won't be playing an inhabitant of Mordor. Our total list would look something like this. I've added in some additional comments on gender, the skills possessed by those sent out by Aragorn, and the use of minor characters.

You had indicated "Men of Gondor". Do you think we could leave that open to any Men?

How does this look? It's not set in stone and can be changed......

___________________________

Characters played by the game founders:

Child of the 7th Age: Lindir the Elf; Radagast the istar , both part of the group sent out by Aragorn

Durelin: Man of Gondor; ???

________________________

Major Characters:

Each poster should select one major character from the two lists below.

A. Group Sent Out by Aragorn

2 "Men"
1 Hobbit
1 Dwarf


**Each of the above characters should possess one or more skills that would be needed by the refugees to help establish the new settlements: scouting, working with stone and/or metal, soldiering/hunting, teaching, healing, farming. If anyone has thought of additional skills you'd like your character to have, please run these by the game founders.

***The healer and teacher may be female; all others should be male.

and

B. Inhabitants of Mordor

1 Ex-slave (male)
2 Slave escapees (at least one male)
2 "Rebel" Orcs (1 male/1 female)

Minor characters

Posters are encouraged to carry one minor character, generally one of the inhabitants of Mordor. However, if the list become too lopsided and everyone is requesting one character type (Orcs, for example), we may ask some writers to consider a different choice.

_______________________


My math was wrong on the last posting, where I managed to add up the characters on the list and came up with "ten"! Rather that would be 11 posters (including us). If we get fewer than that, I think we can still manage as long as some folk write for two characters.

I am going to paste all this into the proposal and we can make further changes after you see it.

I also need to check with Piosenniel. At one time, she and I had discussed some other possible characters being sent out by Aragorn. Let me get back to you on that one.....

[Child of the 7th Age]

I am also tentatively adding in the final destination as the southern Plateau of Gorgoroth. This can be changed if we desire.....