02-13-2013, 10:23 AM | #771 | |
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Join Date: Oct 2006
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Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming
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I'm inclined to agree with Jason that the feud among some Elves and some Dwarves is just that, a feud. IMO, it has roots in specific historical events that concern certain nations or kinds of Elves and Dwarves; it doesn't represent anything universal in the nature of either race. The 'different body language' idea is cool, though, and I might use it in some other setting. |
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02-13-2013, 10:48 AM | #772 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming
On another topic, I wanted to mentioned that I was looking through Fonstad's atlas, and I noted that she says that the Sea of Nurnen, which had no outlets, was salt and bitter, presumably like the Caspian Sea; but that the soil around it, formed by weathering of volcanic rock, would have been highly fertile. She suggests that it was a region of dryland farming, which would have been rather different from the agriculture of the highly fertile Shire.
Bill Stoddard |
02-13-2013, 11:05 AM | #773 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming
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02-13-2013, 11:14 AM | #774 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming
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Bill Stoddard |
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02-13-2013, 06:09 PM | #775 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming
More specifically, both were tied to Aule, the Dwarves by the fact he was their 'creator' (subject to the ultimate source of their being in God), and the Noldor in that they were Aule's favorites, and revered him in especial (along with the general Elvish reverence for Elbereth) among the Valar.
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02-17-2013, 01:09 PM | #776 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming
On the subject of gaming in the Fourth Age, or at least in the post-War of the RIng period, it seems to me that there is at least one period where the imagination is free to roam over enormous expanses.
At some point between the fall of Sauron and the beginning of recorded history, something happened that transformed the physical world, drowned Gondor and Mordor under the Mediterranean, made the other changes that turned the world of ME into the world we know. JRRT never told us anything about this time, leaving it almost wide open for GM interpretation. It presumably came at, or close to, the turning of an Age, it might have been the event that heralded the Fifth Age. (JRRT once said in a letter that he thinks we are at least in the Fifth Age now, and more likely by now in the Sixth. So if we assume that the Resurrection of Christ marks the beginning of our current Age, the transformation of ME into our world (physically speaking) might likely mark the 4E/5E transition.) |
02-17-2013, 01:41 PM | #777 | |
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Join Date: Oct 2006
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Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming
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I imagine that turning of the ages as a process by which the poetically imagined history of Middle Earth in the Fourth Age merges with the known history of our world, and also with the scientifically imagined prehistory. If I hopped in a time machine and set it for X number of millennia in the past, I’d never find Gondor or Mordor under what’s now the Mediterranean. But if my machine let me travel though the collective unconscious, into stories, I could find those realms in that part of the world. We could perhaps draw a connection between the Biblical Great Deluge, the filling of the Med, and the assumed drowning of the former lands of Gondor and Mordor. Myth and a scientific understanding of prehistory may touch and join in such events. I’m not certain that I’ve explained all this well enough. Let me know if any of you are confused, guys. |
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02-17-2013, 01:59 PM | #778 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming
Makes perfectly good sense. I don't agree, mind you. I think JRRT felt the need to vaguely graft Middle-Earth into prehistory as a consequence of the logic of his framing narrative, and his attachment to making things earth-like. Sometimes he got too stuck on such pieces of logic, e.g., the Glorfindel problem.
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02-17-2013, 02:17 PM | #779 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming
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Bill Stoddard |
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02-17-2013, 06:30 PM | #780 |
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Join Date: Oct 2006
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Re: Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming
I had a longer conversation with my wife and another of the Thieves World campaign players about this before the game tonight.
I think we have multiple pasts, which are all valid and often overlapping but not necessarily congruent with one another. These include:
Within each of those fields; mythic, historical, and scientific, there are competing/varying versions of what came before the present day. All of them may overlap and intersect in various ways. Middle Earth seems to me to have the strongest connection with the first of the three realms of our past and the weakest with the third, while it has a second (historical) past of its own that is connected with our history by echoes and similarities rather than direct links. Note that 'scientific' is not the same as 'the non-human or pre-human natural world.' Thus, ME also being an earlier incarnation of ‘the Old World’ doesn’t necessarily imply its strong connection to the prehistoric past as imagined by 20th century scientists. Last edited by combatmedic; 02-17-2013 at 06:35 PM. |
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