Reposting this map from the last thread. It's a scenario about Middle Earth that had an industrial revolution roughly 800 years after the events in the Lord of the Rings.
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After the War of the Ring the people of Middle Earth knew peace and prosperity. Under the Dunedain king, Elessar, founded a powerful kingdom. This age was only brought to an end when Morgoth broke the door of night and started the Dagor Dagorath, the final battle, which destroyed Ea and Middle Earth along with it, forcing Iluvatar to remake the world as we presently know it. Fortunately fate takes many roads and in another history some dark creature wrapped its slimy appendage around Morgoth’s foot and dragged him further back into the Void. Preventing his return for millennia.
In this new history the elves either parted or faded from the world and left their former realms in the hands of Men. The Reunited Kingdom under Elessar grew and prospered and was passed down to his son Eldarion who ruled with as much wisdom and sound judgement as his father did. Unfortunately Eldarion’s wife and five children died before him, leaving only his youngest son, Elssador, to succeed him upon his death. He always stayed in Minas Tirith, except on campaigns, to be near his loved one. So he sent his sister, Neisa, to live in Annúminas where she married an Elf and settled there. He grew distant from his sole surviving heir, and so when the crown passed to Elssador he was left unprepared for the responsibilities that came with it. Earning him the name Elssador the Unready. Some would say this is an unfair title as many of the challenges he faced had their seeds planted during his father’s reign. Such as the debt that the realm had accumulated as its feudal structure lacked any form of taxation to support itself and relied on the charisma of Elessar’s line to hold it together.
By far his greatest challenge came from the Cult of Shadow lead by Baron Herumor, a noble from the Rhovanion provinces who claimed to be a descendent of King Earnur. According to him Earnur did not perish at Minis Morgul but was enlightened by Sauron who showed him that Gondor was controlled by a decadent court. Which sought to usurp his power and suppress progress under guidance of Elves to prevent men from growing in power. Sauron was supposedly going to restore power to his house and teach men new science’s before he was destroyed at Mount Doom. Herumor declared himself King Earnur II and created the Kingdom of Adunabar to replace a failing Gondor. He had the support of many wayward young men in Gondor and the Generals in the Rhovanion province who did not believe Elssador had a warrior spirit.
This, combined with the other rebellions started by Elssador’s tax reforms, would have toppled any ordinary king. But Elssador was still a descendent of Aragorn and he was not one to accept defeat easily. In spite of the adversity he faced while drawing on every connection he had, he managed to keep the tide of darkness at bay. Luckily Elssador could still count on the support of Rohan who wasn’t about to let a pretending Dark Lord rise on their borders, allowing his allies to contend with Adunabar. Meanwhile he quelled rebellions in Umbar, Nurn, and Lond Daer and built up his reserves financed by tribute from the Kingdom’s of Erebor and Dale as well as loans from the Etchons dynasty. With his powerbase in Gondor secure he turned toward the enemy masquerading as royalty. He had met them at Aldburg where the enemy was trying to cut off the route to Erebor and prevent its treasures from reaching Minis Tirith. The pretender Herumor himself was personally overseeing the battle for the city with the larger bulk of his army. Seeing it as his moment to strike, Elssador engaged him at the Battle of the Folde.
Though Herumor had the superiority in numbers he was still caught off guard by the Gondorian host. Yet he was able to reform his infantry in time to form a solid square formation, protecting his flanks. The king of Gondor rallied his cavalry and made a suicidal charge at Herumor’s Orc portion of his army who were always placed in between his more reliable flanks to prevent them from fleeing. As mad as this tactic seemed, Elssador had a strategy. He charged into the unprepared Orcs in a triangular formation which wedged its way into the center of the enemy square, using the flesh of dead horses to act as a barrier between his army and the Orcs while his infantry reinforced him from the rear. The rest of his army kept rushing the front. This sowed chaos amongst the Orcs and their formation collapsed. This left Herumor exposed to the Gondorians and he immediately fled at the first sign of danger. The rest of his army quickly followed their master’s example which left them as easy targets for the Rohirrim to mop up. The armies of Rohan and Gondor perused the enemy all the way to his capital in Adunabar where he expected to find reinforcements. Instead he found that they had left to contend with an invasion from Dorwinion and Rhun (arranged by Elssador) and the forces that were left were insufficient to repel the western allies. His capital was left without walls or towers as he never expected for invaders to reach the heart of his empire. Reduced to the one fortress he had, he sent messengers east for a faint hope of relief. He was finally betrayed by one of his lieutenants, Varan. Elssador made Varan king of Adunabar as a reward as the Battle of the Folde left Gondor without a large enough army to retake all of Rhovanion and Elssador wasn’t sure if Dorwinion or Rhun would cease their raids if he somehow did. Elssador wanted to use his expensive armies to secure the more profitable province of Endewaith anyways. So he settled by forcing the king of Adunabar to surrender territory to Gondor and Rohan, pay him a heavy tribute, allow a Gondorian garrison, and finally repressing the Cult of Shadow in return for peace.
With the War against the New Shadow concluded, Elssador refocused his efforts to the west and continued his reforms whenever he could get away with it. He also created a monopoly on silk that kept Gondor’s economy afloat for generations. After 80 years of kingship, Elssador finally passed away leaving his father’s and grandfather’s kingdom battered but intact. In spite of being known as the Unready, he was remembered as a part of the three Restored Kings, the greatest leaders Gondor had and will ever know.
He had intended for his only son Cellyn to succeed him upon his passing. Unfortunately Cellyn fell ill within one hundred days into his rule. Cellyn was taken as one of the many victims of this plague that struck across the Reunited Kingdom. With the line of Elessar through Eldarion vanquished, the kingship should have rightfully gone to Alcarin of Bree who was related to Elessar through his grandmother Neisa. As the Gondorians recognized Salic law and thought it undignified to claim kingship through one’s mother. They instead elected Barahir, the Prince of Ithilien and Steward of Gondor to be their new king (ironically he too was related to Aragorn threw his mother Grydien). Alcarin’s line was content to remain in Arnor and did not dispute the transfer of power as long as Arnor retained its autonomy. The Reunited Kingdom remained at peace for the next few decades until King Barahir decided to refuse repaying the powerful Etchons family the loans that King Elssador agreed to. The Etchons held large swaths of valuable territory in both Arnor and Gondor and were also regents of Arnor. The young Lord Gleomir, patriarch of the dynasty, refused to accept this insult to his House prestige. He declared Alcarin’s infant son, Arathalion, to be the rightful High King of Arnor and Gondor, kicking off the first of the Belegar Wars that would forever tear the Reunited Kingdom apart.
The first war ended when Arathalion came of age and signed a truce with Gondor. The long unending conflict was unpopular with the peasantry while the nobility grew jealous of the Etchons preeminence in Arathalion’s court. Arathalion began to assert his power as king and dismissed the Etchons from his capital. Gleomir responded to this perceived slight by declaring Arathalion’s cousin to be the next king, hoping he would be a more compliant puppet. His plan was to sack the capital of Bree quickly by marching through and occupying the lightly defended Shire from his powerbase in the Grey Havens. He thought the Hobbits were no threat to him and made easy targets. He parceled out land in the Shire to minor nobles to gain their support. His soldiers pillaged the countryside and forcibly relocated Hobbit populations to make way for settlement by Men. The Hobbits resorted to guerrilla warfare against the invaders and collapsed the Etchons supply lines to Bree. Arathalion defeated Gleomir and confiscated most of House Etchons holdings. He thanked the Hobbits for their support in the succession crisis but did little to restore the lands taken from them or undo the damage caused by Gleomir and his supporters.
The Belegar Wars might have ended right then and there but Gondor intervened in the Palanway County during the crisis in preparation for a counter invasion. Arathalion ended this scheme and reasserted his claim as High King. The series of battles that followed swayed the tide back and forth between Arnor and Gondor. Until it finally came to an end when Gondor gained the upper hand in the south and Arnor bought off Gondor from directly interfering in the war in Endewaith.
The conflict changed warfare in Middle Earth by replacing feudal style armies with professional troops and standing armies. The importance of knights was negated by longbows and the first early firearms. Bringing an end to the expensive and highly trained heavy cavalry units. The feudal system itself eroded over the course of the wars and weakened the power of the nobility, ultimately giving rights to the commoners and peasantry in Arnor.
The city of Lond Daer was rebuilt by Elessar after the War of the Ring. Six other cities also sprang up along the coast of Endewaith who were populated by a mix of Gondorians, Dunedain, Rohirrim, and Dunlanders. Elessar often visited them while he traveled from north to south. Bringing with him various ministers who grabbed power over decades and gained autonomy. When Elssador took power and attempted to impose tax and administration reforms, the city of Lond Daer rebelled. Elssador captured the city but failed to account for her six sister cities who declared support for Lond Daer and formed the Thangailic League to oppose him. Elssador eventually quelled the rebellion after ending the war in the east and believed his position in Endewaith was secure when he passed the throne to his son. It seemed that was the end of it but then the Arnorians invaded the province and drove the Gondorians out. At first the former League members welcomed the Arnorians but the soldiers stationed in the province failed to receive pay after many long years of fighting and started to loot the countryside. This sparked a second Thangailic League, this time to oppose Arnor. They finally secured their independence after the Belegar Wars and endured one last attempt by Arnor to retake lost territory. They established a new commonwealth and named their country Nineilph (a corrupted Sindarin word for the region). They were led by a Supreme Justicar traditionally held by the Dodger family.
The Period that followed was generally peaceful with the exception of attacks from Harad and Adunabar and, more notably, the War of Federation in Arnor which temporally disposed the monarchy before it returned to power and introduced a constitution that limited the crown’s power. It was also an era of new ideas in relations about government and philosophy. Which gave rise to the embryonic form of Arthism.
With the conflicts in Middle Earth concluded, the powers turned their focus to colonizing the New Lands discovered in the west. They discovered new goods and textiles never before seen in Middle Earth and brought them back home. Like cotton, rubber, rice and even an aphrodisiac for Dwarves that led to a population boom. Access to these new resources ignited an Industrial Revolution but they also created new problems. When Hobbits started planting Cotton when encouraged by the Arnorian government, the demand was so great they were forced to use more land to plant more cotton to offset the cost. Leaving little land aside for food production. It created an artificial famine in the Shire and many Hobbits were forced to emigrate and formed a large diaspora. Meanwhile the conditions in factories were horrendous while also giving rise to a new middle class who competed with the nobility for power. These new social changes inevitably boiled over into a revolutionary wave that washed all across Middle Earth from Gondor and Rohan to Dale and even Erebor! Usually led by the middle class but fought by the peasantry. These ad hoc militia groups were usually uncoordinated. One by one either through reforms or military force these revolutions were quelled but their ideals lived on and continued to shape the world. This era also produced new machines that revolutionized the way people communicated and traveled. When the King of Rohan was bested in a race pitted against an early steam train (as most technology was powered by steam as there were few sources of fossil fuel in the world) and his finest horse. He declared that the Fourth Age had ended and that a Fifth Age of Steam had begun.
One area where the revolutionaries were the most successful was in Nineilph where they overthrew the Dodger Justicars and replaced it with a committee. This committee fell under the sway of a strongman named Heshkal. Heshkal ruled the commonwealth with an iron first but his tyrannical government remained unopposed for forty years before he was finally disposed of, but his downfall would not come from within Nineilph but from external forces instead.
Going back a bit, an Ent-wife was discovered north of the Shire, she revealed that the Ent-wives were attacked by Sauron during the Last War of the Alliance between Men and Elves of which she was the lone survivor. She escaped with severe burns which left parts of her body reduced to charcoal but she managed to travel all the way to the Old Forest in spite of her wounds and became the shepherd to the Huorn living there. She assumed that she was all that remained of her race but upon being informed that a group of Ents still prevailed in Isangard and Fangorn she left the Old Forest in the care of Tom Bombadil and rejoined her kin. She married Quickbeam and together they started a family, except their offspring were very peculiar. They appeared more manlike (but still bore a strong similarity to trees) and rarely grew beyond 7ft. They lived for only a few centuries but made up for this by being more hasty then their elders (for Ents at least.). Weather these mutations stemmed from Sauron’s black magic, their father’s attributes, or both it mattered little to the Ents. They loved their children all the same and the elves named them the Gwinigalad while Men sometimes called them Dryads. Like rabbits in a virgin field they multiplied and joined the races of Men, Hobbits, and Dwarves.
In Orthnac the Dryads intermingled with the Dunlanders and taught them agriculture. They formed a multicultural society but Dryads held most positions of power due to their longevity compared to Men. This culminated in the revolutions which eventually formed a new coalition government dominated by Men but also forced many of its citizens into refugee camps in Rohan and Nineilph.
In Nineilph Dunlanders were stereotyped as hillbillies and the government enforced many discriminatory policies against them. When Heshkal threatened the refugees inhabiting the eastern part of his country the Orthnac government responded by covertly arming new militia groups influenced by Arthism. A nationalistic ideology that called for the violent overthrew of market based governments and replace it with a controlled economy ruled by lower class syndicates. The most notable leader that emerged was a former noble named Dag Ingemar, he claimed to have been heavily inspired by Arthism but remained politically neutral otherwise. The militias captured Lond Daer and Ingemar became the next Justicar. Unfortunately Ingemar’s Dunlander allies refused to leave the country once he was in power and he gained a reputation for being an Orthnac and Arnor pawn. He started dismissing Dunlanders from positions of power and ordered the militias to disarm and return home while associating himself with the old House Dodger supporters that still remained. The situation quickly erupted into a new civil war and the Dunlander’s initially appeared to hold the upper hand. However Ingemar held a lot of political clout in the wider world by presenting himself as a moderate and the best hope of keeping Arthism from taking over the country. Most of the conservative countries like Rohan, Gondor, and Palanway took his side but Arnor intervened on the militia and Orthnac side due to incidents along the Arnor-Nineilph border and other grievances. The only other power beside Orthnac to join them was Adunabad over unrelated reasons. The war grew to cover the entire continent in a scale not seen since the Belegar Wars, or even larger counting the conflicts that spilled over to the colonies. After seven years of intense fighting, the Arnorians and their allies were driven out of Lond Daer and the militias cut off from supplies, and Adunabad surrendering. The war was a clear victory for the conservative powers.
Except peace didn’t last very long. Adunabad’s absolutist monarchy was discredited from all layers of society. The army was in a state of mutiny, the peasants were inspired by the ideas of their Arthist allies, and the nobility lost much of their fortunes financing the war, all on top of facing the worst famine the country had ever seen. The decedents of King Varan were disposed of in a palace coup and a provisional government was set up. This government was quickly hijacked by a radical Arthist faction. Senior military officers and monarchists rejected their authority and the country descended into civil war. The Arthists defeated the opposition but their rule was so brutal that they were ousted and replaced by a more moderate faction in another coup. The struggling corrupt government sought to turn the public’s attention away from internal matters by starting another war against Gondor over an Orc rebellion in Gorgoroth. The Gondorians expected a quick victory but the Adunabad general was more talented than they anticipated. General Sulrandir utterly crushed the Gondorian army dispite being outnumbered three to one. Flushed with victory the people of Adunabad praised him and after two years of gathering more fame and power. Sulrandir declared that the current government had lost track of its Arthist ideals and the spirit of revolution must be replenished with blood. To unite the nation he took up a royal title to appease the monarchists but characterized it as a “vanguard for the revolution” to placate his Arthist allies. He also maintained using Arthist legislation and policies throughout his rule. He didn’t declare himself king as that would be too much of an insult to his Arthist supporters, he instead took up a non-hereditary title not usually associated with monarchy but left no doubt that he was lord. Enter Sulrandir, Dark Lord of Adunabad.
Shortly after the declaration of the new Dark Lord, an old man dressed in blue robes arrived in Minis Tirith from the east. He claimed to be Morinehtar, the Blue Wizard, he came to warn the free people of Middle Earth that the new Dark Lord was none other his former colleague Pallando, better known as Rómestámo to Men. His tale was long ago, before the War of the Ring, he and Rómestámo traveled to the east to encourage rebellion against Sauron. They traveled all the way to the place where the Elves first awoken. There they discovered a vessel of Oromë that he used to travel in the visible world. When Oromë walked in the mortal realm before the First Age he encountered a gigantic serpent that bit him on the cheek. Oromë killed the beast but its poison still rested in his material body. Though it could not kill the mighty Valar he could feel it slowly corrupting him and it would transform him be like his enemy Morgoth. Oromë quickly removed himself from the body like one would take off ruined garments and sealed it away beneath a nearby mountain. Sauron searched for this body to use to house his spirit so could conquer the mortal realm but Rómestámo donned it to deny it to him and attempted to defeat the Dark Lord then and there. Sauron chose to flee instead, sealing away the wizards inside the tomb leaving them trapped for a thousand years. During that time the poison warped the noble Istari into a being of pure evil leaving nothing left of the old Pallando.
Once he was able to confirm who he was. The armies of the west mobilized to stop the new Dark Lord. So dire were the circumstances that even the Valar chose to send a Red Wizard, a servant of Aulë named Annalan, to aid the mortals of Middle Earth and secretly act as a counterbalance to Morinehtar who the Valar could no longer trust. Annalan chose to face the enemy at the abandoned forest realm of Lorien to deny him the chance to open a northern flank on Rohan and Fangorn. Gathering forces from Dwarves, Men, and Dryads he engaged in a fierce battle but it had only turned out to be a diversion. Sulrandir’s forces true objective was to send a covert force of Orcs to take Khazad-dum. Which forced Annalan to allow his Dwarven allies to leave and defend their homes and dividing his forces. With the Dwarves gone Annalan had little left to defend his remaining allies from the enemy’s now superior artillery. Hardly a tree stub was left standing in all of Lorien by the end of the battle, while the Dwarve fought in vain to defend Moria. Leaving Arnor open to invasion. The Rómestámic War was about to begin.
