Asornok (Middle Earth) Revisited

As mentioned in this thread, one of the settings I am working on is my old

Asornok setting moved to Middle Earth:

http://basicroleplaying.com/openquest/d100-system-setting-2650/

At the moment I am working on an introductory adventure which should in-

troduce the players to the rules (modified Call of Cthulhu Dark Ages) and

their characters to the game world and give both players and characters

an idea of the direction of the campaign.

While I normally prefer a sandbox, my introductory adventures usually have

a degree of railroading, mainly because I assume that the players do not

yet know the setting well enough to decide what their characters want to

do without a little guidance.

Since the campaign will start at the beginning of the Fourth Age of Middle

Earth, the introductory adventure should also link the events at the end of

the Lord of the Rings to the setting, so the campaign can build upon the la-

test part of the book's story.

The idea I have at the moment is that Saruman got an important message

before he left Isengard for the Shire: The Lossoth have found the two Pa-

lantiri that were lost a long time ago when King Arvedui's ship sank in the

Ice Bay.

Well aware how valuable these two Palantiri could be for him, Saruman deci-

des to send some of his human henchmen to the Lossoth camp at the Ice

Bay with orders to get the Palantiri by any means necessary and to deliver

them to him at the Shire.

The henchmen easily overpower the surprised Lossoth and steal the Palan-

tiri. The surviving Lossoth flee to a nearby camp of an Asor hunting party,

where they tell their story and ask the Asor for help. Since the two arctic

people have an old pact to help each other against the creatures of the

Shadow, the Asor send a small group - the characters - to pursue the rob-

bers and take the Palantiri.

Assumed that the characters succeed, the Lossoth decide to give the for

them useless and obviously dangerous Palantiri to the Asor as a reward for

their help, and the Asor take the Palantiri to their settlement Nan Asor on

their northern peninsula Asornok.

- here I will need a short adventure or two, for example a walrus hunt to

introduce the combat and hunting rules, to pass the time

A while later the Asor are visited by emissaries of King Elessar, who has re-

ceived news about the Palantiri by Dunedain Rangers who met the Lossoth,

and who wants to negotiate a return of the Palantiri to his newly refounded

Kingdom of Arnor and Gondor.

Through his emissaries the previously almost completely isolated Asor learn

of the last years' events and the end of the Shadow, and the negotiations

about the future ownership of the Palantiri open the way for a small group

of Asor - again the characters, of course - to travel all the way to Minas

Tirith to deliver the Palantiri and receive the negotiated reward.

With this the actual campaign can start.

While the first phase of the campaign is designed to take the characters

all the way from their arctic homeland to Minas Tirith in order to give them

an impression of Middle Earth and the developments there at the beginning

of the Fourth Age, the next phase will probably cover events closer to ho-

me.

When the Asor migrated to the Asornok peninsula during the Second Age,

the land was inhabited by Morgoth's Shadow Creatures. The Asor fought

a series of campaigns to cleanse their new land of those creatures, and

managed to free the southern coast, the western coast and most of the

islands off the coast from the Shadow's influence. However, Shadow Crea-

tures, like Ice Demons, Ice Worms and Snow Trolls, still inhabit the moun-

tains and hills of the interior, the northern coast, some of the islands and

the border region in the east.

During the reign of the Witch King of Angmar the Asor needed all of their

strength to defend their lands against the hordes of Shadow Creatures

sent north from Angmar to destroy them. Many Asor hunters who served

with the border guards were killed, and for a while it seemed likely that

the Asor would be wiped out by the Witch King's armies.

After the fall of the Witch King the Asor have slowly rebuilt their realm,

but they did not have the strength to fight the remaining Shadow Cre-

atures, there was an uneasy stalemate between the Asor in the south

of the peninsula and the Shadow Creatures in the north. The only place

truly free of any Shadow influence remained the small island of Nuk Hu-

rom, the seat of the High Anganoka of the Asor and the location of their

only temple, once blessed by the wizard Radagast when he visited the

Asor.

Now, after the fall of Sauron, the Asor are strong again, and the Shadow

Creatures have lost the source of their power. The anganoka have there-

fore decided that the time to cleanse all of Asornok and to heal the land

from Morgoth's and Sauron's curses has come. When the characters re-

turn from Minas Tirith, the plans have been made, and the Asor's last war

against the remnants of the Shadow will begin ...

By the way, this is a little map of Asornok:

For the characters the war will probably begin with an operation against

the realm of an Ice Demon (= Helegrog) in the northeast of the peninsula,

and in the case of a success the group, experienced in travelling in the

south since their visit to Minas Tirith, will probably be asked to travel to

Rhosgobel in Wilderland to learn Yavanna's Blessing and other magic use-

ful for the healing of the land from the wizard Radagast.

By the way, while looking for nice illustrations for the setting material I

also discovered this picture, probably a Hobbit's idea of a walrus:

Working on the stats of the various Shadow Creatures, based upon Fergo's

excellent material, I have run into a minor problem with Snow Trolls. Accor-

ding to all the Tolkienesque written sources I have found, from the Hobbit

onwards, Trolls are turned to stone (or ice in the case of Snow Trolls) by

sunlight. However, in Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies the Trolls fight in

broad daylight ...

Keep with the written source!

From memory, Sauron had an elite breed of Troll, the Olog-hai, which were capable of attacking during the daylight, and Peter Jackson is consistent with this.

I'm not sure how I know this, whether it is from reading Tolkien many years ago, or playing MERP, also many,many years ago...

ADDIT: The term 'Olog-hai' appears here in Wikipaedia, so it must be right

From memory, Sauron had an elite breed of Troll, the Olog-hai, which were capable of attacking during the daylight, and Peter Jackson is consistent with this.

Ah, I see - thank you.

So my setting's Snow Trolls will be the normal daylight incompatible

species, bad enough in a region where the sun is above the horizon

only a few hours each day in winter, and these Olog-Hai will remain

a frightening rumour from the far south.

Meanwhile I have also done a little more work on the setting's magic system.

The basic idea is still that the Anganoka (female shamans) use their skills Spi-

rit Lore and Ritual to contact the spirits and ask for their help, and that the

spirits - non-player characters - work the actual magic. Whether a spirit deci-

des to help the shaman depends on whether the spirit is friendly towards the

shaman, understands what the shaman is asking for, has the power to help

the shaman, and can be convinced by the shaman to help.

The Ancestor Spirits, the spirits of those shamans who decided to live on in

the Spirit World Inguanok after death, are usually friendly to the shamans of

the material world Asornok, but their powers are rather limited, they can only

give knowledge and advice. Their help is also somewhat unreliable, they can

tell the shaman only what they consider true knowledge, but they may well

be wrong.

Friendly Animal Spirits are those most likely to help a shaman. The Asor, who

call themselves "the people of Owl and Wolf", have very friendly relations with

the Owl Spirit and the Wolf Spirit, but at best neutral relations with the spirits

of the animals they hunt, for example the Caribou Spirit or the Seal Spirit. Un-

less a shaman's clan has violated the pact with the friendly spirits, for exam-

ple by killing a pregnant she-wolf, the spirit will act on a reasonable request

for help, within the limits of what animals of its species can do. For example,

an owl can lead a hunting party to a herd of caribou, and a wolf can guide a

lost hunting party back to the camp, but no animal spirit can make a fire.

Nature Spirits, like the spirits of mountains and rivers, are the most powerful

of all spirits, but also the most difficult to deal with. Even those who are basi-

cally friendly towards the Asor and willing to help rarely comprehend what the

humans want from them, and if they comprehend it they are often very slow

to act - the needs of humans and the human concept of time are normally be-

yond their experience. For example, there is no way to ask a mountain spirit

for an avalanche to destroy a band of raiding snow trolls, the spirit would pro-

bably not even be aware of the existence of trolls in the first place. To ask

the spirit to collapse a cave used by the trolls could work, but perhaps only

next year or the year after that.

With the Asor and their society and culture mostly finished, the next things to

look at are the Asors' enemies, the Shadow Creatures.

During the First Age of Middle Earth, when Morgoth ruled the North, what is to-

day the peninsula of Asornok was a part of the wide plain of Lothlann, north of

the Iron Mountains, in Morgoth's realm. All of the lands once ruled by Morgoth

are still under his curse of cold and desolation, and will remain under the curse

as long as there are places which have been touched by Morgoth during the

First Age.

As mentioned previously, the Asor have cleansed the lands on the southern and

western coast of their peninsula and on many of the isles off the coast, but the-

re are still lands under the control of Shadow Creatures in the north and east of

the peninsula, lands the Asor intend to cleanse now that the Shadow of Mordor

has fallen in order to remove the anchors of Morgoth's curse and heal the land.

The most important of these places is Kala Udar, the "Heart of Cold". It is a deep

volcanic rift in the northeast of Asornok, guarded by the nearby grey ice fortress

of an Ice Demon. According to the legends of the Asor, Morgoth himself created

the rift as the home of a Fire Demon who ruled Lothlann in his name. This Balrog,

if it ever existed, probably no longer lives under Kala Udar, because any Helegrog

would hardly have built his fortress next to the home of a Balrog.

Another important Shadow Hold is An Gurim, the "Place of the Worm", a large sub-

terranean network of caves in the north of Asornok. For centuries it has been the

lair of an ancient Cold Drake, but it is unknown whether Morgoth placed him there

to guard the caves and whatever they may contain, or whether he wandered the-

re after Morgoth's fall at the end of the First Age.

In order to cleanse their lands and to lift Morgoth's curse the Asor will have to de-

feat both the Helegrog and his Snow Troll followers at Kala Udar and the Cold Dra-

ke at An Gurim, two extremely difficult tasks, and then to use Yavanna's Blessing

to heal the lands. While the Asor characters have the means to destroy the Hele-

grog of Kala Udar, at least after they have eliminated his small army of Snow Trolls

with an all out attack or a campaign of attrition, the Cold Drake of An Gurim is a far

more serious problem, because the Asor have no weapon which could hurt it at all.

They will most probably need some knowledge and help of the powerful Southerners,

and someone has to travel South to search for the means to fight the Worm ...

Reported

Reported

So, you're saying that the Asor wouldn't appreciate double-numbered football jerseys?