East Rohan
By: The Lidless Eye
And here we are, at last. We’ve taken a couple detours along the way (hello, Dunland!), but we’re on the the Fellowship’s trail once more. Finally, we can finish our tour of everywhere Frodo and company went in Fellowship as well as pushing deeper into The Two Towers. Enough painting outside the lines. Enough being coy.
The Riddermark. Rohan. Finally.
Our goal with the Great River earlier this year was to give players a taste of the Eorlingas as well as pushing development down the Anduin, right to the border of the Mark. While the world and content teams were at work populating that area, it fell to me to start work on the other side of the Limlight, in what turned out to be the largest landscape-development project for LOTRO since the initial construction of Eriador for the launch of the game.
Here’s the thing: Rohan is huge. It’s not something you can avoid – you can’t skimp when developing vast, sweeping grasslands. To do it justice, and to keep scale with the rest of the world as we’ve presented it so far, the entire Mark needs to be about six times the size of our average landscape expansion … and that’s not even including pesky details like Fangorn Freaking Forest.
My first task, then, was to grab a map of the kingdom and demonstrate to the powers that be that there was no conceivable way to build all of Rohan in one pass. It’s just too big to do it justice. So the plainest answer was to cut it in half, across the most obvious geographic boundary: the Entwash River, which divides the Eastemnet from the Westemnet. We’d do the eastern part first, since that’s contiguous with the Great River region and it’s where the Fellowship visits first.
This worked out well for us, as it let us focus on developing Rohan as a culture without getting distracted by the more major set-pieces like Helm’s Deep, which we’ll concentrate on more in the next update. And the Eastemnet is more what the average Tolkien reader considers “classic” Rohan: this is where the widest grasslands are, where crofters tend herds of horses and éoreds of warriors gallop across the plains in pursuit of the Uruk-hai, as opposed to the hidden fastnesses at the wooded feet of the White Mountains that are found in the West. Thematically it worked as well, because dividing Rohan gave us a chance to do two different flavors for the Mark. For now, we’re dealing with the time when Gríma Wormtongue still holds sway over Théoden, the king’s son is dead, orcs are running rampant, and the beleaguered Rohirrim can barely keep it all from falling apart. The kingdom’s heroic, glorious revival can wait; we have desperation to wallow in.
The Eastemnet, then. Still huge, but it’s more manageable to build. Add the East Wall – a.k.a. the Emyn Muil on the western side of Nen Hithoel, where the Argonath and Amon Hen and Rauros and the Tindrock and all that good stuff are – and the edges of Fangorn, and we’re still talking three times the size of the Great River region. The first step to making that assailable by the design team was to divide the kingdom into smaller provinces, both to give us more manageable areas to develop and to flesh out the politics of Rohan. This is, after all, a somewhat loose feudal society of lords who are reasonably self-governing but are bound to ride to the King’s aid when he declares a “weapontake.” Each province, or Riding (to borrow an old English term that had a nice Tolkieny bit of wordplay), has its own personality, its own lord (and lesser lordlings who serve him), and its own problems. The Wold of Rohan (the uplands of “tussock and fen” in the north) became one Riding, and I set another along the upper Entwash Vale, in roughly the area where Aragorn and Éomer met.
The remainder of the Eastemnet, the iconic oceans of green grass and grazing/farmland, I split into two provinces, the Norcrofts and Sutcrofts. I assigned a lord to each Riding, drawing from mentioned-in-passing characters from the books for some and devising new characters to rule the others, and gave them their own personalities and families (and symbols – one town after another with just a white horse on a green field on its banners would get as confusing for the Rohirrim as it would for players). I also sketched out ideas for the remaining lands, across the river, so there’s a full scheme of how the kingdom is put together. I could tell you about the differences between the Ridings of Broadacres and Stonedeans in the Westemnet, but be patient. You’ll get there in time.
“Wait, wait!” some of you are probably saying. “Doesn’t Tolkien say no one lives in the Eastemnet besides roving herdsmen?” Well … yes. But we really only see a small, wild section of it as we follow the Three Hunters (and Merry and Pippin) from the East Wall to Fangorn. And look, the Rohirrim aren’t fools. They would build some strongholds to protect this huge swath of prize land (and its people) from roving orcs, wargs, and such. So while there aren’t any cities the size of Edoras or Aldburg on this side of the Entwash, there are a handful of villages and towns, as well as a bunch of smaller keeps and watch-posts. Some of these have been badly beset, even razed, by the Mark’s enemies, and there certainly aren’t enough Riders to thwart a full-scale onslaught, especially with Éomer having ordered everyone to take shelter in the west.
So hooray! Rohan’s all sketched out. Time to make a bunch of flat land and cover it with grass!
Not so fast. It turns out that, geographically speaking, Rohan’s a lot more complicated than you’d think. I mean, just consider how it relates to the River Anduin, for starters. Here’s a (mostly) navigable river that runs alongside the Wold, but then ends up passing through hills that drop steeply down to the plains (which have sloped down much lower now), and ends in a lake and an extremely tall waterfall plunging down to the marshes below (a lot lower!). You can smile and nod when looking at it on paper, but to build it … how does that even work? It took a while even to picture how you can have those extremes so close to gentle grasslands. And then, to make things more complicated, Rohan’s framed by not one but two major mountain ranges (which we’ve already built, in part at least, for other parts of the game), each of which has rivers flowing out of it that merge together to form the Entwash – as do the hills of the East Wall, and aaaargh my brain hurts and I need to lie down now.
It took a while, and a lot of finessing (OK, swearing at) our landscape-modeling software, to sculpt the contours of the Mark so that everything worked together, more or less as Tolkien described it, but I think I got it. (I sculpted the entire Mark, at least in broad strokes because everything needs to hook up properly without any nasty surprises down the road, and anyway, you need to see something across the Entwash.) You can ride from one end of the Eastemnet to the other, in any direction, without worrying about hurling yourself and your horse off a cliff, but you can also follow the Great River all the way to Amon Hen and behold a view from the Seat of Seeing that’s as majestic and lofty as you’d hope, and follow Merry and Pippin’s path down the cliffs of the East Wall to the plains.
This is an actual job that they pay me to do. I’d love to travel back in time to high school and tell my career counselor.
The next challenge of developing East Rohan was one that had been nagging at me for a while: can we really make such an enormous, (mostly) treeless plain without things getting visually boring? In the past, we’ve tried to include many different biomes in a small area (just look at Dunland and the Great River), but the lore of Rohan limits our palettes more than that. That meant getting much more creative with what we could work with, and finding different ways to interpret “grasslands.” Each Riding got its own personality, and different inspirations from the real world. The Wold became almost prairie-ish, all golds and rusts, fading down to green-yellow pastures in the Norcrofts, then growing dark, rich, and damp as it slopes, gently, to the fertile waterlands of the Sutcrofts. The Entwash Vale, meanwhile, is all grey-green downs and willowy marshes along the river’s edge, as Tolkien described the area in the book. Trees are scarce everywhere, except for a few isolated patches. Crumbling stone and meadows of wildflowers are what break up most of this part of the Mark, not forests – Fangorn excepted, of course.
Giving the land of each Riding its own character also helped define the Riders who live there. The Men of the Wold, who live right on the hardscrabble edge of the Mark, are rough, crude, and self-sufficient, for instance. The Sutcrofters, dwelling in what is essentially the kingdom’s breadbasket, are more cultured and less warlike (for Rohirrim, anyway) -- civilized but complacent. They even built their chief village of Snowbourne amongst the ruins of an old Númenórean citadel – this was once the province of Calenardhon, after all, and traces of Gondor remain even now.
In the meantime, a facet of development we’ve never had to deal with before stems from the nature of Rohan itself: this is a huge, functioning kingdom with its own culture, rather than a crumbling remnant of some past civilization like most of Eriador, or a gang of warring tribes like Dunland. Tolkien depicts aspects of it vividly in the books, but there’s also a lot he doesn’t cover. Almost every man we meet in the books is a lord or warrior, for instance, and the only woman we encounter is, essentially, a princess. But how do the common folk live? What do they do for fun? What do Rohirrim eat? What are their laws, and how do they punish criminals? What heraldic symbols do they use, beyond the horse and sun we see in the books? What’s their artwork and music like? How do they tell stories when written language is limited to occasional runes? In what ways is their speech different from other cultures? What’s life like for women and children? Over the course of a couple weeks, I researched and compiled a, frankly, alarmingly large (and still growing!) guide to all things Rohirric, drawing from the cultures that inspired Tolkien – the Anglo-Saxons and the Goths. It’s a huge beast, and only a little of it will ever come to the forefront in the game, but every designer can use it as a foundation for the content he or she creates.
So that’s East Rohan: plenty of wide-open space for mounted combat. Heroic warriors fighting a hopeless battle against enemies on all sides (not just Isengard – Mordor and the Easterlings have beset the Horse-lords for a much longer time). Villages and fortresses put to the torch, good people scattered, their faith in their ailing king broken. And a desperate need for heroes, even people the Horse-lords have never trusted (or heard of) before.
And now, as the design team continues to refine and polish the east, it’s time for me to start looking across the Entwash. The Westemnet (and Fangorn!) isn’t going to build itself.