So. This post led me down a lengthy speculation rabbit hole last night, lol.
There's something I've been curious about in the terrain markup stuff on the terrain map. There's what looks to be a large square shape on the map southeast of the Barrow Downs, nearly the size of Bree. I've been curious what this is going to be. It appears to be perched on a spur of rock that extends from the Barrow Downs. I wonder if this, and not Ost Gorthad, is actually going to be LOTRO's representation of the capitol of Cardolan, and if the Barrow Downs will in fact be extended to stretch to this point.
If you look at the area south of the Bree-Land on the terrain map, it looks like the entire landscape slopes gradually downward from this one point, like it's this huge massive hill that dominates the entire area and defines the structure of this part of the game world. SSG seems to have really gotten into the idea of incorporating verticality into the game world and perching points of interest on high hills. It's something that's always been part of the DNA of this game; consider Weathertop, or the some of the ruins in the Trollshaws, or the Gondorian ruins in Enedwaith. But it seems like it's been especially prominent in the landscape they've released so far this year; look at the many hilltop ruins in the Angle, or the way Long Cleeve climbs up the cliffside, or the ruins along the northern edge of the Yondershire. It certainly makes for striking landscape, and it can allow a location to really loom over an entire area and dominate the player's imagination. Thelgarth in the Angle is clearly visible as far away as Mirobel; it's probably going to be visible from much of the landscape to its south and west.
A hilltop city located on the square visible on the terrain map would absolutely dominate everything around it. It would be visible from anywhere in the zone. It would be visible from Tharbad, from the Bree-Land Homestead, from the Barrow Downs as they currently exist in game, from Bree, perhaps from parts of the Southfarthing, from whatever lies to the south... it would be an incredibly striking location, which would no doubt fire the imaginations of all the new players who find themselves in Bree and catch sight of this huge ruined city looming in the distance.
I've been imagining Tharbad as the center and endpoint of the new area's story, but maybe it's actually the capitol of Cardolan. Maybe this is Bandit HQ. Maybe this is where Saruman's lieutenants are working out of. Maybe the Nazgul went in and out of this city as they were looking for a Baggins in the Shire and Bree. Maybe this is the source of all the turmoil in the Old Forest. Maybe it's crawling with Cardolan's reanimated dead.
And maybe there are other ruins of Cardolan climbing down the hill... I'm picturing it as sort of an updated, 2022 version of the Fields of Fornost, with a new Fornost at the top of the hill, and with story tendrils spreading out to everything around it. And since it still looks to me like these hills are contiguous with the original Barrow Downs, maybe the Barrow Downs are not just those two little valleys in the Bree-Land but this entire range of hills.
It's the story hook this area needs, and I think it fits nicely with both the lore and what we can see on the map. :)
...so this is what I was thinking about last night. But my thoughts didn't stop there. Because I then turned my attention to the idea of extending the Old Forest--which I would definitely love--which led me to look at some maps on Tolkien Gateway, my go-to site for Tolkien lore, to try to figure out if it would make sense to extend the Old Forest. And looking at the maps made me realize that, actually, the landscape of the Southfarthing is already surprisingly well-defined in-game.
This is Christopher Tolkien's map of the Shire, as it exists in LotR. This is the canonical layout of the Shire as far as the books SSG has access too are concerned:
https://i.imgur.com/Uf8CXcG.jpg
The Green Hills serve as the southern border of the Shire as it exists in-game, meaning everything south of those hills is part of the Southfarthing region. One of the central features of the Southfarthing as it exists on this map is the Shirebourn River; and the Shirebourn already exists in-game, at least in some form. You can see it on the terrain map, and you can see the location where it flows out into the Brandywine. They might adjust the course of the Shirebourn as they build the Southfarthing, but I think the location of its mouth will probably be as it exists on the terrain map now.
Using the mouth of the Shirebourn as a landmark, it's easy to locate where the village of Deephallow should be; it's located in a marshy area just north of where the Shirebourn empties into the Brandywine. These marshes are already visible in-game; they're in the screenshot I posted above looking down the Brandywine. There should be a village called Rushey halfway between Deephallow and Stock, along the causeway road that currently leads from Stock into the Marish; that would probably place Rushey just about at the point where the rocks that keep us from swimming further down the Brandywine are located. And the marshes that are visible south of the mouth of the Shirebourn would be the Overbourn Marshes. As on Christopher Tolkien's map, the Brandywine bends briefly east just south of the Old Forest, then turns to the southwest.
There are three more villages present on Christopher Tolkien's map of the Southfarthing, whose locations we can guesstimate pretty easily. The village of Willowbottom is located on the Shirebourn; Pincup is located on the south side of the Green Hills; and Tookbank is at the western end of the Green Hills, probably just on the other side of the Southfarthing Gate. There's also one village in Buckland that exists canonically but doesn't exist in-game: the village of Standelf, which is presumably located within the hedged-off area south of Brandy Hall. There's also a location called Haysend at the end of the hedge, but it's not clear whether Haysend is anything more than the name for the end of the hedge.
That leaves a handful of canonical locations for the Southfarthing that are off the edges of the map. Longbottom is located in the southern part of the Southfarthing; it's probably in a long valley, and it is the center of the Shire's pipeweed industry, meaning it will probably be surrounded by a lot of fields. Sarn Ford is a crossing of the Brandywine at the southern end of the Brandywine; it was guarded by the Rangers until they were chased away by the Nazgul the day before Frodo and company left Hobbiton.
The Fonstad Atlas, which the world designers rely on heavily, and which seems to have dictated the locations of Tighfield, Long Cleeve, and Gamwich in the Yondershire, places two more villages in the Southfarthing. One of them is Hardbottle, the hometown of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. Hardbottle's location is unclear; various people have placed it in the Far Downs or the Northfarthing. Since Karen Wynn Fonstad places it in the Southfarthing, though, there's a good chance that SSG will do so as well.
The other village is Sackville. It's not unclear if Sackville is an actual village or just a family name, but it's reasonable to think that there's an actual village called Sackville that gives its name to the village's most prominent family. So Fonstad decided that there was probably a village called Sackville; and she placed it both near Hardbottle, since Lobelia married into the Sackville family, and in the Southfarthing, because of the Sackville-Baggins family's connections to the pipeweed industry.
There's one more location of note: Old Winyards. Old Winyards is the name of a wine, but there's a good chance that there's also a vineyard named Old Winyards. Since SSG needs to fill out the southern half of the Southfarthing, I imagine it might be located there.
Once I'd pieced this all together, an interesting thought occurred to me. If a player wanted to, they could currently level to the mid-20s without leaving the Shire. The Shire zone proper will take a player to around level 15. A player could then go to Buckland and do the Buckland and Old Forest quests, which would likely level them to around level 20. They could then go to Yondershire, which would take them to the mid-20s. I wonder if the plan, then, is for the Southfarthing to be a level 25-30ish zone that players could go to after they finish Yondershire. Then, once they finish the Southfarthing, players could go to Evendim and quest out of Oathbarton, Dwaling, and Northcotton Farm, which begin at around level 30. Thus players, if they wanted to, could level to around level 32 without having to stray far from the bounds of the Shire.
Which allows for an interesting story progression. There's relatively little evidence, in the original Shire, of what's going to happen to the Shire over the next year. The only real hint is that there's a strange bandit camp near the Marish. Players can then go to Buckland, where they find out that there are some hobbits who were robbed by bandits (I've been doing the Buckland quests the last couple of days on a level 19 burglar, so those quests are VERY fresh in my mind.) Then players can go the Yondershire, where hear about a "Chief" who has installed his own bounders, where Fredegar Bolger helps them discover that there are bandits changing the borders of the Shire, where they find numerous bandits and half-orcs stationed in the ruins just beyond borders, and where they confront Lotho Sackville-Baggins directly. Then, perhaps, they go to the Southfarthing. If SSG goes with Fonstad's map, the Southfarthing is Lobelia's birthplace and the seat of the Sackville-Baggins family, and the center of the production of pipeweed, the control of which is Saruman's entire reason for taking over the Shire. It's also the location of Sarn Ford, which was recently abandoned by the Rangers, and which is likely the entry point for many of the bandits entering the Shire (perhaps from Cardolan's ruined capitol city, located a short distance to the northeast!). So the Southfarthing would be an excellent place for players to continue to experience the events leading up to the Scouring. And then players could go to southern Evendim, where they discover Dwaling, a village that has been fully seized by bandits.
Played through sequentially, from level 1 to level 32, the Shire, Buckland, the Yondershire, the Southfarthing, and southern Evendim could allow players to experience in full the story of how the Scouring comes about, escalating gradually from Hiders and Seekers to rumors of bandits camps to highway robbery to bandits changing the borders to confronting Lotho to visiting the very heart of the conspiracy in the Southfarthing to realizing that the Rangers are gone and Sarn Ford is controlled by the enemy to a fully-scoured Dwaling.
And then, of course, hopefully we'll get an alternate level 140 version of the Scouring to play around in, which would complete the story. :)
