Quote Originally Posted by Phantion View Post
Much agreed! It'll be fun to see how they fill-out the world moving forward! My hope also is that this will lessen the "Iron Hills" effect, where they, in my view, made a mistake to under-scale the zone more so than other zones under the pretext it might be "boring" to have to ride that far. Well, I beg to differ. Those Iron Hills should be a great deal further east of Erebor than they are, and it would've been fun to have other Dale-ish towns like Utterby out there . . . maybe some hidden delvings to hone-in on the "Howling Pit" theme a bit more. I'm very glad that they are adopting the opposite philosophy with CardoSwan *smiles.*

I also think that the River Carnen, because Iron Hills is too far west, is way too close to the Celduin; the rivers are practically parallel. So, as with the Royal Road in CardoSwan, I think they should do 2 things: A- Expand the Iron Hills eastward, maybe by having an "eastern exit" from an expanded Jarnfast; B- Just redirect the flow of the Carnen due eastward for a bit, away from that line of cliffs that borders Long Lake, just so that the two rivers don't get too close to each other and converge closer to Dorwinion. I still can't stress enough: A Dorwinion without Elves of any sort will make me pretty sad; I really hope they'll do something magnificent. Tolkien hinted in his drafts there are other hidden Elven realms out there - like Thranduil's in Felegoth.
They do need to extend Iron Hills or - at least - just leave it intact, it is what it is, but if they develop Dorwinion and then Rhun... make it extra large, so the Sea of Rhun is actually pushed as far East as possible! Because it should be pretty far, otherwise it will come across as pretty funny, like a gravity of some kind had pulled it towards the West. Or a devastation :P But I doubt that would be a plausible explanation :P
Maybe extending Dalelands a bit South/South-East, so it feels more like a Kingdom, could help to have more content there, before we get into Dorwinion.





Quote Originally Posted by Phantion View Post
The Chayasir could've dwelt in the vale itself, above-ground, while the Elves --- like the Avorrim cave Elves near Dol Amroth - largely kept to themselves in their own hidden vastness.
Nah. The Chayasir have me at the edge of my seat really, because there is a chance they might be from beyond Orocarni... though it's possible they're from the mountains near the Sea, but then again, that's actually almost the backyard of Dorwinion so in that case they shouldn't be all that aware of the devastation IN Rhun proper... and they really seemed to have come a looong way, the longest of all the refugees... which makes me think of Orocarni, and it's not like the game would shy away from it... it's already a thing in the lore, with the other dwarven clans, would be amazing to delve into it a bit more or what could possibly be in this part of the world, beyond the bounds of the map and beyond the bounds of Middle-earth proper...