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Tumunzahar makes Menegroth look like a contract project. Which, the Dwarves assure her, it was. The stonework is astonishingly careful and beautiful, silky to the touch up close while from a distance it gives the impression of stretching on forever above, a sky of stone with crystals for stars. Vast natural cave systems are connected by dozens of perfectly smooth, gently sloped broad stone pathways from which the fall, if she fell, would be several miles down. There are handrails. "We use those to move materials carts," someone explains to her, "we're not going to be reckless."
There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
I don't think so, actually. I think he wanted my father to come after him, and wanted my father as desperate and furious and therefore undiplomatic and politically isolated as possible when he did.
purposeful_glory
Oh. I guess that's one way to do it. I don't suppose tapestries go to the Halls of Mandos? Maybe when that gets handled as a thing he can be repurposed as an art curator.
They don't. When that gets handled perhaps my grandmother will desire to return to the making of them.
We can't start playing yet but we could draft an advantages and complications list, for Governor. What sort of setting would you enjoy?
purposeful_glory
I'm sort of tempted to have a frost giant kingdom on the Helcaraxë, but I'd be making up everything about frost giants except what they look like and that at least some of them have cool ice powers I don't know how to operate.
Establish as much as we can in advance, present the question in general terms to the other person when you want to do something that requires an answer, some people appoint a mediator but that seems like taking it a bit far.
purposeful_glory
Fair enough. Let's see, things about frost giants. I don't know what they normally eat, or anything about the food chain on the planet; maybe they can just absorb sunlight or they're inherently self-sustainingly magical or something, but there's so little sun on Jötunheim and species that do that are rare. So I don't know what sort of supply lines I might or might not need into the Helcaraxë to support them. I have little information on their culture including game-relevant properties like susceptibility to bribery or structure of social influence, but I am not running imaginary Jötunheim, I'm running imaginary Helcaraxë, so I suppose as long as I don't assume they're all congenitally this or that the culture can be freely invented. I'll try to restrain my utopianism.
Fair. Are we assuming Valinor is a non-entity, having made their mountains higher and their border chillier, unless someone does the sort of thing that'd definitely attract their attention?
purposeful_glory
Well, if we assume Valinor's in play then we'd be on uneven footing, all I know is unflattering hearsay. And one and a half flattering hearsays.
No Valinor, then.
I can think of some flattering things, should you require them. The Trees were an impressive work of magical engineering.
I can think of some flattering things, should you require them. The Trees were an impressive work of magical engineering.
purposeful_glory
Oh, they've done all kinds of technical work that's impressive, but it matters what you're impressive at, and according to the context I got from Melian having to have Trees to light things up sounds like a patch job because they couldn't figure out real stars in a timely manner.
In a timely manner? The Ages of the world before the Elves awoke were a thousand times the length of the present Ages, and there were hundreds of them.
purposeful_glory
And yet. Melian says there are real stars but they are not in the locations indicated by the night sky; those are fakes they slapped up there. The sun is new, I know, I was there; that would also ordinarily be a star. The planet's supposed to be spherical.
purposeful_glory
I mean, I'm not sure I wouldn't have naively made a flat planet too, on my first try, without having known what I was doing from having seen examples; but once it collapsed without magic...
You wouldn't have tried to use magic to make it stay, you'd have checked what actually worked? Maybe the problem is that they're too powerful, such that 'make it stay' was actually an option.
purposeful_glory
But they had to hack together such a kludge to do it! The gravity's all fucked! Please do not go play at the edges of the top of the cylinder, they have something set up so they can go rescue anyone who gets stuck in it and I feel like that would be bad all around. And the wasted space! All that surface area on the side and the bottom, far as Melian knows there's nothing there but general mountainousness!
purposeful_glory
Oh, I won't, I told Melian I wouldn't tell anybody who seemed likely to go poke it.
purposeful_glory
If nothing else, once I can teleport I ought to be able to go rescue you before the Valar and Maiar minding the alarm notice anything.