She sends him an image.

It is very pretty, isn't it? There used to be dozens of them, Morgoth destroyed most and the war took most of the rest.

I heard about that when I exclaimed over it. Gratuitous thing to do.

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.

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.

Maybe.

We can't start playing yet but we could draft an advantages and complications list, for Governor. What sort of setting would you enjoy?

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.

I don't find that particularly objectionable. If you knew all about them we'd be on uneven footing.

How do we adjudicate things hinging on their properties, then?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

He laughs for a while, that time. You and I could do so much better with a fraction of the power.

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.

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!

Don't tell my father, I am reasonably sure he'll decide to build something there just on principle.

Oh, I won't, I told Melian I wouldn't tell anybody who seemed likely to go poke it.