#variags

Life is Strange/Lord of the Rings crossover fanfic. Basically Max and Chloe go to Middle-Earth and back again.

While this crossover might seem eclectic, I think there are some common themes between LiS and LotR. Ordinary people faced with impossible situations. The power of love and friendship allowing people to endure untold hardships. Destiny and what should people do when confronted with it. "The smallest person changing the course of the future".

If you don't like crossovers in general or fantasy in particular, consider reading the beginning of chapter one and the entire chapter four, which take place before Max and Chloe leave their universe and after they come back respectively. That way it becomes a short story about Max's and Chloe's visit to Away. But then you'd miss the part where I describe how Max's and Chloe's engagement rings look like (how could I write a crossover with the Lord of the RINGS and not touch upon this subject), as well as one particularly sappy and drawn-out declaration of love made by Chloe before they go into battle.

If you think that David doesn't deserve Chloe's forgiveness for his "tough love", my answer is - nobody ever deserves forgiveness. It's always something better than we deserve. I think Chloe is a kind-hearted person. She was able to almost immediately forgive Max. I imagine she would also forgive David. And I find the prospect of Chloe and David being reconciled much more appealing than Chloe hating him for the rest of her life, even if she has legitimate reasons for doing so.

While my nickname on AO3 might suggest I hold extremely unorthodox views on Middle-Earth, I honestly don't think what I wrote is incompatible with what we know about the world of LotR. I don't think what I wrote is a complete retelling, like "the Last Ringbearer". In my mind, I just provided a different perspective on the events we already knew about.

men of middle-earth ⧎ easterlings and southrons ⧎ headcanon disclaimer

Free Map: Sutrlûrza Khand

I made this for my MERP Campaign, but you can adapt it to yours as long as you need a Middle-Eastern/Arabic styled city. Tools used: Age of Empires II Definitive Edition's map editor + Adobe Photoshop CS6 for merging and final details.

Run From The Hills!

Finally finished work on my Khand force for Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. Its an odd force, made up entirely of leftovers from when I wanted a Khand army years ago. But its a decent 300 point warband, and wasted a band of Morannon Orcs led by a hulking Troll Chieftain yesterday.

Love me a chariot!

Aquired: 177

To celebrate the end of Legendarium Ladies’ April (amnesty week), I did the prompt ‘The Forgotten People.’ Here’s some headcanons about the women of lesser known peoples in Middle-earth.

The traditional costume of Haladin woman includes loose trousers, worn under a tunic or a skirt that falls to the knee. This scandalizes their Hadorian and Beorian neighbors, whose women wear long skirts.

It is taboo for Drúedain women to perform stone magic. The Drúedain believe that part of yourself passes into your creation, and this transfer of power cannot be recovered. A women must keep her power intact, otherwise her children will be diminished, born weak, sickly, and ill-formed. This taboo is so strong that a woman who breaks it will be socially shunned and cut off from the community. But Drúedain men are discouraged from performing other magics, because of their lessened natural powers. Young, childless girls are the only ones trusted to perform magics of foresight, and female elders who have passed their childbearing years learn their people's healing magics.

Lossoth women quite literally keep their people alive. To cope with the extreme freezing cold of their native land, the Lossoth must wear garments of watertight furs and skins. Construction of these fur clothes requires highly developed skills, knowledge of the animals, and of the seasons they must be harvested, passed down orally from mother to daughter.  

Freeborn Variag women have considerable social and political power, because Variag men are often away at war, raids, patrols, or long trading trips. Most agricultural work is performed by them, and they own the food they produce. Variag thrall women, on the other hand, have almost no rights and are often sacrificed when their master dies, to serve him in the afterlife.

Among the Haradrim of the Inner desert, in some camel herding tribes the women are held to be the great navigators, entrusted with the ancestral memory of the water sources that give their people and animals life.

The women of Umbar still make offerings to an ancient pre-Numenorean, pre-Sauronic protective goddess of sexuality, fertility, and motherhood. Her image has the head of a cat, and every Umbarrim woman keeps at least one cat as a protective spirit. When her cats die, the woman mourns them with the same rituals she would use for the death of a family member.

@ataniweek day six | easterlings

“ Here and there [was] the gleam of spears and helmets; and over the levels beside the roads horsemen could be seen riding in many companies... These were Men of other race, out of the wide Eastlands.” 

Famous Easterlings: Nyrguyana, the warrior-maiden

Excerpt from Züün Tzus - The Story of Rhûn.

When in the Second Age the clans Szreldor and Vulszev, who had been part of the Uldorians of Beleriand, returned to the east and settled in the vicinity of the Sea of Rhûn, the native Ulgath tribes of the area were subjugated by these newcomers, over all the northern Murgath tribes, who lived on the land we now know as Dorwinion. Thus was born the empire of the Shrel, name with which his kingdom was also known with Shrel-Kain as its capital city.

For a long time, the Murgath tribes had a low social status in the social ranks of the empire, until the time when the Shrel were called to arms by the armies of Sauron for the conflict we know as the War of the Last Alliance. Here an important division in the Murgath society occurred as there were many who responded to align themselves in the ranks of Warlord Shrel to win their favor. This folk would be known later as the Sagath (or Southern Murgath), who settled southwest of the Sea of Rhûn after the defeat in the plains of Dagorlad.

However, there were others who resisted the oppression of the Shrel and the most famous of these opposition guerrillas was the one raised by the warrior maiden known as Nyrguyana.

Nyrguyana was a peasant native to the plains north of Celduin, which were under the Shrel domain. She had two children with a carpenter who would later die of a lung infection. His eldest son, Nuböz, was enlisted for war by the landowner of where they lived and was slain in a skirmish with the armies of the northern kingdoms. It is said that Nyrguyana refused to lose her second son, whose name is not remembered in the books, when the Warlord of Shrel called the youths to enlist in the service of the armies of Mordor, and took action in this regard by secretly summoning women who were in the same situation. When the victims formed a large number of members, they went out openly to declare themselves against the policies of the leaders of the empire.

Of course the response of the leaders did not wait. First, they tried to use force forgetting that many of these women were wives of soldiers of their own empire who refused to repress, even under death penalty.

For fear that on the eve of war an internal conflict would break out, the Shrel Emperor tried to dialogue and reach an agreement with the leader of the revolution. It is said that the emperor did not imprison or kill Nyrguyana at that time for fear of creating a martyr of her figure, then offered the peasant her own weight in gold in exchange for disarming the conflict and surrendering their children to the ranks of his army.

It is said that Nyrguyana accepted the deal, but instead of fulfilling her part, she used the gold to arm her follower warrior mothers and any other volunteer who wanted to be part of the revolution. They painted their hands golden, or so the stories say, to demonstrate metaphorically that gold cannot buy blood and during a cold night, Nyrguyana, knowing that retaliation would not wait when the truth of the deal was known, guided the mothers and their young children outside the city heading north.

Evidently they were persecuted, but they prevailed in union escaping the tyranny of the Shrel. Some ancient writings of the Sagath name her as a witch who had bewitched the wolves of the north to fight at her side. Like all legends, there may be some truth in all this.

From the warrior mothers, a nomadic and matriarchal society emerged, who wandered through the steppes of the south and east of the Iron Hills. In the language of the Ulgath they were known as the Logath, which means "the refusers", and their land is known today as Logathavuld, with its numerous divisions according to the clans that were emerging with the passage of time. We will return to this topic later. The truth is that to this day, the figure of Nyrguyana is almost as important in the history of the Logath as that of the goddess Uldona herself and is one of the most common names with which the parents baptize their daughters in the lands of Rhûn.