Middle Earth 260x260

This map focuses on the region of Middle Earth from Rohan to where approx ther Easterlings were situated. It incorporates the nations of Rohan, Gondor, Mordor, The Corsairs, Harad, Khand and the southern part of Rhun.

Rohan
I have made this a bit more hilly and forested than some maps have previously done. I got the impression from reading Tolkein that Rohan was not completely flat.

Gondor
I debated about whether to make Anduin a crossable river or widen it and place a land bridge at Osgilliath. I choose the later as this is more represented of how Gondor was defended from Mordor.

Mordor
Mordor was quite hard to do. Some parts of Mordor are well described whilst others are not.

Umbar, Khand
Neither of these 2 lands are well described by Tolkein but I have tried to add the neccessary features and resources that would support a large population.

Easterlings
Their exact location is not described other than East of Mordor.

Here's a shot of the mini-map.

Here's a shot of Rohan


edit: I'll try that again in a sec

The sea of nurn could b bigger

Nice.
This would go great with my map.

Very, very nice! It looks excellent and seems pretty damn accurate too (if my recallation of the LOTR map from the book is correct).

Just one comment, I know that the South is supposed to be wasteland (at least, this is according to what fragments I can remember)... but it could probably still have a little variation in terrain, if only for artistic purposes. (Very large areas of just a single terrain type [excluding the water terrain types of course ] don't work too well on a civ3 map.)

Yeah, it could use some scattered desert and maybe some hills(?) in Harad.

This is a pretty awesome map. I've recently been playing on a map of the whole of middle earth, and all the features are tiny in comparison to this map

I agree that more detail is need in Harad, just to add some variety. Regarding the area east of Mordor: is that artistic licence, or do those features actually exist in Tolkien's world? I'm curious, as I've never seen them on any maps and was planning on trying to make my own middle earth map at some point.

Thanks for the feedback.

The area south of Mordor beyond Ephel Duath was not described in great detail with expception to Harad and Umbar (and even then Tolkein didn't go into to many geographical details), which made it very hard to accurately portray this region.
I did much research into Tolkeins ME to find as much detail as possible so that the map accurately portrays how he envisioned ME. This is very possible with Gondor, Rohan, Mordor, Ithilien, etc but when it came to the lands south and west of Mordor, it was a lot harder to find references on how this land looked.
I did manage to find some references but they were not as detailed as I had hoped for. Which meant that I had to use a bit of my imagination.

Khand and the land west of Khand was totaly made up. Tolkein doesn't describe this part of ME at all. So I had to create how I thought it might look

Harad and Umbar only have brief geographic desriptions so I did those lands to how Tolkein describes them and added a few extra bits in to allow for a sustainable civ.

I put the desert in between Mordor and the Easterlings so as they wouldn't run into one another when growing as a civ.

I had been working on a LoTR scenario featured around the last battle of the 3rd age, but I haven't been able to finish it due to other commitments.

I got most of my info from these sites
The council of Elrond
Tuckborough.net
The Enclyclopedia of Arda

Regards

Sir Eric said:

I had been working on a LoTR scenario featured around the last battle of the 3rd age, but I haven't been able to finish it due to other commitments.

Click to expand...

Same here. Maybe we could do something together sometime.