first, second, and third impressions: wow!

[asthmatic_thematic]

Somewhat agreed! Things must move forward to the fifth age!

Things like asking Osse for help to solve human problems could still be consistent with the Blue Wizards already trying to open a portal to the Void to say hi to Melkor (who is a Vala), which could be related to traffic cones on the Straight Road to break all connection to the Undying Lands and render it vulnerable to Melky. Or not.

But the idea of dark men of the east, opposing the sun paladins and politically grappling for power to help give the blue wizards or a dark captain assistance in bringin in da void, could be very consistent with a focus on men. (Also: palantiri between eastern capitols!)

I especially like the idea of basically running political dissolution in reverse. The basic history behind LotR was: Numenor -> (Arnor + Gondor) -> (Rhudaur + Cardolan + ... + Gondor).

Now T4 has added Numenor -> west + east, or dunedain + oroedain. Perhaps the good oroedain, the sun paladins, are holed up, and are in charge of reuniting the lost kingdoms of the East (lost to the black oroedain) so that the new eastern king (the Sun King? har!) can make a push to stop the blue wizards and or dark captain or... (Or maybe the kingdoms are like a swiss confederacy!) This would somewhat parallel Aragorn heading to Gondor to reunite the north and south kingdoms, but in LotR this was a purely notional reunion (although Gandalf did say to Butterbur after the War that Aragorn would probably rebuild Fornost), and the notional union just headed east to give Frodo a distraction. Here there could be a somewhat more real reunion. It could be on an even grander scale, to create a new numenor despite the bent seas, bringing east and west together. (Tower of Babel anyone?) But such a story would always be a backdrop to the basic idea of trying to stop someone sending an invitation to Melkor.

There's something interesting about sunset and sunrise--Tolkien seemed to be a bit fatalistic about Middle Earth, that even if men won, the passing of so much beauty from the world would be a tragedy. The fact that Faramir bowed to the sunset before eating with Frodo always had something a bit sad about it, and Tolkien's fondness for making things eastern evil always seemed in tension with the fact that sunrise is normally thought of as a wonderful beginning of things. To Tolkien the point to the fight seemed to be that evil had to be vanquished if only to make a washed-out grayness possible. Fin de siecle in the middle of a century, even if a rough one.

[darkgod]

I have planned to have an easterling presence in the east but the main force controlling the land is the Orc Pride.

Now there nothing that says there are not some islands controlled by evil humans.

There is also the dark land, an other continent to the south. This could be tha the far east continent split of the dark land during the sundering of the world.

I had planned to have vast lush primordial forests in this continent, populated mostly by trolls (the "smart" version, olog-hai and such).
There could be an ongoing war out there between the trolls and the easterlings or black numenoreans

[asthmatic_thematic]

The one thing I would add would be that having orcs as direct unmediated subordinates to your big boss (or big bosses, as is the case with the blues brothers) lacks a bit of heirarchical interestingness. Sauron definitely relied 90% on orcs for dirty work (at least before the haradrim et al showed up), but his immediate lieutenants were nazgul. Really orcs are too stupid to do anything but fight amongst themselves and kill defined enemies (think of the squabbles when Pippin and Merry were captives of the uruk hai). The idea of orcs controlling four areas of a large map, all quiescently subservient to a couple of wizards, could be really made more interesting by having a layer of nasties between the blues brothers and the extraordinarily dumb orcs. Say, Oroedain who aren't numerous enough to fill out a real army, but who act as very good smart henchmen to the istari.

There's a great article somewhere about what the player needs to believe in a game. It's very little. The example given was a halo-like game, and an enemy soldier was supposed to cry out "call for reinforcements!" when half of them were dead. This cry had ABSOLUTELY no effect on the processor. But the player would hear it and think, uh oh, bad news coming; and if it did, the game seemed genius; and if it didn't, the player imagined that the reinforcements hadn't come fast enough.

Adding messengers who go from the blues to the prides, or henchmen who seem to be running things, or outposts, or patrols, or... This makes the far east seem like a place which exists independently of a little @ who shows up with a ring of str + 1 and a stack of potions of lesser healing. And that's generally good gamesmanship, even if the processor isn't trying to calculate the political implications of niebuhr's theory of governance wrt orcs.