Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-25981649-20171129144913/@comment-26149161-20171129175702

I love the vast majority of ideas here. However, making Nurn even more fertile? I feel as if that takes away from the stories. We're told all these lovely descriptions of scenery as the Fellowship travels. Tolkien does this for a reason--to show what will be lost if Mordor is victorious. Nurn is a land owned entirely by Sauron and the Orcs, and if it's beautiful or at least pretty nice-looking, it makes Sauronic rule seem not so bad. That fertility, I believe, would lessen the legitimacy of the threat of Mordor to all life. I would much rather have a ruined land, dry-farmed in the ash, to show that the Orcs hate all living things, and love nothing more than despoiling and destroying those which grow.

Ithilion, Discussions Moderator (Auta i lómë)