Rogue Trader: the Ignatian Rebellion

One thing I quite liked in Rogue Trader was its origin path system for character generation. Each character selected background options from a series of choices, which then formed a path from their planet of birth to their character class. Where different characters' paths intersected, you were encouraged to come up with an event that they had all participated in. We didn't exactly do this, but since several of our characters did have some war experience, it seemed like a good idea - and one very much in keeping with the Warhammer 40,000 universe - to have a fairly recent conflict in the campaign background. That conflict is the Ignatian Rebellion.

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The rebellion was started by and therefore named after Ignatius Virius, governor of the agri-world of Derbe in Tertia Pars of the Acheron sector. A scion of one of the most powerful noble houses in the sector, House Virius, Ignatius had ruled Derbe effectively for years without any untoward incident. Derbe is just off the main trade route between Ultra and Tertia Pars, and House Virius did lucrative business feeding the hive worlds and mining colonies producing materiel for the Imperium's endless wars - until Ignatius Virius declared independence from the Imperium.

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The Children's Crusade

Several regiments of the Imperial Guard were raised to suppress the Ignatian Rebellion. The 76th Rad-Guards were raised on the death world of Chirikov, blasted by atomic warfare in the distant past and now home to tenacious tribes of survivalists. The garden world of Boye contributed the mechanised 41st Dragoon Guards, and the 113th Acheron Repentants were recruited from the penal world of Ministerium Veri. These new regiments were bolstered by the veterans of the long-serving 328th Kurchatov Jaegers, who would settle in the Anastasian Traverse after the rebellion was put down. But the regiment that features in the most stories about the rebellion was the 165th Ophir Highlanders.

Ophir is a hive world not far from Derbe, which was accustomed to providing its tithe of war materiel and regiments for the Imperial Guard. When the rebellion broke out, however, the 164th Highlanders had only recently been sent south to join the garrisons around the Eye of Terror, and recruitment for the next regiment was barely getting underway. Because more troops were urgently needed, the recruitment process was accelerated and the newly inducted troopers sent to the war zone after only a bare minimum of training. To compensate for this, a call went out to nearby monastic orders of the Adeptus Ministorum to send preachers to motivate the green troops, and many orders responded.

While the rest of the regiment was being mobilized and the Ministorum priests were arriving, the first battalion of the Highlanders was thrown into battle on the desert world of Athir. An insurrection against governor Flaccus Rufius had broken out, and had to be suppressed before the fire of rebellion spread any further.

The first troops on the ground were the green conscripts from Ophir, who were dropped onto a spaceport near the capital of Athir. Not only had most of the population joined the rebellion, but also the local planetary defence force, so the Highlanders had a stiff fight on their hands. Their initial casualties were terrible, but reinforcements were dropped in, and once the first of the preachers arrived, the first battalion developed the fighting style that would become iconic to the campaign: the bayonet charge inspired by the preaching of the Ministorum priests. With fanatical determination and huge losses, the Highlander battalion cleared the rebels from the spaceport.

Their first forays into desert warfare beyond the spaceport's perimeter were a complete disaster. The rebels knew how to survive in the death world's hostile deserts, and how to fight in them. They lured columns of Ophir troops into the desert with skillful raids, and destroyed them in ambushes. The tide only began to turn when the 76th Chirikov Rad-Guards were deployed; they had grown up on a desert death world even less forgiving than Athir, and could fight the rebels at their own game. The mechanised Boye Dragoon Guards defeated the minimal armored corps of the planetary defence force, but the rebels fought on as guerrillas. Eventually the Punishers Space Marines, held in reserve for the assault on Derbe, had to be deployed to Athir. Punishers kill teams took out the rebel leaders, and eventully the uprising was put down. Governor Rufius, who had fled the planet at the outbreak of the insurrection and was considered by many to have brought it on by his misrule, was quietly deposed.

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The siege of Derbe

While Athir was being pacified, the Imperial Navy turned their attention to the rebel fleet. Acting on good intelligence, a naval squadron surprised the rebels at Anceli Aurieli and defeated them thoroughly. Some pirate ships escaped, most prominent among them the frigate Flammis Acribus Addictis, which would trouble the trade routes of the Acheron sector for years to come.

With the fleet beaten, the Imperial Navy was free to invest Derbe. With complete control of the space around the planet, there was no way for the rebellion to spread any further. However, the Imperium is not content to contain those who challenge the authority of the Emperor. Governor Virius would be made an example, and so the order came to invade Derbe, subjugate the planet and capture the renegade governor.

The resistance was centered around the Governor's massive palace and the capital city surrounding it, so that was where the Imperial assault would be concentrated. After a massive bombardment by the orbiting naval squadron, the first wave of penal legion dropships was deployed right in the teeth of rebel defenses. Casualties were considerable, but for a penal legionnaire, dying in the service of the Emperor is a blessing. After the penal legion neutralized the air defences around the capital, the 113th Acheron Repentants were dropped in to secure a landing site for the regular troops, and the bulk of the Imperial army began to deploy.

Yana Vash, dropship pilot and survivor of the Derbe drop
Governor Virius sent his planetary defence troops to attack the Imperial forces, and ferocious battles raged in the city. Virius had openly declared his allegiance to Khorne, the Chaos god of battle, and his rebel forces were joined by warbands of Chaos Space Marines, eager to slaughter in the name of the Blood God.

It was here that the bulk of the 165th Ophir Highlanders received their baptism of fire, and made their name as a regiment. By their standards, the troopers of the first battalion who had survived Athir were practically veterans; on Derbe they formed a core for the regiment that could almost be regarded Imperial Guard regulars. The rest of the regiment, fresh from what little training they had had time for, was thrown directly into combat against the rebels. Hordes of Ophirian conscripts, bayonets fixed and urged on by their preachers, charged rebel positions with a fanaticism that outdid the heretical followers of Khorne. Bloody battles raged throughout the city, and little by little, the bayonets of the Highlanders cleared the rebels from an ever larger part of the city, allowing the regular regiments to deploy. More and more artillery was sent in, and the guns of the Imperial Guard and the orbital bombardments of the Navy reduced the capital of Derbe to a dust-choked ruin. Rebel casualties were massive, and superior Imperial firepower gradually forced them back to the heavily fortified gubernatorial palace.

The Imperial army methodically laid siege to the palace, completing an elaborate network of fortifications and entrenchments to cut it off from the rest of the planet. While Guardsmen manned trenches in the ruins of the planetary capital, penal troops and Space Marines of the Punishers chapter fought crack rebel troops in desperate close-quarters battles in the sewers and tunnels below. Recon teams of the Kurchatov Jaegers probed the palace's defences, capturing prisoners and scouting out its weaknesses. Their snipers took a steady toll on the rebel garrison.

Once the palace was fully invested, the remaining rebels could have been starved into submission, but again the order came: the palace must be taken and every single rebel exterminated. The assault was preceded by a gigantic bombardment, and led by the Acheron Repentants, who breached the first line of fortifications. The main assault on the very doors of Ignatius Virius's palace was carried out by the Sisters of Battle, their battle-hymns echoing as loudly as the roar of their flamers and melta-weapons in the close confines of the palace. Simultaneously, the Punishers Space Marines attacked through the tunnels below the palace and even mounted an aerial assault on its highest levels. Behind the power-armored vanguard, the Imperial Guardsmen poured in, scouring every nook and cranny of the palace and executing every heretic inside.

Only one man could not be found: Governor Ignatius Virius. How he could have escaped is unknown. Some say that Khorne appreciated his massive blood sacrifice so much that the Blood God himself somehow spirited Virius away, but such talk is heresy and invites swift and terminal punishment. Nonetheless, the Ignatian Rebellion was over. The governor's palace was thoroughly dismantled, and the planet placed under military rule, the horrible casualties a grim reminder of the price the Imperium will extract of anyone who defies it.

Blood Bowl: The Sheogorad Saints

I've taken a first step toward actually playing some Blood Bowl this year: I've painted my team. I introduced my team earlier; I'll be playing Dark Elves, with an all-positions roster. The models are a Wicked Elf gridiron team from Shadowforge Miniatures, via Eureka Miniatures. They're not the most elaborately detailed models, but I think they've got a lot of character and are just plain fun, and hey, this is Blood Bowl. Here they are!

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Also, a stands update! First of all, from Bad Squiddo Games, the wonderful Time for Beer and Women's Land Army Picnic.

Here they are in the stands:

It's not very crowded yet, but we'll soon fix that!

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From Eureka Miniatures, we have their African Mob:

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Speaking of Eureka, their gracious gift of a complementary Frog Standard Bearer led to us shopping at Dark Sword Miniatures, because their Critter Kingdoms line has an absolutely splendid Frog Bishop. The good people at Dark Sword also very kindly sent us a complimentary birdman from their DiTerlizzi Masterworks line; here they are!

And this is them in the stands: the bishop being attended by his fasces bearer, and the birdman stoically enduring the beastman superfans.

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So here we are: I have a team, and I have more folks in the stands. We'll see if I can squeeze in a game at some point!

Let's Play Terraforming Mars

The Hunter's Moon waxed round in the night sky, and put to flight all the lesser stars. But low in the South one star shone red. Every night, as the Moon waned again, it shone brighter and brighter. Frodo could see it from his window, deep in the heavens, burning like a watchful eye that glared above the trees on the brink of the valley.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Book II, chapter 3

We had been hearing a lot of hype about Terraforming Mars, a board game by a Swedish guy where you, well, terraform Mars. Seeing as how I enjoyed Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and I live in a household of avid Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri players, this was a no-brainer purchase for us. Luckily - spoilers - it's also really, really good.

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To start with the best bit: it fits on our kitchen table! We own several lovely board games like Star Wars: Rebellion and Star Trek: Frontiers, not to mention War of the Ring, which we almost never get to play as they simply will not fit in our apartment. The Game of Thrones board game has an expansion that comes with an additional board, and I'd love to get it, but I have literally no idea where we could possibly play it. So I'm delighted that we managed to fit a four-player game of Terraforming Mars on our table!

The centerpiece is obviously the board, which is a pretty map of Mars that gives off strong SMAC vibes. Each player has their own player board and player-colored plastic cubes, and there are very nice copper, silver and gold-colored cubes to denote resources. The only real criticism I have for the physical game is that the cubes are very light, so if you so much as nudge your player board (or, heaven forbid, the table), you'd better remember how much steel you were producing, because that little cube is gone. I can't help but think of the Fallout board game's robust player boards and contemplate something similar here.

The objective of the game is to terraform Mars: in practical terms, make the surface of Mars habitable for humans. This is tracked through three global parameters: temperature, oxygen and ocean. Everybody co-operates to raise these to their maximum levels, earning Terraforming Rating points for their contributions, and when all three parameters max out, the player with the highest TR wins.

I already mentioned the player board: it keeps track of how much money and other resources each player is producing per turn. These resources are used to either directly terraform, especially in the case of heat and plants, or pay for projects that contribute to either your production or terraforming. Each player plays as a corporation involved in colonizing Mars; for first games, the recommendation is to take a beginner corporation, which we did, but later you get to pick from different corporations that affect how your game unfolds.

Each player also gets a starting hand of project cards, and each turn ("generation") there's an opportunity to buy more. Project cards cost money to buy and play, but some (or all!) of the playing cost can be offset with resources. Even with the beginning corporations, the project cards you draw at the beginning of the game will tend to give you a starting direction, so to speak. For instance, one of us got Soletta into play on their first turn, which massively boosted their heat production, making it clear that they were going to be contributing significantly to raising the temperature. On the other hand, I started with Regolith Eaters, which drove me toward a science specialization and meant that I was active in raising oxygen levels. This specialization is further driven by the milestones, which you can unlock when you reach a prerequisite, and awards that you can fund which will award victory points to whoever fulfills their conditions - not necessarily the person who funded them!

When you play project cards, they either go into a personal discard pile or stay on the table. Below you can see my player board and cards several generations in: I'm growing oxygen-producing microbes, recharging Mars's magnetic field with the Equatorial Magnetizer, and a bunch of other stuff as well. On the map, you can see several ocean, greenery and city tiles already deployed.

Several of the project cards have upper or lower thresholds for when they can be played, which meant that we progressed from a cold, dry planet with microbes and small sheltered colonies to one with several oceans, fish and livestock and lots of greenery. I ended up playing a lot of science projects and just projects in general:

Many of these projects also came with victory points, and I was a bit disappointed to not be able to afford to fund the Scientist award, as I easily had the most science tags. Here's what the board looked like after final scoring:

And here's the final score! I won, which doesn't happen all that often, but most importantly, final scoring was a nail-biter, with all four of us finishing within just a couple of points of each other. I can freely admit that when the last generation ended, I had no idea who was going to win.

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We also got to try a couple of three-player games, where me and my brother-in-law played proper corporations, with a third player helming a beginner corporation. In our first game, I was the Tharsis Republic, facing Ecoline.

I was lucky with the cards, drawing Capitol and Noctis City to go with the Tharsis city-based strategy, and ended up winning with 88 VP and a comfortable margin.

The non-beginner corporations only make the game better: you pick from two options at the beginning, so there's some choice, and although they give you a boost in a certain direction, they don't really tie you down to a particular path. Also, having to pick which starting project cards you buy adds an excellent new layer of decision-making. Having beginner players get to keep all their starting cards is a stroke of genius, because it means they can work out what they all do while the non-beginners are puzzling out which cards to buy.

On our next three-player attempt, I played as Interplanetary Cinematics; we were going to colonize Mars and make reality television out of it, and for some reason, we start with all the steel ever.

This time I was less lucky with the cards - all that steel's no good if you can't draw any building tags - but I'll freely admit I also made some poor card-buying decisions, and in the end, I lost to Credicor.

Even in a losing effort, this is just a tremendously enjoyable game to play. You get to plan ahead and contribute to a joint effort, so even if you're not winning, you're still engaged in doing something meaningful and fun. I don't know if it's all the Alpha Centauri, but I find Terraforming Mars incredibly immersive, and just great fun throughout.

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After beginner corporations and the standard game, the proper way to play is Corporate Era. This adds the rest of the project and corporation cards in the base game, and everyone starts with zero production in all the various resources. This makes for a slightly longer game - our first attempt clocked in at just a bit under four hours - but it was a very well-spent four hours!

Starting with no production makes the impact of your starting corporation that much greater, and the early going is a bit rough. However, Corporate Era only underlines the genius of Terraforming Mars: its pacing is damn near perfect. Whereas a lot of board games have a final phase where it's become somewhat obvious who's going to win, we've never had that happen in Terraforming Mars. Even in Corporate Era, at first terraforming is a bit sluggish, until it starts picking up the pace and all of a sudden you find it's the last turn, and you're scrambling to play what cards you can.

In our first Corporate Era game, Teractor's superior financial resources won out by a fair margin. We liked the Corporate Era cards; they add some more opportunities to sabotage your rivals, but never to the extent that any real "PVP" feel would develop. Even though Corporate Era games are a little bit longer, the extra time is fully warranted and the experience remains excellent fun, without the physical and mental exhaustion of larger and more complex board games.

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The game has several expansions, of which we've bought Prelude; I'm slightly concerned that Colonies and Venus Next won't fit on our table! Prelude adds a couple of new corporation and project cards, which I think are worthwhile, and a special "pre-round"; each player is dealt four Prelude cards with their starting corporation and project cards, and two of these are played before the first proper turn starts. They do various things to speed up the early game, like give you a pile of money or let you play a card.

We tried it, and it was excellent. The prelude cards led to a lot of careful thinking at the start of the game, but they seem to be excellently balanced, because the game lasted pretty much exactly as long as it did without them! My prelude cards were Research Network, which let me draw three cards and increased my money production, and Orbital Construction Yard, which had me producing titanium from the beginning. Despite my best efforts, Teractor won in a game where none of us really knew who was ahead until final scoring.

Also look how green our Mars was! I don't think we'd ever placed that many greenery tiles before.

Maybe the best way to sum up the Terraforming Mars experience I've chronicled here is that over four fairly competitive and very fun games with the same four players, each of us won once. That's balance for you!

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To sum up, this is a truly excellent board game. When we first tried it, only one of us had ever played before, but we had no trouble diving in, got through it in something like 3-4 hours, and definitely enjoyed ourselves. With proper corporations, the game barely took any longer at all, but was even more fun. I think Terraforming Mars is one of the best board games I've ever played, and I highly recommend it.

LotR LCG: Over the Edge of the Wild

"There are no safe paths in this part of the world. Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go."
- The Hobbit, chapter VII

In a slightly bizarre episode, someone got their hands on the Crossings of Poros AP as long ago as July 2017, and spoiled the accompanying flavor text, which strongly indicated that the next deluxe would be set in Dale. Finally, in December, the Wilds of Rhovanion deluxe expansion was announced, and promised for the first quarter of 2018. We got it at the very end of June.

John Howe: An Unexpected Party, 2000.

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Journey up the Anduin - DL 5

I wonder why they still bother with the difficulty levels? Journey Up the Anduin is obviously a sort of revisiting of the second core set quest, Journey Down the Anduin. What with the Hill Troll and everything, the original quest is, in my mind, one of the true classics of the game. I still remember the first time I beat it solo. The reverse journey here uses most of the same encounter cards as the original did, and this return to the core set had a lot of us thinking that this would definitely be the last deluxe expansion! Luckily we were wrong.

The quest itself is okay. I liked using the old encounter cards mixed in with the new stuff; I disliked the "evil creatures" deck, because it feels fiddly. But the difficulty level felt manageable, and while this quest doesn't hold a candle to the brilliance of the original, it was perfectly decent.

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Lost in Mirkwood - DL 5

Once we've made it up the Anduin, the next quest is a retread of Passage Through Mirkwood, only with more spiders and way more locations.

This really is location lock: the quest. The first time I tried it, we were completely swamped by locations, and with cards like Dark Black Woods and Twilight Hall in play, even Northern Tracker couldn't save us. On a second attempt with my partner's Tactics deck, we got the location control engine up and running, and actually managed to beat the quest!

I'm kind of on the fence about Lost in Mirkwood; if you can manage to not get buried under the avalanche of locations the encounter deck provides, it's quite doable; even kinda fun. But if the locations hit just right, or you don't have the right cards to deal with them, this is a frustratingly impossible quest.

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The King's Quest - DL 5

Having made their way to Dale, for some inexplicable reason our heroes have volunteered to raid the Iron Hills version of Moria. Luckily there isn't a Balrog, but there is a dragon. This quest uses a "Deep" mechanic, where locations with the Deep keyword are replaced by locations from a Caves deck when you travel to them. This is actually a pretty clever mechanic, as it introduces some uncertainty into traveling.

As a quest, King's Quest is a fairly straightforward dungeon crawl, with frankly slightly boring enemies (except the Werewolf and Hobgoblin!), that turns into a pretty decent bossfight against the dragon guarding its treasure. We damn near beat this quest on our first try; we were doing all right until the damn dragon murdered all of my questers! But it was fun.

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The player cards in this expansion are all Dale-themed. Of these, Bow of Yew should find a home in quite a few Tactics decks as a 0-cost weapon that can trigger events like Foe-hammer, and Leadership decks should like Hauberk of Mail. Another card of general interest is Necklace of Girion, which introduces the Guarded trait for player cards: the Necklace gets attached to a location or enemy card from the encounter deck, which you have to beat to get the attachment. This sounds like it might be fun!

Other than these cards, everything revolves around the Dale trait and attachments, so in terms of player cards, get this if you're into that kind of thing?

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Because all three quests heavily feature locations and are most easily lost through location lock, this really is location lock: the deluxe expansion. If you're looking for quests, I can't recommend this expansion unless you have a deck that's not just decent, but good at location control. If Heirs of Númenor was the combat deluxe, this is the location control one. If you've got what it takes for locations, then this was a decently fun box; I didn't think any of the three quests were great, but they were perfectly competent. I kind of liked that they used the core set encounter cards, but then I also didn't think they did anything particularly clever with them. I can't remember when I've last seen an East Bight Patrol, though!

I mentioned fiddliness in the context of the enemy creatures deck in Lost in Mirkwood, and I think it's been a recurring problem from since the first adventure pack cycle ever; there was something you needed to do when questing that we never could reliably remember to do in Hunt for Gollum. In my mind, the problem is that the core gameplay in this game is so solid, that what we at least want from a quest is to just sit down and play the damn game! Everything that breaks up the flow of the game - special tests or discards or whatever that are out of the normal turn sequence - is not only difficult to remember, but takes away from the core gameplay experience that we like so much. I find I much prefer straightforward quests, even if they're a little bit boring, to ones that try to have too many moving parts - where the end result tends to be that we forget to move said parts! Anyway I didn't think the quests in this deluxe were too fiddly, but these are some general thoughts brought on by thinking about the subject.

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It's been ages since I really played, but I did make a change to my deck! While I was initially kinda excited about Dúnedain Pathfinder, I've rarely found myself in a situation where I can play him - or when I can, we don't need him. This is kind of a "win more" card in my opinion: if we're clearing locations efficiently enough, then we don't really need two more willpower.

Lately, with quests like Desert Crossing and Lost in Mirkwood and the like, the opposite has been the problem: even though we can put down a decent amount of questing and I have a bunch of location control tools, we still end up in location lock more often than not. I feel like the designers felt a need to compensate for the new location control tools we got since Grey Havens by burying us in horrible locations. Nonetheless, I think we need more help with location control, and with a Noldor and Dúnadan hero, I think the answer is Heirs of Eärendil.

Finally, I figured I'd give the new Guarded mechanic a shot with Necklace of Girion.

56 cards; 30 Spirit, 20 Lore, 6 neutral; 22 allies, 12 attachments, 18 events, 2 side quests. Starting threat 28.

Arwen Undómiel (TDR)
Idraen (TTT)
Rossiel (EfMG)

Allies: 22 (15/6/1)
Jubayr (TM)
Northern Tracker x2
Súlien (TCoC)
Elrohir (TMoF)
Lindir (TBoCD)
Rhovanion Outrider (ToTD) x2
Bilbo Baggins (TRD)
Galadriel's Handmaiden (CS) x3
West Road Traveler (RtM) x3
Elladan (TMoF)
Gléowine
Mablung (TLoS)
Warden of Healing (TLD) x3
Gandalf (OHaUH)

Attachments: 13 (5/6/2)
Unexpected Courage x2
Ancient Mathom (AJtR)
Light of Valinor (FoS) x2
A Burning Brand (CatC) x2
Cloak of Lórien (CS) x2
The Long Defeat (TBoCD) x2
Magic Ring (TCoP)
Necklace of Girion (TWoR)

Events: 19 (8/8/3)
Flight to the Sea (TCoP)
A Test of Will x3
Elven-light (TDR) x2
Heirs of Eärendil (TDoCG) x2
Leave No Trace (EfMG) x2
None Return (AtE) x3
Daeron's Runes (FoS) x3
Keen as Lances (EfMG) x3

Side quests: 2
Double Back (EfMG)
Scout Ahead (TWoE)

Let's Read Tolkien 58: The Forbidden Pool

Frodo woke to find Faramir bending over him.

Faramir's men have spotted Gollum fishing in the pool below the waterfall. Faramir asks Frodo what he would have them do with the creature, and Frodo asks them to not kill him. Instead, he helps Faramir's men capture Gollum, who is then brought before Faramir for questioning. The interrogation is fruitless, but Faramir extracts an oath from Gollum to never return to their refuge or speak of it to anyone. He then releases Gollum into Frodo's care, and grants Frodo the liberty of Gondor.

Faramir demands Gollum reveal where he's taking Frodo and Sam, and names the place as Cirith Ungol. Gollum doesn't deny this, and is sent away. Faramir tries to persuade Frodo to leave Gollum, and especially to avoid Cirith Ungol, but Frodo argues he has no choice, and Faramir can't offer any better ideas. With a final warning about Gollum's duplicity, Faramir bids Frodo farewell.

**

When the fellowship was in Lórien, it was already obvious that they didn't really know where they were going. If Gandalf had a plan for getting into Mordor, he never told anyone. Aragorn, by his own account, had been to the Morgul Vale and possibly beyond, but he never seemed to have a clear idea either. So it's hardly surprising that Frodo has very little idea how to go about getting into Mordor, and although Faramir tries to dissuade him from Cirith Ungol, he doesn't have a better alternative.

So maybe Aragorn's indecisiveness was in part because nobody actually had any freaking idea how to get into Mordor at all? Perhaps not even Gandalf. There might be old maps or drawings of the fortifications built to guard Mordor in the archives of Minas Tirith, but if Gandalf ever found them, apparently he didn't tell anyone. I've been critical of Aragorn's leadership, but the really unforgivable lapse seems to be Gandalf's, either in not figuring out a fairly key part of the whole project beforehand, or not telling anyone what his plan was.

Had Gollum not shown up and been succesfully pressed into service by Frodo, is there any way the quest of the Ring ends in anything except disaster? The most likely scenario would see the hobbits captured; the best possible case would probably have involved the Ring falling into some obscure crevasse of the Mountains of Shadow. If someone at some point had a better plan, we know nothing of it.

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Next time: rambling.