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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.

You can download the full image (98 MB - 16439x8379 pixels) clicking here.

“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.” 

^{J.R.R. Tolkien  “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”}

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.

Years later, the Logath would be part of the coalition known as the Wainriders. But that’s another story.

^{Cosplay by Sean McCarthy}

Easterlings by atanesblog