: Look at the Myth map. What do you see. Gower surrounded
: by Ghols to the East Trow to the North what was The
: Dark to West and South. Its hardly going to survive 50
: years between the Fall of Muirthemne and the Defat of
: Balor with that kind of opposition. Just because it
: isn't mentioned in game doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Trow did nothing until the last few years of the war, when they probably weren't wasted on Gower. Ghôls, meanwhile, were being directed by Balor against the enemies that mattered; the Dwarves and the Light armies of the West.
In the Wind Age, Gower was surrounded by the Trow Empire and Dark forces on every side, and ravaged by Myrkridia on an hourly basis. They survived a thousand years. Where Krids fail, how will Ghôls succeed in a fraction of the time?
At the time of Myth II, sixty years after every major Light city in the West "fell," the Province population was booming. Why? Not because every survivor had thirty kids, but because sacking cities and burning villages doesn't translate into total annihilation. Unless you use a nuclear holocaust spell like Balor did on the Bruig, there are always refugees and survivors hiding out. A larger fraction of the population survived the war than you'd reckon by looking at how much of the map the Dark controlled.
Now Gower doesn't have much in the way of cities. You can't do nearly as much damage with an organized army if the population's scattered throughout tiny villages and isolated farms, rather than conveniently bottled up in cities your Thrall can surround while you pitch in the torches. Self-reproducing predators like Myrks, who can spread out and match their own numbers to the numbers of humans, are much better at genocide in those conditions--but as we've seen, even they weren't successful.
So the chance is pretty much zero that Gower no longer exists. If Balor, for some odd reason, had half his army spend their time and lives tracking down the battle-hardened Gowermen hiding in caves and ditches, then sure, lots of them probably died. But even if only a few guys and a few girls made it to the end of the war alive, then they came out, had babies, and repopulated. There'd be as much a "state of Gower" as there ever was.
: Also if there was something there when Alric was so close
: you think he would have gone there briefly for some
: much much much needed reinforcements. But he didn't,
: why? Because there were none.
Gone there briefly? Like, spend three or four months hiking across half the Barrier and the Dire Marsh just to visit some isolated backwater nobody's heard from in a century and check if they happened to have an army he could borrow? :-)
By the time he got to Muirthemne, Alric already had the upper hand in the war--assuming he'd be able to cut off the flood of Myrkridia. It wasn't the time to cross the continent in hopes of finding a significant addition to his forces.
--SiliconDream
