: A mountain pass (i.e. seven gates, the stair of grief,
: etc.) is often the only entrance to a valley. If you
: destroy the only entrance to the valley, no one comes
: in or out. As hard as it is to believe collapsing a
: fortification would be enough to stop the ghols, it's
: even harder to believe that doing so would kill 10,000
: dwarves.
Well it did say it entombed 10,000, now that either means squished or trapped. I think for a Ghôl, there is always another way, nimble bastards.
: LOL, okay, whatever. I didn't "accuse" you of
: anything, I pointed out an error in your logic. And
: note the ":)" after propaganda.
Sorry, bit of an over reactoin there, and probably could have used a better owrd than accused. Heh.
: No, the quote is: "Hours after the fall of Myrgard,
: the dwarves defending Stoneheim collapsed the
: barbican, entombing ten thousand of their number
: behind as many tons of shattered rock." It
: doesn't actually say the barbican was collapsed in
: response to Myrgard's demise. That's just when it
: happened, unless you read between the lines (correctly
: or incorrectly). This is also the only text that gives
: any evidence to the caves theory: "entombing...
: behind" gives a picture of someone either trapped
: in a cave or under a lot of collapsed rock. But even
: if the dwarves killed were in a cave, it doesn't mean
: the city was. Not too smart to kill that many of your
: number consciously unless it was a sacrifice to save a
: far greater number.
Its an anoying qoute because it doesn't clearly say whether it was being attacked or not.
: Last point for this post: paratrooping dwarves. What
: would someone that lives in a cave want with a
: parachute? :)
Thinking about that and the idea i came with is that we know Dwarves are top notch engineers, and they had about 50 years in the West overearth, plenty of time to develop balloons etc. Also whether or not the cities are in caves they also lived over earth, so it may be that Over earth Dwarves developed parachutes.
: but hell, what do I know? Maybe the dwarves lived in
: caves at Stoneheim and were planning on trapping the
: ghols under the collapse of the barbican. But one
: stupid dwarf was playing with a cocktail and
: accidentally blew all his buddies to hell and back.
: Dwarves are annoying that way sometimes. :)
I am honestly having doubts about the cave thing, however one thing I noticed is how much the dwarf city markers on the maps looked like gates. I think that maybe the Dwarves originated in the caves and spread out, the city now existing both over and underearth, but I don't like the image of cave like Dwarves, I prefer the image: Take the massive hall we see in LOTR, put a city in that, add a bit more light, that's it. A sort of city in a big massive cave, rather than loads of tunnels, seems a bit more Dwarvish anyhow.
On the Barbican, I don't know, maybe the saw an oncoming horde of Ghôls collapsed the Barbican and the 10000 overearthers hadn't evacuated to the underground got crushed under 10000 tons of rock.
-zeph
