Has there ever been a better BBEG Base?

What Ring?

If I were Gandalf, I would call the eagles and drop some hobbits down there.

Hobbits solve all the problems.

>no one mentions the Overlord Tower
It's like you guys don't even know what a good BBEG's base looks like...

The thing is you can't. In the book, everyone just sort of accepts a direct assault on Mordor is a fool's errand. The original battle which saw Sauron's first defeat was sort of a last-ditch effort. It only really worked because of Sauron's pride.

While it wasn't in the book, movie Boromir's description of Mordor's defenses is pretty accurate. Ancient memes aside, he gave a valid analysis of the difficulty an assault on Mordor would present.

That was kind of the point. You can't beat Sauron with strength of arms. You need to sneak around him.

It HAD a superlaser. It was called the Death Star.
The Imperials called it that, too. Don't try to push the bullshit that the Imps never called it Death Star.

>Poormans Barad Dur

As everyone else told you you couldn't, even less so since the whole thing is held up by the magic of the One Ring and indestructible as long as it exists

I actually can't think of any scene off the top my head where the Empire specifically refers to it as the Death Star. Except one scene in ESB where Sheev refers to Luke as "the young Rebel who destroyed the Death Star". But that was a Lucas edit applied like twenty years after the fact. Almost every other time an Imp refers to it, they call it "this battle station" or "this station".

That said, even though almost no Imperial actually calls it the Death Star doesn't change the fact it was used exactly the way it was intended. I can't stand Empire Apologists who insist Tarkin or the Emperor were somehow misusing it. Like it was never explicitly intended as a terror weapon and the Empire wasn't largely on board with that. Any kind of ambiguity or this notion Tarkin was some kind of outliers are creations of EU writers grasping at moral ambiguity which was never there so they could make their pet faction look like good guys.

youtube.com/watch?v=wXSADDAiTk8

>how would you take that fortress?
With a small higly trained elite force, which is entirely dedicated to fucking shit up.

I'm partial to Carn Dûm. Or Utumno.

Undermine them?

Or just destabilize the lava funnel to provoke an eruption.

I was referring to something in the EU or WEG that talked about how proper Imperial officials were supposed to call it a superlaser and avoid the term "Death Star".

Utumno was too cold.

Angband>utumno

Imagine, for a moment, if Sauron or Morgoth had taken Gondolin and used it properly

Shit would be bad

Go watch ANH again.
5 minutes into the fucking movie.

Channel water to the magma moat and stand back while they get steamed to death.

I can actually imagine vader making all his troops call it the death star because he thinks that sounds cooler

The best evil lair ever built was my palace of shitposting that I made for a campaign

Starve them.

>Starving out Barad Dur

they kept going for 7 years, what human army of 1100AD could besiege something in Mordor for even half that long.

...

That wasn't on the books though

youtu.be/0pOiiw-XwgE?t=38s

I know I'm likely to start a shitstorm, and I'll be sorry if it's indeed the case, but construction or use of a terror weapon doesn't prevent moral ambiguity and makes you 100% Evil.
Otherwise a couple real life countries have a lot to worry about.

The Empire is a rotten and corrupt organization, there's no way about it, but going from Beacon of Civilization in the Galaxy to Saturday Cartoon Evil Nazis with a simple change from republic to empire? In less than twenty years, galaxy-wide, in a setting with a stagnant technology? Meh.

Blame that on George's inability to write his own universe consistently. The Empire was originally quite older and most likely smaller than Lucas later decided.

At the end of the day, the Empire was a regime dedicated to subjugating the galaxy. They only "maintained" civilization by keeping a boot on the neck of anyone who disagreed with their methods and the movies show this is the case multiple times. They destroyed Alderaan solely because they wanted to send a message to anyone who got the bright idea of raising objections. Alderaan was not at war with the Empire. It was never at war with the Empire. They had no real interest in war with the Empire and their only real actions against the Empire was some members of the government were funneling resources into the Rebellion. But the Empire blew it up any way, mostly just because they could.

They were and still are 100% intended as the bad guys and we were never meant to think they were in the right.

Then diplomacy?

They do briefly try that on the books when they think Frodo and Sam have been captured and killed. Sauron's definition of diplomacy is everyone paying tribute to Mordor and letting him do whatever the fuck he wants as the sole ruler of Middle-Earth,

>Barad-Dur
>Death Star

I always dreamed of making a campaign starting with Sauron straping Mount Doom at the base of Barad-Dur (everything is possible with the power of magic) and turn it into a gigantic lava powered rocketship, going all "screw you guys, i'm leaving this shitty planet and going to explore the cosmos", while the boring good guys siege the gates of moranon, the players being chaotic-fuck-up orc space explorers under the evil command of Sauron T. Kirk, discovering new civilisations of blue skinned all-female space elves who ignore the concept of clothing, right before exterminating them in a storm of barbed, poisoned arrows.

>Death Star being even close to Mordor

the Death Star has "is this another drill?"

while mordor has this
youtube.com/watch?v=-8cqzAUsArM

also
>people depicting Mordor as a valley when it's always called the PLATEU of Gorgoroth

...

Also, take in mind that the least destructive choices were either that or the ring being destroyed. Defeating Sauron practically without the elves and only a few tiny and dying human kingdoms left on Middle-Earth would have taken a mini-War of Wrath that would have absolutely destroyed the land

I would only need 20 good men

You could poison the food, assassinate the commanders, open the gates from inside,...
Thinking about it, it makes sense for a ruler to use adventurers in his wars.

Or simply send corpses with the plague inside with catapults.

>some members of the government were funneling resources into the Rebellion.
More like the entire royal family. Even if we look only at episode IV and ignore that they started the Rebellion, they are hardly neutral.
And they try to bring Ben and R2 there, after all, so there is at least a few important operatives on the planet.
Alderaan was a perfect target for a terror attack: Not an industrial center, small population, seat at the senate, rulers involved with the rebellion. Evil? Probably. But it's sensible, resonnable evil.

The problem is that the Empire is never seen in direct confrontation with peaceful people.
Tantive IV? Fair Battle, no breach of the Geneva conventions.
Alderaan? Two lines of dialog about them, hard to tell if they're innocent or not.
Javas and the Lars? Only bodies, no imperials seen.
Tatooine? Stormtroopers acting as cops.
Yavin IV? Fair Battle, no breach of the Geneva conventions.

Hoth? Fair Battle, no breach of the Geneva conventions.
Cloud City? Imperials don't damage the city in any way, 3PO is destroyed by an unseen foe, stormtroopers bash chewie instead of shooting him when he resists.

Endor? Fair Battle, rebels use natives and ewooks takes trophies from dead imperials.

I may have missed a line of dialogue where an imperial officer shows how despicable he is (aside from Tarkin and Alderaan), but I honestly don't remember such a thing.

And that's from movies that are from the rebel's PoV.
It woudl have been very easy to show some stormtroopers harassing civilians.
Luke even wants to join the Empire at the start of the movie

>The Empire was originally quite older
I know, but the bit about the dissolution of the council in A New Hope always carried the opposite for me.

Illegal immigrants truly can destroy any civilization.

What can I say, I'm fat. I like the cold.

>assassinate the commanders
>open the gates from inside
>poison the food
Sauron would see all of this from a mile away. The only reason he didn't catch Sam and Frodo right away was that there was an army outside of the gates hogging his attention, and that was mostly because Aragorn made him nervous. Also, good luck assasinating Nazgul

>So, in real life, if you were able to assemble an army in, let's say 1100 AD, how would you take that fortress?

No way in hell.

Definitely one of those cases where the only hope you have is bribing someone to let you in, and I don't really see that happening...

Location and design means that you can't batter the walls down with siege engines, since the ones the defenders have will inevitably be better positioned and outrange yours, before you even factor in the ridiculous size and the materials it was constructed with.

So ridiculously high walls that siege towers and scaling ladders become impractical/unrealistic.

No hope of sapping operations when the moat is fucking lava and important parts are metal, not stone, any breach created is very hard to exploit due to how much of a hassle it is to assault the walls with sufficient numbers, and since there is no way in hell you're going to force a sudden breach, you're inevitable going to encounter a second wall or significant repairs and preparations in the ludicrous scenario that you actually make a hole anywhere.

On top of this, it's located in such an inhospitable place that you are absolutely not going to starve it to submission since their stockpiles will definitely outlast whatever you're able to bring there.

The thing is that compared to 1100AD stuff , Sauron was literally playing on God Mode. Barad-dûr is so big it's pinnacles are in the clouds, and a significant part of it is constructed of IRON, including the gates. You can throw all the stones you want at it, you're not going to accomplish anything.

If you're thinking in terms of historical armies, you'd need a World War 1 equivalent army to take it.

Don't forget the several tens of thousands of orcs inside, and that the only land where you can actually grow anything edible in all of Mordor is also in there. There's also the Easterlings

But why when Angband has the best of both worlds
>biting cold in the north
>volcanos and hot springs in the south
>damp caves in the middle

I'm probably forgetting, but is any sort of information ever given in A New Hope on Alderaan's population? If not, for all we know it was just another Rebel outpost on an uninhabited planet like Yavin and Hoth, if we're just taking information from A New Hope.

> for all we know it was just another Rebel outpost on an uninhabited planet

Tarkin
>Since you are reluctant to provide us with the location of the Rebel base, I have chosen to test this station's destructive power on your home planet of Alderaan.

Leia
>But Alderaan is peaceful! We have no weapons, you can't possibly...

Obi-Wan
>I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

CRASHING THIS FORTRESS
maddsaw ;^)

Ben's "A million souls were suddently silenced".
Also it's stated to be Leia's home planet and constituency, and to have a king.
So I don't see it as planet bumfuck.

But since the guards on the Tantive IV and the rebel soldiers have the same uniform, I think we can say that Alderaan was very involved with the rebellion.

The plateau of Gorgoroth is only one part of Mordor

I would introduce an assortment of highly aggictive moder drugs to the orc ecosystem and watch as addiction spreads and violence ensues within when we cut off the supply.

>what is Utumno
>what is Angband
>what is the dark kingdom from SM

As does Ephel Duath, it was the only one I noticed when looking at the OP?

The weird thing is that Amon Amarth has like fuckall tolkien stuff and has just made viking metal since forever.

Except for the hilarious under the influence album.

Nightfall on Middle-Earth remains the best Tolkien metal album