So why didn't the eagles just fly with Gandalf and the hobbits to Mount Doom?

Got you the next best thing.

Since this is a LotR thread after all; what actually led to the fall of Arnor? It wasn't all Angmar's aggression, was it?

Yeah but why wouldnt those fuckers just be hunting them anyways?

Like I dont understand why fellbeasts are a counter to eagles but somehow aren't a counter to BEING ON FOOT.

Imagine if the chase bit from Weathertop to Rivendale had happened but instead of being on slow ass useless horses, the Nazgul were on fucking demi dragons. Youd think they would have caught them.

>violating the NAP

They were? After leaving Lothlorien, Legolas managed to wound one and scare it off with a shot from the bow he was given as a parting gift.

>Like I dont understand why fellbeasts are a counter to eagles but somehow aren't a counter to BEING ON FOOT.
...Because you can hide in forests and swamps? You seriously can't grasp that it's difficult to see under a tree from above it you fucking retard?

Or just had orcs shoot them. The Eagles in The Hobbit are quite concerned about even flying Thorin and Co across the Anduin vales for fear of being shot at.

Angmar's attacks were the final nail in the coffin, but that was some time after a three way civil war that lasted for centuries and a bad plague that killed off a lot of the rest of the people. It's not very likely that the WK could have just shown up with an army of orcs and men and knocked over a united Arnor.

You don't see the Fell Beasts until the fellowship is boating down the Anduin. Likely they weren't emplyoed earlier because

A) They were something of a secret weapon that Sauron wanted to keep concealed.
B) He was still trying to go low profile in Eriador, since most of his armies couldn't actually project force there. A bunch of dudes who are creepy but on horses raise a much lower sense of alarm than a bunch of flying monsters rampaging across the countryside, and THAT sort of action can lead to something seriously bad, like Elf-Lords trying to track you down and probably succeeding because you can be seen from miles off flitting around like that.

>A) They were something of a secret weapon that Sauron wanted to keep concealed.
>B) He was still trying to go low profile in Eriador, since most of his armies couldn't actually project force there. A bunch of dudes who are creepy but on horses raise a much lower sense of alarm than a bunch of flying monsters rampaging across the countryside, and THAT sort of action can lead to something seriously bad, like Elf-Lords trying to track you down and probably succeeding because you can be seen from miles off flitting around like that.

Literally what the fuck is the point of concealing the fact that you have dominant objective technological superiority over your enemy?

Like a handful of fell beasts could easily fuck up the entirety of either major nation far harder than an army would, sheerly due to the fact that there is literally nothing anyone can do to stop them.

>but somehow aren't a counter to BEING ON FOOT.
The nazgul had no idea what the ring-bearer looked like. Their only leads were the words "Baggins" and "Shire" screamed from a tortured Gollum. Horseback was their best option because they had to get information from locals just to locate the ring-bearer.

The hobbits got all the way to Bree, and were only discovered there because one of them got wasted and spilled Frodo's last name to a bunch of mercenaries.

So what's the true nature of the Nazgul? If I'm remembering things right, they're only given form through the dark fabrics given to them by Sauron, and without those they are largely powerless to affect the Seen world?

You mean turning up at the end after Sauron's power has failed and his minions dispersed? The action was done when they showed up, nothing to worry about.

WTF are you talking about? As the above user said, Legolas managed to shoot one down with a bow. And archers are pretty commonplace. You send the nine of them off on their own, and you better hope pretty hard that those fear auras the Nazgul project will throw off everyone's aim, or they're just going to be shot down as some sort of freak demon-bird thing.

Think about it. There is not a single instance of the Nazgul on the "hell-hawks" away from their own armies supporting them.

Yes but who cares about the Ring? You could dominate/decimate the kingdoms of men with a handful of fell beasts over time.

>send out one of your most powerful servants to scout the world
>give him a great fell beast to carry him on the winds at unnatural speeds
>he comes back a month later and explains that he got 360 no-scoped by some tights-wearing elf prince from your old backyard
Being Sauron is suffering

They're not THAT impressive on the ground, compared to units of cavalry, siege weapons, etc. Their major advantages are their speed in flight and consequent air superiority. It's like asking why the US hasn't replaced its infantry with F-22s.

It's somewhat deliberately vague by Tolkien, a compromise between the "Evil doesn't really exist, it's simply an absence of good" and the "Evil has objective existence" philisophical concepts. SOMETHING is holding up the WK's crown at the gate of Minas Tirith, even if there's "nothing" there.

>What is light armor plating

Literally the only flying threat the LoTR universe has ever successfully dealt with was done through pure plot magic.

they arrived before the ring was destroyed

even if they didn't, what are you thinking? they teleported to the battle? they were just passing by? accounting for travel time, they'd obviously committed to fighting mordor before the battle had even started.

You underestimate elf lords. Legolas, a young prince that was little more than a particularly gifted archer, was able to wound one with a single arrow. If fellbeasts appeared anywhere near Elrond's domain, he would have torn them right out of the sky with Vilya's aid.

>Yes but who cares about the Ring? You could dominate/decimate the kingdoms of men with a handful of fell beasts over time.
It is impossible you haven't read stuff already repeated a thousand times in the thread. You are either trolling or in the middle of total brain death. I refuse to humor you any longer, may you rest in peace.

Yes but in this example there is absolutely nothing the defenders can do about the F-22s.

If there was absolutely no way to handle an F-22, and your only goal was destruction and havoc, you'd want a fucking ton of F-22s and not much else.

Eowyn chopped one's head off and another was shot down. The fell beasts are powerful, but they're far from impervious to damage. I doubt they'd stand up to a company of archers.

Again, a fellbeast was wounded and driven off with a single arrow from a skilled archer in the form of Legolas.

No one gave the actual answer.

The eagles aren't there to facilitate the destruction of the ring. That's it. They're not allowed to for the same reason the Valar don't just come themselves and smack Sauron around.

>You could dominate/decimate the kingdoms of men with a handful of fell beasts over time

Sup men? Heard you had a fell beast problem

>adding weight to your fellbeast
And now you've reduced its speed and effective range.

So the defense of having an overwhelming threat is that they just forgot to put some armor on them, so they're actually useless?

>Lets make a cool fightan circle in the middle of a huge battle, and let me land my flying beast you can't catch instead of just killing you from the air.

I don't think you could slap armour on something that needs to be as light as possible, and even armour is not a guaranteed defense against injury.

Nowhere is it stated that the fell beasts are anything but terrifying flying mounts of the Nazgul. They're not dragons or anything, just great lizard-like bird creatures that stink something fierce. They'll break an already engaged unit's morale, sure, but against a company of archers from, say, Morthond, I doubt they'd do that much. They gotta be deployed where they fill a function, just like any other animal of war.

Oh right, because there isn't any example of a heavily armored flying creature being felled by arrows in Middle Earth.

>Bard the Bowman shot down the dragon Smaug with a single well-placed arrow that hit a weak point in the otherwise impenetrable natural armor of the dragon.

Oh.

The fell beasts don't have particularly good air-ground weapons. They can swoop and bite a bit, exposing them to massed ground attack (thrown spears, archers, ballista) and I suppose they could drop stuff? They don't have fire breath or anything that I recall.
By contrast, in air-air they can just swoop a giant eagle and wreck them in melee.

They're great if you have a besieging army around to shake up the defenders, then fly your fell beasts around out of range to shake up the enemy. They can't do shit if you have nothing to press the attack while scaring the shit out of the enemy with.

From what I recall, they didn't actually enter Mordor until the threat was passed. They could easily have been standing by for extraction, likely at the request of Gandalf.

Hey, there you are! I was worried you would overlook this thread because of the nonstandard OP.

The same reason why the eagles didn't drop off Bilbo and co. at the Lonely Mountain. They owed Gandalf a favour and told him that there's no fucking way that they're going to go anywhere near that place. Imagine if some guy with a supposed magic ring asked you to fly into the most dangerous part of Middle Earth so that he could drop it into a fucking VOLCANO.

On the topic of LotR; have any of you anons given The One Ring a shot? The focus on non-combat mechanics got me pretty interested.

And let's not forgot the possibility of an Eagle being tempted by the One Ring, and claiming it for their own.

Good job guys. At best you just made a Dark Eagle Lord. At worst you just gave Sauron a servant who can deliver the Ring directly to Barad-dur, completely unimpeded.

>Nowhere is it stated that the fell beasts are anything but terrifying flying mounts of the Nazgul. They're not dragons or anything, just great lizard-like bird creatures that stink something fierce. They'll break an already engaged unit's morale, sure, but against a company of archers from, say, Morthond, I doubt they'd do that much. They gotta be deployed where they fill a function, just like any other animal of war.

Oh yeah Im sure all of those peasant countries that make up the nation's supply chain will do great against them.

>>Bard the Bowman shot down the dragon Smaug with a single well-placed arrow that hit a weak point in the otherwise impenetrable natural armor of the dragon.

Thats what I said. A magic Chosen One(tm) made an impossible shot because it was his Destiny(tm). If he hadn't been a plot device the entirety of the region would be a charred hellscape.

>The fell beasts don't have particularly good air-ground weapons. They can swoop and bite a bit, exposing them to massed ground attack (thrown spears, archers, ballista) and I suppose they could drop stuff? They don't have fire breath or anything that I recall.

Yeah, but again, tell that to the peasants that make up the bulk of the nations. Have a few of those fuckers swoop in on the regular, and suddenly the nations aren't able to function properly and economically collapse.

>They're great if you have a besieging army around to shake up the defenders, then fly your fell beasts around out of range to shake up the enemy. They can't do shit if you have nothing to press the attack while scaring the shit out of the enemy with.

Except create economic shock and terrorize the nation to a standstill.

>Oh right, because there isn't any example of a heavily armored flying creature being felled by arrows in Middle Earth.
So, just speaking hypothetically, if you weigh 200 pounds, do you think that means you're always carrying around 200 pounds of extra weight?

Good for terrorizing peasants? Sure. But the Fell Beasts are no more special than giant, scary birds - nor do they come in great numbers. Without an army around to stop the enemy from driving the fell beasts off, they'd probably get ambushed by the nation's rangers soon after the thread was known. If we're going to use Gondor as an example, there's not much doubt.

>Yeah, but again, tell that to the peasants that make up the bulk of the nations. Have a few of those fuckers swoop in on the regular, and suddenly the nations aren't able to function properly and economically collapse.
If you're attacking anything large enough to matter, the garrison have a non-zero chance of grounding one or more of them. Sure, the nazgul will wreck infantry while dismounted, but they would get wrecked in return by a block of spearmen.
The FBs are too few and too valuable to waste picking at the farms and villages where the garrisons are small, and the economy doesn't actually rely on the individual villages too much anyway. Maybe panic might spread eventually, but to get that effect you're using all your witch kings and flying monsters on peasants and whoops there goes the one ring. Ya blew it.

Just saying, if a talented human archer could fell Smaug as soon as he knew the sole weak spot in the dragon's otherwise impenetrable coat of scales, then I imagine no fell beast no matter how well armored would stand a chance.

Unless you're somehow able to develop armor for a fell beast that is superior to a dragon's natural armor.

And light enough.

Sounds like Sauron needs to conquer Moria and employ some ancient dwarves to make mithril armour for him.

That's nice, but we were talking about how silly it is to say that "a naked dragon counts as heavily armored and since the dragon can fly just fine, a fell beast wearing a ton of metal should be equally adept at flying".

Play dominions you rube.

>Moving the goalposts this hard
Wew lad

What?

I was responding to , which just says:
>So the defense of having an overwhelming threat is that they just forgot to put some armor on them, so they're actually useless?
I wasn't talking about armor weighing down fell beasts at any point. That didn't factor into my discussion at all, I was just pointing out that this guy's suggestion of armoring fell beasts and making them unstoppable war machines is dumb because there's instances of skilled archers overcoming armored flyers in the setting already. Whether an armored fell beast would fly as adeptly as Smaug didn't factor into my argument at any point and is irrelevant to what I was saying.

God dammit not this again.

Isn't it interesting that dated bait posts make for better thread starters than genuine questions and discussion starters?

The Nazgul have felbeasts.

The Eye of Sauron would have seen those eagles 20 miles away and would have plenty of time to bring them down.

...

>tfw desperately want to rewatch LOTR but only have the standard edition of the fellowship.

That's really not so bad. This is just a personal opinion, but I think that most of the extra scenes added in the extended editions of all 3 movies are pretty bad.

>what are torrents
The extended editions are pretty great, but they require some edits still imo. Instead of just including the good scenes that were cut for time, they added shit that really shouldn't have been kept in either because it was unfinished (the orcs fleeing Helm's Deep into a horribly CGI'd forest) or just had no place in the film at all (the Witch-king breaking Gandalf's staff).

If I knew how to edit I'd do that just for the sake of my own enjoyment.

Interesting topics are banned and moved to /qst/ so all we've got is shitposting

>implying it gets tired

I laughed harder than I should have at this

Quest posters begone, you were moved to your containment board for a reason, now stay there

>, you were moved to your containment board for a reason
You mean because the inundation of faggots from /a/ and /co/ due to moot's faggotry ended up the the creation of unrelated quests no one wnated, which resulted in anti-quest faggots spamming evry single thread, both quest and nonquest, and continued to shitpost the hwole board until Hiroshima said "fuck it" and made a new board to get people to finally shut the fuck up?

Because to be honest, neither quests nor the anti-questfags were a problem at all until /a/ and /co/ migrated over, then it all went to shit. Before that time though the collaborative story telling of Veeky Forums related quests was considered one of the better qualities of the board, especially because General Culture hadn't set in yet

It’s been explained over a thousand times why. There’s a reason why the journey was a journey of secrecy.

My wife and I play it, and, it's honestly fun as fuck. Get it.

>Literally the only flying threat the LoTR universe has ever successfully dealt with was done through pure plot magic

And this is how I know you haven't read the Silmarillion. Look up Ancalagon the Black. Know the storied of the Elder Days before you lay down words such as "ever".

Basically because it would be too obvious. Gandalfs strategy was to make Sauron think he was charging straight into Mordor, while he sends two random Hobbits to actually destroy the ring, because no way would Gandalf be stupid enough for that.

"fly, you fools!"

Gee, what could he have meant by that, mere feet from the exit to the eastern misty mountains where the eagles live?

Guess we'll never know.

They were over 150 miles from where the Eagles lived, and if they were heading there, why not take the same High Pass (instead of aiming for Redhorn Pass) that Bilbo took?

Given that they were being cornered by a huge demon that Gandalf was planning to allahu akbar, in context it meant flee, and it was thematically matched to the language of wings of darkness. Also Balrogs do not have wings, or if they do, it was not Tolkien's point.

youtube.com/watch?v=y5LLHZf9ebU
What are your thoughts on this?

Consider the mindset that you have only one, just shot at throwing the ring into the magma. If you screw up this shot, it's all over for all of Middle Earth.
Let's say the Eagles did agree to carry Frodo to Mordor.
So now you're making a beeline straight towards the volcano and of course Sauron sees you coming. No element of surprise, he quickly figures out what you're trying to do and starts sending Felbeasts and archers firing arrows your way.
Under this condition Frodo is on the back of an Eagle who's going to be avoiding all this shit and they can't get too close to Mt Doom which will likely be guarded by this point. So Frodo, being airborne and helpless as the Eagle he's riding is still trying to stay alive has to throw this small object into the mouth of Mt Doom which must look like a dot from where he is, likely with black smoke bellowing out so he can't even pinpoint the mouth, winds rushing and even if he does drop it at the mouth there's no guarantee that it won't land on a jutted out ledge inside the volcano or just missing the magma, where an orc will now simply walk over and pick it up.

I understand why they can't go all the way to Mt. Doom, but why not fly and land pretty close to outside Mordor if not slightly in it?

Although ultimately I don't like thinking about this because to me it goes against the core of the story. All that travel, experience, and adventure is just glossed over.

Because it was a problem men had to deal with on their own. Hobbits count as men, which is why as the magic goes away it's implied that hobbits become men.

They didn’t kill Bilbo for the ring in The Hobbit.

>faggots who have only seen the movies now champion the discussions
Fucking kill me now; when Lord of the Kangs: Fellowship of the Transdemipansexuals finally comes out no one will be left to remember the real books.

As someone who studied music theory, I love this stuff. I believe it because of the sheer amount of time and effort which went into those movies. Perfect music like that tends to be very meticulously-planned and packed full of meaning.

It is weird to hear the Spanish version of LotR though.

What did I get wrong? I read the trilogy more than a decade ago, so I'm mostly going off the movies which I recently re-watched.

Yeah, then you could have F-22s occupying the territory you invaded, kicking down doors and grabbing dissidents. Actually, why did we ever send infantry to Afghanistan instead of spamming F-22s?

>What is light armor plating
>plating

There is no plate armor in Lord of the Rings you fucking idiot.

There's nothing wrong with the movies.

i like to believe that that was gandalf's plan all along. we know that he was in contact with the eagles; and if you look at the map of middle earth you can see that the red horn pass is fairly close to where they reside.
It also adds to the "fly you fools" phrase he said when he fell with the balrog.
i mean, there are a lot more eagles than there are fell beast, they could just swarm them while some start sneaking frodo and co for a landing on mount doom.
Of course this is my personal hypothetical

Imagine Gandalf when he discovered that they didn't get it.

>Fly you fools! Fly! I didn't say run you fools!

that's the thing, he came back as gandlaf the white. do you think that he'd remember this plan if he did think it through? doubt it

ITT moviefags misinterpret the plot because of Hackson's butchering of it. These people will still claim that the movies are masterpieces.

Who hurt you user?

>who cares about The Ring?
Read a book you absolute mong, why are you even debating LotR of you haven't read them?

Just Sauron focusing his will on the ring bearer might actually be far enough. The whole deal about Sauron is his ability to break the will of those who oppose him and the one ring already have a strong influence on its bearer. We can already see how hard it is for Frodo, a hobbit supposed to be the most resilience race, to keep his sanity with the ring. So bringing the ring in Mordor, where Sauron is at his strongest, and trying to resist his mindrape when having his full attention sounds actually suicidal.

I bet he would break the ring bearer and the eagle without the need of fell beast and orcs.

Plot hole? They talk about the eagles at the Council of Elrond - they even talk about Tom Bombadil and why leaving the ring with him would be a bad idea.

They didn't know the ring was there/Sauron was still recovering

There might had been an 'increase' in the power of the Ring once Bilbo brought it back out of the Golbin's shitcave; and Sauron strengthened himself since then. This might had amplified the seductive powers of the ring enough that being ontop of an Eagle - beings who are already weird and do their own thing - would be tantamount to suicide, either from one Eagle going rogue or a whole flock.

>Using your elite limited edition flying terror ghosts to kill dirty peasants

Yet another ttrpg system that I want to try now but will probably never get to

>Peasants

Gondor's standing army has literally been training since it's inception to fight against the armies of Mordor. Despite what the movies tell you, they're 'ard fuckin' men.