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Minas Tirith and the Pelennor Fields

One-click collection of themes and assets can be found here.

A recreation of the White City and its surrounds from The Lord of the Rings. I tried to be reasonably faithful to the descriptions in the book, while not going overboard with details and assets and staying within the limits of the game. To that end, I’ve used Avanya’s stone quays and hikke’s Great Wall to construct the city walls and the Rammas Echor, and Network Extensions’ stone pedestrian streets inside the city proper, as well as Ronyx69’s tunnel entrances. The topography may be a little wonky in places around the walls, but it was the best I was able to do in a map editor that after all wasn’t really designed for this sort of thing. It’s certainly believable as a city built on very hard rock. The fact that the walls aren’t perfectly circular in some places, however, is intentional, as it looked too artificial (even if, on every conceivable level, it literally is) if they were.

A few other custom assets are required: I’ve used hikke’s Great Wall turrets for the Causeway Forts and the beacon-tower on Amon Dîn; Psychocinesis’ Paris bridge for the old bridge at Osgiliath; and a handful of trees by pdelmo and MrMaison, including the White Tree. Since I was going to require Network Extensions anyway, I went ahead and used a few other roads from that mod elsewhere in the map, mainly the two- and four-lane highways and the national roads. The intended theme is a mix of Rhinestone Island and Project Monaco*. I’ve placed aradras’ Barcelona Post Palace at the top of the city to represent the Citadel tower, as it looked wrong without something there and it fits very well both geometrically and thematically, but of course the map plays just fine without it. I’ve also used Avanya’s quays in a couple of other places as retaining walls, and as actual quays at Harlond.

There are a couple of aspects in which the map reflects the books rather than the movies: the Pelennor Fields were actual working fields and townlands, not mere grassy plains, and had their own outer defensive wall; and the “keel” of the city probably wasn’t flat-topped, but rather was a natural outcropping of rock. The scale of the city is explicitly taken from Tolkien’s descriptions. One particular aspect I would have liked to be able to capture was that the outer wall of the lowest level was actually made of the same dark rock as Orthanc; unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any appropriately black quays on the workshop, so I ended up going along with the usual depiction of the wall as white to match the others.

The actual geography of the surrounding area, particularly the foothills of Mindolluin immediately west of the city, is based on the area around Sopron, Hungary, which corresponds both geologically and geographically to the area of Mindolluin — though heavily modified, both before and after importing the heightmaps into the game.

Minas Tirith itself is built (that is, the walls and basic roads, of course; the actual building itself is left to the player) to scale, but the surrounding area is scaled down a bit. If I made the map entirely to scale, I would still be able to fit Harlond in, but definitely not Osgiliath and Amon Dîn, both of which were of the order of 30km away from the Citadel.

To make the map properly playable, rather than just a canvas for making movie set recreations, it of course needs highways, railways and so on. Rather than just plopping these down more or less at random, I decided to posit what might have resulted if Gondor had survived into something resembling the present day. As such, there are four strata, as it were, of infrastructure laid out on the map.

The first is what was there at the time of Aragorn. The walled city, the Rammas Echor, the beacon-tower and the gravel path winding up the hill are in this category.

The second represents what was there at that time, but not in the same form, as it would have been redeveloped, expanded or upgraded over time. The farming fields, the big piers at Harlond, the paved avenues and national roads around the Pelennor, are all essentially modern versions of what was there, in function if not in exact form. The bridge at Osgiliath was explicitly stated to have been rebuilt.

The third is basically the railway. This includes a couple of bridges over the main approach avenue to the old walled city. When I build on this map myself, the idea will be that this area would likely have become urbanised simultaneously with the arrival of the railway, and there’s suitable space set aside for a central station nearby. Of course, the player is hardly bound by this suggestion! The idea is along the lines of real-life European “New Towns” found on flat ground below fortified old towns on hills, such as in Edinburgh and Zagreb among many other examples — for a great example built in C:SL, see Akruas’ Altengrad series on YouTube. The maximum grade is around 2%, which has necessitated some lengthy cuttings and causeways as well as a couple of spirals due to the hilly geography.

The fourth is the highways. These are imagined to have supplanted the original roads leading from the city northwest to Calenardhon/Rohan, south to Pelargir, and northeast past Osgiliath into Ithilien, but to have had to bypass already built-up areas. So the main north-south route takes a wide easterly loop around the inner Pelennor, along the line of the creek flowing into Harlond. The original route is still extant as an ordinary avenue. The Ithilien-route similarly starts as an avenue at the gate of Minas Tirith, crosses the north-south highway by way of a pastiche of Spaghetti Junction, incorporates part of the original Osgiliath-road upgraded to highway, then bypasses Osgiliath itself to the north, while the old road continues straight on over the old causeway and bridge and rejoins the highway near the corner of the map.

In terms of actual gameplay, the map is perfectly playable without any DLCs or mods beyond Network Extensions, and I’ve tried to keep the number of strictly required assets down to a reasonable level. Loading Screen is recommended as always. There are decent amounts of the four vanilla resources, as well as all four fish to be found. I kept as much as possible within the 25-tile square, although you will need 81 Tiles in order to develop eastern Osgiliath, explore Amon Dîn, or make the most of the lake to the north.

* I can’t export theme mixes on Mac, but the theme used for screenshots is almost exclusively Rhinestone Island, with Project Monaco used only for its lower-contrast cliff, oil and ore textures. It should be trivial to replicate.