Trollshaws Battle of Five Armies & The Third Age of Middle-Earth The current year for our Middle-Earth campaign is set during the year of 2946 of the Third Age. Inspired By J.R.R. Tolkien

The Trollshaws rise out of the earth like a jagged fortress of limestone and iron-gray rock, a vertical wilderness that defies the easy travel of the Bree-land. Here, the rolling hills of the West are shattered into a labyrinth of deep, shadowed ravines and sheer-sided ridges. The terrain is a vertical puzzle of ascending terraces and sudden drops, where the ground beneath a traveler’s boots is more likely to be treacherous shale or slick moss than solid earth. In the year 3011, this land feels like a realm that has completely forgotten the rule of Men, returning to a primordial state of jagged edges and ancient, brooding silence.

The flora of the Shaws is as defensive as the rock itself. Ancient beeches and gnarled oaks cling to the cliff-faces with root-systems like clutching hands, their limbs twisted into grotesque shapes by the fierce mountain winds. This is a "tight" forest—a canopy of interlocking branches so dense that even at high noon, the valley floors remain trapped in a perpetual, emerald twilight. Below, the forest floor is a graveyard of fallen timber and gargantuan boulders, many of which are draped in "Old Man’s Beard" lichen, hanging from the branches like the tattered funeral shrouds of a forgotten people.

Water in the Trollshaws is never silent; it is a landscape of sound. Hidden streams plunge over precipices in thin, white ribbons, their roar echoing through the canyons until the very air seems to vibrate. These waters are ice-cold, fed by the distant peaks of the Misty Mountains, and they carve deep, black pools into the stone that seem bottomless.

The mist here is different from the Chetwood’s—it is a roiling, mountain-born fog that descends from the heights without warning, swallowing the sun and turning a narrow mountain path into a blind leap into the unknown.

The true masters of this region have left their mark everywhere, turning the landscape into a gallery of the macabre. Massive caves, their entrances stained with the soot of immense fires and the grease of a thousand kills, yawn open in the sides of the ridges. Around these "Troll-holes," the earth is trampled flat and littered with the bleached bones of horses, elk, and Men. Great "standing stones" are often found in clearings, but a closer look reveals they are not monuments of the Dúnedain, but the petrified remains of Trolls caught by the sun—grotesque, moss-covered statues frozen in mid-roar or eternal agony.

Nature itself seems to have soured under the Shadow in the North. The brambles are longer and sharper here, capable of shredding leather and skin, and the insects are silent, replaced by the heavy, rhythmic drone of carrion flies. There is a sense of being constantly watched from above; the ridges are lined with jagged outcroppings that resemble hunched watchers, and every falling pebble or snapping twig echoes with a sharp, unnatural clarity. It is a land of echoes and shadows, where the wind whistling through the limestone cracks sounds like a chorus of low, mocking whispers.

As the light of day fades, the Trollshaws become a place of primal terror. The transition from dusk to night is sudden and absolute, as the high ridges steal the last of the sun long before it sets. It is then that the "Stone-folk" awaken, their deep, guttural voices booming across the ravines like the grinding of tectonic plates. The smell of the woods changes, overtaken by the stench of wet fur and rank, unwashed hide. To be caught in the Shaws after dark is to enter a world where Man is no longer the hunter, but merely a small, fragile piece of "Bree-weight" for the masters of the stone.