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New Mordor

This isn't your wandering, hobbit-manipulating wizard's Middle Earth. The Third Age, which brought the defeat of Sauron and the One Ring, is now ancient history, bordering on myth. Indeed, most of the peoples and deeds of those distant times are largely forgotten. Yet, despite the relentless march of time, the Land of Shadow remained abandoned, the mere memory of its darkness holding at bay those who might venture into its wasted lands.

That is no longer the case.

Time has washed away the darkness and sorrows left by Sauron. Mount Doom is now dormant, as it has been since the cataclysmic upheaval following the Dark Lord's demise. Indeed, the entire land is now a stark contrast to the waste it was in the days of the Necromancer. Where there was once naught but ash and ruin, there are now burgeoning forests and fertile fields. Rivers flow over once arid lands, wending through rents and chasms on their journey to the Sea of Nurnen to the southeast. It has been long enough. It's time for civilization to return to the land of Mordor.

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I made this map with the intent to recreate a more traditional Mordor, but realized the impracticality of building a city in a literal ash desert pretty quickly. Instead, as I worked on the map, I stumbled upon the idea of instead creating a Mordor of the future, after time and nature have basically reclaimed it.I won't claim it's perfect, and I certainly took creative liberties, especially in adding rivers and water (kind of essential, you know). But I definitely tried to stay as accurate to Middle Earth canon and geography as I could, with the caveat that this is Middle Earth in the future. Not only is Mordor an ancient ruin, so is Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul. And apparently it didn't bother the current denizens of Middle Earth to build a freeway through Osgiliath.

I found a great height map of Middle Earth from https://blogs.ubc.ca/thereandbackagain/methodology/, which I edited in photoshop to create the height map for Mordor and its environs. I used said map in the map editor to get the basic landscape and then edited the crud out of it.

Anyway, I hope people like this. I have found it to be really fun to play on, and I hope you do too. This is my first upload to the Workshop, for any game, and the first map I've made for Cities Skylines. Let me know what you guys think! Thanks!