[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Ooooooooooo -- I love Roa's idea.

So if I'm getting this right, Roa, the envoy from Lorien finds the dead patrols, tracks the 'survivors' to Mirkwood, are attacked by orcs, and are rescued by a scouting party of Mirkwood Elves? Where do the possessed Elves come in?

I just thought -- how about we do away with the orcs and fighting them at all for the time being (save that for later in the story) and just Elves -- THREE groups of Elves -- all meeting up in the middle of Mirkwood. We could have the Envoy from Lorien, the Scouting Party from Mirkwood AND those Elves from Lorien who have been taken over by the Houseless. The possessed Elves capture the Envoy and take them toward Dol Guldur. On the way they meet the scouting party from Mirkwood. The big "struggle" for the first part of the story, then, is 'saving' the 'possessed' Elves (and here it could be rich with plotline -- many of those taken by the Houseless are friends of or known to the Elves in the Envoy?).

The whole party is then attacked by dark nasties from Dol Guldur and they have to hold on until Celeborn and Thranduil get there to save them.

At any rate, much as I like the idea of exploring the Houseless, I am still open to removing them from the story entirely as Durelin is suggesting. I think that there is good textual basis to have them in the story, though -- when Sauron was in Dol Guldur he was called the Necromancer: wouldn't it make sense that he was doing something 'necromantic' by preparing the Houseless to enslave the Elves of Lorien? If we do use them, we should avoid having them as fighting-enemies, and use them instead for personal/character conflict. If we go with my three-group approach, would it be too unweildy to have THREE story lines with gamers playing the Mirkwood scouting party, the Lorien Envoys and the possessed Elves? The advantage to having us play the possessed Elves is that they could interact with orcs and other servants of Sauron -- which as Durelin pointed out would be fun! There would also be ample opportunity to do interesting stuff when the Houseless come to the Elves and ask for 'admittance' and then overmaster their will.

Fordim