[Thoran]

Originally posted by Nerull: </font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Kakero: Something I want to ask, where does Sauron get the finance to fund his military expedition? How does he feed his enormous armies? I don't see any sort of vegetation or animals in mordor.

The honest answer is that it does not matter. I really doubt that Tolkien considered it, just like most of your D&D dungeons. How many times in D&D dungeons do you see critters living on a bottom level of a dungeon with no food and no water? They essentially survive by "DM license".

Same with the orcs and trolls in Mordor. I guess you can make an assumption about food to state that they got enough captives and animals to feed them all, but I did not see so much as a stream anywhere. There is a reason that most settlements are near water. I guess they just had underground springs enough to fill waterskins... </font>[/QUOTE]I don't think there was much about Middle Earth that Tolkien DIDN'T think about. As far as feeding the orc horde, we were just discussing this on another forum:

At the top of Page 201 in The Return of the King, Tolkien writes "Neither he nor Frodo knew anything of the great slave-worked fields away south in this wide realm, beyond the fumes of the Mountain by the dark sad waters of Lake Nurmen; nor of the great roads that ran away east and south to tributary lands, from which the soldiers of the tower brought long waggon-trains of goods and booty and fresh slaves. At the top of page 247 in TRotK, Aragorn grants freedom to the slaves of Mordor and he "gave to them all the lands about Lake Nurmen to be their own."