For ease of reference, please see Bramblebury Gazette's copy of Tom Maringer's “Postal Map” (1991, ed. 6.1) of the Shire (a display with a Cynthiana-centered Kentucky for comparison and contrast is in ch. 6 footnote 3). Let me know if you find a more updated hi-res version! 🙂
As far as Rick's TWD adventures go, he's not off of the hook here, just stuck in another world to compound things. We join him in chapter 2, when a doctor who had taken him in is called away for an emergency. Things unravel quickly, but the upshot is predictable; different crew, same problem: survive — except that now it's without knowing how to get home, or that Earth (and Lori, Carl, and Shane) is crawling with zombies. There is no mission to kill a dragon or destroy a ring, just an ongoing zombocalypse serial of kill, run, hide, rinse and repeat, maybe find some Elven magic to cure the plague or a Dwarven hall of stone in which to weather the ravenous siege.
Elizabeth Bennett (PPZ) comes in after a few chapters.
The date is equivalent to the start of the Hobbit, but in a world with a radically different history, as changed by Morgoth since some point in the Years of the Sun (before the First Age) of the Silmarillion, with some Lord of the Rings grimdark elements present. The virus behind Earth's plague is just beginning to ramp up here, no magical cause behind the zombies, but Rick's presence could be attributed to supernatural powers; Morgoth's palantír (or palantir, if you prefer) is technological just like all palantíri, though it likely uses energies and techniques as advanced as those of Krypton (DC), and incorporates the merged science/magic tech approach of Asgard (Marvel Comics/MCU, not Norse mythology).
The material in chapter 4 (on top of chapter 2) has me thinking that I might need to tag this for Food Porn (lots of food named specifically, lavish descriptions, etc.); I don't think that it's a sufficient element as yet, but suspect that it might become so over time.
Morgoth isn't referred to explicitly by name in the first chapter, being called only “It”, a being of pure evil energy, but it occurred to me belatedly that this might be a poor choice of name, given Stephen King's “IT” / Pennywise (nor the “IT” of “A wrinkle in time” per The Film Theorists [nor Mary Poppins, to take things a step further with one of their earlier conjectures]); they certainly could be the same being in my story-verse, but very definitely aren't (not here, anyway, though surely it's also true that they are in an infinite number of other iterations). This might seem a redundant point to have brought up, but my fics tend to cross a lot of territory, especially considering that they're ultimately all interlinked as a larger whole. Then, rather later, the ideas coalesced, and It became Morgoth. I could have simply renamed him here, but that idea felt disingenuous: It wasn't originally designed to be Morgoth, but in embodying something of the same sort, this scene felt right to become the opening chapter (prologue, really) once the crossover idea hit me.
On a tangent, Morgoth (and any number of other LotR characters) is somewhat of a powerful entity; for a semi-related study of scaling characters' relative power levels in writing and games, please see “Superheroes: Powers and Principalities ”.
NB: For a fonts tutorial, e.g.: Rick's handwritten note, please see Fonts, and colors, and work skins, oh my!.
Also: my apologies for having taken a while to get back to this one, but “The Dimmendark ” (a 2e D&D story) and “In for an Amy, in for a Pond ” (Doctor Who) held a stronger sway, so I had to finish those first. Given the schedule, I'll be making pit stops for a Sonic & Zelda / Peach Halloween special, and a Red Dwarf Christmas, but those won't get in the way of this Grimes-in-Middle-Earth tale or the “When Hermione met Harry ” smut-fic (seriously: don't click that unless you really mean to; it has some fun crack-fic world-building in it, and some slice-of-life scenes and a romance theme... but it's absolutely definitely explicit material).
