Follow the Greenway road north from Bree, past the farms and horse fields, past the ruins of the Old Greenway Fort and the ominous camps of the Orcs, and you come to the town of Trestlebridge. Perched on the edge of a great chasm called Cirith Núr, this besieged town of Men marks the boundary between Bree-land and the harrowed highlands of the North Downs. Beyond that chasm rise war-torn hills where ancient kings fell in defeat against the Witch-king and where modern Men struggle to keep hold of their ancestral lands in the face of new Orc-armies out of Angmar.

The town of Trestlebridge is the North Downs’ last precarious link to civilization in Bree-land. Its namesake bridge, the Trestlespan, suffers as a constant target of Orc raids.

The road from Bree into the North Downs was once an avenue of Arnor that linked the great capitals of the North Kingdom with lands all the way south to its distant sister kingdom of Gondor. Now the road lies all but lost amid the weeds and brambles. The chain that once connected today’s Free Peoples to the glories of ancient Arnor seem broken.

But that is just a woeful illusion fashioned from memories of defeat. In truth, the nobility of the north-lands lies diminished, but not altogether spent. What was once a kingly land has now morphed into a crucible in which young and spirited adventurers out of the Bree-land are tested and—if they have the mettle—transformed into worthy adversaries for the forces of the Witch-king.