LOTRO: A tourist guide to Hytbold

I suspect most people in LotRO nowadays spend their time on the new raid and other instances. The times of grinding dailies to get armour sets is (finally?) over, and existing Hytbold allergies might have worn off. Time to look at Hytbold from another perspective: that of the curious tourist!

Not a pretty sight

This is what Hytbold looks like the first time you encounter it: not a pretty sight. That's why the clueless tourist will need this guide to show what it could look like. For a change we players can do something about the state of our environment: we can rebuild the town! Although rebuilding parts of it unlocks armour pieces for your character, my personal reason for rebuilding was lorewise. I just couldn't stand the sad sight while I knew there was something to be done about it. I was also curious at how they visualized features of the town. I will show you in this post.

Eventually I rebuilt the whole thing, even though this wasn't of any use to my characters (I already collected a lore-master set, the captain sets are underwhelming). 

The lumber mill

Rebuilding Hytbold includes the opportunity to build community shared buildings, like the lumber mill above. The mill resembles historical sawmills, such as the mill near Ashborough depicted in the late 19th century photo to the right.

(If you are interested in the construction of these mills, Sash Sawmill in the history blog Notes on the History of Randolph Country gives a great deal of information.)

Farms and windmills

Each Rohirric clan has their own area in Hytbold, a nice invention of the game designers. Every larger settlement will have had their own neighbourhoods, even though most times not as obviously divided as in Hytbold.

On the picture you see the farmsteads of the Sutcrofts, with as special feature the windmill. While water mills (initially of different types than shown before) were already built in Europe since the Roman Empire, the wind mill slowly came into use around 1000 AD. First in modest wooden forms, later in larger and more complicated forms. The mill in the Norcrofts district with has its interesting combination of wood and stone in common with the existing moulin chandelier type. The difference is, this type has the stone at the bottom and the wood at the top - a more logical solution than the mills in Hytbold, where the wood carries the much heavier stone, if you ask me. Oops.

To the right a 1967 picture of the rare moulin chandelier (source: fr.academic.ru). As you can see, the stone part could take the form of a tower, although reconstructions often show a square bottom part as in Hytbold.

Behold my bane of Middle-earth: corn! This evil plant can also be found at the Hytbold farms. I propose stopping there a moment when passing by to curse in general chat.

Corn originates from Central-America, and was first brought to Europe with Columbus at the end of the 15th century. It is an exotic plant in Europe, and I was very shocked when I first saw the hobbits in the Fellowship of the Ring movie run through a field of corn. It's no secret that Tolkien based Middle-earth on the medieval period of Europe, and seeing corn is immersion-breaking for me.


This is probably just the plant nerd in me freaking out, but I get upset by these things!

Camps & Factions

Hytbold is divided into different areas, each with their own watchtowers, houses and tents for refugees. Although the people living in the camps must've gone through difficult times they make the best of it, as you see in the picture above. This cute game design was an incentive for me to do the dailies: each time I could rebuild a little more, giving more refugees a new home.

Wold

Sutcrofts

Norcrofts

Entwash

Each neighbourhood is inhabited by refugees from a different part of the Eastemnet, each with their own banner and colours. This reminds me of late medieval guilds, which often had their own place in town as well. After all, each region in the Eastemnet has their own speciality: e.g. the Norcrofts are good at farming, the Wold focus on defence and Snowbourn/the Sutcrofts on offence. I thought it was a cool choice of the developers to reflect this in this way in Hytbold.

Hytbold also features a lot of cute horses. Awww.

In the the town's main stable many rare horses are found, such as the Steed of the Minstrel, the Steed of the Eastemnet and the Steed of the Kundolar. But I mainly wanted to get this picture with the cute horse in. Again: awww.

I like the general cosy look of Hytbold, as seen above. The small white stone walls look a bit off, though. Why make those little walls like that while the rest of the town is made of wood? It gives the impression of rather a Roman than a medieval town, and the 'romantic' cultivated pink roses... hmm. I sorted of wish I had left them burned.

Daily quests

The largest attraction of Hytbold on players is its (notorious?) daily quest which is bestowed in front of the meadhall. Each player of level 84 or higher can pick up this quest, allowing them to complete a total of 5 repeatable quests in any of Rohan's major hubs. The quests reward with coins and reputation which you can then use to restore parts of the town. I actually liked these quests at the start: there are many to choose from and they have varying setups. In the end, it becomes a grind, though. You just need to do so many quests, it requires 40 days of completing the daily wrapper if you want to restore everything (15 if you want to spend real money on it). For lore fans it's definitely worth to completely rebuild the town on at least one character, though: apart from being able to see all aspects of Hytbold restored, doing so will in addition open up a quest bringing a conclusion to the stories of the towns of the Eastemnet. I thought it was pretty cool when I got there.

More in a Tourist guide to Rohan

• The Wold
• The East Wall