LOTRO: The beauty of simbelmynë

Contrary to the feeling you might have gotten when reading the latest post on the topic, I'm not totally done with LotRO. Yet.

Actually, I have been enjoying some Rohan exploration lately. After months without login in, I just felt that LotRO feeling itching again. Surprisingly, when I asked Tiger if he would mind me starting the new content on my own, he offered to explore it together with me. Surprisingly, because he seemed to be pretty busy impersonating a dark thundercloud every time someone mentioned the word "LotRO" before. Maybe he was now carefully getting over that. Or maybe he just doesn't want to unleash me unattended in-game. Either way, I blackmailed him into promising me not to become gloomy, naturally.

Aaaaanyway, this seems like a good moment for a beautiful screenshot.

"Oohhhh! Ahhhhh!"

We both bought the Helm's Deep expansion with Turbine Points. Luckily I was able to afford it, I think I had about 2000 left (of which I immediately spent half on extra storage space). Tiger logged in and found that he had like... 10.000 TP left or something? So if you need any, you don't need to beg me for them... (Okay, I'm so going to die now.)

The epic quest made us ride directly to Edoras and I was all like "Ohhhhh! Ahhh!" when I saw it from afar. I had to stop to make a screenshot.

Before we entered the city we came through the burial mounts of the kings of Rohan and I thought it was very impressive. I just had to jump into my princess dress and take a 'selfie' amid the simbelmynë.

Geesh, Rav, you're such an attention seeker.

Selfie with simbelmynë

LOTRO: The Balewood

Help, I'm surrounded by Ents!

I wasn't disappointed when Tiger and I ventured into the Balewood: it was full of Ents. In fact, we seemed to be surrounded by them!

A good wood

Har har, that rhymes! I really love the look of this wood. It has a pastel green-blueish teint that is very pretty, and the trees are done in a manner which makes you really feel like you are walking through a wood. I don't know if you remember the first large wood that the developers made, the Old Forest? It is still my favourite wood up until this day, and it created the illusion of being one big maze very well (I always got lost in there, but I did not mind), but Balewood is in all ways its superior. Here there are no impenetrable "walls of trees", a cheap way of filling the forest up, but every single tree is there. It truly feels like walking through a real forest, with dense and less dense parts, although it's sometimes a bit heavy on the computer and trees may appear right in front of you at the last moment. 

My heart broke at the Ent's tale of the bringing down of one of the oldest trees of the Balewood by orcs. The tree fought back and many orcs died because of it, but eventually it was brought down. It was such a terrible thing to have to look at.

This conflicted and helpless feeling only became worse when I had to do a Nurzum session play and actually had to play the monster, having to kill Ents left and right. But but... I don't want to kill Ents! Yet I had to, to continue the story. I also felt a bit sorry for Nurzum, because he had only three skills in total. It must be such a boring existence, you're bound to get frustrated and violent like that, right? I guess it's all to mentally prepare us for our 'challenging' skill trees with Helm's Deep. /sarcasm

We finished all the quests in Balewood, and I must say that I found this the most awesome part of Wildermore. The quests were fun and the wood itself with all the Ent tales felt very immersive. A good ending of the long and very elaborate Wildermore region.

LOTRO: Into the woods

It was time for Tiger and I to start the last area of Wildermore: the Balewood. These woods to the northwest are usually shunned by the people from Wildermore, for spooky tales surround them. Still, some fled into it after running away from Núrzum and the orcs, and we were to find them back. 

As usual, I was a bit disoriented after just having logged in and mounting my warsteed, so I decided to just mindlessly follow the green arrow on the mini-map where Tiger had disappeared. I wasn't looking very much at the surroundings, in fact, I was looking so little at them that I just managed to halt my steed before I would have fallen down a deep cliff. There lay the Balewood, and my, was it beautiful!

We of course know that this wood is one of the outer parts of Fangorn, and it looked just as magical and fairy-tale like as I imagined. Only I imagined it as being very green, but here, it was winter.

Now we got excited thinking about the Ents and other creatures that may or may not be hiding in this forest. I will write more about that in my next LotRO post.

LOTRO: Popular among goats

I continued to explore Wildermore with Tiger the other day. We found the Dunlending girl Nona in a cave, where she was taking care of wounded Rohirrim she rescued. I really like the love story of her and Horn, and I so hope it's going to end up well between those two! It is the main motivation for me to complete the Wildermore quests. We also had to bring some tame goats to refugees hiding in caves. Because we were questing with two we got double the amount: a whole army of goats running after us (bottom picture). Two didn't want to leave after handing the quest in and followed us for the rest of the day. It was kinda cute, I've never had a goat pet before.

I am still bothered by the fact that I'm only enjoying LotRO in a casual manner. After Wildermore, there will be nothing that attracts me to the game as it is. There are so many things wrong with LotRO that I occasionally fear that it is beyond repair and then I wonder why this bothers me so much. It is only a game, is it not? But then again, it was my first MMO and it bewitched me as soon as I set foot in Middle-earth. This is the game where I made my first online friends, where I learned how to raid and fell in love with the lovely class that is the lore-master. And last but not least, it is where I met the amazing Tiger, with whom I continue to explore many other games.

Wildermore might be the only thing left for me before Helm's Deep, but at least I got this romantic picture (top one) of Tiger and me, the moon and the (photobombing?) pet goats. I was pleasantly surprised when I checked my screenshots folder, because it's possibly the best picture I have of Fingolwë and Ravanel (or Tiger and I) together.

LOTRO: I see dead people

Okay, so my LotRO posts lately seem to be all death-related, but it's not all my fault, really!

Questing with Tiger in northwestern Wildermore. All of a sudden we are surrounded by dead people, ghosts of those who have passed in this land due to the terrible winter ad orc attacks. I really hope we are able to help the people of Wildermore for real soon, because the body count is getting quite high. With the death of each new NPC I forget the name of the previous one. This probably makes me a bad player, but there's just a bit too many for me to remember them all.

The quests go slow and are frankly quite boring (kill x this, collect x that) and there are a lot of them in Wildermore. So we slowly continue finishing one location a Saturday. Talk about immersion: at this pace it really feels as if the winter will never end.

I was a bit shocked when I caught myself red handed while thinking that this was a beautiful scenery. The moonlight drawing the shadows of the trees on the snow made me catch my breath. Then I remembered that I was looking at the fresh grave of a young warrior surrounded by dead orcs, giving the presence of my raven a morbid taste. And I thought: when something terrible turns into something beautiful we can't help but stop and look with fascination.

ABC3: Rohirric funeral

A typical day in Middle-earth. Fingolwë and I have traveled to Wildermore, where a mysterious force is at work, causing the land to freeze while it should be summer. 

I could tell at once that this was more than a mere coincidence. Even I as a lore-master can only lower the temperature by a subtle amount, and on eight creatures or people at most, with utter concentration. And I have trained hundreds of years for this. It's no easy task to change the environment of a whole region, and at this scale I sense the influence of a Maia. There's only one I can imagine doing such a thing...

But let's not speak of such things now. Fingolwë and I are doing what we can to help and try to see things from the bright side. 

I don't remember what Fingolwë said here, but it made me blush. Bad Elf!

What, you don't know who Fingolwë is, you say? I promise to tell you one day, but not today.

Still, it's hard to stay positive when you see the whole family of Gárwig, thane of Forlaw getting claimed by the ice. The old man is one of the few left in his line, surrounded by mourning women. I don't envy him. We tried to help out with the funeral the best we could, but I cannot help to feel out of place.

These people are short lived, and it's hard to imagine what's the difference in a twenty year more or less to live, but their pain is real and makes me feel uneasy. It's terrible to see how Mankind suffer under the hands of evil once more. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't time for me to head for the Grey Havens and be done with it all.

I'm sorry for this depressing entry, dear diary. This is the diary of an old Elf, after all.

In June, 'the other Ravanel' takes over Ravalation to ponder about her life as an avatar in the light of the Avatar Blogger Challenge (ABC).

LOTRO: Winter in Wildermore

The past few months I've been playing SWTOR as my main game. The only thing in LotRO that interested me was raiding, which didn't happen too often because of lack of signups. The Erebor raid hasn't been received with as much enthusiasm as we all had hoped, but that's another story. The point is that I had only been playing my lore-master, not my other characters, and the only thing I did with her was raiding occasionally. And as a result, the world of Middle-earth has slowly become strange to me.

I think this has happened to everyone who has ceased to play a game very actively, after being absorbed by that world for a long time. When I logged in, everything felt familiar, yet strange. My first impression was that of annoyance, having to spend the points on all my legendary items and warsteed, plus having confusing alerts all over my screen. On the positive side, I finally managed to get Tiger to log into LotRO with me. He took his champion Fingolwë to explore the lands of Wildermore, the new area that was released earlier this week.

Once you have seen SWTOR questing, you might say it's hard to get into questing in any older games. In SWTOR the quests are all fully voiced and appear in cutscenes, much like in any modern single-player game (like in Mass Effect or Assassins Creed, to name a few well-known games). This makes gameplay very engaging. In LotRO, quest givers still present you with the old-fashioned box of written text above their heads. 

Still, I liked Wildermore. One might need to take a bit more time to get into LotRO, the movement and combat feels slow, but once you've slowed down yourself and take the time to look at your surroundings, it's worth it. I experienced a strong sense of nostalgia riding through Middle-earth again. Its amazing landscape designers did their jobs well once more. The air looks thick with cold, giving a very realistic feeling.

Of course Tiger started crying when we had to swim to a deserted island at the other side of the lake, but I just had to smile at the memory of the lake in Evendim ("Everswim") which took ten full minutes to swim over. It took Turbine three years to invent boats to take you over with just a loading screen. Oh, nostalgia. The lake in Wildermore wasn't actually that bad, and luckily it didn't freeze us to death (as in Forochel) either. We did experience an "is this safe?" moment before jumping in.

I got a strong Skyrim-feeling when I approached the meadhall of Wildermore's major town. The designers must have looked at that game for inspiration, I cannot imagine else.

If there's anything about Wildermore that I don't like, it's the design of the large icicles and the monster that's roaming the area. The villain looks cartoony, as if he walked out of World of Warcraft, and the icicles have a strange pointy shape. I guess they're intended to not look as if they belong there, and they succeed in that, but the style does break my immersion into Middle-earth a bit.

The absurdness of the picture below makes me giggle a bit and feel bad about it at the same time. I guess it's not so much fun if your guard buddy is instantly frozen right next to you, but it's a strange sight.

Story-wise the mini expansion follows the trend of a more serious LotRO, with the damage of Saruman shown all around you. No more delivering mail for curious hobbits, but helping out in the real fights, there where it matters. 

Many heroes fall in front of our eyes, but we need to continue and give hope to these people. Though this sounds very grave, the conversations and questlines have a cute flavour to them, especially compared to the realism of SWTOR. There is a certain scent of romanticism in this game, in the way the world is perceived. Perhaps this is why so many enjoy it. 

"Winter in Wildermore", it could just have been Turbine's title of this update.

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

LOTRO: A tourist guide to the Wold

It's time for my (long overdue) second part of the Rohan landscape series, my very own excuse to post all the landscape pictures I've been taking in-game the past weeks. This time, we'll make a virtual travel through the Wold, the uttermost northern region that falls under Rohirric territory.

I was sent to the Wold by my epic quest from the South, but if you don't follow the epic storyline, you will enter the region (and with that, Rohan) from the Great River region to the North. This will be your first view of the region: a transcendence area with the hills and last remnants of the ruins of the Southern Great River, in which you can already see the grass become more yellowish as it is in the plains of Rohan.

Now I already gave it away! Indeed the well-known plains of Rohan start here, with sloping hills and undeep clear waters in the lower parts. Wild horses wander around, sometimes alone, sometimes in large groups.

The Wold features the first Rohirric settlements after Stangard, of which the well-defended Harwick (picture above) is the largest. Since Tolkien didn't describe any villages in this particular area, the game makers had to make up some names of themselves. And just like Tolkien did, they took their inspiration for Rohan from the Saxons. There's no doubt that they were inspired by the many wics or wichs of the seventh and eight century that are found throughout northwestern Europe. These towns were all harbour towns that played a role in international trade. In fact, they were the only city-like places there were in these times. In England we find places like Lundenwic (London), Eoforwic (York) and Ipswich.

Picture above: stand on the hill north of town to get this typical Harwick picture.

Even though Harwick isn't a harbour town (the water on the picture above is very shallow), its name reveals that our developers tried to keep with the lore and took their inspiration for this region from the Saxons, as we know Tolkien himself did.

War may bring people together, but it may also drive them apart. The village of Langwold experienced the latter. While their houses were burnt to the ground by invading brigands, the leader of the nearby Harwick doesn't want to provide shelter. It is the first example of the troubles in this threatened country.

Lewis Maskell of Stnylan's Musings eloquently describes the atmosphere among the people of the Wold in his article Unwelcome at Harwick. Syp from Biobreak takes a more mundane approach to the behaviour of the thane of Harwick in If LOTRO would let you be evil, the world would be a much better place.

For the nature lovers among us, the Wold features many wild animals, of which many quite unfriendly. I cleared quite a few of them to get the romantic picture above. The shallow waters are inhabited by salamanders, the northern fields by large wild cows. There are no wild bears in this region. My pet bear (picture on top of the article) looked very carefully.

When exploring the plains of the Wold, it is advised to travel by war-steed. Brigands and roving warbands roam the fields, and a quick escape can be of vital importance. For the ecologists interested in boars: they are found just south of Harwick.

More in a Tourist guide to Rohan

• The East Wall
• Hytbold

LOTRO: A tourist guide to the East Wall

It's been five days since Rohan was launched, and I haven't been able to write a single post. Shame on me! I've been so busy with my studies (and I don't expect it to get any less busy the coming two years, to be honest) that I barely had time to let alone play the game, and I'm level 77 as we speak (while many of my kinmates are already level capped). Nevertheless, it's time to get rid of some screenshots I have been capturing!

In fact, I thought it would be cool to guide you through the different regions of Rohan while I quest through it. Today will be all about the East Wall area, where I started off with the new epic book quests.

And what better than to start with the Argonath, the giant statues of Isildur and Anárion that mark the passage into the large lake Nen Hithoel, and more symbolic, that into the reign of Gondor at that time. If you follow it more to the south, you will end up at the Falls of Rauros and Amon Hen, where the Fellowship fell apart.

The landscape of the East Wall region is rough, with many wild weeds, pine trees,

rocks and clear water creeks,

and warped trees. Not warped as like those crazy trees in the Old Forest, but warped in form. Even though capricious, I really like what these look like. I would love to walk through the landscape on the picture above in real life, if only there weren't Uruks hiding behind the trunks.

Sadly enough, these lands near the river banks of the Anduin are infiltrated by orcs of all sorts. Some even got the guts to settle themselves in fortifications such as on the picture above. I was pleasantly surprised, though, when I encountered these. The forts strongly resemble the Iron age and early medieval hill forts as found in northwestern Europe (including England, France, the Netherlands and Germany). It is no secret that Tolkien was inspired by archaeological remains as there are still many to see in Great Britain. 

Often, these forts, by rule situated on hills,  had ditches around them, and circular earthen walls brought up with the earth that was collected through digging them. In this case, the rocks already figure as walls, so ditches are unnecessary. Professionally, I've spend a lot of time studying the early medieval forts, and have recently attended two lectures about Iron age hillforts in France and Germany, so I thought it was pretty cool when I ran into this. For me it brought a bit more realism to the landscape.

As a first impression, I'm glad to discover there has been as much effort put into the landscape of the East Wall (and probably the rest of Rohan as well) as we are used to. It's no punishment to run around here and slaughter some orcs.

More in a Tourist guide to Rohan

• The Wold
• Hytbold