The Nature of Middle-earth

One side effect of the Internet is the realization that you can't be the "most" of anything. Growing up I thought of myself as a huge Tolkien fan, devouring not only his popular books but also the posthumous Silmarillion and other unfinished tales and fragments. Then I got online, and found that there are many many people who know far more about the legendarium than I ever will. I've mostly been content with my love of Tolkien and haven't felt the need to prove my devotion by, say, buying ever volume in The History of Middle-earth or something. I revisit the main books every few years, and have enjoyed popping in recently with the novelistic updates of The Children of Hurin, The Fall of Gondolin and so on.

Recently, though I did decide to pick up one of the more fragmentary books, The Nature of Middle-earth. Nearly all of the posthumous Tolkien publications of the last fifty years has come from his son Christopher, who made it his life's work to sort through and bring sense to the vast body of work his dad left behind: some typescript manuscripts, but also lots of essays scribbled into the margins of exam papers, little tales written on the back of publication catalogs, mostly undated scraps that represented different ways of thinking at different decades of his life. Christopher himself passed not too long ago, and this is the first Tolkien book published since then. Carl Hostetter had worked with Christopher going back to the 90s, had previously published some primarily linguistic essays in Tolkien journals, and had received the green light for putting this particular publication together.

 

As he explains in the introduction, there is a fair amount of unpublished stuff from JRR that is interesting but that hasn't fit well into earlier books. He and Christopher agreed on the title of "Nature" for this entry, which kind of takes on two meanings in the two halves of this book. The first part is mostly about the lives of the Elves: how they are conceived, born, mature, age, and what exactly happens at the end of their lives. It delves further into the fëar and hröar (roughly "spirit" and "body") philosophy that's previously been explored in HoME. Like pretty much all Tolkien's writings, these are ideas that evolved over time, and we can see how Tolkien's conception of things changed. The second half of the book is more focused on the physical makeup of Middle-earth, most specifically on the island of Númenor. He describes the coasts, the hills, the indigenous and imported fauna and flora on the island.

It's surprising and very interesting to read Tolkien writing about the sex lives of elves. It isn't prurient, but also isn't strictly clinical. He writes about the joy of union, the different forms of love, the delight they find in one another. In some ways you can see Tolkien's Catholic orientation: romantic love, marriage, sex and child-bearing are all very closely tied together. But this account also differs from Tolkien's own experiences in notable ways; he writes emphatically about how elf women marry at a younger age than men, but Tolkien himself married an older woman.

The book mostly consists of documents Tolkien that wrote for himself: they're more advanced than notes, but not intended for publication. Reading these reminds me a lot of how, when I'm working on a creative project, I'll often make a new Google Doc and just write through some problem I'm considering; almost like talking to myself to try and understand the situation and come to a conclusion. The output ultimately informs the creative project while the document itself can be discarded. Or maybe it's a little like these blog posts, where again I'm just expressing some thoughts and kind of figuring stuff out as I write. Of course, Tolkien is a much better writer than me, and even when writing for himself there's a high degree of art to it.

I think of Tolkien as being all about language, and that's definitely his primary passion, but this book seems even more interested in math. He's in a situation where he had published Lord of the Rings, along with the appendices, laying out the timeline of Middle-earth. He also has large amounts of unpublished-but-intended-for-publication manuscripts that fill out more detail in the world, and he has become aware that the timelines don't line up. So he's trying to figure out how to reconcile things. It's a complex situation, because there are different scales of time described in the Silmarillion. The sun doesn't exist for a really long time, so there are different time scales before: years of the trees, years of the lamps, and so on. And elvish ages are different, so a year in Aman is much longer than a year in Middle-earth. Elves "age" more quickly in absolute time on Middle-earth. This all makes things hard to track, but also gives some flexibility: he can adjust the scales or adjust the dates to make things work. Here's a representative sample of his mathematical musings:

 A better solution is 3) The Rate of Growth of those born in Beleriand was 10 = 1. But of those born in Aman it was 50 = 1 in Beleriand. But it began to increase as soon as they left Valinor, say after the Doom of Mandos. The Valian Year spent reaching Beleriand via the ice aged all the Exiles about 2 years (it took 144 Sun-years) = 72 (but Fëanor reached Beleriand in one half the time = Bel. 50 and so only aged 1 year). As soon as they reached Beleriand the rate quickened to 50 = 1. Thus Finduilas, 12 in 1495, was 13 at 1496 and needed 7 years to become 20. This took her 7 x 50 = 350 years. She was therefore 20 in Bel. 350. In Bel. 472 she was however only 122 Sun-years older, only just over 21, and in 490 only 140 Sun-years older: nearly 21½. She was the youngest Exile.

There are also lots of tables, in some cases filling out details, in other cases running different scenarios to calculate the implications of certain decisions. One big case is determining how the Elvish population increased from the initial group of 144 to the tens of thousands that would be needed for the later events of the Silmarillion. He experiments with different family sizes, marriage rates, birth rates, and life spans to try and come up with a plausible and grounded anthropology for his story.

This level of detail reminds me of Tolkien's process of writing The Lord of the Rings. He finished the story, but publication was delayed for several months while he want back to review all of the dates in the books and make sure they made sense: he calculated the distance they traveled, the amount of time that would take on foot or horseback, whether people could actually be in the right place at the right time, that the weather was appropriate for the season, that the phases of the moon were consistent, and so on. All that work isn't immediately obvious in the final text: those months he spent checking and re-checking just resulted in a few dates and spans of time being updated. But, I think that this care and attention to detail is one of the things that makes Lord of the Rings so wonderful. You're seeing the tip of the iceberg, but below it is this vast body of work that underlies and supports it, and... there's a weight, a sense of reality, that it otherwise wouldn't have.

I get the impression that even the editor of this book was a bit bemused that Tolkien devoted so much time in his life wrestling with these details, and I doubt that many other authors would similarly spin their wheels over these sort of "technical" issues. After all, this is a fantasy world, and there are plenty of convenient hand-wave-y excuses easily available. Just say "Elves are immortal!" and readers will go along with whatever you say as long as the story is entertaining. But it's this wrestling with contradictions that, in my opinion, gives Tolkien's work so much depth and flavor. It reminds me of the difference between ancient religions and modern religions. Older religions have holy tests that were written by a variety of people over a long span of time, and so they have apparent contradictions. Those religions then spent considerable thought in attempting to resolve this contradictions, which in turn leads to rich theologies. In contrast, modern religions are usually created wholesale by a single leader, with a single text or no text at all. They're generally free of contradiction, which makes them a lot less interesting to explore and reason about.

Tolkien explicitly started this project to create a mythology for Britain, and while I imagine he felt great frustration at writing himself into corners, reconciling those corners lead to still more great inventions, adding more layers of meaning and delight to his myth. It ends up feeling kind of like the result of a millennia-long religious tradition, even though it all came from the pen of one single guy!

I've previously read about Tolkien grappling with the nature of evil, such as the problem of where Orcs come from: Can Melkor create new things? Can he corrupt Eru's creations? This book has some similar grappling with the nature of good: If Eru is all-powerful, why is there so much misery in Middle-earth? I don't think this is a definitive answer, but one idea that he considers looks like this: Eru has a plan for the world, but he gave free will to his creations, and when they choose to stray from his plan then evil occurs. This straying is often rooted in good desires! As one example, it wasn't Eru's plan that the Valar create Valinor and call the Elves to the west. The Valar were motivated by a desire to protect Eru's children, and to create a safe space where the children could thrive. But the Valar should have remained in Middle-earth, keeping up a constant fight against Melkor, and trusted in Eru that the elves would be taken care of. If the Valar had remained, then Melkor would not have had free reign to corrupt Men, and much later misery would have been avoided. I'm not an expert, but to me this feels like a very Catholic philosophy: God is all-powerful, but when something goes wrong, it's our fault and not His.

Speaking of Catholicism, there's some good discussion about religion in this book, including an appendix that glosses several concepts and phrases that may be unfamiliar to non-Catholic or non-Christian readers. Carl Hostetter particularly highlights one of Tolkien's letters that has perplexed many readers, in which he states that The Lord of the Rings is a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work". This is odd because there's no visible religion in his world: no priests, no temples, no scripture, no rituals. Perhaps the occasional call for intercession to a higher power, but that's about it. In Hostetter's reading, the key word in that sentence is "fundamentally"; in other words, the basic metaphysics underlying Middle-earth are the same fundamental principles as in Catholic thought. Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians thought a great deal about the dualism of the body and the soul, rejecting both gnostic mysticism and hedonistic sensationalism. They view the person as the union of the flesh and the spirit, both sacred and an essential part of the whole human. The body isn't merely the vessel for the spirit. In the same way, Tolkien's characters are beings with a divine purpose, an eternal fëa that was made for and inseperable from one hröa.

Later in the book there's a lot of stuff on Númenor, including descriptions of native and imported fauna and flora. As usual, Tolkien is pretty precise, working out the exact size of the landmass, the initial population of Númenoreans, how they increased over time, by making rough calculations on birth rates and lifespans. This seems like it would be dry, but I devoured this section. It probably helps that it's tied in to discussions of the culture of Númenor: in discussing the shape of the coastline he segues into describing the evolution of their ship design, their love of seafaring, and (via footnotes) the way this troubled the love lives of marriageable Númenoreans. Similarly, discussion of horses leads to description of roads which leads to vivid imagery of the pleasure they took in getting around. It's a fully-realized vision that feels like a whole world.

Like I said before, this book shows off Tolkien's lesser-known math chops, and not his more famous linguistic skills. That said, he is still Tolkien, and particularly in the middle portion of the book there's a lot of linguistic stuff. One of the most striking things for me was this digression on the language of time perception, critiquing English and drawing a contrast between it and Elvish:

Our language is confused, using after or before both (in certain circumstances) of the future. We sometimes think and speak of the future as what lies before us, we look ahead, are pro-vident, forward-looking, yet our ancestors preceded us and are our fore-fathers; and any event in time is before the one that is later. We speak as if events and the succession of human lives were an endless column moving forward into the unknown, and those born later are behind us, will follow us; yet also as if though facing the future we were walking backwards or being driven backwards, and our children and heirs (posterity!) were ahead of us and will in each generation go further forwards into the future than we. A widow is a relict, one left behind, by a husband who goes on.

As in so many things, realizing the amount of thought and deliberation that went into using a single word is really impressive, and renews my lifelong admiration of Tolkien as a writer, artist and (sub-)creator.

Rohan't

This is probably the longest consecutive run I’ve taken at Lord of the Rings Online, and probably my last run for a while. I continue to appreciate the scenery, themes, and lore, but the actual gameplay has hit a pretty rough patch, and it’s time to recharge my tolerance for tedious quests.

I think my last post covered up to through the end of the Rise of Isengard expansion, so this one covers the entirety of Riders of Rohan, as well as the Wildermore region. One obvious difference from the Isengard plot is a change of companions. The previous epic storyline focused on the Grey Company, a group of Dunedain Rangers heading south to unite with Aragorn and assist his quest. Things do not go as planned, and much of the fun of that plot dealt with the unexpected changes in the Rangers’ circumstances and fortunes. For better or worse, the Grey Company is very large, with about a dozen named individuals, and I always had a hard time keeping their various personalities straight.

MINI SPOILERS

Riders of Rohan shifts to a new and smaller party, which definitely helps as it’s easier to keep track of the individuals. Nona is a link to the earlier expansion: a Dunlending warrior, you met her in Galtrev with the Company and helped uncover the mystery of her brother Wadu’s passing. She steps into a larger and more rewarding role in Rohan. Early on you meet Horn, a Rohirric bard who was banished from Edoras for his songs criticizing Grima Wormtongue; he helps Nona find healing after she is stabbed with a Morgul blade, and is instrumental in assisting your party as you navigate the culture and politics of Rohan. Corudan is an elf who joins your group on Lorien and tags along… just for the fun of it, I guess? He seems much less invested in the plot than the other two, but has really good cheer and is always welcome.

Your party is following essentially the same path as Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas after the Breaking of the Fellowship (which is revealed in some pretty cool and narratively interesting Rashoman-esque flashbacks). You track Pippin and Merry via the orc party that captured them, eventually finding the site where Eomer’s war-band defeated the monsters. After this, you’re more or less on your own, narratively… a relatively short trip into Fangorn reveals that the hobbits are alive, well, and in the company of the ents. The bulk of your time, though, is spent in the Riddermark, visiting various towns and cities and assisting them. The country is in rough shape, facing an external threat but with a respected king who refuses to take action against it.

RoR is the darkest storyline yet in LOTRO, continuing the gradual slide towards despair that we’ve been experiencing ever since leaving the Shire. War has now come, and we see its evidence all around us: villages are burnt, soldiers and civilians slain, crops destroyed, refugees huddled on the road. The story really excels, though, in the detailed attention it pays to loss. You can visit a grave where villagers are buried - dozens of them! - and learn about each one. Who they were, what they wanted in life, what they were doing, how they died, who mourns them.

It becomes clear that this isn’t a story about valiant heroes triumphing over villainous heroes. It’s a story of grief, of loss, of mourning. You can defeat the bad guys, but that doesn’t restore what’s been lost. Once again, Turbine does a fantastic job at grokking Tolkien’s essential essence. The goal isn’t to amass power and destroy a threat. It’s to maintain your spirit: remain hopeful in the face of overwhelming terror and malice, and be receptive to unexpected grace when it appears.

END SPOILERS

While I really dig the story, though, the actual minute-by-minute gameplay has been grating for a while. Most MMORPG quests are very repetitive - travel here, kill X enemies, click on these objects, return here - and the Rohan quests aren’t as good at disguising their same-ness as the quests in earlier regions. (As a counterpoint to the above, though, they DO start introducing some interesting branching plot lines and choice - absolutely nothing in comparison to a BioWare game, but it still seems like a significant departure to everything else earlier in the game. Refreshingly, these aren’t matters of “Will you do the good thing or the evil thing?" Instead, you might need to choose between honesty and love, or between caution and valor.)

The big hurdle for me, though, was the pure tedium of actually completing those quests. For me, LOTRO has been defined by its gorgeous settings. Even when you are killing 10 swamp rats, you’re doing it in a beautiful area. In Wildermore, though, the you need to travel through unnavigable terrain, sidetracking around long sheer cliffs that aren’t depicted on your map, while moving through dense thickets of hostile enemies, and all this often while in deep forest that doesn’t even let you look at pretty scenery while doing so. I do generally appreciate how each area of LOTRO looks distinct and unlike anything that had come before, but in this case, I really wish that they hadn’t done such a good job at crafting a hostile land.

While I feel some short-term frustration, though, my long-term heart still burns for LOTRO, and I’m confident I’ll return sooner or later. From some peeking around online, it sounds like the Helm’s Deep expansion may bring annoyances of its own (Big Battles, much like Mounted Combat, seems like another innovative idea that doesn’t really succeed), but beyond that lies Gondor, which seems prettier and more fun. It’s also exciting to see, big-picture, how the game is coming along: the latest update brings the action all the way to the Black Gates of Mordor, along with some other nice upgrades like new premium player housing on the Bay of Belfalas, and there are rumors of a proper expansion in the near future, which most likely would cover Mordor, maybe including Mount Doom or even Barad-Dur. And beyond that? Some rumblings of Erebor and the Scouring of the Shire. Tolkien created an enormous world, one that I could happily spent my entire life exploring.

So, here’s my latest album of screenshots, covering most of Riders of Rohan and the Wildermore region, along with a few odds and ends in Moria. Middle-earth is still very pretty!

The Mines of the Siege of the Rise of the Riders of Helm’s Deep

I’m occasionally struck by the big disparity between how long I spend with a particular piece of entertainment and how much I write about it on the blog. Particularly with the artsier games I’ve been playing lately, a game might say something really interesting over the course of just an hour or two, which will get a write-up that’s of comparable length to a roleplaying game that I’ve played for dozens of hours.

The biggest example might be Lord of the Rings Online. It’s been my side-game for a while now. I’ll go for months and months without even opening it, but when I’m in the mood to lose myself inside Middle-earth, it’s waiting there for me to dive back into it. It continues to be the most relaxing video-game experience I’ve had. The gameplay itself is rarely challenging… there are tons of activities you can choose between, only some of which require combat, and that combat almost never poses a worrisome threat.

Playing LOTRO may be the most peaceful, rejuvenating experience I regularly have apart from hiking. This may not be coincidental. Both take places in huge, expansive, gorgeous areas, one real and one virtual. Neither requires a whole lot of active thought, so my mind is free to wander while I feel like I’m making progress. I can feel a faint pride in my achievements and improvement without ever feeling like I’m being compared to someone else or need to compete to prove superiority.

Even when I am in the periods where I play a lot of LOTRO, I tend to take my time, which is definitely the best way to approach this. The game probably won’t satisfy people who are looking for intense tactical combat or looking for excitement on the bleeding edge of advancement. It’s at its best when you’re roaming through the landscape, spotting ruined watchtowers atop overgrown hills, spying a flock of doves soaring over Lindon, seeing the sun set from the foggy swamps of Dunland. This is a game where you immerse yourself into the world rather than prove your mastery over it.

As I write this, I’ve finally crossed over the Anduin and into Rohan. In geographic terms, this brings me roughly halfway to Mordor from my start in Ered Luin. In gameplay terms, this is the start of the “Riders of Rohan” expansion, the fourth of the game (after Mines of Moria, Siege of Mirkwood, and Rise of Isengard). My progress has been erratic. I’ll tend to move ahead to new areas that appeal to me, then backtrack and finish epic quest storylines for older zones, then spend some time wandering through areas for crafting materials, then get distracted by seasonal festivals, then catch up on Bingo’s adventures, then get back more or less on track with on-level content.

All that being said, I finally wrapped up the main Mines of Moria epic quest long after leaving the mines proper. In some respects, I really like doing these quests once I’ve overleveled them. Once you are ten levels above the enemies in an area, they turn gray, and will no longer attack you. This makes it much easier and, more importantly, quicker to finish the quests. Between the faster progress of epic quests, and ignoring the standard landscape quests (which I either did long ago or am skipping altogether), I’m able to keep track of the main storyline: who these characters are, what they’re doing, what our goals are. I found, for example, that while I enjoyed the Grey Company plot, I had a really hard time keeping track of the individual rangers. When blowing through the Moria quests, though, I could focus on their particular story, of pride and determination and doom, and it had a pretty powerful impact.

There are narrative advantages to this approach, but the gameplay can suffer a little. In particular, the epic quest line tends to reward the best equipment (well, better than standard quests at least). If you get them on-level, they’ll be the most useful items for quite a while, But, getting capstone items to Level 60 quests when I’m level 74 means a lot of experiences of “Ooooh, that looks awesome!” immediately followed by “Too bad this yellow gear from Dunland is better than that.” But, again, LOTRO isn’t hugely challenging anyways, so it isn’t worth worrying too much about.

I completely skipped the Siege of Mirkwood content, though I’m sure I’ll eventually come back to it. I wanted to get to Rohan so I could pick up my War Steed. These are an advanced type of mount: larger, faster, and more powerful than the standard horses you’ve been able to get before now. I’m not sure how much I’ll enjoy mounted combat proper, but I wanted to get a horse so I could start leveling it and maybe getting cool caparison at future festivals. War steeds are also much faster than normal horses, which could come in handy when I’m backtracking through earlier content again.

Mounted combat was a new mechanic added for Riders of Rohan, many years after the game first launched and many years before now. It’s been very interesting to encounter things like this: new ideas that were added to the game, with a lot of initial excitement, then later refined, then later… not exactly abandoned, but moved on from, with less emphasis as newer features came along.

Playing LOTRO sometimes feels like going on an archeological expedition: not only uncovering the rich history of Tolkien’s world, but also exploring the ten years of active development on the game since it was released. You’re witnessing artifacts crafted by prior developers, edifices constructed by earlier producers.

Or maybe it’s more organic than that. I have very limited experience with MMOs apart from LOTRO, so I’m fascinated by the idea of a game that grows so much after it is released. Single-player games almost always have a single, cohesive vision that guides and shapes them prior to release. Afterwards they may get patches and updates, perhaps some expansions, but always in a relatively short span of time and with the same creative team, and they have a unified feel. MMOs grow, though: not just adding more content, but trying out new systems, changing old ones in response to feedback.

So you end up with things that feel like evolutionary detritus: those weird glands and genes that do not serve any useful function in our human bodies, but are living records that show our evolutionary past. Wandering through the game, you come across characters like class trainers and bards, who used to be crucial elements of the leveling process but have been rendered entirely useless. And there are also things like skirmishes, which clearly had a ton of thought and effort put into them, but were not fully embraced by the community: they still exist, and at certain parts of the game are more prominent, but as a whole seem more like a vestigial appendage than a useful limb.

We’ll see where mounted combat ends up in the grand scheme of things. At a minimum, I’ll have a faster horse, and that will be pretty cool.

I don’t know how long I’ll stick around in Rohan, but so far I’m enjoying it quite a bit. One small thing in particular caught my attention. In the first village you enter, you meet the thane (the local lord) and his family. Speaking with his daughter, she says something like, “I will be Thane after my dad dies, and if I die, my little brother will become Thane after me.” It continues the great, understated and matter-of-fact handling of gender in LOTRO, where women are shown to be just as capable and important as men.

In some respects, that specific example might be considered non-canonical. To the best of my knowledge, Tolkien never wrote about women in leadership roles among the Rohirrim, and I don’t believe any female names are included in the lineage of Rohirric kings. However, I also don’t think it specifically violates canon, either. After all, the game isn’t saying that a woman rules Rohan; they’re saying that a woman can oversee a part of it. There are examples in Earth history where women could hold local titles and power, even if the national sovereign was always male (as in France, with the noblesse uterine). More importantly, it’s very much in keeping with the overall tone of Tolkien: after all, we are now in the land of Eowyn, Shieldmaiden of Rohan. As she says, “The women of this country learned long ago, those without swords can still die upon them.” She didn’t come from out of nowhere; she was part of a proud culture that valued martial strength, and it’s very easy to imagine that women could prove their worth through strength of arms in this land.

This is also a great opportunity to bring up Haleth, one of my favorite characters in the legendarium. In the first age, she was the chieftain of the Haladin: technically an ancestor to the Numenoreans, she and her tribe remind me much more of the Rohirrim: their relationship to the elves is much like that of Rohan towards Gondor. All that to say, I’m delighted to see Turbine drawing on the inspiration in the source material while also creating a world that feels inclusive and welcoming.

MINI SPOILERS

Earlier in Dunland, I ran across an even more extreme example of something that on its surface seemed lore-unfriendly, but tapped into deeper elements of his writings. A Boar-clan settlement at the edge of a swamp is under assault by abominations: orcs and trolls who bear the White Hand. However, they act differently from other monsters you have encountered: they sound genuinely fearful and sad when you attack them. One of the tribal members tells you that Saruman has corrupted them from captured Dunlendings, twisting them into new monstrous forms to serve in his army.

At the capstone of this short quest, after fighting your way to the home of the abominations, you encounter that rarest of all things in Lord of the Rings Online: a choice. Do you listen to the woman who urges you to show mercy and spare her kinsmen who have been led astray? Or to the man who warns you of the dire threat these monsters will pose to him and his family? I was delighted to be able to choose the former course of action, and got almost teary at the goofy, nearly cartoonish animations of happy orcs and trolls cheering for their salvation.

The ultimate impact of this decision feels ambivalent. The tribe is still arguing about it in a later meeting when they decide whether to throw in their lot to oppose Saruman. And the fight that follows that is brutal, when the Boar-clan is almost entirely wiped out. You might be tempted to think, did I make a mistake? Should I have struck when I had the chance, and would it have saved those innocent lives?

The whole idea of “good orcs” seems absurd at first glance: in the Lord of the Rings novels, they’re practically the definition of disposable and purely evil fodder. However, if you read Tolkien’s letters, you’ll see that he grappled with the problem of them. Did orcs have souls? If so, could they be redeemed? He never really resolved those problems before he died, and I think that ambiguity is very fertile ground for exploration and re-interpretation in a medium such as this.

MEGA SPOILERS

This quest was shortly followed by a trip to Isengard, which was also fascinating. That whole arc was unusually bleak: you aren’t triumphing over evil, but becoming aware of evil’s immense power and your relative hopelessness to overcome it. Just the sight of the immensity of Saruman’s armies is stunning, and once you see Isengard itself, it’s hard to be optimistic about your chances.

This is reflected very well in the gameplay: you aren’t fighting endless waves of enemies; instead, you are actually taken prisoner and forced to do menial and humiliating work in the dungeons below Orthanc. (And, side note, Turbine is REALLY GREAT at creating vertical spaces. I feel filled with awe when I look around those unfathomably deep areas, and am amazed when I can actually walk down into them.) You feel relieved once you exit: not filled with the pride of victory, but simple happiness at escaping this dire fate.

Isengard is one of the more dramatic examples of the incredible variety in environmental design and art. It’s shocking to see something so industrial plopped here in the middle of Middle-earth: smokestacks belching foul fumes into the air, giant gears slowly turning below the earth, ironworks pounding out immense quantities of weaponry, machines of war being constructed around the clock. The game does a great job at capturing and conveying Tolkien’s horror at industrialization, the destruction of nature, and the depersonalization of modern society.

While Isengard is one of the most drastic cases of original design, I’m almost more impressed by areas like Dunland, just because it’s amazing that they’ve been able to make a zone that could be described as “rolling hills” look unique and interesting and beautiful after nearly a dozen different zones. I love how, in an instant, you can tell the Lone-lands from the North Downs from the Trollshaws from Eregion from Enedwait from Dunland. Each of them is a grassy, temperate area with hills and occasional rivers, and it’s a remarkable achievement to make each one so distinct.

As I get further into the game, I’m also moving further ahead in time, to zones that were released more recently, and in some cases that also means seeing more advanced technology. While it’s fairly subtle, the landscape can seem more alive now. These are often little touches, like windmills that gently spin in the wind.

A more drastic example came in that first village in Rohan: in keeping with the increasingly dire sense of the plot, after finishing that quest chain, the village is attacked by Easterling raiders under the leadership of a Nazgul, and is destroyed. Coming back to it later, the walls and buildings still stand, but are constantly smoking as the fires within smolder. There used to be children running and playing in the streets, now they stand empty. The merchants who used to trade and repair goods are no longer accessible.

I think there have been a couple of cases before where areas update after a quest, but they’ve been fairly minor. In Angmar, some folks appear in a later area after you’ve beaten an earlier quest. The Rangers will appear or disappear from different villages depending on where you are in the Grey Company quest. And sometimes the interiors of instances (e.g., behind doors) will change. But this is the first time I can think of where actual structures in the landscape seemed to change in response to my actions. It was very impressive!

In a lot of RPGs, like Dragon Age: Inquisition or The Witcher 3, geometry updates are used to convey a sense of power and achievement: “I did this thing, and now I can see this testament to my glory!” It seems very appropriate that LOTRO, a game set in a world of decline, would invert this: good things are fading, happy times are passing, and more of the world is falling under shadow. It isn’t nihilistic, and there are plenty of opportunities for happiness, but that sense of fading-away is core to the setting, and, once again, it’s great to see Turbine embracing Tolkien’s spirit like this.

END SPOILERS

My playing has been irregular, but it’s also been a really long time since I wrote about LOTRO, so I’ve accumulated more screenshots than necessary. I have very poorly organized them into several folders:

Oh That Is Pretty Part 7: 222 photos, starting at the climax of the Angmar epic quest (which I wrote about in my previous LOTRO post but wasn’t included in that album), and continuing into Dunland, with tons of side-excursions and backtracking to earlier epic quests. No captions in this one because, let's be honest, neither of us has time for that.

Oh That Is Pretty Part 8: A pitiful 41 photos, featuring the latter part of the Dunland quests, including some items discussed in this post.

Oh That Is Pretty Part 9: Back up to 126 photos this time. This covers the climax to Rise of Isengard, a very belated climax (?) to Mines of Moria, and the very beginning of Riders of Rohan, including many of the topics discussed in this post. This one does have captions because, um, I guess it turns out that I did have time for that after all.

Festival of the White Lady: My second time at this party, very fun!

Weatherstock: The concert event of the year, also a great social repeat.

So, yeah! LOTRO continues to be an engaging and surprisingly rejuvenating experience. It’s kind of astonishing to think that, for as much as I’ve played it, there are still huge parts of the game that I haven’t even seen: not just what lies ahead, but all the stuff I’ve skipped or ignored along the way. The day will probably come when I finally start playing one of the alts I have sitting at Level 1, and I’m looking forward to seeing even more of this wonderful world that they’ve created.

Royals

Hey, I’ve been playing more Lord of the Rings Online! I’ll break with tradition and present a link to my screenshot album at the top of the post instead of the bottom.

This period covers my time in Enedwaith, followed by a backtrack to Eriador to complete the Level 50-51 climax of Volume I of the epic storyline. Along the way are some adventures with Bingo Boffin, a trip to the Yule Festival, and a few other random quests. As usual, there are tons of spoilers and ramblings in the album notes. A few things that felt worthy of more detailed exposition are in this post.

One thing I’ve felt mildly but consistently disappointed in has been the lack of choice in the game. As noted in earlier posts, I’ve been spoiled by BioWare, even their own MMO of Star Wars: The Old Republic, in being able to chart my character’s course. I get why this is the case: to their great credit, Turbine is creating a game steeped in Tolkien’s values, so there’s no option to join the “dark side” or aid Sauron’s forces or any nonsense like that.

MINI SPOILERS

Recently, though, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the introduction of a few choices. They’re minor, but significant to me, and presented in a thoughtful way. One came during the early part of the Grey Company’s epic storyline, where you travel throughout Eriador to summon the various Rangers to travel to Rohan. Most of this is completely rote: travel to a spot, talk to a ranger, do a short quest for them, and then move on to the next. The interesting one, though, came with a ranger who was stationed in the Shire. He’s fallen in love with the people there, and wonders aloud whether he should leave. In either case, he wants you to bring the news to a hobbit who has been asking after his plans: one Lotho Sackville-Baggins.

Lotho? That rang a bell… wasn’t he a bad hobbit? I did a quick wiki search, and was confirmed in my suspicion: during the Scouring of the Shire, Lotho (aka Pimple) seizes control of the Shire, and his thugs enforce “Sharkey’s” (aka Saruman’s) malevolent designs.

Now, I don’t expect that my choice here will affect the ultimate outcome of the story - it isn’t like they’ll decide whether to scour the Shire or not based on one decision way back at Level 50. But it’s exactly this type of choice that’s perfect for the game and the story. There isn’t a “good” or a “bad” choice here. In one direction, you urge the Ranger to fulfill his duty, travel to the aid of his liege and kin, and trust that the hobbits can look after themselves. In the other direction, you urge the Ranger to follow the direction of his heart, and lend his sword to the people who need him most. While there may not be a major gameplay consequence, it’s a decision that will resonate as the story continues. Whenever the Grey Company faces obstacles, I’ll wonder if they would fare better with one more talented warrior by their side. Whenever I travel back through Brockenborings, I’ll feel a little happier knowing that at least one Dunedain remains to look after the little folks.

The second choice was even more interesting. The Yule Festival is pretty different from any of the other ones I’ve been to before. The Spring, Summer, and Harvest festivals have all taken place at the standard fairgrounds for the four races. Yule, however, is a bit more like the Treasure Hunt in that it takes place in an entirely new area. This new areas is considerably more developed, though, with a mayor and economy and traditions.

You tour the village on your arrival, and get a sense for its purpose. This is, to put it bluntly, a tourist town. They host festivals to attract out-of-towners like yourself. As you speak with more of the inhabitants and explore off the beaten path, though, you realize that it isn’t nearly as idyllic as it initially appears. The Mayor, in his quest to make a picture-perfect town, has quietly swept the undesirable beggars out to the far reaches of town. He squeezes the workers to work harder for less pay, so he can put on a bigger show for the visiting patrons.

Many of the yule quests have the same structure as the other seasonal festivals. There are quests to collect things (parts to build a snowman!), quests to defeat things (collect branches from ambulatory trees!), and entertaining bits of busy-work (bake bread! clean up dirty trash!). My favorite is a new innovation: the GLOBE theater (Green Lily Orators, Bards, and Entertainers), run by an enterprising troupe of hobbits. Impressively, the game recruits actual players to play roles within the play, while other players watch and show their approval or disdain by tossing rose-petals and rotten fruit respectively. (I gave an exemplary performance in my role as Partygoer!)

Now: I tend to say that you don’t have a choice in quests in LOTRO, but there really is one choice in every quest: whether to take it or not. For the most part, that isn’t really a choice at all; or, if the answer is “no”, it’s for mechanical rather than story reasons (it would take you too far out of your way, or take too much time, for too small of rewards). In the Yule festival, though, there are some quests that you’ll think twice before accepting. One quest, offered by the striking workers, asks you to give your hard-earned tokens to the unemployed. There aren’t any rewards to speak of for this; it effectively undos the rewards you would get from one of the other “real” quests. The only benefit is you feeling good about yourself. Conversely, there’s also a quest to shoo the undesirables off of the street. This is an easy job, with good rewards, and no negative consequences, other than possibly thinking less of yourself.

After the first day, I returned to the town, to find that the game had now progressed to presenting an actual mutually-exclusive choice. The Mayor asks you to infiltrate the workers and find information that would embarrass them into ending their strike. The workers, in turn, ask you to help uncover malfeasance in the Mayor’s administration and ultimately convince him to re-hire the proletariat at their original wages.

This was FASCINATING. For starters, it’s an asymmetric choice. The rewards you get from siding with the Mayor are MUCH better than siding with the workers; the poor only offer you shabby clothing and a unique title. This dynamic reminded me much more of the choices that Failbetter Games offers, where you feel compelled to take the “good” choice despite knowing that it offers fewer rewards; and the fact that it offers fewer rewards, curiously, makes you feel even better about taking it, as if it’s saying something positive about you as a human being rather than as a character in a game.

It was also surprising for its on-the-nose portrayal of inequality. I’m curious to see what year this was added to the game, but it must have been sometime after the 2008 financial crisis. LOTRO is a fantasy game, but in this one scene it feels a little like a small metaphor for the very real problems that people in the real world are facing.

It’s a delicate thing to present, and I’m a bit surprised that they attempted it at all. Tolkien isn’t particularly interested in poverty in his books, and in real life he was fairly anti-socialist (particularly later in life). But he was even more irritated at the factory-owners and industry titans, and you can sense that deep-rooted antipathy in (e.g.) his descriptions of Saruman overseeing the “factories” of Isengard or the Shire. Tolkien would have preferred that the factories be shut down entirely rather than turned over to the workers, but it isn’t necessarily out of character to offer this kind of story in Middle-earth.

Okay! So, yeah. That’s a grand total of two interesting choices in, uh, about ten months of gameplay. I’m curious to see if this pace continues in the future.

MEGA SPOILERS

As I noted before, one of the difficult things about playing this game as an MMORPG is how fragmented the storytelling can be. I think the epic storyline is probably good, but since I only experience it in short chunks separated by long periods of time spent doing other things, it’s hard to keep it all straight.

I’m a bit happier with how the conclusion of Volume I went. Part of this might be that it was just more memorable: you spend a lot of time with a handful of characters, rather than the constantly-changing cast that was featured earlier. But I think a big part is also because I was overleveled enough to just blow through it all. By this point I was level 67, far above the level 50-51 it was originally created for, so I didn’t have to waste any time discovering new fast travel points or while moving from point A to point B, and wasn’t distracted by on-level quests along the way. I could just do story after story and see how it all ended.

And there is a LOT of story! I was a little surprised by that. Because there’s so much STUFF in an MMO, I’ve tended to assume that it was filling out and covering up an anemic central plot. It’s complex enough to be the central thread of a single-player RPG, though.

I’ll probably go into this in more detail in the album, so I’ll refrain from the blow-by-blow recap here. But here are some musings on how well it worked for me big-picture:

The final conclusion to Volume I was very affecting. I was a little gun-shy at first after the Lorniel episode; I worried that Amarthiel was getting more development just to get shot down. That was… kind of true, I guess, but I ended up sort of loving how it was handled.

The whole arc with Laerdan and Amarthiel/Narmeleth is such a wonderfully Tolkienesque story. Its tragedy feels very much like something out of The Silmarillion: most of the tales in that book are stories of things getting worse and worse, of hopes being betrayed, of pride destroying chances of happiness. And yet, its conclusion rests on some of the values that Tolkien held most dear. It’s a story of confession, of redemption, of mercy, of sacrifice. Amariel can’t undo the deeds that she’s done, but her soul is saved, thanks to the hard work of others and her humility in accepting her own limits. (I hadn’t thought of it in these terms while playing, but it’s a very Catholic story as well.) Part of me wishes that Amariel had lived and could do more cool things, but as it stands she’s the most memorable original character in this game, and I’m happy with the emphatic conclusion to her story.

That kind of devotion to Tolkien’s themes is even more important to me than their admirable respect towards Tolkien’s lore. They bend over backwards, for example, to explain that Narchuil is NOT one of the Nine, or even one of the Seven (which I personally would have been tempted to do), but still manage to connect it to Sauron via the oblique passages describing the various other rings he crafted. And his appearance as the Gift-Lord is chilling and subtle, all the more ominous for how innocuous it appears.

END SPOILERS

As usual, the thing I love most about LOTRO is the feeling of physically inhabiting the space of Middle-earth. I’m glad that I’m now able to engage even more with the feeling of actually living there, making choices and inhabiting the emotional universe Tolkien created.

That sense of identification is strong, so much so that every once in a while I’m pulled up short by some quest I’m doing. I’m currently traveling through Enedwaith preparing the way through the Grey Company. Much of this is agreeable work - gathering allies, scouting roads, gathering supplies - but every once in a while there’s a quest like “Collect 8 Dunlending Cloaks”. Which must be done by killing Dunlendings. Which then plunges me into a miniature crisis - Dunlendings are people, too. These PARTICULAR Dunlendings are part of an army that seeks to overthrow the Free Peoples and plunge Arda into darkness, but does that mean that they can’t be reasoned with?

While the details sometimes make me question the game I’m playing, the larger picture stays clear. This is a game that presents the nuance and complexity in tribal societies, the mixture of good and bad people everywhere, or even in the same person. I was briefly annoyed recently by the revelation that a particular character wasn’t just a dwarf, but a Dourhand Dwarf. In the shorthand of this game, Longbeards = Good Dwarfs, Dourhands = Bad Dwarves. Every time you see a Dourhand, you kill it.

Except, this time, you don’t. Dourhands are rational, thinking, social creatures, just like you or me. This particular person was unhappy with the actions of several of his comrades, and works with you to undo the damage done. That really touched me - it’s just a single character out of the thousands of faceless foes, granted, but one is all it takes to show that genetics aren’t destiny, that you can’t dismiss a tribe or a race as being evil because of their ancestry.

And then I remembered that, of course, this isn’t some amazing new insight that Turbine has injected into the game. One of my favorite moments in the theatrical version of Lord of the Rings is probably when Faramir comments on the Easterling slain by his forces. Up until this point, we’ve known the Easterlings as members of a faceless evil “other”, the “evil men” who are supporting Sauron and so much be stopped. But in the midst of very real suffering, he ponders this man. He had a family, and people who loved him. He didn’t think of what he was doing as evil. He had accepted the call to raise arms, just as the brave Gondorians on the western side had done.

I can’t watch this scene without thinking of Tolkien’s time as a soldier at the Battle of the Somme, when he witnessed first-hand the awful waste of war. He saw bravery and sacrifice, and made those virtues in his books; but he avoids glorifying killing and battle. After the victory of the Battle of Morannon and the destruction of the Ring, Aragorn focuses on rebuilding, and creates a stable peace that endures beyond the end of his reign.

That’s the endgame. Not total victory and raising your side to supremacy, but removing the essential threat facing you, and then using the gifts of wisdom and diplomacy to raise everyone around you. That’s the moral universe that Tolkien created, and it’s one that I love inhabiting.

Oh, That's Pretty! Volume 26: Yup, It's Still Pretty

I spent a very pleasant couple of weeks participating in activities for the Spring Festival for Lord of the Rings Online. Along the way, I've gained newfound appreciation for the unique pleasures of this game and my own evolving preferences for gameplay.

The festival lasts for a limited amount of real-world time, during which the game world offers a variety of fun activities and some rewards that otherwise aren't available. It exists in an interesting sort of parallel to existing game systems: you still gain XP as normal for completing quests, and I probably gained levels as quickly by celebrating as I would have through normal questing. But instead of getting level-appropriate gear and item rewards, you receive Spring Leaves or other special tokens which, in turn, can be redeemed for cosmetic clothing, household furnishings, steeds, and other objects which aren't swords. Not to mention that you can attend dance lessons and learn how to dance like a hobbit, like a dwarf, like an elf, or one of those silly humans.

I quickly got into the spirit of things and began spending all of my in-game time pursuing these activities. While in these social areas, I took advantage of the game's fantastic cosmetic outfit system, putting on something appropriately festive and spring-y. However, it began to bug me that Taharien was still visibly dragging around a club and a wooden shield: very useful items in the Lone-Lands, far less crucial when running through hedge-mazes. So I moved those items into my inventory, figuring that I could easily re-equip them when needed.

I think that might be the single most representative example of my time with the spring festival: I didn't even have a weapon equipped for well over a week, and didn't miss it at all. Instead of killing monsters, I was racing horses, balancing on wooden beams while blind drunk, picking flowers, stomping on shrews with giant boots, going on epic pub-crawls, scolding rambunctious tweens, confusing elves, delivering booze, chasing chickens, drinking some more beer, drinking cider, helping sweethearts find each other, dancing, drinking, planting flowers, and drinking. Oh, and also drinking a lot of alcohol.

Anyways! I was really impressed that, in a fantasy roleplaying game, there was so much fun stuff to do that didn't fall into the typical RPG loop of "kill monsters so you can get better equipment so you can kill more monsters." In my grumpy-old-man persona, I often point to the release of World of Warcraft as the turning point in the decline of western RPGs, particularly in how things like rogue classes are handled. In prior generations of games, RPGs were more about problem-solving, and classes like rogues could overcome obstacles through completely pacifist strategies like stealth and deception. With the streamlined combat-centric design approach of WoW, though, rogues were reinvented as nothing more than a burst DPS class, and even great franchises like Dragon Age have largely followed suit, losing the complexity and variety of different playstyles to instead focus on making the killing experience as engaging as possible.

So, it's both welcome and ironic that another MMO would give me one of the more satisfying combat-free RPG experiences of recent years, while I continue to blame the biggest MMO for taking those options away in the first place. (Not to say that there's no non-combat options in other RPGs, of course, but I can't think of the last fantasy RPG I played where I could literally go for weeks without fighting and deeply enjoy it.) I believe that a lot of the credit has to go to the source material. The Lord of the Rings obviously has fighting, both on smaller and larger scales, and the game does a great job at representing that part of the story. But when people think back on LotR, the battles aren't the only thing they remember. They remember the hobbits eating mushrooms with Farmer Maggot, meeting Goldberry by the spring, swatting away midges in the marshes, listening to Aragorn sing, wandering the halls of Rivendell, smoking pipeleaf in the ruins of Isengard, Frodo and Sam disguising themselves as orcs, and so on. Fighting isn't the point: it's something that's occasionally necessary, but isn't really glorified, and the ultimate hope of the entire quest is to put an end to Sauron's aggression. With all of that as backdrop, it makes sense (and is fantastic) that the game designers would put so much care and attention into the other activities that make up the game beyond combat. It feeds into what I love most about this game, how it makes Middle-earth feel like a place where people live, not just an orc-slaying simulator.

As I mentioned above, the spring festivities included a very wide array of drinking games. This included the pub crawl, an epic circuit through the Shire that requires stopping in at a good eight or so bars, downing a half-dozen alcoholic drinks at each one before moving on. As the “quest” progresses, your vision and movement grow impaired. Early on, the world seems to grow a bit brighter; after the first few stops, the camera begins to grow a bit unsteady, swaying off the center axis, making it a bit trickier to navigate; by the end, you’re suffering from double vision, trying to figure out which of the two floating mugs in front of you is the real one you need to click in order to down the next beer. Your character’s speech also grows slurred, and they start singing to themselves and hiccuping. It was surprisingly fun, and I spent some time thinking about why I was enjoying it so much. To put it bluntly, I’ve never gotten that drunk in my life: never had a blackout, never lost control of my movement or vision to that kind of an extent. The video game ended up being a way that I could sort of vicariously have that experience. This is the sort of thing that we often look to games for: to provide us with the experiences that we will never have in real life. I’ll never fight in a war, but I can shoot guns in Half Life; magic isn’t real, but I can cast fireballs in Dragon Age; I’ll probably never make it into space, but I can explore the galaxy in Mass Effect. And, on a more mundane level, I COULD get blackout drunk, but I probably won’t, and instead will experience a simulacrum of it in Lord of the Rings Online.

As I write this, I realize that it probably doesn’t sound like a good thing: drinking can be a real problem, and the lighthearted treatment here may downplay the risks. The worst example is probably that LOTRO has the most fun drunk-driving simulator ever. On that pub crawl, there’s a time limit involved, so if you want to complete the quest, you’ll need to hop on your horse to make it in time. But when you’re on that stretch from Stock to Frogmarsh, you’re three sheets to the wind, and your horse will be crashing into fenceposts, falling into ditches, colliding with other riders on the road. It’s all consequence-free within the game context, and very amusing from an in-universe perspective, but becomes rather horrifying once you make the connection from horses to automobiles. It becomes a relief when the next pub lies along a stable route, so you can take a “taxi” instead of driving yourself when you’re in no condition to navigate the Shire.

The pub crawl was the most memorable, but there are also quests that involve delivering speciality drinks to Inn League members, and one that involves drinking a Bullroarer concoction and then running along a plank without falling off, and my personal favorite, where you have to find the middle of the Hedge Maze, drink from a huge sinister keg, and then make it out of the maze before you black out. I failed once, and was delighted/terrified to find myself transported to frozen Forochel. And of course there are plenty of non-drinking games, most of which involve spring themes of planting and growth.

As a side bar, going through this festival has given me a better understanding of and appreciation for Fallen London’s own seasonal events. I’ve greatly enjoyed participating in Hallowmas confessions and Feast of the Exceptional Rose liaisons and Christmas lacre-shoveling. I’d kind of thought of those as being their own idiosyncratic things, but I now see how they fit into a larger tradition of time-limited events in persistent-world multiplayer games. (The two other MMOs that I spent any appreciable time in, Ultima Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic, were early enough that they didn’t have fully-evolved seasons, whereas LOTRO has had eight years to build up its traditions.) Of course, Fallen London isn’t an MMO, but these events do provide a similar opportunity to shake things up and interact socially with other players, as well as a chance to break up whatever routine your character is currently engaged in (leveling up, buying an Overgoat, gaining Notability, etc.) and do something that can be enjoyed at all stages of a player’s career.

Anyways. The spring festival is over. Oh! And the Steam Summer Sale is over too, I just realized I forgot to mention that. I’d kept my eye open and grabbed some good sales on the Quad Pack, Helm’s Deep Premium Edition and Steely Dawn. Those unlock most of the game for me, and leave me with a tidy sum of Turbine Points for grabbing the remaining quest packs I need along with some cosmetic/quality-of-life enhancements. Story-wise, I’ve completed the Lone-Lands and am now traveling through Evendim, along the shores of the beautiful Lake Annúminas. That should get its own blog post at some point - LOTRO continues to open up Tolkien’s world in ever-more beautiful ways.

Shifting from questing to celebrating and back to questing again, I’m finding that playing LOTRO is one of the most relaxing experiences that I’ve had. I’m surprised that I’m responding to it so positively, because “relaxing” isn’t something I typically look for in a game. I tend to play games because I want to be challenged, or I want new experiences. I’ve often looked down upon people who play “casual” games that seem to require little effort. After these last few weeks, though, I can totally understand the appeal. It feels so pleasant to log in, inhabit my character, and spend time just immersing myself in the calm beauty of Middle-earth. Yes, there's fighting, but there's also dancing and singing and drinking and sightseeing and wandering. Not all who wander are lost, and I feel like I've found the place I've been searching for since I was a little boy.

Edit: I forgot the pictures! Entirely too many are available in my latest photo album.

Fashionably Late

“Lord of the Rings Online” used to be called “Shadows of Angmar”. I kind of think that they should rename the game again, this time to “Oh, That’s Pretty!”, since that’s what I keep on saying while playing it.

Not a whole lot new to report. The game is still gorgeous. I’ve traveled through Ered Luin, briefly through the Shire, and spent a pleasant long stay in Bree-land, the Old Forest, the Barrow-Downs, and surrounding areas. I’m currently working with the Eglain in the Lone-lands, including some great adventures around Weathertop. Each new area of the game yields stunning new vistas, and even old areas look astonishing when viewed again at different times of day and in different weather.

I think that I’m closing in on the end of the easily freely playable portion. I’m still having a lot of fun, so I’ll probably pay a bit of money to keep on going. I found what looks like a good guide for getting content efficiently; with the Steam summer sale starting soon, I should have a good chance at grabbing the Quad Pack, and around that time I’ll probably pay for a month of VIP, which should get my main (so far only) character pretty much ready for Moria.

One thing I’ve been struck by, though, is just how differently I approach seemingly mundane matters in video games compared to in real life. The one I’m thinking of at the moment is fashion. In reality, my clothing mission is simple: I want to spend the absolute minimum amount of time, money, and brain cells in order to meet the minimum level of social approval. If I spent less than $20 and nobody’s staring at me, I consider it a rousing success.

In games, though… wow! I’m absolutely willing to spend HOURS doing research, poring over different looks, scanning online fashion guides, looking at in-game mannequins and staring enviously at NPCs with bespoke outfits. I’ll gladly spend in-game money that could be spent on healing potions and swords, instead grabbing a cloak that comes in the perfect shade of midnight blue. Or, instead of slaying dragons, will patiently slaughter the entire population of Nugs in the Hinterlands so I can craft a breastplate with brilliant white fur trim.

Anyways. I’m at a complete loss to explain the discrepancy, or even why in-game clothing ever became interesting to me; it isn’t as if I was following the example of another player or something. And, while I’m currently thinking of this in the context of LotRO, it definitely isn’t the result of wanting to be perceived a certain way by other human players: I’m at least as conscientious about fictional avatar looks in single-player RPGs like Dragon Age and Fallout as I am in [my rare forays into] MMOs.

I noticed a similar tendency back when I was working on Shadowrun Returns campaigns, specifically around interior decoration. As anyone who has visited my place knows, my “style” can best be described as Spartan. I’m perfectly happy living for years with nothing on my walls, no real decorations, and have just automatically kept on using the same pieces of furniture I’ve had since graduation since they work perfectly fine and I don’t want to expend any mental energy thinking of alternatives.

As soon as I start creating a virtual world, though, an entirely new personality takes residence in my head, and this personality has OPINIONS! About AESTHETICS! “Oh, no, no… Kali’s style is very sleek and modernistic, so her office needs to focus on neutral colors and glossy surfaces. That antique wooden desk looks fantastic, but it clashes horribly with her artwork. Let’s give that to Norton, it fits his warmth and eclecticism. Hrm, but the feng shui of this break room is way off. We’re channeling all of the energy into that dark corner, where nobody has a reason to go. Let’s examine A Pattern Language and see if we can find a solution… ah! Yes, let’s put a window in there, and lounge seating, while keeping the refrigerator and food preparation areas on the western side. That way people traveling through the office can quickly grab a snack without bumping into anyone, while those who want to spend some time eating lunch can do so in quiet and comfort. Oh, and the player’s probably running low on health after shooting their way through the four security turrets outside, so I should put two medium healthkits on the north wall. Hm… on second thought, the crimson of the healthkits clashes with the scarlet of the security alarm panels. Maybe I should put them over by the black dragon sigil? Ah, what a striking contrast!”

I don’t have a thesis or anything. It’s just another weird thing about myself that I don’t understand.

Oh! More photos in my album here. There's a bit of light narrative in there about my character's quest, but frankly, I haven't really encountered anything yet within LOTRO that would qualify as a "spoiler", particularly not for anyone who has read the books or even seen the movies. It's very much about the atmosphere and not so much about the plot.

Fellows

As I briefly noted earlier, I've started casually playing through The Lord of the Rings Online and found it a surprisingly relaxing, fun experience. Not too much to report, but I figured I'd share a couple of observations.

Things I like:

• Fantastic sense of place. It feels like you're "really" in Middle-earth.
• Rather good writing. There's only so much you can do when your game design requires you to have thousands of quests, leading to endless variations on "Kill 10 Crebain!" and "Collect 20 wild mushrooms!", but they're presented in a way that contributes to the overall narrative ("The enemy has sent birds to spy on the path taken by Frodo!") and setting ("With the threat of war in the south, we need to make sure Bree has enough food stockpiled to survive the disruption of trade and farming!"), and the writing itself is solid... not too goofy, not too dark, nicely congruent with the feel of Tolkien's voice.
• Terrific customization options. It probably says a lot that, thus far, the time I've most been tempted to spend money on the game was to buy a particularly pretty cloak (sky-blue with Telperion woven in silver threads on the back). And I love how you can present yourself with one outfit while gaining the gameplay benefits of another.
• Wonderful music. It's thematically rich and varied, catching my interest and never outstaying its welcome. Best of all, it seems to be tied to your current region, so I expect I'll continue to hear new music throughout the course of the game.
• Well-sized content. I imagine this will change as I progress, but at this point, I feel like I can make good use of whatever time I feel like spending in the game: just a few local quests if I'm hopping on for a quick half-hour before bed, or an entire chain of events and instances if I have a couple of hours to play on the weekend.
• The community seems good. I dropped off the global chat channel so I don't hear a whole lot, but people seem well-behaved and generally friendly. Since arriving in Bree I've also seen a lot of fun-looking roleplaying events around the Prancing Pony: dance parties, plays, in-character bantering, and other fun activities. (I'm playing on the Landroval server, I imagine this can vary a lot from one server to another.)
• The integration with the canonical story is surprisingly well-done. I was kind of dreading meeting Aragorn and Gandalf and other major characters, but so far it has blended in quite well, both in terms of the books' timeline and the representation of the characters.

Things I'm a bit indifferent to:

• The economy seems out of whack. I think it's a by-product of them trying to hurry new players through areas where they used to spend a lot of time, but it feels really weird that I earn, say, 80 copper pieces for finishing a quest, and 400 silver pieces for opening a Hobbit gift. Thanks to the rapid progression in RPGs, though, it's not that big of a factor... I'll quickly outlevel any new equipment anyways, so the only thing I'm expecting to spend any money on soon is housing and cosmetic outfits.
• Combat is... fine. I dunno. I hit three keys and every enemy dies before it reaches me. Again, this is probably due to rebalancing, and I'm sure it gets tougher at higher levels; hopefully it also gets more interesting, because at the moment, there's no reason for me to use 80% of my skills.
• Crafting. Right now, the main issue is just that you outlevel your gear so quickly that there's really no reason to spend time and effort making new items. I imagine it becomes more useful once your progress curve slows. They made an interesting design choice that requires cooperation across multiple professions in order to craft most items (e.g., if you're a weaponsmith, you'll need materials from a metalworker); if I get into this, I imagine that I'll need to hit up the auction house semi-regularly in order to make the stuff I want.
• Voice acting is really minimal. It reminds me a lot of the Baldur's Gate era: you'll get a short voiced phrase that accompanies two paragraphs of written text. It isn't bad, as such, but that sort of in-between state feels weird these days; I'm much more used to games either going full-text and letting your imagination color them in, or fully voicing them for maximum impact.

Things I dislike:

• The sheer proliferation of currencies is absurd. Three types of specie (copper, silver, gold), mithril coins, turbine points, various types of marks, medallions, tokens, barter items, badges, and more. I hate it. Each merchant only accepts a particular type of currency, and I have no idea how I'm supposed to earn most of them, or what I can do with some of the ones I have.
• It's to be expected in a free-to-play game, but it's aggravating to see the developers intentionally cripple aspects of the game to make it painful for people who haven't spent money. The most obvious is the limit on currency (2 gold coins), which leads to a UI nag every time you loot any money or sell an item. I vastly prefer Failbetter's F2P philosophy, which is essentially "Provide a great and complete experience to all players, and offer to sell more and newer experiences to players who want more."
• And, given that there is a store, it's bafflingly hard to use. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to get into the store from the lotro.com website, only to finally realize that it's impossible. You can only browse and purchase from the in-game browser, which has an awful, janky, ugly interface. All I want to do is browse through it on my desktop browser, where I can actually read about stuff and compare items and complete purchases.
• Overall model and texture quality is rather low. It's mostly a factor of how old the game is, and I'm amazed that the environment itself holds up so well.
• This is a rather unfair complaint, but I'm a bit bored by the lack of choice in quests. I've been trying to instead focus on the choices available to you as a character: which quests to accept or decline, where to go, how to spend your time. Still, my time with Star Wars: The Old Republic spoiled me for having interesting, engaging, branching storylines in my massively multiplayer roleplaying game, and it's increasingly hard for RPGs to keep my interest without offering a similar degree of agency over how the plot develops.

As you will not be shocked to learn, I've been taking some screenshots of my experiences and assembled them into an album. It's pretty interesting to look through... a mixture of gorgeous settings and badly dated graphics. 

We'll see where things go from here. I'm up to level 19, pretty significantly overleveled for the content I'm currently doing in Bree; as with currency, it feels like Turbine has shifted the XP curve to hurry people along to later content, but that does mean that if you try to actually do everything in the game, you end up getting no meaningful rewards from the quests. Anyways, I'll wrap up the stuff in the Old Forest and Barrow Downs, along with any other Ranger business, then head on into the Lone Lands. I'm on a trajectory for reaching level 30 before terribly much longer, at which point I'll make the call whether to start spending money on the game or not. So far, the pleasures of adventuring in Middle-earth have outweighed the pains of playing a somewhat dated free-to-play game, so I won't be shocked if I stick a quarter into the machine to keep playing a while longer.