Jogging about Eriador

Took the Elfgirls off to the Lone-Lands. One of the things I love about LotRO is just the richness of the terrain. In LotR, we catch just glimpses, the major stopping points and places of battle and the camps where dialog occurs. Part of that is that Tolkien portrayed much of the North as desolate wasteland after the fall of Arnor, but part is just the result of any novel — you don’t see what you don’t need to see.

Here, instead, off east of Bree, we have a semi-ruined inn, the fringes of a society being slowly pushed back by incursions of goblins. We have the remains of a fortress (complete with a “Minas” name), and backstory, and a combination of both the epic and the mundane, hints of what’s happening in the big picture even as we help Joe Yokel reestablish his supply chain back go Bree.

We went to the Forsaken Inn simply to close off a quest, but it’s hard not to click on all those shiny ring contacts, and, hey, we can do these three or four things all together without any trouble, right, and that would let us do this and that, and, wait, they want us to also go back and collect …

So we visited Minas Eriol a couple of times, only getting defeated once. We’ve learned to go slow and steady, and Hunters rock in terms of being able to (usually) pick the field of combat, which is fine until the little goblin bastards repop on top of you. 

If I have a criticism of the evening, it’s the necessity to allocate time at the end of the evening to go sell, level, auction, craft, etc. That’s true in CoX, too, of course — even moreso since the auction houses opened — but it seems moreso here. That said, I am sort of working my way to a sweet spot with what I want to be bothered with, and what I don’t. (Margie’s comment, dragging herself up to bed a bit after I was up there, was that she either had to spend an hour doing all the logiistics/management stuff at the end, or spend an hour in bed thinking about what she was going to do when she got back on next).

Overall, a good time. And beginning to think, parenthetically, of the whole Kinship schtick, and to what degree I might have an interest in our characters getting involved in something a bit bigger than the two of us. There would certainly be times when it would be convenient, or a break from our (very effective and enjoyable) duoing.