When our most gra­cious host, Tony, asked for help with his blog, I had no hes­i­ta­tion in offer­ing my assis­tance. Fool that he is, he accepted, and here we are.

So hello. I’m West­novote. I play on Gilrain, a Euro­pean server. I’ve been play­ing Lord of the Rings Online for just under a year now and I’m a life­time sub­scriber. I’m cer­tainly not ‘hard­core’, although I do enjoy all aspects of the game, raid­ing included. My main inter­est though, remains Tolkien and Middle-Earth. It’s the rea­son I started play­ing and it’s still the area I take most delight in. I’d like to write here about the way in which the game uses Tolkien and the way in which Tur­bine cre­ates it’s own con­tent related to the license. I’ll also blog about my gen­eral game expe­ri­ences. This fine look­ing lady to the left is my main, she’s a Cham­pion and Shield Maiden of Rohan.

I’ve never really liked the word ‘lore’ when applied to gam­ing. It seems to imply that there is some set of rules which are con­nected to the game and limit what is pos­si­ble, but are there more as a hin­drance than any­thing else. Maybe it’s the fact that ‘lore’ sounds so sim­i­lar to ‘law’. I’ve always seen the ‘lore’ in gam­ing as much more than just back­ground, more than just a palette. The ‘lore’ is the game. Or rather the game is a win­dow onto the world itself. The world is already there, we just need to dis­cover it.

Tolkien cer­tainly had this view of his sto­ries. He approached them from an archae­o­log­i­cal view­point. He wasn’t cre­at­ing, he was discovering.

Tur­bine view Tolkien’s mate­r­ial in a dif­fer­ent way to that in which most gamers view it. They are bound by the need to design a prod­uct and also to keep within legal restric­tions of which mate­r­ial they can use. They also need to make sure that when they cre­ate new mate­r­ial that this is com­pat­i­ble with the exist­ing canon. No easy task.

Indeed, Tur­bine are crit­i­cised for many of the deci­sions they do make, although in the main they tend to pick a line which pleases more than it riles.

I’m a huge Tolkien fan, and, like many oth­ers, was orig­i­nally attracted to LotRO via this route. So I have a keen inter­est in the ways in which Tolkien’s writ­ings are used in the game. Most of the time I am a very happy gamer. There are some exam­ples where I am less happy, but I choose to ignore these. The game is an MMO, it is not the books. I have to keep telling myself this at times.

I will try and write from the per­spec­tive of a Tolkien fan play­ing the game and com­ment on some of the ways in which Tur­bine has taken the source mate­r­ial and brought it to the game as well as times when the Devel­oper has cre­ated their own content.

The sin­gle biggest cre­ation to date by Tur­bine has been the idea that the realm of Angmar was re-occupied by the Enemy and the forces of Dark­ness began to move against Eri­ador. This is total inven­tion. There is no ref­er­ence what­so­ever by Tolkien to Angmar being used as a stag­ing post for an inva­sion in the War of the Ring. The idea by Tur­bine was largely forced on them. They had to start in Eri­ador, for a game which didn’t include the Shire and Riven­dell wouldn’t kin­dle any inter­est. They also knew that they couldn’t build the whole of Middle-Earth at once, nor would they want to. So they decided to start in an area of the world which was largely peace­ful. In The Lord of the Rings the main threat to Eri­ador comes from Saru­man, and he con­cen­trates his atten­tion on the Shire once he learns of Gandalf’s inter­est in the region. There is evi­dence that Wargs and pos­si­bly Orcs have moved down from the moun­tains, but they haven’t moved far West and cer­tainly not as far as the Shire or the Ered Luin. So, in order to cre­ate a suit­able envi­ron­ment for a game, Tur­bine invented a threat. An inva­sion of Orcs would have done the job, but it wouldn’t have been believ­able and wouldn’t have involved a base of evil, which a game like an MMO would require. Angmar, sit­ting just to the north of Eri­ador, was per­fect. A seat of ancient evil, left in ruin, unin­hab­ited, largely unexplored.

The idea of Sauron want­ing to invade Eri­ador is one that Tolkien had con­sid­ered. Indeed, The Hob­bit itself was largely an expe­di­tion organ­ised by Gan­dalf to nul­lify the threat to the north. Sauron him­self could not direct the effort, and the Nazgul were needed to search for the Ring, so he sent a lieu­tenant. The Lord of the Rings men­tions only one direct ser­vant of the Dark Lord other than the Ring Wraiths, the Mouth of Sauron, a seem­ingly unsuit­able Gen­eral. We are given pre­cious lit­tle infor­ma­tion of the forces of evil, save for the Orcs. Another Wraith is a plau­si­ble fig­ure to act as a ser­vant for we know that wraiths could be cre­ated using the weapons of the Nazgul. Mordirith, The Regent of Angmar, there­fore, is an entirely believ­able enemy.

So we enter Eri­ador at a time where the threat is just on the hori­zon, vis­i­ble if you look hard enough. Indeed, some had already seen the signs of the com­ing storm. Sam Gamgee and Ted Sandy­man dis­cussed these fears in The Green Dragon in The Fel­low­ship of the Ring. Tur­bine sim­ply exag­ger­ates the dan­ger and brings it closer to home, and for this I can only applaud. They have cre­ated a vision of Middle-Earth which, whilst not iden­ti­cal to the books, is a totally believ­able inter­pre­ta­tion and one which trans­lates to an MMO won­der­fully well.

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