This is a guest post by Moor­mur of LOTRO­Cast, an excel­lent blog and pod­cast. My apolo­gies to him for tak­ing so long to post it! Enjoy.

I’ve been think­ing lately about the story of Lord of the Rings. Specif­i­cally, I have been think­ing back on an inter­view I did for LOTRO­Cast: The Lord of the Rings Online Pod­cast a few months ago with Berephon, A.K.A. Jonathan Rud­der, a mem­ber of the LOTRO team over at Tur­bine. You can find a link to that story here: http://​lotro​cast​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​0​9​/​0​5​/​e​p​i​s​o​d​e​-​0​0​8​-​d​e​v​-​i​n​t​e​r​v​i​e​w​-​b​e​r​e​p​h​o​n​.​h​tml. Rud­der is many things; Copy Edi­tor, Con­tent Designer, and res­i­dent lore–mas­ter for the game Lord of the Rings Online. We chat­ted for a good hour on the topic of story. Since Tur­bine is devel­op­ing a video game based on the works, nat­u­rally there will be some changes and alter­ations made to the details of the story to make room for game­play mechan­ics and ideas. While there are exam­ples of times when Tur­bine has strayed from the lore path (we don’t really need to look too far to think of a few), there are exam­ples in Lord of the Rings Online where Tur­bine has taken steps to pre­serve the story as much as pos­si­ble. The pur­pose of my inter­view was to dis­cuss with Mr. Rud­der the ins and outs of work­ing with a story as aus­tere as The Lord of the Rings, and, more specif­i­cally, to dis­cuss the company’s offi­cial stance on changes and alter­ations to the orig­i­nal work to cre­ate a syn­ergy between the lore of LOTR and the needs of LOTRO.

Before the inter­view, I wanted to find out a bit more about Rud­der. Infor­ma­tion was a lit­tle hard to come by, but I was able to piece together some bits of infor­ma­tion to paint a pic­ture of Rud­der. He fills sev­eral jobs at Tur­bine. His main role (and the rea­son he was hired in the first place) is that of the copy edi­tor for the game. Above all, he is respon­si­ble to make sure that every­thing that goes into the game in terms of text is appro­pri­ate to the envi­ron­ment of the game and that there are no gram­mat­i­cal errors. When new regions are being planned, he is one of the pri­mary resources for infor­ma­tion on what exists in the world of Middle-Earth. He is ref­er­enced to see what sorts of envi­ron­ments (geo­log­i­cal, weather, geo­graph­i­cal, etc.) exist in the lore of LOTR that Tur­bine can tap into to cre­ate new lands. He has stud­ied the lin­guis­tic pat­terns of the cul­tures of Middle-Earth. He has also done research into J.R.R. Tolkien’s meth­ods for cre­at­ing the lan­guages and cul­tures for the story so that he can work on fill­ing in the blanks. Tolkien may have been metic­u­lous with the orig­i­nal sto­ries, but there are plenty of holes that need to be plugged when you are mak­ing a game that allows play­ers to roam freely over lands that may only have been briefly men­tioned in the orig­i­nal works.

Rud­der is a ‘guardian’ of the orig­i­nal story, mak­ing sure that even if Tur­bine may stray from the strict para­me­ters set by the lore of LOTR, the game stays true to the spirit of the books. He has been a life­long lover of Lord of the Rings…he says he reads the books at least two or three times a year. He is a pub­lished author with four books in stores and another in the works. He has even appeared for book sign­ings in some stores around the Boston area. They are ‘high fan­tasy,’ as he put it, and while the sto­ries are hardly rip-offs of Tolkien’s fan­tasy sto­ries, the Lord of the Rings were the books that set Rud­der down the path to writ­ing the books. More recently, at Tur­bine, Rud­der has wanted to expand his hori­zons and taken on the job of con­tent designer in addi­tion to his copy work. Since he works solo, he is given fairly free reins to do pro­pose any ideas he wants. He uses this job to look for a small area in the game, per­haps a cor­ner of a region, that he feels is empty and hasn’t been given enough atten­tion and improve it.

The inter­view gave some inter­est­ing insight into the devel­op­ment process. One par­tic­u­lar topic sticks out in my mind. Fol­low­ing the ques­tion on ‘where does Tur­bine draw the line,’ Rud­der was talk­ing about how Tur­bine re-uses assets in the game (tex­tures and archi­tec­ture being the most com­mon) and how some­times play­ers can mis­in­ter­pret some of Turbine’s actions. He talked about how some­times the com­pany just needs to get con­tent out the door so instead of wast­ing resources on cre­at­ing whole new archi­tec­ture and tex­tures, they may re-use some of the assets from ear­lier in the game.  Play­ers will see this and think that the two regions, which may be com­pletely sep­a­rated in terms of loca­tion and his­tory, have been arbi­trar­ily con­nected by Tur­bine in a very lore–break­ing move.

Look­ing back over the inter­view, I am sat­is­fied with how the whole event tran­spired. The over­ar­ch­ing sense I took away from the inter­view is that Tur­bine, while tak­ing steps to pre­serve the fun­da­men­tals of the story, has no prob­lem tak­ing lib­er­ties to make the story fit the game as long as it is for a pur­pose. What Tur­bine is cre­at­ing is just one inter­pre­ta­tion of the Lord of the Rings. When a player enters the game, they are expe­ri­enc­ing Middle-Earth…Middle-Earth as pre­sented by the LOTRO team at Tur­bine. At the core, how­ever, the mere pres­ence of a man like Jonathan Rud­der is a sign of Turbine’s ded­i­ca­tion to the story of Lord of the Rings. Sure, changes have been made along the way, some alter­ations have taken place (some more griev­ous than oth­ers). But my inter­view with Jonathan Rud­der re-assured me that Tur­bine is fun­da­men­tally com­mit­ted to pre­serv­ing the lore of Lord of the Rings.