I’ve been deliberately avoiding my Captain since I returned to the Lord of the Rings — she’s so much higher level than anyone else I know who plays — 35 to everyone else’s 13-23 — that it just seemed wrong to not play a lower level character while everyone catches up.
But heck, everyone in my circle of gaming companions is staggering under as large a gameload as I am (and why is that?) so — hey, look, I have a character who isn’t looking forward to dreary months soloing in Lone Lands.
Nope, I have one who I logged off after a dreary few days soloing in North Downs, and didn’t play again for two years. My Captain!
North Downs has changed a little since the last time I was there. For one thing, Esteldin has moved from the top of the map to somewhere near its center (it is BARELY possible I might have misremembered where it was, but no — my perfect memory cannot be mistaken). So, all those people I confidently guided to Esteldin by saying top-middle of the map — sorry, and I hope the Dourhands and spiders weren’t too much trouble for you. Since I, of course, knew where the secret Ranger stronghold was (so secret that there was no little banner flag for it on my map), I must have been leading you to certain doom — on purpose.
You’re welcome!
Thanks to the experience boost I received that punted me from level 33 to 35 on my first kill, I was suddenly able to do a bunch of the quests I couldn’t find groups for way back when, like wiping out the wild aurochs, just the latest in the chain of quests from the nature-cherishing Rangers that instruct me to kill everything that slithers, crawls, flies, runs, or breathes on the Downs. These Rangers would welcome Saruman, I’m sure. Strip mine the land? Kill all living creatures? Turn the area into a barren wasteland devoid of life! Yes, please!
Apparently the Ranger master plan was to kill all the game in the area so the Orcs and Goblins would be forced to eat the people of Trestlebridge instead.
The senseless slaughter and casual evil of the Rangers was brought home to me in a really fierce way when I was asked by the noble Rangers to not only slaughter some ice wurms and drakes, and to crush their eggs, but to actually return there and find the mother of them all and snuff her out like Gandalf’s least-favorite smoking pipe.
I play MMOs, but there is a level below which even I will not go. Rangers, your mindless, indiscriminate evil has driven me away. Sent me off — to Evendim.
And more on that fateful trip — another time.
WTB another song with Captain in the title so I don’t have to keep using O Captain, My Captain.
Farewell Captain by Drink Up Buttercup
Captain Love by Mock Orange
Say Captain Say Wot by Captain Jack
The Captain of Her Heart by Kurt Maloo
I’m Your Captain/Closer to Home by Grand Funk Railroad
Ride Captain Ride by Blues Image — saving this for when I can afford a horse
Captain Indecisive by Trevor Peacock
Calling Sky Captain from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow — am I the only one who liked that movie?
Hooray for Captain Spaulding! by the Marx Brothers — can’t believe I haven’t used that one yet.
Fantastic post as always, made me LOL. And… wow yes good songs. XD Uh ok!
#!/usr/bin/perl
$string =~ s/Estendil/Esteldin/g;
my $string = “Evendrim”;
$string =~ s/r//g;
# end
😛 Couldn’t help myself, it was just so noticeable that LOTRO isn’t your main game/first love/anything you care about which is typical when people don’t even bother to spell the names. I do the same thing in games I don’t have any real interest or investment in.
Well, I didn’t misspell them on purpose :/ It’s just all made up names anyway. And I don’t even have a main game at the moment, maybe it will be LotRO? I dunno!
And seriously — perl? Why not just use SED?
I’d never heard of SED before? I don’t use Linux as much and because I used to work on some particular packages for a distro I had to learn Perl a few years back. It’s also been a few years since I’ve used it…
sed — streaming editor was more of a Unix thing, because if you couldn’t make all the edits you need with one mega regular expression and a pipe, then it wasn’t worth doing.
Anyway, I’m not the greatest at sed, but …
sed -e {s/Estendil/Esteldin/} -e {s/Evendrim/Evendim/}
would have done it. I’m positive it could be done in half the characters.
Rumour has it there is a festival going on in Lotro with an honest to goodness maze. I have never been particularly impressed by turbines festival’s up to now but a maze sounds interesting. I am tempted to resub just for a look.
yup, there’s a maze, and several repeatable quests to explore through it. Each time you complete a quest, you get a leaf. Get enough leaves and you can buy stuff at their vendor.
We have to kill the living creatures because we killed too many of their natural predators. You know like the wargs and lizards a few hundred yards to the north. They are too lazy to walk south, thus natural selection will eliminate them too, er, ranger selection.
A fun fact I just learned: one of the reasons the europeans found such nice oak forests here was the Indians periodically burned the forests, killing underbrush and killing maple trees. We didn’t even know that until we started conservation efforts and wondered why suddenly the oaks were dying out in Vermont when we had no human intervention. Turns out our idea of nature was not very natural.
Okay, but hear me out. We have an example in the Hobbit of Beorn, who could shift into bear-shape and protected bears. So, ESPECIALLY on the way from the Shire to the Misty Mountains, bears should be more or less sacrosanct, right? And those annoying birds — those birds are annoying because Saruman has convinced Radagast the Brown to use them to keep tabs on the Fellowship, but they aren’t inherently evil. We meet Radagast in Book 3, isn’t it? Why doesn’t someone ask him to call off the APB on the Free Peoples?
And we don’t just kill one mean old bear who is terrorizing the countryside. We kill them by the hundreds and thousands for their hides so we can craft outfits. Actually, we kill them by the hundreds and thousands so we can craft stuff nobody will use because we need to make hundreds and thousands of things before we can make something useful.
LotRO loves its lore, but they put this MMO wrapper around it that distorts it beyond recognition. Only in battles do you see people wantonly killing, and then it’s because they themselves were attacked.
You are forgetting the rangers use honey as currency, so the bears naturally must be culled or they will wipe out the monetary supply and destroy the credit ratings of rangers everywhere. on the other hand inflation has ravaged the dunedain economy.
yeah to your point that’s why I dont’ really play anymore. I like it to walk around and look at stuff, and see the places I’ve read about, kind of like travelling in real life. I used to have a house there. But the rest of the grindfest – the actual game part – is just like everything else. I think I solo’d thousands of elite turtles (on my guardian that can solo elites) It’s nice though. I guess “nice” is not a huge compliment 🙂