Merry Christmas!

Public Service Announcement: When collecting eggs for the Yulefest, beware of foxes in the henhouse.

While I’m enjoying the holiday traditions and time with my family, as well as a beautifully white Christmas and the fact that I *can*, after all, get my netbook to connect to the internet from my aunt’s house where we gather for Christmas, I am wishing for the many friends I have made here both in the game and on the blogs to have a blessed Christmas as well and take joy in the celebration of the Incarnation! What greater gift could there be? But I am also liking this quote of Tolkien’s:

“The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the *Incarnation* — This story begins and ends in joy.”

Courtesy of Tolkien’s Twitter feed. Merry Christmas everyone! May your Christmas also be full of the joy of Easter!

Golden Summer

Early in Lennidhren’s career and character development, I determined that gold must be her color. From the orangeish-gold Frayed Elven Robes that she started out with as a level 1 lore-master to the Elegant Dress dyed gold that she now wears, it suits her well and goes nicely with her almost-golden shade of hair. But her attachment to the color is not driven by vanity, as a matter of fact: She is, after all, an Elf of Lorien – the Golden Wood. So she surrounds herself with the color that reminds her most of home.

And that is why, having just this morning passed her driving riding test at Hengstacer’s Farm and been granted the right to buy a horse of her own, she CANNOT WAIT to acquire the latest model, the Pale Golden Summer Steed.

Someone was riding this horse of that breed at the Taste of Hobbiton race today, and Lennidhren was quite impressed. So now she’s been fishing all over Middle-earth to save up tokens for her horse, and all that’s left to do is to win the tricky little race and pick up a token for the horse. So far I’ve tried once at each race course and managed to fall in the mud every time. Argh. I did manage to complete the race on Linett in the Spring festival, so I know I can do it…just hope it doesn’t take too many more tries!

Because Linett is going to need that horse too. And it may not stop there. Vanita and Alduine know how to ride a horse too…

But once that goal is out of the way, there are so many other lovely things to collect from this festival! Linett has been eying the hammock and wicker chair, and most of all, the new cosmetics! The dress and tunic are both just gorgeous. Wonder how they would look dyed gold for Lennidhren?

More Spring Riders! Epic Lottos and Epic Flashbacks

Apparently the Valar of spring festivals loves Vanita and Linett just as much as Alduine, for several Springfest lotteries later…they too are riding cute neon-green-blanketed Springfest mounts! That makes one for each of my characters who are high enough level to ride it, so I’m done entering that lottery now. I highly recommend trying it if you don’t already have last year’s spring mount!

Spring Rider

Alduine must be high in the favors of whatever Valar has charge of spring festivals, for the Lottery gods presented her with a new Springfest mount today!

Yay, free horse! I was hoping it was the new spring design, but this one’s pretty too.

MMX

Happy New Year to all! Here’s to another year full of adventure, exploration, and the beauty of Middle Earth!

Also full of fireworks, if the lotteries won by my characters mean anything. They ran every other hour, it seems, and I entered quite a few of them once I noticed that, so nearly all my characters have won at least one multicolored set of fireworks! They made merry with the winnings…

Yeah, I have an abundance of alts…

Meanwhile, back in Thorin’s Hall, Mireleth continued to do well in the quest for the Glorious Beer.

Isn’t it a glorious looking arena?

She finally lost a round by being flung out of bounds before she could grab the coveted drink, but still managed to collect enough of it that she is now known as “Bruised, Battered and Contused” for her rough-and-ready efforts.

Worn out from a long day of brawling for the glorious beer

She also discovered that one way to lose the beer brawl is when no one else shows up to fight for it. You can’t win that quest unless you can smack your fellow players around three times. If you’re the only one in the arena, grabbing the beer is easy but you can’t finish the quest. Alas!

Where is everybody? Come play with me!

Proceeds from Mireleth’s (and Alduine’s) festive competitions have gone toward a set of the classy cosmetic gear, which they shall share, because it was expensive (and is not bind on acquire).

I love that red!

She and Alduine have also been stocking up on the Yule gift boxes and those kind Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits and Men gifted them with a few lovely items to give Linett’s home at 3 Haven Way a more festive look.

A Yule wreath and candle

Yule trees – two of ‘em – collected in past festivals

We decorated this wing of the house Hobbit-style with garlands and bows; a mountainous snow globe from Thorin’s Hall takes center stage and a brightly wrapped present is waiting to be opened

Alduine is eager to open this present!

The table is spread with a holiday feast

Garlands in the Elven style deck this wing of the house, and if I had a third wing, it’d be decked in the Dwarven style…

Ah, the infamous Glorious Beer…the Dwarf Gisli sent home a souvenir stein with Mireleth.

Mireleth and the other alts have not been entirely idle during the festival season. Mireleth advanced to level 21 in the past few days and acquired a cute little horse.

Not the horse, sorry. I failed to get a picture of that.

She also learned to manage heavy armor, so my armoursmith Trumpkin made her some of the best.

On her, though, it doesn’t actually look that heavy!

But she still found time to learn a few new dances at the festival…

Dancing like a Woman

Some of my other newer alts advanced a few levels due to winning the fireworks lotteries, particularly those whom I’d created for whatever reason but not yet gotten out of the introduction instance. They had to finish the instance to have access to a mailbox and collect the fireworks, so…now I am tired of the starter instances for a while. But Cindella and Corella et alii are no longer stuck in them.

So, on to another year full of promise! In fact, a whole new decade. Make the most of it, whether in game or in life. Bonne Année, Annum Novum Faustum Feliciter, and however one says “Happy New Year” in Sindarin!

Mireleth, Beer-Champion

Today it’s Mireleth’s turn to move beyond her level 13 rank, but she got distracted by the Yule festivities. She collected berries and snow and then wandered into the Festival Arena, where it turned out that my Elf Champion is a champion at getting to the Glorious Beer first! Unexpected, since I never managed to complete a bar fight on Alduine, who always got flung out of bounds too quickly. Mireleth claimed the trophy on her very first try and hasn’t lost a fight since! After five rounds she’d made Senior Member with the Inn League…and she’s never even done the pub crawl quest, this being the first festival she’s participated in! After seven rounds she decided to get down to work and return to the War against the Shadow. From level 13 she advanced to level 16 and moved on from Ered Luin to Bree, learning dances from Elves, Hobbits, and Dwarves along the way. (She also filled in her Shire map by racing to all its famous pubs…figured since she was already an Inn League Senior Member after the brawls in Thorin’s Hall, might as well go ahead and actually be initiated into the Inn League!)

I do wonder what Strider thought when this Elf with thoroughly muddled wits showed up to speak with him…

Likewise, the mayor of Bree was rather more welcoming than one would expect while she was so muddled.

Fortunately, she did wait to sober up before speaking with a dwarf called Ultan Foebane about her Champion training!

He sent her to deal with three egregious foes…that would sort of make Mireleth the Foe-Bane instead of the dwarf, wouldn’t it?…of which she has so far dispatched one. Two more to go next time Mireleth comes out to play!

Open for Business in the Barrow Downs

I’ve been working on my alts’ crafting this week, which is probably why I haven’t posted for a few days. There are just not that many ways to make “Smelted ore. Tanned hides. Spent hours researching which weapons to craft for which alt” sound any more interesting or less repetitive.

Anyway, today I logged on to Vanita to have her smelt some ore for Alduine’s weaponcrafting, and decided that since she was just a smidgen away from leveling I should go ahead and turn in some quests or kill something to get her to level 23. She actually had three or four quests ready to turn in and had just been consigned to crafting-alt status for so long…there they sat, just waiting. So I did that, and one of them was to turn in to Tobold what’s-his-name, who used to be in the Scholar’s Stair in Bree but now camps out in the Barrow-downs, which suggests he might be getting a little senile because who would really prefer camping out there to a nice comfy library in Bree? Anyway, while turning that in, Vanita picked up a few of the other quests from the Barrow-downs hubs, including the repeatable bounties for crafting. She got to go chop down some really mean and scruffy-looking maple trees south of the Barrows, as well as terrorizing the local wildlife in the form of bears, crawlers, barghests, rats, and wights. (It was also a handy spot for collecting more ore for Alduine, yay Vanita the multitasker!) I noticed a welcome change in the quest hubs of the Barrow-downs: They each now have a Traveling Vendor! It is no longer necessary to run back to Bree to empty your bags before you can actually turn in those crafting bounty quests (since they give you four or more different rewards for each quest…can’t do it after collecting all the vendor trash from the things you killed for the quest)! The last time I was in the Barrow-downs was with Arethryth before Siege of Mirkwood came out, so presumably the vendors were instated then or in the patches since. I am so so glad to see them there.

Alduine has been Yulefesting a bit too, in between crafting more weapons than she or any of my alts have any use for (nor does anyone on the Auction Hall, except she did sell a few throwing axes there, yay). She gathered snow and fir branches and mistletoe and all that, and attempted to grab some Glorious Beer with, alas, not a bit of success. Unless she was aiming for moonwalking practice, because something is definitely fishy about the gravity in that dwarven arena.

Summerfest, Summerfest! (And other Book 8 fun)

Two of my girls have a new title!

So nice to enjoy the brief Sunshine, and to carry its legacy back with them into battles in the dark places of the world…(Hey, it’d be nice if having the Sunshine title entitled you to brighter lighting in Moria too, wouldn’t it?)

Alduine has been having a wonderful time at the Summer Festival this year. First she helped stock the Bywater pond with fish from the far corners of the map (the first fishing she’s done!). Along the way she assisted some scatterbrained individuals with finding various items they had misplaced, and restrained herself from suggesting that in future they keep said items attached to their person with one of those parent-to-child leashes…since they do seem to lose them again every year…

She bet on numerous races of overstuffed Hobbits and drunken Dwarves, most of which ended, like the following videos, with the contestant she supported coming in well behind the winner…

Mudric loses the Taste of Hobbiton race | Lar loses the Dwarf Race

In all the races she watched, every time her favorite lost (and Linett has only won one of them so far)…but they were fun every time, all the same! Those Dwarves and Hobbits in the races are hilarious, so much attitude!

In between races Alduine did a lot – A. LOT. – of fishing, because with her record for not winning the race bets, that was the best way to earn a lot – A. LOT. – of summerfest tokens, namely 56 of them, the amount necessary to upgrade her blonde sorrel horse to a beautiful new festival horse!

Which shall be named Freckle.

In celebration, Alduine let off some fireworks:

She watched others set off fireworks, too, quite frequently, especially while waiting around for races to start!

Then there were dance classes. Alduine made it around to all four festival grounds to learn the dances of every kindred. Actually she already knew how to dance Elf-style; she learned that at the last festival…so this summer just called for a few more advanced classes. She’s thinking of trying out for a chorus line or something, so here she shows off her newfound dancing abilities:

Dwarf Dance 1 | Dwarf Dance 2 | Hobbit Dance 1 | Hobbit Dance 2 | Man Dance 1 | Man Dance 2

She also discovered why you should not dance while holding a fishing rod. It becomes airborne!

Linett’s main goal at the festival, since she is content with her wintry steed, is apparel. Something about her being a Tailor… So she has a flashy new cloak, and will continue fishing to earn a pretty new sunhat that she can tuck her hair up into for these sultry summer days.

Linett has spent some time on more “serious” pursuits than festival fun and wardrobe upgrades, however. First thing she did was to reorganize packs, vaults, and housing chests with the new bigger stacks of food and crafting items, as well as exchange some old materials for the new, much more logical ones, and thus free up some pack space, hallelujah! (Such a pack rat. It’s just dreadful.)

Then she went to Lothlorien, where this gorgeous view of the Celebrant just south of Echad Andestel distracted her for a moment before she could go on to find Haldir. That led to revisiting ol’ Mazog…

But it didn’t lead much farther into Book 8 quests than that, because once Mazog was safe in custody again, soon after that Linett got a note in the mail about the summer festival and dropped everything else to go play. She watched some races, caught some fish, and also wondered how this fellow managed not to fall over backwards:

(He ran up on his horse and dismounted into that strange angle, so I think it had something to do with the horse climbing the steps…but weird!)

Now, Linett’s heading back to the docks to fish up some more tokens and fetch that sunhat…and maybe a banner or flowerbox for the house as well! Vanita might see about getting a sunhat as well, and Arethryth is eyeing Alduine’s new horse….Then Trumpkin and the other younguns must have a look at the newly restructured Breeland quests! I guess it’s safe to say I’m enjoying Book 8 so far…

Yuletide

Linett says:

Hobbit customs are so peculiar. As I was passing through the Shire, I was able to do some favors for the quartermaster in charge of Hobbiton’s Yule festival, for which he thanked me with an early Yule gift. To my surprise,this festive and gaily beribboned box opened to reveal…a potato! Now, potatoes are a fine thing, but what an odd thing to receive as a gift. I have seen many rare and beautiful things, and many more inexplicable and useless, yet still somehow cheerful, things in the collection of the Mathom Society in Michel Delving, but I am sure I have never seen a humble potato among them.

I shall pass this spud on to my halfling friend Vanita, I think. Maybe she’ll know what to make of it. At the least, she’s a much better cook than I, and she might make of it a nice shepherd’s pie. Mmm, pie!