Sweet berries in the sky

Some say there's a flying bush of berries that only appears on dark, rainy days, but it's just a rumour and I've never seen it. Who'd believe anything like that, anyway?



..I do feel like I'm being followed, though. Damn hobbits.

Let there be light

My goodness, I'd totally forgotten the 'torch' function (alt+f10) when it comes to taking screenshots in bad light conditions. It does look very unnatural when you're out riding in the woods at night, but indoors it's great.


I really, really NEED a reputation or festival horse. This one's so mundane.

Eye candy

A really stunning LotRO landscape'gasm, feels like a real game trailer :).

On another note, I finally remembered to enable anonymous commenting, meaning you don't have to have any fancy blogger accounts to leave a comment :). I also had to do a bit of rough editing to get the missing 'read more' tag (without it, the Helegrod post below would inflate my blog's main page with another 40+ images - a bit too heavy), but now it seems there's a 'read more' in EVERY post on this blog, even tho I have only cut one post. Gahh, in this aspect I really miss the cut function on LJ.

EDIT. Lulz. Got my first spam comment already. Let's see how this works out, if it even does.
EDIT2. Changed the 'read more' code. It's some Javascript thing now, not sure how many people actually have it blocked - if it doesn't work now, please come and complain. The advantage of the current code is that it only applies to the posts I want it to.

Them trees

I'm eternally allergic to purple magical forests. I've rolled a Night Elf in WoW a couple times (I've used at least 3 trial accounts, I think), but the starter area always makes me feel ill.


One of the things I fell in love with LotRO at first sight were the trees. After playing several MMOs where forests mostly look like sticks with a ball of green/yellow/purple cotton wool on the top, the trees in LotRO actually look very credible. Note that this comes from a former girl guide who has camped in Scandinavian coniferous forests, and thus feels completely at home in the snowy hills of virtual Ered Luin.


I also like the way distant landscape is rendered in LotRO - it looks okay even though it's not very detail-rich. Much better than AoC, where the world just ends after a certain distance.


Hm, I think I'll have to do a photo tour in Ered Luin soon, and try to capture the spots where I first got that "ooooooh" feeling back in 2007. Meanwhile, have some Lone-Land sunset.

What 24 Lore-Masters do when they're bored

This is what a raid of 24 Lore-Masters looks like. Eye-blinding whiteness. A raid of 12 LMs had tackled The Rift earlier yesterday, and I was lucky to get into the second, larger raid to Helegrod. 24 LMs, 24 pets = 48 players. This story is very image heavy, so be prepared.

Old harp?

I've got an on-off relationship with this old man. Over a year ago, when I started playing LotRO, I thought "hey I'll make this old grey guy who runs around the world, killing things with a banjo". I wasn't thinking "hey I'll make a healer because I want to help people/get into groups easily/get tells asking for rez plz", because that would have just been boring. Come on, the minstrel is a healer class that can kill things with a banjo!

He was my first proper 'main' (which didn't, of course, stop me from playing a horde of alts - more on that later), and playing the game a squishie (also known as the hard way) for the very first time really taught me a lot. Well, at least about dying. But once he hit the old level cap I just switched to leveling my alts, and when Moria launched last November I took my Lore-master to see the mines. Poor Wakey was left home to tend the garden.


Look at me, coming back to res a nearly-wiped raid!

Recently, however, I've started to bring him to Turtle raids because we always seem to lack a minstrel - and when not running with the kin it's easy to fit into a pug. And when I do raid as a minstrel I start to miss the class and especially the character. I love him and playing the class, but somehow I always tend to forget that when I go back to playing alts.


And yes, the character is called Wakefield, and no, I don't live there (or anywhere in the UK, for that matter), and no, it's not my last name either :D.

Home sweet home

I went to Goblin-Town on my hunter last week (mostly just to look around), and found this cute little goblin-home. The door is very small, maybe up to her chest at most. I just love finding these little details in games.