I haven’t posted much about Lachwen lately, mostly because she’s been busy grinding her way up in levels and I haven’t had time to come up with much storywise for her. I will try to fix that soon — I’d like to post a bit about her roughly once a month starting in September, now that I’ve built up a fair collection of screenshots with her. I do know how her story starts — but I have no idea where it will go from there.

But she did have one entertaining thing happen recently. You see, Lachwen is from northern Mirkwood originally, i.e., the kingdom of Thranduil (Legolas’ father), and the elves of Mirkwood are some pretty hearty partiers. (See also Bilbo’s adventure riding the wine-barrels out of Thranduil’s halls.) Lachwen is no exception to this.

So when some dwarves invited her to toast their comrade Nykr, fallen in the depths of Moria, naturally she was happy to join in!

What she was not expecting, was that just how many friends Nykr had — and that they would all want to drink with her, one at a time. In rapid succession.

Even a hardened veteran of the Drinking Wars of Mirkwood can only take so much. The lesson learned here: be wary when offered a drink by a dwarf, or you might wake up in the crazy cat-lady of Bree’s house, mysteriously missing your pants.

-The Gneech

Originally posted to my LotRO blog.

Warning: Bad fic ahead.

Describe your character from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know them.

Toby and I were on the road from Ost Guruth to Bree; it was a risky trip, we knew, but we had a wagon full of pristine hides and we knew the Bree auction house would get us the best price. We were almost to the Forsaken Inn, when the howling of wargs chilled our blood. Over the hill a pack came swarming, some being ridden by goblins, and we ran for our lives, abandoning the cart in our panic.

We scrambled our way up a rocky cleft, goblin spears striking the cliff walls to either side of us; Toby’s short hobbit legs made it a lot harder for him, so I practically lifted him into the air and shoved him over the precipice. “Wait!” he shouted. “There’s–” but I couldn’t stop to listen, there was a warg right on top of me! I just barely had time to heave myself over the top and into the canyon beyond, kicking the hairy beast in the face to give myself the last push over.

I turned back and glanced over the edge: the wargs were not following, even though they could easily make the leap. Instead, they were circling below. I said as much to Toby, but he didn’t seem impressed.

“Uh … I don’t think our situation has improved,” he said, pointing into the ruddy brown, dusty valley. In the shadows, gleaming green eyes — in nauseating sets of eight — glistened at us. Chittering and making what almost sounded like vicious chuckling sounds, a half-dozen obscenely huge spiders were slowly but visibly closing in on us. We couldn’t go back, we couldn’t go forward.

“You and your pristine hides!” I said.

“I wanted to sell them in Ost Guruth!” Toby shot back.

The nearest spider was dangerously close, now; I could smell its disgusting venom and hear the click-clicking of its feet on the rock. I pulled out my dagger, a futile gesture of defiance, determined to slay at least one of the monstrous things before they overwhelmed us — when suddenly and as if out of nowhere, the horrid thing burst into flames before my eyes, squealing and thrashing in agony!

“Hey, you two need a hand?” called a feminine voice. Off to our right, seeming to shine with her own internal light, an elf-maid stood with her hands on her hips and her head cocked to the side, as if amused by the whole thing. She wasn’t like any elf I’d seen before … instead of regal and elegant, she was rough-edged and almost arrogant, with a bright motley of clothes and a shining winged circlet on her head. But for the leaf shape of her ears, I would have assumed her to be of the race of men.

The spiders, enraged by the interference, turned from us and converged on the elf, whose expression turned into a predatory grin as she crouched for battle. Reciting something in elvish that I couldn’t catch, she held a stone between herself and the closest spider — a flash of lightning arced from the stone into the beast’s body, causing it to jerk and smoke. Then she turned to another, pulling a small vial of something out of the satchel at her side and hurling it at the beast, which like the one at the beginning burst into flames.

Within moments, it was over, and the elf-maiden was stepping over the charred spider corpses to come over to us. “You two okay?” she said. “I’ve got some medicine here if you need it.”

“That was amazing!” cheered Toby. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“Eh, it’s no big deal,” said the elf-maid, with a shrug. “I’m from Mirkwood … if there’s one thing we know, it’s how to kill spiders.”

“We owe you our lives,” I said.

“Oh, heh, don’t worry about it,” said the elf. “I’m sure you’d have done the same for me. But we oughta get out of here before more show up. We’re not far from the Forsaken Inn, I’ll go with you that far.”

“But what about our wagon?” said Toby. “This whole trip will be for nothing.”

“Was that your wagon in the road?” said the elf. “I guess it’s a good thing I blasted those wargs and goblins, too, then! C’mon, we’ll go pick it up. It’s a bit of a mess, though, sorry!”

Toby looked like he was about to pass out. “You saved our wagon, too? Please! Tell me your name, so I can write a song about your great deeds!”

“You write songs?” I said to Toby.

The elf-maid laughed. “Wow, a song about me? That’d be great! My name’s Lachwen. C’mon, let’s go!”

-The Gneech

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150223186041807&oid=141884481557&comments#!/video/video.php?v=10150223186041807&oid=141884481557&comments … ugly URL is ugly.

-The Gneech

Okay, the idea of a world-famous hobbit seems a little strange, and it was a grindy, grindy deed. But he did it! As a bonus, I now have lots of extra rep items I can send along to my alts to make the rep grind a little less burdensome for them.

Maedhroc has been gradually collecting more stories to tell the folks back home, so fans of my “Life of a Bounder” series take heart: there will be more, hopefully soon! Right now I’ve been trying to rescue all the original entries from the RSS feed and repost them to gneech.com, so I probably won’t actually make new posts to the series until that’s done.

I have to get back in the habit of taking screenies! Maedhroc took on an elite Shadow Wolf named Burgul in Enedwaith solo and slapped him down quick — so quick that the body had de-rezzed before I even thought to take the screenshot. And with all the instance runs he’s been doing lately, it’s been getting harder to have a few seconds to catch a good shot. But I’ll keep trying! I did get manage to get this one, if you can make it out: it’s Maedhroc fighting the gigantic boss at the bottom of “New Devilry” and picking up his Shield Line capstone.

So it’s not like he hasn’t been busy! He just hasn’t been writing home to tell everyone about it like he should. But we’ll fix that, shan’t we!

-The Gneech

In LotRO the past week, Maedhroc has been grinding away at reputation in order to get the “World Renowned” deed. No real reason beyond bragging rights, but I’ve gotten some good practice in while I was at it. Soloing Grimbark and Ivar “hard mode,” even way above level, requires keeping a balance between outgoing damage vs. survivability … and skirmishes can be run at every level, so I got some good tanking practice running those at 65 and “tiering up” to increase the difficulty. Keeping idiot NPCs alive is always a challenge!

My two largest accomplishments, however, were not really connected with the reputation grind. First, I finally went back to Mirkwood and completed the “Death From Below” instance, inspired by Doc Holiday’s video walkthrough. I can’t remember if Maedhroc ever completed it previously, although my memory is that he did once and decided it was too hard to bother repeating. Galadhalion, I know, has never completed it. It’s considered a “challenging solo instance,” although I have to admit that going through this time it wasn’t that hard. Apparently I’ve become a better player! Or at least, I have much better gear than I used to.

The other big accomplishment was that last night, fellow Valar Guild members Gildor, Ardisian and I grouped up for 2.8.3 (“A Relic in Lumul-Nar”), the Hall of Mirrors instance. We’ve all had it sitting in our quest logs for months or years; it has a reputation of being a really hard instance, and nobody ever wants to group for it. But we were all determined to bang it out (or at least give it a try), so I looked up a strat guide, then we grouped up and went on in.

Frankly, it wasn’t that hard. First, we ran it at the default level of 60, which I’m sure was a big part of it; but also, we just followed the strat guide and worked well as a team. I’m getting to be a pretty solid tank, and for the first warg boss pull especially, I just pulled one mob and locked it down (“tank as crowd-control” as they say) while Gildor and Ard burned down the other one, being quick on the draw with corruption removal and anti-poison potions. The entire instance went like clockwork, except for one bad pull that we quickly recovered from with no deaths (“Crikey, that was a lot of bats!”), until the end.

We could have just destroyed the relic and ported out to finish the book quest, but we figured that while we were there, we would try to finish off the instance. Unfortunately, the bottom of the instance is an extremely annoying puzzle where you have to align mirrors in exactly the right sequence. That part isn’t so hard, except that monsters keep spawning next to the mirrors and resetting them. So while you’re fixing mirrors A, B, and C, the monsters are resetting mirrors D, E, and F. You could keep doing that all night, and probably would.

The answer appears to be that you have to split up so you can all turn the various mirrors more or less simultaneously, but that means two things: first, people will be soloing monsters at the mirrors (fine for some classes, impossible for others), and second, everybody has to know how each mirror has to be aligned. I had a chart from the strat guide that gave me what I needed, but Gildor and Ard didn’t and both got killed when trying to solo monsters anyway. Probably you could check your map and see if any given mirror was right, and the two of them could have done half while I soloed half but … meh. We all completed the book quest and we were content. Even if we had fought the final boss (with or without hard mode), all we would have gotten was Lothlorien Medallions … and the right to go “Nyah, nyah, nyah!” at all those people too cowed by the Hall of Mirrors to go down there, I suppose.

Still, it was a fun trip and it’s always good to get a book quest taken care of. I’ve come to really love being the tank. You don’t get to see the huge damage numbers flashing overhead or cast lots of flashy spells, but with all of the monsters pounding on you and all the other party members depending on you to keep them safe, half the time you’re still the star of the show.

-The Gneech

For those interested in the tale of Maedhroc of the Shire, there’s a new post on my LotRO blog. Enjoy!

-The Gneech