FYI, for any autograph hounds, I’ll be at the Borders in Shrewsbury, MA on Sept 26, 1:00pm doing a book signing . . . if you live in the area and want your LotRO box signed, feel free to drop by and say hello!

So there was a point in time (I was going to say recently, then I realized it’s actually been months ago) when Mirkwood development was just beginning, and the poor copyeditor (namely myself) had very little to do, since there were no quests to edit. Expanding my duties to include Content Design had been discussed for a while, so it was suggested that in my “downtime,” I find a little corner of the world that I thought needed some love and start generating some simpler quests to get some practice and give me something productive to do (besides heckling forum players’ lore-newbness and spewing forth Sindarin names.)

It did not take long to find that little corner . . . I had run two characters through Lothlórien and was starting a third through there, and I found it quite odd that there were only 4 or 5 landscape quests (two of which were repeatables) going into the Fanuidhol area, the only all-out combat zone in the Lothlórien region. Thus I busied myself with bringing the war into the war-zone. By the time I was finished (and preparing to jump into my newly assigned quest hubs in Mirkwood!), I had produced 19 new quests in Fanuidhol, targeting the 4 largest Orc-encampments.

The first quest sends the player to aid two Elves who each ask you to patrol 4 of the 8 Orc-camps in Fanuidhol. Upon completion of these quests, you can simultaneously undertake a series of 4 kill x, 4 collection, and 4 summoned boss quests, which then open up 4 daily repeatable quests which combine the kill x and collection quests.

The best news is that they reward players with Item XP, Galadhrim barter items, cash, and most importantly Galadhrim Reputation, without having to deliver flowers to the denizens of Lothlórien! These quests will become available with the release of the Siege of Mirkwood^TM digital expansion. Hope you enjoy! (And rest assured, should such a “slow” time occur for me again, I will be putting my new developing skills to use in other locations. . . .)

As of around 9:15am, Brenden Alexander Rudder was born, weighing in at 20 inches, 8 lbs, 1 oz!

At the heart of the mountains, in caverns so deep that the Sea might drown them should the stone give way, dwell monsters so terrible that even the Dark Lord Sauron would not dare to disturb them without the power of his Ring. Footsteps echoing like thunder, crumbling stone, the hiss of steam, and vile, sulphurous fumes precede the lord of all demons. The mighty Belryg dwarfs even its malignant offspring, the Balrog, in both evil and power. . . .

Well, no, not really.

We are not revealing another addition to the fauna of Middle-earth. In fact, if all goes well, the abomination above will never see the light of day. (Of course, it would probably turn to stone if it did.) In copyediting text, reviewing bug reports, and interacting with beta-testers, it became readily apparent that many people have difficulty – very understandably – recognizing word structure in Sindarin, the Elvish language to which Tolkien devoted a large amount of time and effort to create; a language for which he invented an entire world to bring it to life . . . Middle-earth.

Now I know we’ve already posted an article about our naming methods for creatures, places, and so forth, and how we use Tolkien’s own linguistic rules, so I’ll move on to the meat of this article: Plurals. When I say that my Belryg can beat up your Balrog, the answer is quite simple: I am a dishonorable cheat. I have more than one Balrog at my disposal, and I intend to use them all to beat up your Balrog. (No, you cannot have a Balrog for a pet.) Belryg is the actual Elvish plural of Balrog.

In most cases, Sindarin plurals are formed not by adding an “-s” to the end of the singular, but by changing the vowels in the root word. A common example that is seen frequently in both The Lord of the Rings novels and our game would be the change from “-a” to “-ai” in the last syllable of words. For instance, Dúnedain (“Men of the West”) is the plural of Dúnadan (“Man of the West”). You will note as well that the “-a” in the middle also changes to “-e”. Both of these vowel changes have to do with pluralizing Dúnadan.

Below are a few examples of Sindarin plurals you may find in The Lord of the Rings Online(TM). The singular form is listed first, plural after the equals sign:

craban = crebain

Dúnadan = Dúnedain

Eglan = Eglain

hendroval = hendrevail

morroval = merrevail

norbog = nerbyg (and even worse, norboglir = nerbeglir)

Below is a table which explains how the vowels change to form plurals in Sindarin:

Sometimes you may notice the singular form when you might think the plural is called for. For example, you might think that a nest full of hendrevail would be a “hendrevail-nest,” but this is not so. Normally, when using a creature name as an adjective, you will use the singular form. Thus a nest full of hendrevail is, in fact, a “hendroval-nest.” Other more common illustrations (in English) would be Elf-song, dwarf-lord, or Orc-sword.

So, when you are adventuring in Middle-earth, and the farmer down the road asks you to go kill “crebain”, you should look for multiple creatures called “craban” . . . and hope he doesn’t ask you to also hunt Belryg.

If you are interested in the full linguistics of Tolkien’s Sindarin, you might consider David Salo’s A Gateway to Sindarin: A Grammar of an Elvish Language from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll make this a first post in a series of Sindarin topics. . . .

I have an announcement to make:

I hazin baby lore-monkey! (Or my wife is, anyway) Due in July.