It started with this message:

Want to see where Golum held up for years and kept the ring of power, send invite to adventure in Goblin Town.

Read the Lord of the Rings Online game diary after the jump.

I'd been to Goblin Town before, very briefly, and only by accident. But that was a long time ago and it hadn't been unfogged on my map of the Misty Mountains. Somehow, I had a quest to collect fire pots from the chittering goblins who live there. But for the life of me, I could figure out where it was. Sometimes I wish all MMOs had the idiot-proof mapping feature in Age of Conan, where all you have to do is travel to the clearly indicated quest marker, do your business, and return to the clearly indicated quest vendor marker. But for better and worse, LOTRO is a world where sometimes things are hard to find and sometimes it's a hassle to get where you're going.

So I asked for directions to Goblin Town on the advice channel. Voila. I was told forthwith exactly where to go. And then someone named Baldrdash publicly asked, in the advice channel, if I wanted to team up. I politely demurred. I still hadn't gotten a handle on all these icons in my inventory and on my hotbar, and I didn't want to drag anyone down.

"This server sucks," Baldrdash typed petulantly. "No one ever wants to team up."

Shortly thereafter, in the proper channel for people looking to team up, I saw the following message from the guy who'd given me directions:

It turns out he had taken pity on Baldrdash and was assembling a team. And he was doing it the right way, in the proper channel, and by appealing to the lore. That's my kinda guy, even if he couldn't spell Gollum or correctly capitalize the name of the One Ring. I couldn't say no.

What followed was about four hours in Goblin Town with a very pleasant pick-up group, including a suicidal under-leveled minstrel hobbit, three stinky dwarves (although one of them was a guardian and there's nothing quite so nice in a party like a dwarven guardian who knows what he's doing), and our petulant Baldrdash occasionally wandering off and leaving his character on follow without telling anyone. Many of the guys were overleveled for Goblin Town, so it was a relatively unchallenging affair, and a perfect way for me to get back into the swing of minstrelling. I love playing healers. There's something so, I dunno, supportive about it. Everyone else is doing the hard work and I'm like the mom/cheerleader/administrator. And you can bet they all look out for me, particularly since the other minstrel was busying playing like a DPS. Silly hobbit.

As for Goblin Town, it isn't much of a town. It's more like a bunch of caves where goblins hang out. I was delighted to find a few buttons from Bilbo Baggins' clothing, left from his travails here in the original Hobbit. This was a deed quest, similar to the flowers in the Old Forest. I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. If there's one thing that will keep me wandering through a rather genetic looking dungeon populated by rather generic looking goblins, it's hunting for buttons that used to belong to Bilbo Baggins. Lore is a powerful hook, even when it's just shiny baubles forgotten in dark corners.

There are a few quests down here that were shared with me from my party members (it's called a "fellowship", but I'm only slowly remembering the proper LOTRO terminology), but I didn't want to hold everyone up by actually reading the quest text. As a result, I had very little idea what exactly was going on. We seemed to be doing tasks for various prisoners. Which strikes me as odd. I'd think they'd much rather have us set them free.

And, of course, there was Gollum's lair. It looked pretty unassuming. It was basically a lean-to on a small island in a misty underground pool. But it was dark and without goblins, basically abandoned. This was where it all stalled for, what?, a thousand years. Gollum and His Precious deep under the Misty Mountains, waiting for the trilogy to get underway. LOTRO knows how to use the lore to give places a somber and important air: Weathertop, RIvendell, the lovely Brandywine, and the somber hush of Gollum's lair where the One Ring no longer lies. Its emptiness is the central fact of this world.

Then my companions started jumping around, doing handstands on the lean-to, and fishing. Stinky dwarves.

(Read the next Lord of the Rings Online game diary.)
(Read yesterday's Lord of the Rings Online game diary.)