Let’s be up front and honest for a moment. I know I’ll lose some geek cred with this one, but….I’ve never read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Hey, put that rock down!!! I have read The Hobbit, and loved it. I own all the books, but I’ve just never got around to reading them. I’ve never been a big reader, which is probably evident in my writing abilities. When I do finish a book, I’m more than pleased with the fact that I spent my free time doing it. But as someone who’s grown up with TV and video games I’m one who wants (read: thirsts for) visual stimulation.

So now that you have a little back story, you’ll understand that certain things in The Lord of the Rings Online that make other players flip out, do little to nothing for me. Everyone and their cousin who’s read the books go a bit nuts the first time they see Weathertop. I watched the movies, and while I think it was really neat seeing it for the first time the other day, it didn’t have that same wide-eyed schoolboy seeing breasts for the first time impact on me. I have yet to see any of the Fellowship gang (other than Strider) or Rivendell (wow, I was just spellchecked on Rivendell, how cool is that?), but I have a feeling that the same, “Oh look, Gandalf…neat” reaction will come over me. So, again…sorry (watching as people stop following me on Twitter.

I’ve been told that LotRO is a pretty faithful representation of the world of Middle Earth as described in the books, but maybe scaled down a bit for ease of travel. I plan on dusting off my copies to see if I agree or not, and to see if I gain any more respect for the game than I already have. But even without the preloaded love that other subscribers have, I do have to say that I am enamored with the environment in the game. There was a lot of love put into the zone creation. The feel of every area I go through is just fantastic. One place flows into the next but the moods subtly change. Because of this, I often just wander around exploring. I have not done this since kind of exploration since Everquest. No joke. I’ll usually check out odd looking nooks and crannies of zones in an MMO, but I can’t remember getting lost in a game like I do in LotRO.

I partly mean lost in the “everything outside of the game is a blur to me right now” sense, but I honestly do also mean the “by Odin’s raven, where am I?” kind of lost. It doesn’t happen every time I play. Sometimes I just go around mining or running quests that I tend to know exactly where I’m going and why. But there have been a handful of times that I become so drawn into what I’m doing in the well rendered hills and valleys of Middle Earth that it will take something outside of the game to shake my concentration enough for me to say, “How did I get here?”

With that, here are some of the places I’ve wandered off to: