The Lord of the Rings Online Interview
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The MMO Gamer: Speaking of land, Forochel was an area that was patched into the game about a month or two after our last interview. And it was a very interesting because it's not exactly one of the high-ticket areas in the book.
Jeffrey Steefel: Yeah, a whole paragraph.
The MMO Gamer: There was no great battle that took place there, I don't think the ring passed within a thousand miles of it.
How did you manage to take that one paragraph and flesh it out into an entire zone, with quests, mobs, and an entire new faction?
Jeffrey Steefel: It's kinda the same way we do, you know, everything, no matter if it starts with something that is iconic and has a lot information or not.
Even Angmar, you know, even though it's a pretty important part of the North history, there's not a lot of discussion about it by Tolkien. So, first thing we do is look at what we do know.
There was this very small paragraph in the books, and I think there's one other mention in the Appendices about this place in the North that had these people called the Lossoth, that there was a shipwreck that happened there, you know, some explorers that had actually gone exploring up in the North and. that's pretty much all we knew.
Then you start building out what we think the personality of that region is. Why is it there, who are these people, the Lossoth, what on earth would they be doing up in the North, what's their objective in life, what are their towns built around, what are the things that they have to deal with in a cold and frozen environment?
Then you start to create the personality of the area. In fact, that's what we do in our design, we build out a whole document, a personality document, which basically says: these are who the people are, this is what the history is, this is the kind of things that they do there.
We do the same thing even with something like Rivendell, because the books focus very much on what's happening in Elrond's house, but what we really want to talk about is: what is Rivendell, what happens there, besides the fact it's where the Fellowship's at? Then we create this whole story and history around the area.
It's a lot easier to build quests, then, because we've essentially extended the lore in a way that isn't as rich as anything that Tolkien wrote, because we're not Tolkien, but at least has enough depth and history and information about the culture that's there.
Then, once you have that, we can do what we normally do: work out what kind of faction will this be like, how does this fit into our overall story, where does Forochel factor into the quest of the Ring-bearer, or does it, 'cause not everything has to.
But then it's, well. then what does it have to do with the War of the Ring and all that kind of stuff?
Moria was a huge example of that. We wrote a book, practically, in terms of (what is Moria,) because there you had a lot of information you had to thread:
The history of Moria, when the elves and the dwarves were closely entwined with each other, what parts of Moria were built when the elves were very influential and what parts of Moria were built when it was just the dwarves, how's the architecture different, you know, how does this place work.
That's what the Waterworks is all about, the mirrors and. you know, that's kind of fun, basically creating history.
