Diversion to Trestlebridge

There were only three of us available on Saturday night.

Earl had an opportunity to drive in an autocross event, one of his many hobbies, on Sunday morning.  But that meant getting up early, something not exactly compatible with staying up until 3am gaming.  So he bowed out for the night.

Gaff as well was out, though for the longer term.  A high school teacher, the coming onset of classes and coaching one of the sports teams signaled the end of his abundant free time and the need for him to trim back on his gaming subscriptions, which include multiple EVE accounts, WoW, and LOTRO.  LOTRO went on the block, at least until free to play kicks in.

That left three of us to venture out on a Saturday night.

• Nomu – level 19 dwarf Guardian
• Fergorin – level 20 dwarf Rune Keeper
• Enaldie – level 21 elf Rune Keeper

We had three obvious choices in where to head for the evening.

We could continue through and do the second half of the Barrow Downs.

We could head to the Lone Lands and start in there.

Or we could head up to Trestlebridge.

You’ve already see the title of this post, so you can probably guess our choice.

It was felt that we were likely to otherwise bypass Trestlebridge and the beginning quests in the North Downs, so we could knock off quests there while keeping quests we would run with Earl available.

The second half of the Barrow Downs includes at least one lead-in to the Great Barrow while Volume I, Book 2 takes place in the Lone Lands, so we were going to be spending some time there in the future.  It seemed better to leave those until we had everybody along.

So it was off to Trestlebridge.

The Bridge in Question

We rode in on our Bree mounts, none of us having the stable master route for the location yet, and collected up the quests around town, then got ready to  head out and kill some orcs.

Preparing to cross the bridge

The first few quests out of Trestlebridge concentrate on some orc camps on the far side of the span and are, frankly, much easier to deal with in a group despite most of the quests being flagged as solo.  Going in solo means threading carefully through.  Going as a group means taking out camps in a single shot.

And off we went, wiping out orcs in a couple of quest passes.  It is the usual routine of iterative expeditions further and further into the orc camps.  We had done this before.  I even remembered to get a picture at the platform where I took the infamous double shadow screen shot way back when.

Enaldie, Fergorin, and Nomu in the orc camp

From there we decided to attempt one of the fellowship quests which had us seek out the Tarkrîp-defiler and slay him.  We worked our way into the orc camp and found the defiler and started to get stuck into him.  We quickly found though that we did not have quite enough oomph to overcome him and his partner, and ended up stuck in a stable-state battle for several minutes, neither able to defeat not in danger of defeat ourselves.

Fortunately, a level 39 champion name Deusexmachinadude or some such wandered up, saw we were, if not in trouble, at least in danger of dying of old age before we got the upper hand, and helped us smack down the defiler and his assistant.

MMOs can be nice like that some days.  But I still want instanced dungeons.

Then we got the hell out of orc territory.

The various stages of horse summoning

After that there was more running about, talking to various NPCs, stopping every so often to harvest.

Silver node!

Quests were turned in, levels were reached, achievements were achieves, traits were trained, and a serious discussion about pets peeing on the furniture was had.

Another evening in Middle-earth