Why a Mordor Sponsored Vacation is a BAD idea.

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

So, we're in Dol Guldur, and we need to spring our two useless freeloaders hobbits. We're not really sure where they are, but it seems to fulfill a deep seated psychological need to throw prisoners into deep pits, so we head towards the bottom.

We hit the stairs down without incident, and seem to arrive in some kind of rough hewn cavern, full of trolls. Our second Wizard fulfills his role as a meat shield, But Aragorn's armor helps him resist the blow.


More trolls. Goddamn it Radagast, learn to dodge. We use up one of our precious athelas to heal up after that fight. Stepping on the eyes, by the way, permanantly reduces our endurance by two.


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More stairs down, and we skip to an alternate reality where we throw away our magic glass.

We get off to a fine start. Hey look, the stairs down. That wasn't so hard.    Crap. At least nothing bad happened. In fact, there don't seem to be stairs down, we try jumping in one of the fire pits, but that ends  badly


If we have the glass though..(time swirly) The fire pits appear as pits, and we find the stairs easily. Of course, they don't go anywhere nice.

We try to make our way across the new level, and we found that we're blocked by a pool that looks like lava, which paragraph 252 mentions as

"You see before you a large dark pool of water. In the center of the pool are three extremely life-like granite statues, of what appear to be humans in heavy robes. Carefully aiming your light at where their faces should be, you see a look of
mixed surprise and horror. The water itself is still and very black."

You're supposed to look around for a teleporter, but there's an easy way across. You just step through, and your leader becomes petrified. But it only triggers at the end of the pool, so once you're in, you can cross.

Oh, and you can re-recruit your petrified leader. Once we're across the pool o'death, we need to walk through a false wall to get to the stairs. Unfortunately, the way is guarded


Somehow, Legolas can shoot right through the wall. Note, that despite saying that these are "sorcerers" they don't actually cast spells, just try to cut us up with their daggers. They're reasonably good at it though, so we get through this fight with a few more scars


And we're finally in the basement. Cheery place. Where have I heard those words before? The place is littered with traps that hurt you, random wights, and other bits of "fun." I find that the best route is to go north about half a screen from the staircase and just make a break to the east side of the map.

This run, we bump into a quartet of wights, who surprisingly are unable to do any damage before we take them down. The guard right outside Sam's cell, on the other hand, is a bit meaner although also seems to suffer from vision problems. I blame the fact that the only light seems to come from the lava pits. If he's been reading while bored and standing guard, it'd be sure to mess up his eyes. We take him down without injury, grab the key (it's a copy of the one we found in Caradhras's lair, and I don't get it either), and spring Samwise. He gives us some bad news


Next update, we hack our way to the top, and duel the Witch king to end this game.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

hack, slash, hack, slash.

Been an interesting journey so far. I did like the wibbly-wobbly time effect... ;-]

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

We make our way back up to where we started, fighting a few more incidental trolls on the way. Radagast still has not learned to dodge. Oh well, at least the rest of the party is more or less unhurt.

We get back to the level we snuck in on and take the stairs up, since Sam said that Frodo's at the top of the tower. We're now at the ground floor, and could exit outside if we had a reason too. Instead, we try to avoid as many orcs as possible and head upstairs without any incident.

We're now at some kind of throne room It's not too heavily guarded, only a sorcerer and three urukhai; who give us a few bruises At the south end, we run into more guards, but they are only  puny orcs, and we chop through them like a hot knife through butter.

We go up another staircase, and find ourselves on the battlements. There are regular patrols, but as long as we walk quickly away, they don't bother us. I think it's because we look so much like all the other denizens here

We head towards the main building in the center...... oops, wrong suite Aragorn swipes his head off, hopefully setting back some of Sauron's diplomatic plans. We try to leave before some guards come or something, and we run into another ambassador. Why are they all so hostile? Still, Aragorn is hardly afraid of some poncy talker, and chops him into dog meat.

Guy seems to be pretty cool with being killed for basically no reason. It heals everyone in the party a bit, a welcome boon from all that attrition.  We head up the stairs to find..... more damn guards. This one's pretty serious, with a Nazgul, a sorcerer, and an Olog-hai, so we use up a precious !Elbereth word of power to chase away their strongest teammate, and the other two go down fast.

Why is there a second throne room? I mean, Sauron barely leaves Barad-Dur as it is? Maybe one's for whichever Nazgul is in residence, but really? We skirt it, trying to go up the final staircase, when we run into a problem, (sorry, screenshot failed ) but using the some countermagic (courtesy of Glorfindel) breaks us a way in.

On the roof., and here's the bad guy We were supposed to bring either the Eagle Gem or a word of Power !Thorondor to summon some eagles to kill his steed. (both side quests in the Lorien area) but I seem to have forgotten to do that. Instead, we just rush him, which gives us a dose of  bad breath.

The witch king is really fast, going before any of us, and hits hard. Still,there's ten of us, and he's all alone, and Aragorn burns up two athelas to remove the damage of the Black Breath.  The WK's not about to go down without a fight, but the AI being too stupid to concentrate on a target has its problems. Radagast still doesn't understand how to dodge,, but ultimately, he has the last laugh Immediately after defeating the WK, the ending credits roll.

Victory is achieved.

I hope you can enjoy the rather longer than strictly necessary ending sequence, despite the stitched together from bad stills look it has. (Each word is a separate link)


It's a shame, really. I came out at the end with 499 shots recorded, although I didn't quite use *all* of them. 500 would have been perfect.


Hope you enjoyed the game and the Let's Play!

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

I did, indeed.

I believe it's time to start referring to Radagast as Ablative Meatshield, though... ;-]

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

Hiatus time over. Back to annoying you guys with photos from a game you've probably never cared about!

When we last left our heroes, we had somehow fought the witch-king at the top of Dol Guldur, dodging god knows how many orcs and stuff.

Since that ending is completely ridiculous, no mention of it will ever be made in the second game, which seems to assume the story went more or less as they did in the books. That means, Boromir is dead, Gandalf is dead but will be re-joining us soon anyway, and the groups are split up into

Group 1
Aragorn Who has Anduril, a suit of Mithril Mail, and 3 Athelas.

Legolas Who has a rope, a torch, a suit of chainmail, Tinalin's cape, a magic bow, and the magic sword Trollslayer

Gimli
Who has  Durin's axe, a suit of chainmail, a prybar, Durin's Pick, a prybar, a shovel, and some dwarfwort (a vaguely food like substance)


Group 2
Frodo
Who has Sting, a magic shield, another suit of mithril mail, a torch, a shovel, and that ring thing we're all supposed to care about.
Sam
Has the Spider sword (actually a dagger by the animations), chainmail, a shield, rope, rations, mushrooms, and some elfdraught.
Group 3

Merry
Holding a bow, a pair of barrow daggers, magic mail, a shield, the reforged ring we found in Old Man Willow, and some rope

Pippin Holding a Barrow Dagger, a shield, a suit of chainmail, a torch, a shovel, a pick, and some rations and elfdraught to wash it down.



I tried to give everyone some "mining" equipment because I don't know the game nearly as well as I do the first installment and there are a few areas I want to try rooting around, but I doubt it will actually do me much good Still, I can always throw it out later.

Also, in case I forgot to mention it and you didn't pic kit up by implication, the only things that transfer over are the stats and your items, your skills and magic learned don't change from the "base" (except when they do; some of the skills, like boating, swim, and an odd lore or two don't exist anymore) which was why I was o cavalier about it last game. Oh well.


So we start off with sending old Boromir off, when we're hit by orcs who don't quite get that a funeral is the wrong kind of party to crash. But there are only six of them, so we laugh a bit and take this chance to show off our new combat abilities.


People with "swords" skill (and a sword equipped) can now block, which despite its name, does do an attack which doesn't hit quite as hard, in return for increasing your defense. I never use this, because MURDER DEATH KILL! is the best defense!

Legolas shows off two new ones, "Dodge" gives you an even bigger defense bonus than block did, but I'm not giving up half of my offense for protection, and I'm sure as hell not giving up all of it, this dumb ability wastes your turn.

Aim, on the other hand, decreases defense, but it increases both to hit and damage, doubly nice when Legolas can sit safely outside most enemies abilities to hit back.

Lastly, Gimli (only axe user in the game AFAIK) can "swing", an act which causes him to miss very rarely, but does a *ton* of damage when he connects, we use this one a lot too.

Also note, we have a slightly new combat interface, when we're choosing who we can attack, the scroll will show an exclamation point or an asterisk next to some foes. Asterisk means lightly wounded, and an exclamation point means heavily so (That would be the one Legolas shot). We take a swipe at an unwounded orc, because Gimili usually getsthe headshot

One of the orcs actually manages to hurt us *snicker* before we chop them to dog meat, and continue with the game. The fights do get a little tougher in the sequel, but not much, and that's even if you don't import super-characters. Part of it is just the smaller parties you now work with, but more enemies we'll be running into actually have weapons.......... which you think wouldn't take them to the second game to realize was a good idea. Anyway, that's it for now, I have Thanksgiving preparations to make.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Heh. Yay, massive amounts of damage done by the orcs to you. *snicker*