Controls

Arrows / WASD

Walk — hold to keep walking, tap for a single step

Q E Z C

Walk diagonally

Shift+direction

Turn to face that way without stepping

Drag a finger

On a touch screen, double tap and drag — tap, lift, and put the finger straight back down and move it — and you walk the way it points from where it landed, one of eight ways, for as long as it stays down, just as a held arrow key walks. Change the way by moving the finger round; bring it back to where it landed to stop without lifting it, or lift it. The first tap is still a click, and the walk takes over from wherever it was sending you. Or hold a finger down until a ring comes up under it, then drag: the ring is a joystick, its middle where the finger came down, and you walk the way the finger is from it, one of eight ways, until you lift it or bring it back to the middle. Let go of the hold without dragging and it is the long press it always was, done as you lift your finger. Two fingers dragged together walk the same way, without the double tap, the way the point between them goes; spread or pinch them instead and the view zooms. A two-finger gesture is one or the other, decided by how it starts, so a pinch never walks you. A plain tap is a click, and one finger dragged without the double tap moves the view instead (see Drag the world)

Numpad

Walk in all eight directions

Click monster

Attack — it becomes your preferred target, outlined in red, and you chase it from that first click. Click it again to let it go. A step of your own only pauses the chase: once it is done, you go after it again. A click on the ground lets it go and walks you there, and picking a target while you are walking drops the walk and goes after the target at once. Click it again to let it go, or switch chase off to fight from where you stand. A target that goes out of sight — off the screen, or too dark or quiet to make out — stays picked for ten seconds since you last saw it: nothing is chased or struck while it is gone, and it is fought again the moment it is back; after that it is let go of. Following a player works the same way. The Statuses line says whether you are chasing, and when your target is out of sight

Click player

Follow — you walk after them wherever they go, into the temple included, until you stop. Unless they are outlined red when clicked: when your stance allows them — red, anybody; yellow, anybody protection zone locked; any stance, whoever attacked you — and they are not under half your level and unlocked, they are attacked like a monster instead, chased from that first click. Clicking anybody else follows them and says why

Right-click player

A menu of what can be done with them — Look, Follow (or Stop following), Attack, Trade — on a long press too. Attack is greyed, with the reason, while your stance does not allow them or they are under half your level and not protection zone locked

Click a person

Somebody in the world who is neither a player nor a monster — Grubb, Elrond, or one of the people (see People) — walks you up to them — to within three tiles of them, in sight of them, once, and no nearer — and opens a menu of what you can ask them once you get there, a small list beside them while the world goes on round it. A click on somebody already within three tiles moves you nowhere: the menu opens at once where you stand. A step of your own, a click somewhere else or Stop on the way, and the menu does not open. Click anywhere else or press Esc to shut it; the arrow keys and Enter work in it too. They are never followed the way a player is — they are not outlined, Tab passes them by, and once you are in reach you stay put. Quests come first, marked with a !; a quest you have finished loses its !, is ticked ✓, and goes in among the rest, still there to ask, until a death undoes it; then Trade for a shopkeeper, which opens the Vendor panel once you are in reach; then whatever else they will talk about, and Look. Choose something and they answer it as though you had said it to them: at once if you are within three tiles, and otherwise when you have walked up — a step of your own, another click, Stop, or ten seconds getting no nearer drops the question. A right-click or long press on them does the same as a click. Typing their words still works, within three tiles of them. Everything is done from within three tiles: a word said four tiles off, or through a wall, is not heard, and a question, a quest handed in, a passage or a trade waits until you have walked up. Whatever cannot be done from where you stand says so in the log, “Grubb is too far away.” — when there is no way up to them, a walk up gives up, their words are said from a few tiles too far, or the Vendor panel is used after stepping out of reach. Whoever you deal with stops and turns to face you: a click, a question, words they hear, a buy or a sale holds them where they stand, facing whoever dealt with them last, for ten seconds after the last of it, and for as long as their Vendor panel is open to you and you stay within three tiles. Then they go back to pottering about. Anybody standing right beside one of them keeps them where they are too

Trade

Ask another player, from the menu on them, standing within two tiles. They see the ask and accept it or let it lapse. The window then shows both offers side by side: click a slot in your bag to put one of it on the table, right-click for the pile, click a slot in your offer to take one back. Both of you press Accept, and only then does everything change hands at once — or nothing does. Any change to either offer takes every accept back, and the window says so in words. Walking apart, or Cancel, ends it

PZ lock and skulls

Attack a player who is not protection zone locked and has not attacked you — which only a red stance can — and you are locked yourself, and your eyes go red for anybody to see while you are. Being locked is no skull: only a kill puts a skull beside your name. While you are locked you walk no faster than the lowest level you have attacked under it: attack a level 30 and you walk like a level 30, attack a level 10 after that and like a level 10, and a higher level after that does not speed you up again. It is a limit, gear included: a cloak or armor that quickens you cannot take you past it, and if your own pace is already under it you walk as you did. Nor does a haste: its ten levels count like gear, up to the limit and no further. A horse still goes at a horse’s pace, and your own pace comes back when the lock is off. The lock has no timer, and lasts as long as you are in combat: the moment the In a fight sign goes, ten seconds after the last blow you gave or took and after anybody or anything last had you picked to attack, so does the lock. Killing somebody who was not locked puts a skull on you with a ten-minute timer, and each kill after adds another ten to whatever is still running rather than replacing it; you stay locked while it runs, nothing takes it off before those minutes are up, and after them the skull is gone and the lock lasts as long as your fight does, like an attack’s. Attacking or killing somebody who is already locked, or who attacked you first in the last minute, earns nothing, so hitting back at whoever started a fight costs you nothing — but whoever started it pays for the kill, though their victim was hitting back. While you are locked: no protection zone will take you — you are turned back at the line, and a click inside finds no way — and you cannot log out or call the Eagles, anywhere, however long since your last fight. Nor is closing the tab a way out: your character stays standing where they are until the lock ends, where anybody can walk up to them and kill them, and they will not fight back because nobody is there to fight. Log back in before it ends and you get them back exactly as they stand. A lock is never lost in the middle of a fight. A skull survives a logout; dying takes it and the lock off, since the dead wake in the temple. Your status line shows a padlock while you are locked, and a skull with its timer counting down while you wear one; the Players panel shows who wears a skull and how long it has left

Stance

The button in Controls steps through three, Tibia’s hands: a white hand attacks only whoever attacked you, for a minute after their last swing; a yellow hand those and anybody protection zone locked; a red fist anybody. A new character is white. Clicking a player your stance allows attacks them; anybody else is followed, and you are told why. Whatever your stance, a blow only ever lands on a person you clicked. Chain lightning and fire nova keep to it: they strike the people it allows, and refuse to go off at all, costing nothing, if they would strike anybody it does not. Only red ever locks you for attacking. Nobody may attack a player under half their level unless that player wears a skull, whatever the stance, red included: a click follows them, no blow is swung at them, and the spells refuse while one is in their way

Chase

Whether picking a fight walks you after it. On — the way it has always been — a click starts you after the thing you picked. On, a click on the ground lets the target go, and a pick in the middle of a walk drops the walk for the chase. Off, what you pick is fought from where you stand: hit whenever it comes into reach, shot at if you have a bow, and never followed, which is what you want holding a gate or shooting across open ground, and a walk you click keeps it picked. It is remembered with your character, and it takes hold of the fight in front of you the moment you press it. Following a player is not governed by it, following being nothing but the walking

Tab / Next target

Target the next monster, nearest first; never a player, which is Next player’s job. Landing on the one you already have counts as picking it again. The button is there for touch screens, which have no Tab

Shift+Tab / Next player

The same, but only players, passing over every monster: first those your stance lets you fight, nearest first, who are attacked, then everybody else, nearest first, who is followed. With nobody in sight it says so

Esc / Stop

Drop the target and stop attacking, chasing, following, and any walk in progress. A step of your own only pauses a chase, a click on the ground with chase on lets the target go, and a followed player is dropped by either

Drag the world

Hold the left button down and move, or on a touch screen drag one finger, and the ground comes with you: the view goes off your character and stays where you left it until you take a step. It cannot be dragged past the edge of the map, and Reset view puts it back at once for somebody standing still. A press that travels this way is a drag and nothing else — it does not walk, pick up or attack — which is why the left button now acts when it is let go rather than when it goes down

Click ground

Walk there — to that tile on the floor you are standing on, and nowhere else. The way there may go through a hole or a ladder if that is the only road, but it ends on the tile you clicked, and if there is no way to it you are told so and do not move; it never takes you to the same tile on the floor above or below. Click or tap a stair, hole or ladder to go through it, even down or up to a floor you have never seen. A tile with something lying on it within reach — under you or next to you — is picked up instead, which is looting as you walk past; further off it is ground like any other and the left button walks to it, with the right button for fetching it from there. A quest chest is the exception: click a chest from any distance and you walk up to it and open it when you arrive, as a click on one of the world’s people walks you up and opens their menu. A door — the undercroft’s, or the Doors of Durin — is the one thing in reach the left button still walks onto, since an open door is a doorway. A click walks you up to 300 tiles in any direction, which is most of a country on the far zoom, by a way no more than about twice as long as the straight line. The way is worked out by your own browser over the map you have explored (see Your map), round anybody on screen, and the first step is taken as soon as it is found — at once for anywhere near, and within a moment for the far side of the map, with the screen going on moving while it looks. You can click out into the black, or on somewhere the only way to lies across it: your browser takes ground you have never seen to be open ground and heads straight over it, and when the walk comes up against something it could not have known was there — rock, water, a wall — you stop for a moment while the world finds the way round, and walk on. Only if there is no way at all are you told so; a very long way round may leave you somewhere on the road with “You have lost the way”, and a click from there goes on. If the way over ground you know is shut you are told so and do not move. Somebody who steps into your way later is walked round. Fetching a thing with the right button is still worked out by the world, and reaches anything on screen

Right-click

On another player, the menu above. Otherwise pick up what lies there, at any distance — which is the difference between the two buttons, since the left one only takes what is already in reach: out of reach, you walk to the tile beside it and take it the moment you arrive, and a key pressed or another click on the way drops the errand along with the walk. Anywhere with nothing to pick up, look at the tile. On a bag slot, a stored item or a button it opens the same menu a long press opens on a touchscreen — so the mouse and the finger always do the same thing. On a bag slot that is the how-many box, starting at the pile you pressed, saying what the thing is — its numbers, then what a look at it says on a line of its own, in italics — with Drop and, beside Grubb when he buys it, Sell; at the depot the same box stores first, with Drop, Sell and Use beside it (Equip or Unequip instead of Use for something you wear or wield); on a stored square it is the box again, asking how many to take out. Ctrl+right-click on a bag slot drops the whole pile straight away (stores it at the depot, offers it in a trade), and on the ground looks at the tile instead of picking up

Shift+click

Look at a tile, whatever is on it. Looking at anybody leaves out the floor under them, lists anything lying at their feet, and says so when they are on the level above or below you. Looking at one of the people starts with who they are, and says what they do only when it is not the usual trading or talking. Looking at a player names their level and the gear in use: the weapon wielded, the armor worn and any cloak over it, the helm on their head and the shield held. A player whose stats are hidden, off the highscores and the lists of who is on, is looked at without their level, and their player menu leaves it out too. Looking at an item says what it is and then its numbers, the same as its tooltip: attack, range and what it shoots, two-handed, parry, block, armor, clank, how likely it is to break, food and weight — “You see a bow. A hunting bow… Atk 13 ranged, range 3 · uses arrows · two-handed · … · 50 cn.” Its first sentence floats over your own head in white and the whole of it goes to the console, and only you see it — nobody else asked. A look at something in your bag, your depot or a shop’s list goes to the console alone, since your eyes are on the panel and not on your character

Left+right click

Press both mouse buttons together on a tile, in either order, and you look at it, as Shift+click does. That press is only a look: neither button walks, attacks, picks up or opens a menu until both are let go. The right button on its own acts when it is released, so that a left press joining it in time can still make it a look

Long-press

On a touch screen, holding a finger down is the right-click, and a right-click with a mouse is the long press: the menu on a player, pick up, look, and the menu on a bag slot, a stored item or a button. On the world it happens when you lift the finger, after the ring comes up under it, because dragging from the ring instead walks you like a joystick (see Drag a finger)

Inventory

Your slots are the Inventory panel, opened by the bag in the row of icons under the world. Click a slot to use it, right-click (or hold it) for its menu: use, drop, sell (while a shop is open) or store. Dropping or selling more than one asks how many, with a slider and quick buttons for one, Invert (all of it less what the slider says), half and all — with only one of it the slider stands full at one and Invert and Half are greyed out; within reach of a vendor who buys the thing, the same box has Sell and Drop one under the other. The box is laid out like the menu a long press on a spell opens: the numbers under the name, then a column of large buttons with Cancel last. Clicking a weapon wields it. While a trade is open, a click offers one of the thing instead and a right-click the pile

Within reach

Whatever is lying under you or next to you shows as a lit icon in the bottom right corner of the world, one for each thing, with how many of it there are — the same thing on two tiles is one icon, counting both: along the bottom from the right when the screen is upright, up the right side from the bottom when it is sideways. Click one to pick it up; one on several tiles is taken from the nearest first, your own tile before the rest. A pile shows its top piece, and the hover says how much else is under it

Statuses

What is true of you right now shows as a row of round badges in the top left corner of the world — round and tinted the colour they warn in, so they are not mistaken for the square buttons beside them — to the right of the info button: a shield while you are protected, two clashing blades while you are in a fight (a blow struck or taken, or anything having you picked to attack, within the last ten seconds, outside a protection zone; its clock is the seconds left, and until they run out you may not log out, call the Eagles, take a ship or the Elvenking’s barrels, or light a pipe, locked or not), a padlock while you are protection zone locked, a skull while a kill’s timer runs, a bolt while hasted, a sun while your light burns, a leaf while you smoke a pipe, two upward chevrons while an admin has the server’s experience and training rate at anything but its usual (its clock says the rate, like x2, and its words how long it has left if it has a time limit), a drop while poisoned, a flame while burning, a held figure while paralysed, a web while entangled, a chain while bonded, footprints while sneaking, chevrons while chasing or following, sights while attacking, two people while fighting players, an empty bowl when you are hungry and hurt, and last of all the time of day: a sun drawn in outline by day and a moon by night, whose clock is how long until the sky turns (ten minutes of day, then five of night). It shows under the ground too, so you know what you will come up into. Blue is good, gold is a warning and red is trouble. A status that runs out carries a small clock along its foot. Press an icon, or hover it, for what it is in full: pressing writes it in the console. The stats panel had a Statuses row until 2026-10-01

Info panel

Your Stats, your Skills and the Players list, stacked top to bottom in one panel. The info button, the mark of a head and three bars in the top left corner of the world, shows it, and pressing it again, or Escape, puts it away. On a wide screen it is a column down the left edge of the page from the top of the screen to the bottom, and everything else — the bars, the world, the panels and the log — stands to its right, so it covers nothing; the screen remembers whether you left it out. Drag its right edge to make it wider or narrower — or focus the edge with Tab and use the left and right arrows — and the width is remembered. On a narrow screen — 720 pixels wide or less, a phone’s — there is no room beside the world for it, so it stands above the world and pushes it down, and it starts put away; drag the strip under it to make it taller or shorter — or focus the strip with Tab and use the up and down arrows — and the height is remembered; held upright, Stats stands down its left half with Skills over Players on its right, each scrolling on its own, and folding them shrinks the panel to fit what is left open. The three are in this panel and nowhere else since 2026-09-30. It is not a window: you can walk, fight and chat with it out

Ride

Once you have a horse from Éomer in Edoras (see Horses), a horse’s head stands just below the info button in the top left corner of the world: press it to get on your horse, and again to get down, the same as /ride. It is lit while you ride. After a fight it carries a countdown under its foot, as a status carries its clock: the seconds until your horse will stand for you again. On a phone, press and hold it for its name. The depot screen has the same button, beside its Close, since the screen covers the corner this one is in

Floor chip

The rounded piece in the top right corner of the world: the floor the window is showing — G for the ground, +1 for a floor up, −2 for two down. Press it for the marks to look at the floor above and the floor below, which hang under it over the world, or out to its left when the chip is down the right edge; press it again to put them away, and any step of your own puts them away too. You do not move; any step of your own brings the window back. While you are looking at a floor that is not your own the chip is lit and the two marks stay out, and a press on the floor brings you back. The floor you are looking at is drawn as if you stood on it where you are, in the same slanted view as your own floor, roofs, walls and what is under them included, and as bright as if you stood on it, with a white square on its tile over or under your feet. Hover over it for the floor and the area’s name in words; pressing it open on your own floor shows the area’s name again. There was a line of text over the top of the world saying all of this until 2026-09-29

Area names

When you walk into a new area, or onto a new floor of your own, its name shows large over the world for a few seconds, with the floor under it, and then fades. The lands' names follow the lie of the land: a forest's name keeps to its trees, a lake's to its water and a mountain range's to its rock, a country's reaches as far as it is easy walking, and a town or fortress is named right up to its walls

Types

The 𝕋 button beside Filters, which presses in while it is on, puts the kind at the head of every line in the console — say, dealt, received, loot, server — in that kind’s own colour, which is the word the filters go by and otherwise the one thing about a line you cannot see. It names the lines already there as well as new ones, starts off and is remembered between sessions

Filters

The button at the end of the chat line opens what the console is showing: one switch per kind of message — say, private, noise, dealt, received, loot, level, event, answer, server, blocked, error, spells, debug — each named by the kind it hides. Dealt is the damage you do and received the damage done to you, so either side of a fight can be quietened without the other. Noise is the one that carries the world's own sounds: a rat squeaking, a wolf howling, a dragon rumbling somewhere off the edge of the screen, and somebody eating. They are shown in dark orange, apart from the yellow of words, and unlike chat they are heard only so far — each kind of creature carries its own distance, from four tiles for a rat to twenty-four for the Balrog, and nothing is heard through a floor. A sound is nothing to do with being noticed: a creature that makes one has not heard you, and sounds off whether it has or not. Noise and debug start switched off: noise because it is the one kind that arrives on a clock rather than because something happened to you, and in a cave it will bury the blow that took a third of your health; debug because it is the sum behind every swing, a line or two a blow. That is why a new character's chat line reads “Filters (2)” in the accent colour before anything has been touched. Click the button and click noise to have the sounds back, and they stay back. Nobody who has ever moved a switch is overruled — whatever you set is what you have, noise included. Switching one off hides its lines rather than dropping them, so switching it back on brings its history with it, and the choice is remembered between sessions. The number beside each switch is how many lines of that kind the console holds right now, the hidden ones counted too, so it is what switching the kind on would show; it keeps the last two hundred lines you can see, however many a switch hides, and only so many hidden ones, so the numbers go down as old lines drop off the top, and they keep counting while the menu is open. A kind that is off is struck through in the menu, and the button says how many are off and wears the accent colour while any of them is, so a filter you have forgotten about still says so from the outside: a console that has quietly stopped telling you things looks exactly like a world where nothing is happening

Shift+Up / Shift+Down

In the chat box, step back through what you have said before, and forward again to what you were typing. The last hundred lines are kept, through a reload too; a /resetpassword line never is

Yell

The small loudspeaker button at the start of the chat line. While it is pressed in, whatever you say is yelled: said in capitals — Fenwick yells: HELP — and heard by anybody within 30 tiles, twice as far as a say. It stays on until you press it again. Commands and spells are not yelled. To yell one line without the button, start it with /y, /yell or #y — /y help!

Private messages

Type /w Name words — or /tell or /msg — to send one player a message wherever they are in the world; nobody else sees it. /r words answers whoever last wrote to you. They show in the log in light blue, Bert: hello for theirs and To Bert: hello for yours, under their own switch in Filters, private. You can also start one without typing the command: right-click or hold a player in the world or a name in the Players panel and choose Message, or right-click or hold a line in the log — Message Name on something they said, Reply to Name on a private message — and the chat line opens with /w Name already in it (on a phone, the folded chat line opens too). You can only write to somebody the Players panel lists; anybody else, offline or not, is answered Nobody called Name is online.

Enter

Chat — Enter again to send, Esc to cancel. On a phone the chat line is folded away under the log, which gets its room, until you tap the speech bubble in the log’s top right corner, or hold a finger on the log: below the last line it opens as you lift your finger, and on a line the line’s menu has Chat first. Yell, Types and Filters are on the chat line, so they come with it; while a filter is off the speech bubble is gold, as Filters is. While it is open the world makes room for the phone’s keyboard, so the line sits just above it. It folds away again once the line is sent, or when the keyboard goes with nothing typed. Everyone within 15 tiles of you hears you, on your side of the ground, and nobody further off; the words also hang over the spot you said them from, fitted into the three tiles by two above your head — say a little and it reads large, say a lot and it reads small. Every line in the console says who said it — Fenwick: hello — and so does a line reported from somebody off screen, which is pinned to the edge of the view at half size in the direction it came from — words and spell words alike, from anybody within 15 tiles of you, which is as far as anybody is heard. The words over a head are left bare, since the name is written under them already

Panel icons

Every panel has an icon: a bag for the Inventory, a tunic for the Equipment, a star for the Spells, crossed swords for the Controls, and while you are at one, a chest for the Depot, coins for the Vendor and a stall for the Market. Press an icon to show its panel and press it again to hide it; the icon is lit while its panel is showing. The panels have no titles: the icon is the panel’s name. The bag’s icon fills with your load, from its foot up as far as your bag is full of what you can lift: muted, amber from four fifths, and red and hatched over the line; hover it for the numbers and what the weight does (see Weight below), or long-press or right-click it for a small menu with the same words over Sort by kind and Sort by weight, the order the bag is in ticked. Several can be open at once. On a wide screen the open panels stand side by side in a row on their side of the world, from the top of the screen to the bottom beside the world and the log under it, pushing them in rather than covering them. Each side is as wide as the panels open in it, up to nearly half the screen, past which it scrolls sideways by its scrollbar or the mouse wheel over it; a panel is the same width however full it is, since it scrolls. Each panel stands with its contents one under another from its top — the squares, the spells, the buttons — so it takes as little of the world’s width as it can, and its icon at the bottom of the panel, under them, so the open panels’ icons line up along the bottom of the screen; what does not fit down the side scrolls inside the panel, with the wheel, its scrollbar or a finger, and the icon stays at the bottom. The icons of the panels that are shut float over the bottom corners of the world, the left side’s in the left corner and the right side’s in the right. Drag an icon to the other side of the world or along its own, and its panel goes with it; without a pointer, focus an icon with Tab and hold Alt with the left or right arrow. On a narrow screen — 720 pixels wide or less, a phone’s — the open panels stack one above another under the world, which gives up as much of its height as they take, up to half; each open panel is one row that scrolls sideways with a finger, a trackpad or the mouse wheel over it, except Controls, whose buttons wrap onto more rows, and the space scrolls up and down past the panels when more are open than fit. Each open panel has its icon beside it, halfway down its side, to hide it again; the icons of the panels that are shut stand up the right edge of the world from the bottom. Drag an icon up or down with a finger to change the order: an open panel’s icon carries its panel up or down the stack, and a shut one’s moves among the others up the edge of the world. Every panel scrolls what it cannot show, down the side or along its row under the world (since 2026-10-17; until then its contents wrapped onto new columns or rows instead), and so do Stats, Skills and Players in the info panel, each under its own title. The order, the sides and which panels are open are remembered. The Depot panel does not open by itself: arriving beside a depot box brings its chest icon, glowing and pulsing in gold with a dot in its corner (a steady glow if your system asks for less motion), and pressing it opens the depot screen and quiets the icon while the screen is up; shut it again and the icon glows again for as long as you stand there. The shop opens when you click a shopkeeper and choose Trade — Grubb, Elrond, or one of the six in People below: within three tiles of them at once, or when the click has walked you that near; standing within three tiles of one, its icon opens it too. Since 2026-10-19 it is a window over the world of what they sell, on a phone too, so the log and the panels stay in sight; sell from your bag’s panel, by its menu (right-click or hold a slot and choose Sell) or by dragging a slot onto the window. Close, Escape, its icon or a click beside the box shuts it. The Market is not a panel but a window over the whole screen, for its list of lots: it is in the depot screen, which a depot box’s chest icon opens; click Grubb and choose Market and he tells you the way to the nearest depot. All three close when you leave. The info panel down the left keeps its own three, which fold by their titles. Their own help, which was behind a question mark on each title until 2026-10-10: Stats Skills Players. The icon panels’ own help, which was behind a question mark on each title until 2026-10-01: Inventory Equipment Spells Controls Depot Vendor Market

Reloading at the login screen

Drag down anywhere on the login screen but its fields and buttons, with a finger or the mouse, and a reload mark comes down from the top; once it lights up, let go and the page reloads. Let go before it lights and nothing happens. It works from a phone’s home screen too, where the browser has no pull to refresh of its own

Copying from the log

Right-click a line of the log, or hold a finger on it, for a small menu beside it (on a phone, Chat comes first: see Enter), and choose Copy message: the whole line goes on the clipboard just as it reads, its time and whoever said it included — “12:34 Bob: hello” — and the line lights up for a moment with Copied in its corner. On a line somebody else said, Reply to them puts their name in the chat box to carry on typing after, and Look at them is a shift-click on them, while they are in sight. Click anywhere else or press Esc to shut the menu. A finger that moves scrolls the log as before; only one held still opens the menu. With a mouse you can also select lines and copy them with Cmd+C (Ctrl+C off a Mac), and a right-click over what you have selected gives the browser’s own menu, Copy and all. C on its own still walks south-east; held with Cmd, Ctrl or Alt it never does

The log’s height

The console is directly under the world and as wide as it: on a wide screen it stands between the panels on either side, which run down beside the world and the log both, and on a narrow screen it is across the bottom, under the panels. It is as tall as you want it. Drag the strip along its top edge — the line between the world and the log — up for more log and down for more world; the view above it shrinks and grows to match. A finger drags it the same way, with no hold first: the strip does nothing else, so a press on it can only mean the drag. Without a pointer, focus it with Tab and use the up and down arrows — plain, unlike the Alt an arrow needs on a panel title, because moving this line is the whole of what the strip does. Neither end can be squeezed away: the log keeps the chat box and a couple of lines, and the world keeps enough of the screen to be a world. Where you leave it is remembered, and asked again if the window changes size or the phone is turned on its side

Newest messages

The log keeps up with new lines while it is showing its newest one. Scroll back — with the wheel, the scrollbar or a finger — and it stays exactly where you left it however much comes in, even once the oldest lines start dropping off the top, and a down arrow appears in its bottom right corner with a count of the lines that have arrived since. Press the arrow, or scroll back to the bottom yourself, and the log goes to the newest line and follows new ones again

Back to you / Reset view

One mark, just left of the floor chip in the top right corner of the world, that puts the view back, and is only there while there is something to put back. While you are looking at another floor or have dragged the world off you it is a ring with a dot in it, Back to you: your own floor, the window on you, at the zoom you are at. Once the window is on you and only the zoom is off, it is the magnifying glass whose lens is a turn-back arrow, Reset view: a tile 38 pixels across. The mouse wheel over the world is the zoom, and a pinch on a touchscreen; there are twelve steps, from a tile at 64 pixels down to a tile at 2, starting at 38, and the choice is remembered. Each change says where it landed, for a moment in the middle of the world: the size of a tile in pixels and how many tiles the window shows across and down, such as 38 px · 24×17 tiles. The window shows as much of the world as it has room for in whatever shape it happens to be, so a wide window shows a wide piece of country and a tall one a tall piece; nothing is letterboxed to make them match. Past the point where a tile is too small to draw, the ground goes flat colour and every creature is a dot — which is the old minimap, in the window, and where the violet for stairs, holes and ladders comes back. It is your map: only the country you have explored is on it, and the rest is black until you walk there (see Your map). Dragging the world with the left button moves the view off you, as far as the edge of the map and no further, and a finger does the same on a touchscreen; any step of your own brings it back, and this mark does it without waiting

Full screen

The four corners in the top right corner of the world, between the floor chip and the ⋯: it takes the whole screen, and takes the browser’s own bars with it. Four corners pushed out to the edges means there is a screen to be had; four corners drawn in to the middle means you are in it and the line gives it back. Escape, F11 and the back gesture leave it too, and the line knows they did — it follows the window rather than the last thing you pressed. It is not there at all where the browser has no full screen to give, which today means Safari on an iPhone; there, add the game to your home screen instead and it opens with nothing around it. On a phone, press and hold it for its name

Sound

The world makes noises: a thump for a blow that lands, a clink off a shield, a whoosh for a miss, a twang for an arrow, a roar for fire, a crackle for lightning, a chime for a spell and a rising run of notes for a level. Somebody dying screams — a player with the Wilhelm scream itself, the stock cry heard in films since 1951 (a public-domain copy from Wikimedia Commons), a monster with a fall. Each is quieter the further off it is, and heard from the side of the screen it happened on. There is music as well, quiet under the noises and never the same twice, and which piece it is depends on where you stand. Every region has its own: a gentle country tune in the Shire, a lonely flute in the rest of Eriador, creaking wood in the Old Forest and Fangorn, cold strings in the North, a harp in the lands of the Elves, a horn and the odd hawk in the wild lands east of the Misty Mountains, a dark reed and rustling leaves in Mirkwood, a fiddle and galloping hooves in Rohan, brass and a far-off bell in Gondor, wavering voices in the Dead Marshes, war drums and low brass anywhere in Mordor, a reed and hand drums in Harad, Khand and Rhûn, and a choir and the sea on Meneltarma. Bells and wind play anywhere else above the ground — a rooftop, a wall, a hilltop — and a low drone with dripping water under the ground, but for the dwarves' halls (a low choir and an anvil), the tombs (whispers) and the Elvenking's hall. Going up or down a level fades one into the next over a few seconds. The ⋯ menu in the top right corner of the world has a switch for each: Sound turns the noises off and on, and Music the music, so you can have either without the other. Your browser remembers both. A browser plays nothing until you have clicked or pressed a key on the page, so the first noise you hear is after that

Pixel font

Pixel font in the menu (the three bars at the top right) sets the whole game in Departure Mono, a pixel font by Helena Zhang: the panels, the log, the area names and the names over everybody’s heads. Press it again for the ordinary font. This browser remembers which you chose. The font comes with the game under the SIL Open Font License

Button size

Button size in the menu (the three bars at the top right) sets how big the panels’ squares and buttons are, in pixels: 44, the size of a fingertip and where it starts, 38, or 32. The bag’s and the depot’s squares, the equipment’s places, the spells, the panels’ icons and the menus’ lines all go to it, so a smaller size fits more into a panel and leaves more of the screen to the world. The menu stays open while you choose, so you can see each size before you leave it. This browser remembers which you chose

Page zoom

The page itself does not zoom: a pinch or a double tap on a phone, and Ctrl (or ⌘) with the wheel, a trackpad pinch or + and − on a computer, do nothing to it, so the screen never ends up blown past its edges. The world has its own zoom — the wheel or a pinch over it (see Back to you / Reset view) — and Button size above sizes the panels

F1 / ?

Show this help

Changes

What has changed in the game: every change to it, one line each with the time it was made, under the day it was made (Sydney time). It opens at the bottom, where the newest are, beside the Close button; read upwards for older ones. Anything that landed since you were last in the world is marked, and you are told how much on the way in

Highscores

In the ⋯ menu in the top right corner of the world. Each board shows ten rows at a time, with ‹ and › buttons under it to page through the rest, up to the top hundred. First the Ring-bearers who have unmade the One Ring, then the top characters by level and by each skill, then by the gold they are sitting on (bag and depot box together), by deaths and kills, the Monsters killed, how many of every kind of monster players have killed (each kill counted once, on whoever dealt it the most damage, and anything that rises when it is laid to rest rather than when it falls), and the Most cast spells, the spells cast most by hand across every character (the heal and light the world casts for you do not count), the Time online each character has spent in the world, and the Time outside protection zones, the part of that spent anywhere but a temple, shop or other safe ground: everyone ever made, online or not, who has not asked to be left off. On the Level board and the skill boards each character's race is written beside their name, since race only matters to those, and the Races board, after the skills, counts the characters of each race with their average level. Your own row is picked out. Two characters on the same score are ordered newest first, except where one of them has more of the score behind it — more experience inside the same level, more uses inside the same skill — which is not a tie at all. The last board, Last online, is who has been in the world most recently: “online now” for whoever is in it, and how long ago for everybody else. Click a character’s name on any board of characters to open their character page: their level, race, deaths and player kills, time online and when they were last in, then their deaths, what killed them, where and when, and the players they killed, the newest 25 of each, and the monsters they have killed by kind. A name on the page with a page of its own opens that one; Back to the highscores, Escape or a click outside goes back to the boards. Hidden characters have no page, and an unseen killer is never named. The login screen has a link to the same boards, so they can be read without making a character, and the pages open from there too

/commands

Type it into the chat box for every command you can use, with what each one does, one to a line. An admin sees theirs too. A list a command answers with comes whole, in columns as many as the log is wide enough for, read down each column and then the next; one whose items are long, like this one, is a column of its own with each item wrapped under itself. A word after the command keeps only the items with that word in them, as in /commands kill

/summon and /places (admins)

/summon creatures and /summon things list what an admin can summon, and /summon things sword only the ones with “sword” in their names; /summon makes lists the things that come of a make, and a make’s word in front of a thing’s name summons it of that make, as /summon dwarf-wrought sword or /summon Gondolin sword (one it does not fit, like a Morgul shield, is nothing); a name that is nothing on its own, like /summon winter, is answered with what does have it in its name. /places lists everywhere /teleport to place goes: the places you have named with /teleport name first, with where they are, then every area of the map by the name shown at the top of the view, the ones under the ground said so. The two names the top of the view shows that are not places to go are the caves, which is anywhere dark that no area has, and the mathom undercroft

/items (admins)

/items lists every kind of thing in the world with how many there are, and where when they are in more than one place: equipped (worn or held) and in bags (carried but not on), whether their owners are in the world or not, in depots, on the ground, on the market, the gold held by Grubb for sellers whose lots have sold, and in remains that hold what a risen thing dropped. Bodies and blood are not counted. /items sword keeps only the kinds with “sword” in their names

/trades (admins)

/trades says what players have bought from vendors and sold to them since the record began: the gold paid each way in all, then a line for each kind of thing with how many were bought and sold and for how much gold, most gold first. /trades recent lists the newest purchases and sales, newest first, each with who, which vendor, what, how many, the gold and when (UTC); the newest 1000 are kept. A word keeps only the things, or the lines, with it in them: /trades potion, /trades recent Bungo. /trades clear starts the record again. Grubb’s market, players trading with each other, is not in it

/kills and /deaths

Type /kills into the chat box for the players you have killed, and /deaths for what has killed you: a player, a monster, or an admin’s command. Each says your total and then the newest 15, newest first, each with how long ago, the date and time in UTC, and where: the area and the level. A kill also says whether it cost you a skull or the one you killed was already protection zone locked. Your character keeps the last 200 of each; the totals go on counting past that, and anything before 7 October 2026 is in the totals only. /stats shows your kills beside your deaths. Only an admin can read somebody else’s, with /kills name or /deaths name

/stats

Type /stats into the chat box for your numbers: level, experience, health, mana, gold, food, deaths, kills and skills, and your three most cast spells with how many times you have cast each by hand. A cast counts when it goes off, from the spells panel, the chat box or the Players list; one that is refused or still cooling does not, nor does taking a blood bond off again, nor the heal and light the world casts for you. Counting began on 7 October 2026. Only an admin can read somebody else’s, with /stats name, and an admin’s /spellstats lists every spell with how often it has been cast

/race

Type /race into the chat box to choose your race again, then log out and back in: you are told “At your next login you can choose your race again.”, and when you come back the window to choose your race in is up. Until then you stay what you are. The Race entry has what each race is good at

Bosses

A boss is an admin playing a monster with /boss. It has its own name and looks, but the name is in the monsters’ colour, a look says it is a boss, and it is not on the Players panel. The monsters leave it alone and it leaves them alone, and it may fight you as any monster may. Fight it back as you would a monster, whatever your stance: nobody is locked or earns a skull either way, and a death at its hands, or its own, is on nobody’s kills. Nothing is fought in a protection zone, by it or at it. /boss again, or logging out, makes the admin a person again. With a monster’s name, /boss dragon, the admin takes that monster’s shape and name: drawn and named as it, with its hitpoints, its blow, its armor, its size and its pace, and in place of spells its abilities, a dragon’s breath or the Witch-king’s shriek, each on its own wait. Beat it and it falls as one of its kind, leaving its body, its loot (never a Great Ring) and its experience to everybody who hurt it, and the admin stands up as themselves

Looking at a monster (admins)

An admin’s look at a monster is followed by a second line in the log with its numbers, which nobody else sees: health left of its most, its attack as the roll of one blow and how often it swings, its defense and armor written as the status panel writes yours, its speed level, the experience it gives, and its loot: how often a kill drops anything, each thing it can drop with its count, its weight against the rest and its chance a kill, and the average loot a kill is worth in gold

Destroy (admins)

Press and hold or right-click a thing in an admin’s bag and the dialog that asks how many has Destroy under Drop, in red: that many are gone for good, nowhere in the world. The One Ring destroyed this way is lost in the Gladden Fields again, to be fished out as before: it is not unmade, nobody becomes a Ring-bearer, and no Ring of the Seven or the Nine goes with it

/emperor (admins)

An admin who types /emperor puts on the gold crown, the white shirt and the red trousers that mark them out as an admin, and takes them off again with another /emperor. A new admin starts without them and looks like anybody else until they put them on. It stays with the character across logins and changes nothing but how they look

/invisible (admins)

An admin who types /invisible goes out of every other player’s sight until they type it again, logging out and back in included. Other players do not see them in the world, on the Players panel or in the Online count, and see no trace of what they do: no blows, arrows, damage numbers or blood from their fights, no spell going off or its words, no number over their head, no NPC answering them, and no word that they came, went, levelled or died. What they do to the world is still there to see: a monster they hit loses health and falls, and a door they open is open. What they say is still heard, as a line in the log with nothing over anybody’s head. They are in nobody’s way: anybody walks onto and through the tile they stand on, monsters included, and they walk onto and through anybody, never pushing, shoving or crushing and never pushed, shoved, crushed or caught in a monster’s fire. Monsters do not go after them, and no player can pick or fight them. Admins still see them, and they see themselves, greyed out: the figure in see-through greys, the name and the health bar faded with it. A click or a look on a tile they share with somebody is for the other one. Coming back into sight on somebody else’s tile steps them onto the nearest free one. While invisible they see everything in sight, however quiet: nothing is too far off for its clank, so every creature on their screen is drawn, can be picked and has its numbers shown. Back in sight, they see by clank like everybody else, unless they have /seeall on

/seeall (admins)

Sees everything in sight however quiet it is, as an invisible admin does, without going invisible, and the whole screen is drawn as though seen by blind sight, a step brighter than the dark though not as bright as a light (Sight in Stats reads 10 blind); again to see by clank like everybody else. It stays as you left it when you log out

Players

The Players panel, at the bottom of the info panel down the left of the page (on a phone, the button in the top left corner of the world brings it out; it is in that panel and nowhere else since 2026-09-29), is everybody in the world right now, tallest first, with your own row picked out and the skull of anybody who has killed lately and the time left on it beside their name. It keeps itself up to date: somebody arriving or leaving, a level or a skull shows at once. Everybody else’s name is underlined, since it is something to click or hold. Click a name for the menu a right-click on them opens, while they are in sight, or the spells said at them by name while they are not, or, while the chat box is open, to type it there; right-click or hold a name to cast blood bond or find person on them. Beside each name are two small marks for what they play on, their browser’s and their system’s — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge; Windows, macOS, Android, an iPhone, Linux — as their browser says of itself; hover over them, or press and hold them on a phone, to have it said in words. Only admins see what other people play on; everybody sees their own

/hide, /show and /hidden (admins)

An admin who types /hide into the chat box is off the highscores: every board, for everybody who looks, yourself included — there is one set of boards and no private copy with you still on it — and your deaths come out of the Deadliest tally too. You are off the list of who is online as well: the Players panel, the Online count and the names behind it, for everybody but you, though anybody near you still sees you standing there. While you are hidden your own row on the Players panel wears a shut eye, so you can tell at a glance. It stays with your character across logins, it changes nothing else about you, and /show puts you back (so does /hide again). /hide name does it to somebody else, online or not, and they are told; they stay hidden until an admin puts them back with /show name. /hidden lists every hidden character, saying which are online

/resetpassword

Type /resetpassword and your new password into the chat box to change your password; the old one is not asked for, since you are already in. Spaces in it are fine. Nobody else sees the line, and the answer says the password has changed without repeating it. A password cannot start with somebody’s name, since that is how an admin writes it: an admin can change anybody’s password, online or not, with /resetpassword name password, and if it is yours you are told who did it

Log out

Leave the game, from the ⋯ menu in the top right corner of the world. The same rule as the Eagles: always from a protection zone, and anywhere else once ten seconds have passed since your last fight — anything that hurt you, any swing you took at anything or anybody, players included, and anything or anybody having you picked to attack, so a monster still chasing you keeps you whether or not it has landed a blow. A monster that is only in sight does not keep you. Nor do the Nazgûl or Gollum coming for the One Ring from afar: they know where it is from anywhere, so they keep you only once they are as near as any other chase would and can see you. Hunger does not count: starving is not a fight. While you are protection zone locked you cannot log out at all. The button is greyed while you may not, and its hover says why and for how much longer

How things work

Race

Every character is an elf, a man, a dwarf or a hobbit, picked from a window that comes up when you first log in, and the first time since races came in for a character made before them. Until you choose, you are not in the world (since 2026-10-08): you stand nowhere, nobody sees you or is told you came, and nothing can reach you; choosing brings you in. The window you choose in shows each race as your own character would look, in your own colour. That is how everybody sees you in the world too, since 2026-09-29: an elf is slender with long fair hair and pointed ears, a dwarf short and broad with a beard, a hobbit small with curls and bare feet, and a man as characters always looked. It cannot be closed without choosing. Your race is kept from one login to the next (since 2026-10-07), and the window does not come up again. Races are not locked in yet, and you are reminded so each time you enter the world: type /race, then log out and back in, and the window is up again, with the race you are marked. Until you do, nothing changes. Leave without choosing and you stay what you were, and the window is up again at the next login; choosing, even the race you were, puts it away until you next type /race. When you choose a new race, your most health and mana follow it, and what you have is cut down to that if it is over it. An admin can still change your race at once. Your race is the one word after your level when somebody looks at you, on the Players panel and in /stats. Each people is good at something and pays for it somewhere else. Man: 10 hitpoints and 5 mana a level, a racial clank of 5, and every skill learnt a tenth faster. Elf: 8 hitpoints but 7 mana a level, magic and ranged learnt a fifth faster, a racial clank of 4, snow is no slower than grass underfoot, and +1 attack with a spear or an Uruk-hai pike. Dwarf: 12 hitpoints but only 4 mana a level, melee and shielding learnt a fifth faster, a racial clank of 5, as loud as a man, and +1 attack with an axe. Hobbit: 8 hitpoints and 5 mana a level, ranged and fishing learnt a fifth faster, a racial clank of only 3, a meal lasts half as long again, and +2 attack with a golf club. Every race is medium, an orc’s size (since 2026-10-12, when dwarves and hobbits stopped being small), which decides the monsters you push out of your way by walking into them: those smaller than you (see Somebody in your way). Everybody starts at 100 hitpoints and no mana at level one, and nobody’s eyes carry a light of their own in the dark (since 2026-10-13; elves saw three tiles and dwarves four before). A character whose race an admin has taken away counts as a man until they choose again

Hitpoints

What you can take is 100 at level 1 and 10 more for every level after for a man — 8 for an elf or a hobbit, 12 for a dwarf. It is little on purpose: a wolf’s worst bite is a sixth of a new character and a forest troll’s a third, so the first few levels are what buy you room to be careless. The bar under a name in the world is drawn as big as that creature is tough, yours included: a rat wears a stub of a bar and the Balrog a heavy one, so you can see what you are walking up to before you touch it. It is the square root of the number rather than the number itself, or a rat’s bar would be invisible next to a dragon’s. No bar is ever wider than the tile its owner stands on, since a bar lying across the next creature’s head says nothing about either of them; past that width the curve buys thickness instead, so the Balrog’s bar is as long as the bar ever gets and two and a half times the thickness of a rat’s. The colour is still the fraction left. While a potion is working on you, your own two bars — the one in the stat panel and the one over your own head — say where it is taking you: the stretch past where you are now, in a paler shade of the same bar, is the healing still to come. It is the answer to the only question worth asking halfway through a potion, which is whether what is already on the way is enough. Nobody else’s bar carries one — where their healing is taking them is their business — and with nothing working on you yours does not either

Food

You heal over time only while fed, in quicker ticks as you level — and an empty stomach costs 1 HP every 10 seconds, down to your last hitpoint, except in a protection zone. Starving is not a fight: it does not keep you from logging out or from calling the Eagles. You do not eat by hand: the bag eats for you. Whenever your stomach is empty, a food from your bag goes down by itself, one at a time, and the log says what it was. That happens in a protection zone too, where you mend and nothing can starve you; the meal just is not drawn down until you leave. It eats the food that weighs the most for the time it feeds you, so your load gets lighter as fast as eating can make it: meat first, then fish, then mushrooms, then dragon ham, then honey cake, then dates, and lembas last. Two foods that weigh the same for their time go by whichever pile is smaller, so its square of the bag comes free sooner. Where a food sits in the bag makes no difference, and clicking one does not change the order: the bag always chooses. A meal fills nothing on the spot and drains only while closing wounds, so full health costs none. The Food row on the stats panel adds up the meal you are on and every meal in your bag: it is how long you can go on mending. A haunch of meat is 90 seconds, a fish 60, and a mushroom 30 — the smallest meal there is. Mushrooms are what the dwarves eat: the dwarves of the galleries leave three to eight about one time in twelve, and the king and queen one to eight about one time in ten, the same share a kill either way, and nowhere else in the world grows them — so most bodies have none and the occasional one is carrying a meal's worth or more. Dragon ham, green right through, is four minutes of food, and the one food that does more than feed you: for 5 minutes after you eat it, every fire wound you take is a quarter less, on top of the half dragon-scale mail takes, and another one eaten starts the five minutes over. It is also the one food you can click to eat, there and then and full or not, so it can go down before a fight; a Dragon-fed status icon shows how long is left. It comes off dragons, dragon lords, cold-drakes and were-worms, one kill in ten or so (three lords in twenty, one or two at a time, up to three off a lord), and from those who hunt them: Thranduil one kill in ten (one to three), and one kill in fifty a Wood-elf archer or a dwarf soldier of the hold, whose crossbows are kept against the drakes. Nothing else has it. A vendor pays 3 gold for one. A potion is not food: it heals a third of your maximum hitpoints, 30 a second, whatever is in your stomach, so a bigger bottle takes longer: 33 in about a second at level 1, 96 in a little over 3 seconds for a level 20 man. A second one drunk while the first is working goes on the end at the same 30 a second, never faster

Poison

A giant spider’s bite leaves venom in whatever it hurts. A dose bites every two seconds and takes one less each time: ten, then nine, eight and so on down to one — fifty-five hitpoints in all — and then it is gone. Another bite while it runs puts it back up to ten rather than adding to it, so a spider that keeps biting keeps you at the top of it. It lands in green, and armor is no answer to it: nothing you wear or hold is between it and your blood. The status icons show a drop with the next beat’s number for as long as it runs, and your health bar — in the panel and over your head — turns green at the end for the health the dose will still take if nothing bites again, so you can see whether it will leave you standing. A protection zone keeps it from biting — nothing can be done to you there — and it runs down while you stand in one. A potion closes wounds but does nothing about what is opening them. Athelas does both: it heals as a health potion does and draws all the poison out of you, and it is used if either is needed. Dying clears it. Athelas tends somebody else too: right-click or hold a player standing beside you and press Tend with athelas, and one leaf from your bag heals them as it would heal you and draws all the poison out of them. It is refused, and the leaf kept, from further off or when they have no wound it would close and no poison in them. It is no attack, so it works in a fight and in a protection zone and never locks you. Some things cannot be poisoned at all: the spider itself, the skeleton and the barrow wight, which have no blood in them for it to work in, and the Balrog. The spider-fang dagger, a rare find off giant spiders, leaves the same dose in whatever its blows hurt, topped up the same way on every blow that lands, and the same things are proof against it. The Morgul-blade leaves fifteen

Auto-attack

Your auto stance says what you swing at without picking it, and the Auto button in Controls steps round the three. None: the only thing you ever hit is the target you chose, so you can stand beside something without starting on it. Aware: you swing only at monsters in reach that know you are there — one that is hunting or fighting you, one you have traded a swing with (either of you swinging, landed or not) in the last ten seconds, or one close enough to notice you right now by its keenness and your noise — so you can walk past a rat that has not heard you without starting on it. All: whatever monster is in reach gets hit. In aware and all alike, a monster that knows you are there always comes before one that does not; see Monsters in reach below. A new character is all, and the choice is remembered with your character. The Auto row in your stats says which you are in

Debug

The numbers behind things. It was called the damage debug when the sums were all it did, and it does rather more than that now. The sum behind every swing you are either end of comes into the log whether the switch is on or not, under the debug filter, which starts off; switch the filter on to read them: what is being swung and what skill makes of it, the roll and the range it came from, then what the armor soaked and what your defense rolled and took. Nobody else sees your sums, and the numbers are the ones the fight actually used — the log is reading the calculation, not repeating it. It draws squares round every monster on screen and round you: blue is alertness, how far that one notices others, and red is clank, how far off it is noticed. Every other player on screen gets their red square too, attacking included, and a dark red one when their clank is below nothing. You see another player when their red square reaches your blue one. Red is drawn just outside the edge of its tiles and blue just inside, so the two show side by side when they are the same size. A monster notices you when its blue square reaches your red one, and you see it when its red square reaches your blue one (in a light, under the ground). A monster’s blue goes faint and dotted when it cannot hear you at all. That is the one rule in the game you otherwise learn by being bitten. It adds the raw count of uses to each skill’s hover, and the count the next level starts at. And it brings back the Speed row, which is off the stats panel at every width without it: the only things that move your speed are levelling, a haste and the spidersilk cloak, so it is a number you read once and then once more every twenty seconds you have a spell up, and a line that moves that rarely is a line the eye stops reading. A haste is among the status icons the whole time it runs, which is where you would look for it anyway; the Speed row is for wanting the figure itself, and it shows the pace you are actually walking at, spell included. The pool bar, the meal bar, the Clank row and the HP regen and Mana regen rows are behind it at every width too: they are the arithmetic of a fight, of being noticed and of the bars filling back up, which is what the switch is for showing. Attack, Defense and Armor are not behind it at all, on a phone or anywhere else. Off by default, and remembered with your character

Reading a fight

Every blow in the log says what landed. Something that hits you names what it hit you with — “You lose 47 hitpoints to the claws of balrog”, the teeth of a rat, the fangs of a giant spider, the sword an orc is carrying — and an archer’s line names the arrow rather than the bow it is holding, because nobody is ever hit by a bow and being shot at from across a room is the thing most worth telling apart from being bitten at your elbow: you close on the one and get away from the other. Your own blows name the weapon in your hand, your bare hands included, since you carry several and swap between them mid-fight. The attacks no armor answers — a dragon’s fire, the Witch-king’s rift, a geomancer’s lava and a siren’s song — have lines of their own and end “armor is no answer to it”

Monsters in reach

With your auto stance at aware or all, whenever your preferred target is not a monster within reach — none picked, still being chased, or a player being followed — you swing at whatever monster is: beside you with a melee weapon, or in sight and range with a bow — those that know you are there first (in aware, only those), and then, with a melee weapon, the closest first, and of those as close the one with the least of its health left, so a wounded one is finished before a fresh one is started; with a bow, crossbow or anything else you shoot, the one with the fewest hitpoints left wherever it stands in range, and of those the closest, so the arrows go where they finish something soonest. Never another player, whoever started it: a person is only hit while you have them picked. That never changes your target. A creature you swing at by reflex — one you never picked — is outlined in yellow; the target you chose keeps its red outline, or green for a player being followed. The Statuses line says Attacking, Chasing or Following

Out of sight

A target that leaves the screen is lost, so you are never marched across the map after it

Depot

Three storage boxes — square-edged chests with flat lids and iron corners, so they are not taken for the rounded quest chests — in a row down the middle of the Mathom-house, the long low house on the west side of Hobbiton’s green, on their own floor of boards, and two more against the west wall of the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith, beside Ioreth, one at the north-east corner of Elrond’s terrace in Rivendell, and one on the north edge of Esgaroth’s planks, near Bard, and one a level below the ground in the refuge of the Glittering Caves under Helm’s Deep. Every box opens the same depot. Stand beside a box and press the glowing chest icon to see your depot, over the world, with the log under it still in sight: click a bag item to store it, a stored item to take it out, and hold either for a menu of how many. It holds any number of kinds, each slot a whole kind however much of it there is, and a click takes back the whole of it if you can lift it. Stored goods survive death — and dying spills all the gold you carry, so bank it

A protection zone

Costs nothing to stand in: your wounds close at the ordinary rate without spending a meal, and an empty stomach costs you nothing at all while you are on it. A zone is the ground where nothing can be done to you, and starving in one would make that a lie told by your own body

Where you wake

Under the Party Tree in Hobbiton, on the grass inside its ring of flowers. It is inside the village's protection zone, so your wounds close there fed or not and nobody starves — an empty bag is never a dead end. Standing inside the ring of flowers heals you ten times as fast as anywhere else in the zone, and while it does, soft green motes and a green +10 rise off you whenever a wound closes, for everyone nearby to see

Protection zone

In the village it is two patches of safe ground: inside the Mathom-house, within its walls, and within four tiles of the Party Tree. Monsters keep out of it — they cannot walk in, spawn in, rise in or be summoned in — and nothing may be fought there, other players included. It has no walls and no gates. The rest of the village is not safe ground: the Mathom-house’s doorways, the Green Dragon, the Hill, Bagshot Row’s lane, the lanes between the patches, the Water, the pool, the Bywater bridge, the holes past it and Sandyman’s mill. Monsters do not spawn anywhere in the village, but they can follow you in, and players can fight there. Out in the world, Rivendell, the whole of Lothlórien and the ground round each person’s home are safe ground the same way (see People and Lothlórien). In Minas Tirith that is the city inside its walls, gate included, and not the grass and road outside them

The undercroft

Three rooms under Hobbiton, down the stair in the south-west corner of the Mathom-house’s floor: an antechamber, a door, a room for test fights past it, and a ladder down out of that into a third room. The door is an admin’s: right-click it (long press on a phone) from the tile beside it to open or close it, and it does not move for anybody else. Nobody logs in past the door — a character who logged out beyond it comes back on the village side of it, on the antechamber tile beside the door, whatever the door is doing — and none of it is a protection zone, so a fight down there is a fight

Fighting players

Your stance says whom you may attack, and is remembered with your character: white, only whoever attacked you in the last minute; yellow, those and anybody protection zone locked; red, anybody. Change it with the stance button in Controls; it costs nothing. A click on a player your stance allows attacks them; on anybody else it follows them and says why. Nothing ever swings at a person by reflex, nor does Next target ever pick one: every blow on a player is one you picked, so they always wear the red outline while you fight them. Whoever you attack may fight back — by clicking you — whatever their own stance, and neither of you may log out until a minute after the last swing, or until one of you dies. White and yellow never lock you or earn a skull: everybody they may attack has attacked them or is locked already. Chain lightning and fire nova strike the people your stance allows, by the same rules and for the same lock and skull as a blow; if they would strike anybody it forbids they will not go off at all, say who and why, and cost nothing. A player who dies loses experience and spills their gold, as ever; killing one earns no experience

Armor and defense

The block and the parry of what you hold, in either hand, make up your defense: block grows with shielding skill and parry with melee, and that is the only difference between them. A steel shield is block five, worth 3 untrained and 5 at shielding 5, and shielding skill makes it more. Every blow meets a fresh roll of it, from nought to its top, and loses that much: so a steel shield takes anything from nothing to five off each blow, half that on average, and the skills raise the top. But it only answers two blows every two seconds: the first two blows to reach it in any two seconds each meet the whole roll, and any more in that time meet your armor alone, so a crowd of rats gets past your shield where one or two do not. Armor is worn, not raised, and meets every blow. Your defense answers first and your armor meets what the defense did not stop, so a rat biting into plate still meets your shield, and your shield learns from it. A blow the defense stops is a puff. A blow the defense takes nothing off that is no bigger than half your armor’s number, rounded up, the least it always takes, is sparks; one the armor only stops by rolling above that, or one the defense took some of before the armor finished it, is a puff; one that gets past both is a number. Your shield learns from every blow it took something off: not from swings that went wide and not from rolls of nought. Heavy armor is a real trade — it soaks more and wears out faster for it. Monsters are simpler: every blow at one loses one roll of its armor and defense together, from its armor to its armor plus its whole defense (an admin’s look shows both), but only for the first two blows in any two seconds, the same as yours; any more in that time lose only its armor. A blow that roll stops is sparks if it was no bigger than its armor and a puff if it took some of its defense too. Dragon fire, a geomancer’s lava and a siren’s song are outside all of this: nothing is put in their way at all. Missiles are blocked too: an arrow, a crossbow bolt, a thrown rock or a troll’s boulder is met by your shield and parry and then by your armor, exactly as a blow by hand is, and teaches shielding. The same goes the other way: your own shots are met by a monster’s armor and defense

The best gear

Two pieces come off nothing else in the world: the tower shield, a slab of banded oak, block 6 where a steel shield is block 5, from the dragon; and the carapace, a giant spider’s own back cut free and worn, armor 15 against plate’s 12, beaten only by the rare mithril shirt and dragon-scale mail. A quarter of dragons and a tenth of spiders leave one. Everything else can be bought, found, or taken from something sensible

Rare finds

Six pieces come off monsters seldom, and are worth the looking. Mithril shirt: armor 17, the most of any armor, five more than plate, and silent where plate and dragon-scale mail are loud — clank 0 — off one Balrog kill in twenty, which is to say off Durin’s Bane, off the dwarf king and queen one time in a hundred, and off Shelob one time in sixty-eight. Dwarven helm: a helm of armor 5 that strikes nothing back, off one dwarf guard in a hundred, and one waits in a chest in the dwarf hold’s treasure room (see Quest). Elven longbow: attack 14 from up to 4 tiles, both hands, off about one barrow wight in fifty and one skeleton in a hundred, and the one find you can also buy: Elrond sells it in Rivendell and Galadriel in Lothlórien, for 160 gold. Spider-fang dagger: attack 8, parry 1, and every blow that lands poisons, the way a spider’s bite does, off about one giant spider in thirty, and one kill of Shelob’s in eleven. Geomancer’s staff: attack 8 in both hands, and while you hold it you cast as if your magic were five levels higher (see Magic), off about one dwarf geomancer in twenty-eight. Dragon-scale mail: armor 16, one under the mithril shirt, and clank +1, and fire that reaches you through it does half (see Dragon fire), off six dragon lords in a hundred; a plain dragon never leaves one. No vendor buys a mithril shirt or dragon-scale mail: they are worth more than they weigh (1000 and 3000 gold), so they are yours to keep and wear. Each one’s tooltip says what it does

Gear of the wider world

Twenty-three things belong to the lands past the Shire: Glamdring, the Foe-hammer: attack 15, a point over a Westernesse blade, parry 5, a point under one, slow to break, and it glows near orcs as Sting does. The barrow-blade: attack 10, parry 3, slow to break. The Uruk-hai scimitar: attack 14 and parry 2, a Westernesse blade’s blow with a worse parry. The Uruk-hai pike: attack 14, parry 2 and +50% against large and huge creatures, the spear’s kind of weapon a little heavier and taking both hands. The Umbar cutlass: attack 12, parry 3, a sword’s cousin. The Morgul-blade: attack 10, and every blow that lands poisons, fifteen to the spider-fang’s ten, but it wastes away faster than anything else, a thrown rock included: nine in ten are gone after a quarter of an hour of fighting. The elven cloak: a cloak of Lórien, worn over your armor, armor +2, clank −2. Easterling scale mail: armor 10, between chain and plate, and clank +1. The Rohirric helm: a helm, armor 4. The helm of Dol Amroth: armor 7, the most of any helm but the Witch-king’s crown (see The Witch-king), with the war-mask of Belegost, and clank +1. The Elendilmir: worn as a helm, armor 5, clank +1, slow to break, it shines underground (see The dark), and skeletons and barrow wights let its wearer be (see The Elendilmir). The Uruk-hai shield: block 5 like a steel shield, louder (clank +1) and quicker to break. The phial of Galadriel: held in the off hand as a shield, block 8, more than any other shield, silent, slow to break, and it lights six tiles underground, where its light is its noise (see The dark). Lembas is five minutes of food in one, nearly a whole stomach, and a honey cake two. Athelas heals as a health potion does and draws out all your poison, and can be crushed for somebody beside you to do the same for them; an Ent-draught heals as a health potion does and puts back 40 mana as a mana potion does, and is drunk if either is needed. A warg pelt and a mûmak tusk are trophies, worth 3 and 60 gold to a vendor. The troll key, the corsair’s key, Gandalf’s letter and the corsair captain’s sea-chart are worth nothing to a vendor and something to whoever they are for. Some can be bought: Galadriel sells the elven cloak and lembas, Beorn the honey cake, Éomer the Rohirric helm and Ioreth athelas (see People). Each one’s tooltip says what it does

Makes

Who forged a thing shows as the colour of the outline round its picture, wherever it is drawn, a weapon or shield in somebody’s hand included: gold dwarf-wrought, blue Gondolin, light blue elven, violet Arnor-forged, orange orc-made, green Morgul and red dragon-gilded. Named pieces — Sting, Glamdring, the mithril shirt, Andúril, the Rings and the rest — never come of a make and have no outline. A piece of gear a monster drops is now and then of its people’s make, more often off bigger monsters: from about one piece in thirty-seven of what an orc drops to one in five at the most. Dwarves and the Watcher drop dwarf-wrought gear: a step slower to break, armor +2 on armor or a helm, block +2 on a shield, attack +1 on a weapon and parry +1 on a melee one, a fifth heavier. Trolls and cyclopes sit on whatever they took off whoever they ate, and it can be of any make; Gondolin blades come from their hoards, the dragons’ and the spiders’ webs: attack +1, and they glow near orcs as Sting does. The wood-elves and Old Man Willow drop elven armor, shields and helms: clank −1. The dead drop Arnor-forged blades and spears: +25% against the dead. Orcs and the Dunlendings Saruman armed drop orc-made gear: attack +1, armor +2 on armor or a helm, or block +1, but a step quicker to break, and orc-made armor clanks like plate. The Nazgûl drop Morgul blades, the Corsairs of Umbar Morgul or orc-made cutlasses, and skeletons Morgul blades and bows: every blow or shot that lands poisons, as much as the weapon’s attack, and two steps quicker to break. Dragons drop dragon-gilded gear, the same thing in gold leaf, and their hoards hold every make but orc-made and Morgul. Giant spiders eat anybody, and what hangs in their webs can be of any make; their own carapace, silk and fang never are. A made piece is worth more to a vendor (three times for Gondolin and gilded, twice for the rest but orc-made), is its own square apart from the plain kind, and a kill that drops one says so in the log

Orcrist

Thorin’s sword, the Goblin-cleaver, which the goblins call Biter: Glamdring’s twin, out of the same smithies of Gondolin and the same as it but for its look and its weight in the hand: attack 19 with both hands, parry 5, a point under a Westernesse blade, slow to break, and it glows near orcs as Sting and Glamdring do (see The dark). A vendor pays 48 gold for it, as for Glamdring. The Elvenking took it from Thorin and keeps it locked in his dungeons (see The Elvenking’s cell). The Elvenking’s keys, which his guards carry, are worth nothing to a vendor

Rings

A ring is worn on a finger beside everything else, one at a time, and only when you click it: “You slip on the…”. Click it again to take it off, or click another ring to swap. Nothing in the bag ever puts one on for you, because most of them cost something to wear. The ring of lore makes your spells land as if your magic were 3 levels better; the ring of quiet halves the noise your gear makes; the ring of clean blood halves what poison does to you. A Ring of the Seven or a Ring of the Nine does only what every great ring does (below). There are only seven of the Seven and nine of the Nine (since 2026-10-17): a dragon lord drops a Ring of the Seven 2 kills in a hundred, and a Nazgûl or the Witch-king a Ring of the Nine 4 in a hundred, while none are out, and at half the chance for every one already out, worn, carried, in a depot, on the ground, with Grubb or held in a Nazgûl’s remains, and never once they all are: with one of the Nine out, a Nazgûl drops one half as often, with four out a sixteenth as often. When the One is unmade and they crumble, they drop as often as ever again. Each of them is numbered (since 2026-10-18), so you know which one you have: the first to drop is the First of the Seven Rings or the First of the Nine Rings, and each after it the lowest number nobody has, up to the Seventh of the Seven and the Ninth of the Nine. A ring keeps its number wherever it goes, worn, traded, sold or dropped on a death, and once they crumble the numbers are free again. The Seven, the Nine and the One are the great rings (since 2026-10-13), and each makes more of what you already are while it is on: what your race learns faster is 5 levels better for a man, everything he learns, and 10 levels better for the two an elf (magic and ranged), a dwarf (melee and shielding) or a hobbit (ranged and fishing) learns fastest; your alertness is 3 rather than 1, so you hear others from a little further off, and your dark sight and your light sight are both 5, so you see as far in the dark as in a light but no further in a light (see Sight), and you have wraith-sight, while one that fades you hides you from monsters without it, however near (see Sight); and your clank is 1 less, 2 less for a hobbit, never below 0 (the One already makes it 0). A man, an elf or a hobbit also gains 25% more experience while the Seven or the Nine is on, and 50% more in the One, a dwarf too (since 2026-10-19). But a great ring makes you fade, a part in a hundred of your health a minute, down to 30 — a hobbit or a dwarf a third as fast, a part every three minutes — and you get it back a part a minute once it is off, but not while you stand in a protection zone, where it stays as deep as it is (the Fading status says how far, and everybody sees you that faded). Any great ring on your finger makes you 30% see-through at once, whether it fades you or not, and fading takes up to another 30% off, so a man faded all the way in a great ring is drawn 40% opaque; take it off and the first 30% goes at once, the fading as it comes back — unless you are a dwarf, whom no ring but the One turns to a shadow, and who takes a great ring off like anybody else. No elf wears the Seven or the Nine while the One is found: one on an elf’s finger comes off when it is, and an elf cannot put one on until the One is lost in the Gladden again or unmade. An elf may still wear the One. The Ring of Barahir, which the Lossoth give back for winter-wolf pelts (see The Ring of Barahir), is no ring of power: it costs nothing to wear, makes your alertness 2 rather than 1, and your dark sight 2, and is kept and felt like a lesser ring. The One, the Seven and the Nine fall from you when you die, worn or carried, to lie where you fell for whoever gets there first; a lesser ring stays with you, like anything else in the bag. Your depot keeps any ring, and one in it never falls. A lesser ring on a finger is seen: looking at somebody says which one they wear, as it says their sword. A Great Ring on somebody else’s finger is not (since 2026-10-19), unless you wear the One: to anybody else a look at them says nothing of it, though the see-through and fading still show. Looking at yourself says your own. Only the One feels the other rings, and only the Seven and the Nine (see The One Ring): look at it in your bag (shift-click it, or hold it on a phone and press Feel the others). The Seven, the Nine and the lesser rings feel nothing of any other ring. A ring only carried is not seen or felt

Gear

The best weapon in your bag is wielded and the best armor, helm and shield worn; all four are outlined. A cloak is worn beside them, never instead of them: the elven cloak or the spidersilk cloak over your armor, one at a time, the one that turns most unless you pick another, which adds what it turns to the armor under it and takes noise away (see Clank). It is outlined in the bag when in use and drawn on you. Click a weapon, shield, armor, cloak or helm to use that one instead, even over a better one — that is how a sword and a bow are carried together, or a cheap shield saved from breaking. The bag is always sorted: potions and orbs, rings, weapons (two-handed melee weapons, then bows, crossbows, the black rod and rocks, then one-handed melee weapons), shields, armor, cloaks, helms and everything else, then food, with gold last, and the most valuable first among things of one kind (what one of it is worth: what an outfitter would charge for it); what you are using stays among its own kind, outlined where it lies, so picking something up or changing gear does not shuffle the bag. Or sort it by weight: right-click or hold the bag icon in the row of panel icons and choose Sort by weight, and the heaviest pile goes first — what one weighs times how many, so a purse of gold weighs its count — with piles of the same weight in the usual order; Sort by kind on the same menu puts it back, and the one in use is ticked. This browser remembers which. Pinned kinds go first in either order: right-click or hold a slot and choose Pin (see the Inventory help). Clicking a piece you have already chosen puts it away again, and it stays away — the tooltip on each slot says which click it is about to be. A bow and an axe take both hands, and so do the elven longbow and the geomancer’s staff, so no shield is up while any of them is in hand, and they are carried across the body — or slung on the back when you are walking away from the camera — the axe near level, so its haft shows past one side of you and its head past the other, the bow upright over the shoulder. The long two-handers, the axe, giant sword, Andúril, Uruk-hai pike, staff and black rod, lean the other way from every one-handed weapon, in the bag and in your hands, with your left hand at the end of the hilt. Click a shield while both hands are full and the two-hander is put away for it: the shield goes up, and the best weapon in your bag that leaves a hand free goes in your hand, or your fists if there is none. Click the bow again and it is back in both hands, the shield down. Everything you carry is drawn behind you then, so you cover it, and set out far enough that something of it still shows. A rock is thrown from one hand, so a shield stays up behind it, and so is a spear held: it is one-handed, and it lands half again on large and huge creatures — trolls, bears, wargs, winter wolves, giant spiders, cyclopes, huorns, fire elementals, dragons, the mûmak, Shelob, the Balrog and their like — so a spear and a shield are the cheap way to hunt big game. Against anything smaller it is a plain attack 10, under a sword’s 12. Every melee weapon parries as well as swings: what its tooltip says it parries is added to your defense, beside a shield’s block or without one, scaled by melee rather than shielding, and what parries most is the Westernesse blade at 6 — which takes one hand, so the best parry in the world is one you can still hold a shield beside. A fire sword parries 3, a plain sword 4, a club 1. A fire sword’s blows are fire: armor and defense meet them as they meet any blow, but dragon-scale mail halves them, and a dragon, a fire elemental or the Balrog takes nothing from them at all — such a blow throws sparks, says immune over the creature and tells your log it took nothing — so it is no blade to take to the thing it came from. The dwarf shades of Belegost take a quarter more from fire: a fire sword’s blows, a fire nova and burning alike. The black rod is shot rather than swung: it trains and draws on ranged, reaches two tiles like a thrown rock, and throws a little fireball that needs no ammunition — and its fireballs are fire the same way. The two-handers are the odd pair: an axe parries 2, which is what a spear does, and the giant sword 4, what a sword does. Those two were set by hand rather than taken off the rest of the table, and they are why the weapons that cost you a shield parry next to nothing

Balrog helmet

The one thing that goes on a head and gives anything back, off the Balrog and nothing else; the others — the rare dwarven helm, armor 5, and the Rohirric helm, the helm of Dol Amroth and the Elendilmir (see Gear of the wider world), and the Witch-king’s crown, armor 8 (see The Witch-king) — give nothing back. It soaks 6, as much as Baldor’s helm, worn like armor rather than held like a shield, so it counts against every blow — the third in a second included — and a fifth of whatever gets through it to you goes back into whoever struck you: as your own blow, in your colour, towards your experience, and it can kill. It goes back as fire, so it hurts nothing that fire does not: a dragon, the dragon lord and the Balrog take none of it, and dragon-scale mail halves it. It answers blows only. The Balrog’s fire, the Witch-king’s rift and a dragon’s fire are not blows and go through it unanswered, so it is no way of getting the Balrog to kill itself; and a blow that comes back off a helmet is never sent back again, so two of them cannot trade one blow until somebody dies

Mana and spells

A second pool under your health. A level one holds none of it and every level after adds five for a man or a hobbit — seven for an elf, four for a dwarf — so magic is the second thing levelling hands you rather than something you begin with; it comes back a point every nine seconds at level one and faster with every level — twice as often by level eleven, whatever your magic — but only while you are fed, as wounds close, spending the meal at the same pace when there is no wound to spend it on, and never inside a protection zone, so the town is not a place to wait out an empty pool. A mana potion gives its 40 back over four seconds rather than at once, the way a health potion heals, fed or not and anywhere: a second one drunk while the first is working adds four more seconds at the same rate, and the pale stretch on the mana bar is what is still to come. Your magic level adds 2 in the hundred a level to what a damage spell rolls, so magic 20 takes two fifths again off what it rolled and magic 40 four fifths. It does not make the pool come back any faster. At magic nothing a spell rolls exactly what it always rolled. Magic is trained by the mana itself, a use for every point spent, so every spell teaches it and the dear ones teach it most. Its first level is 25 points of mana and each level after costs three tenths more than the one before, where every other skill’s costs a tenth more, so magic 10 is about 1,070 points spent, magic 20 about 15,800 and magic 30 about 218,000. It buys the things gear cannot. A spell is cast by saying its words into the chat box: they are Elvish, and everyone near you hears you say them. There is a Spells panel with an icon for every spell your pool can hold, cheapest first, so the costs read as a ladder — by what a spell costs out in the open, so levitate keeps its place in a protection zone, where it shows and costs 0 — and then the five utility spells — sanctification, find person, levitate, blood bond and the Eagles — after all the rest, cheapest first among themselves. Each icon is a small drawing of the spell with what it costs under it; the name is not on the icon but in its hover, along with what the spell does and why it is gold or red. Press one and the words are said for you. Spells have cooldowns: once a spell goes off, the spells on the same clock cannot be cast again for a moment. Heal has a one-second clock of its own, since it casts itself; light has a two-second clock of its own, sanctification a one-second clock of its own, Elbereth a ten-second clock of its own, and every other spell shares one two-second clock, so a heal straight after a chain lightning goes off, and a fire nova does not. While a clock runs, the buttons on it are dimmed with a shade sweeping off them until they are ready, and each spell’s hover says its cooldown and what shares it. A spell cast too soon is refused, says how long is left and costs nothing, and a refused cast starts no clock. The icons are the size of a bag square, which the menu’s Button size sets, and every spell is always on the panel: under the world they go along one row that scrolls sideways, as the bag does, and down the side of a wide screen the panel scrolls down. Pin a spell and it goes to the front of the panel, with a small gold dot in its top right corner: right-click or hold it and choose Pin, and Unpin in the same place puts it back. Pinned spells come first and the rest after, each lot in the panel’s own order, and your pins are kept with your character. On a phone there is no hover, so press and hold a button: a box opens with the name and the cost as its heading, what the spell does and the reason for its colour under that, a button that casts it and Pin or Unpin — the same hold that offers to drop a thing from a bag slot. A hold never casts by itself; the box is what casts. The one exception is the light while it is burning, where a hold puts it out. Haste — noro lim: 25 mana, and for twenty seconds you walk as somebody ten levels above you would (on a horse, a tenth faster: 3.3 tiles a second). Anybody can cast it, but it does not take you past the speed limit a PZ lock puts on you (see PZ lock and skulls), and when it would not make you any quicker — at that limit, on a horse while locked, or already as fast as anybody walks — it is not cast and costs nothing. A spell that costs more mana than you can hold yet is not listed — a level one’s panel is empty and says so, and a level two’s has only sanctification — and typing its words still tells you which level to come back at. Each button is one of three colours: green will go off, gold will go off and do nothing worth the mana — the Eagles when the only place they know you in is the one you are in, provoke with nothing near you, a light above ground or over a light already lit, a fire nova with nothing in reach of it that burns, a chain lightning with nothing in reach of it that it can hurt — and red the world would refuse; hovering a gold or a red one says why — not enough mana, a fight you are still in, a protection zone lock — and on a phone holding it says the same. The colour is the server’s own answer and not a guess, and it is a hint rather than a lock: press a red one anyway and the world tells you in the console exactly why it will not go off. Find person is the one button that does not cast on the spot, since the spell is half a sentence without a name — it opens a menu of everybody on the Players panel, one button a name, and choosing one says the words at them; Type a name… at the foot of it puts the words in the chat box for you to finish instead, for somebody who is not on the list. The Eagles’ button offers the places they know you in. Type /cast name if the words have gone out of your head. They are drawn as themselves, ghostly and outlined — red round a monster, blue round a person — over walls and roofs alike, so you can see what is waiting as well as where; zoomed out past the point where a creature would be too small to make out, each is a dot again, red or blue. Twenty-five is more mana than a character below level six can hold at all, so the first spell is something to climb towards. Find person — tiro name: 20 mana, and it says which way that person lies, roughly how far, and how many floors up or down; nothing at all if there is nobody of that name in the world. The bearing comes back in white over your own head as well as in the console, and only you see it — everyone near you hears the words you said, never the answer, the person you are looking for included. For a minute after, a gold mark stays where they stood when you said it: a gold arrow at the edge of your screen points to it, with their name, roughly how far (close by, far or very far) and how many floors up or down, and once that spot is on your screen it becomes a gold ring round it. It does not follow them: it moves only when you see them, to where you saw them, and stays there when they go out of sight again. One person at a time: finding somebody else moves the mark to them, and the spell’s button counts the minute down. Eagle — thoron place: 40 mana, which is the whole pool of a man at level nine, and an eagle carries you to any place on its list that you have stood in, setting you down on the highest ground there, or in Hobbiton by the Party Tree. Press the button and it offers the places it knows you in, with the ones you have not stood in yet listed greyed out underneath so you can see where else it flies; or type the words with the place after them, thoron rivendell. Every character knows Hobbiton from the start, and the first time you set foot in one of the others the console says the Eagles will know you there. The places, and where you are set down: Hobbiton puts you on the ground three steps south of the Party Tree, in its protection zone; Rivendell in the glade by Elrond’s terrace; Esgaroth on top of the Lonely Mountain, north of the lake, with the winding path down it; Tharbad (the Ranger’s camp), the Grey Havens, Lothlórien, Fangorn and Edoras each have an eagle’s crag, a stone with a ramp down it; Dol Amroth puts you on the roof of its tower, behind its battlements, with a stair down inside to Imrahil; the Carrock, the rock in the Great River by Beorn’s house, puts you on its top, safe ground, with a ramp down its west face to Beorn’s bank (setting foot anywhere round his house counts as having been there); Orthanc puts you on top of the tower, with a stair down its south face; Minas Tirith on top of the White Tower in the citadel, with a stair down; the Iron Hills on a summit over the range, with a ramp down its south face; and Mount Doom on its top, beside the Cracks. The Eagles refuse to return to Meneltarma: the swan-ships of Dol Amroth are the way to the isle. If somebody is already standing where you would land, you are set down on the ground beside it. The Eagles cannot reach you under the ground: come out under the sky first. They will not carry the One Ring, worn or in your bag. They go by the same rule as logging out: not within ten seconds of a fight — anything that hurts you, any swing you take at anything, and anything having you picked to attack shuts it for that long — so they are a way home from far away rather than a way out of what you picked. Hunger does not count: starving shuts neither. Standing in a protection zone, they always come, fight or no fight, since nothing can reach you there anyway. They will not come at all while you are protection zone locked. The button is gold when the only place they know you in is the one you are standing in. Levitate — amba: 20 mana, which is the whole pool of a man at level five, and nothing at all in a protection zone, where the roofs are and nothing is hunting you, and it takes you a level up or down and a tile the way you are facing — up onto the top of a rock face in front of you, or down off an edge in front of you to the ground below it. One spell, and the ground decides which way, because what it does is take your weight off you rather than send you in a direction. Walk into a rock face to turn and face it, or turn on the spot with ctrl and an arrow, then say the words. Rock to climb, from any open ground beside it. The orcs’ battlements are not climbed this way: their camp is in a cavern under Lake Evendim, and the ladders in its corner towers are the way onto the wall and back down. Any roof can be stood on from beside it — the thatch over Sandyman’s mill among them — whatever is holding it up, except a roof over water; being on a roof is not being under it, so a roofed room is still entered by its door. Coming down asks nothing about what you are standing on, only that the tile ahead is an edge with ground below it, so you can step off a roof’s edge as readily as off a cliff. You do not rise through a ceiling: standing under a roof, there is no sky over you to go up into. It is not cast underground at all, where there is no sky to rise into and the ladder you came down is still the way back up. It goes off in a fight: nothing without hands climbs, so a rock face is the end of a chase, and that is what the spell is for — twenty mana is the price of the way out. Light — ancalima: 10 mana, which is the whole pool of a man at level three, and for two minutes you see five tiles into the dark under the ground instead of your eyes’ own two to four — most of the screen. It is never cast for you: say it when you want it. Press and hold its button or its status icon while it is burning to put it out (a right-click does the same with a mouse); that costs nothing and gives no mana back. It is the cheapest spell there is to say, because the dark begins on the first floor down and that is where you go when you are done with rats. Above ground it goes off and lights nothing — the sky is lit — and the button is gold there; its two minutes run from the moment it is cast wherever you are, so a lamp lit at the top of a ladder is still burning at the foot of it, which is the one place worth lighting one before you need it. Said while one is already lit it starts the two minutes over rather than adding to it — the button is gold for as long as one is running, with what is left in its hover; its status icon counts it down, and when it runs out the dark closes back in. Every light is seen by everyone on the floor, yours and a companion’s alike: a friend standing in the black lights the cave round themself for you as much as for themselves — the plain two tiles, or the six of their lux — and the map round their dot too. In the orcs’ cavern a light lights both its levels, the yard and the walk over it (see The dark). Blood bond — gwedh name: 30 mana, which is the whole pool of a man at level seven, and for three minutes you carry a share of every wound somebody else takes. Say the words at a friend standing with you and it is done — there is nothing for them to agree to and nothing for them to pay, because all it does to them is protect them. Half of each wound they take opens on you instead of on them, and nothing of yours ever crosses to them: it runs one way. Healing never crosses either; you each close your own. If several people bond the same person the wound is divided by heads, counting them as one — a third each with two bonders, a quarter each with three — so every extra bonder is worth something to the person being carried. When it will not divide evenly the odd point stays on the person the wound landed on, and a scratch of one hitpoint is not shared at all. You may only carry one person at a time: say the words at somebody else and the bond moves to them for another thirty mana. Say them at the same person again and it comes off for nothing, wherever the two of you are and whatever is left in your pool. Walking apart does not end it, but it only works within ten tiles: while you are more than ten tiles from the person you are carrying, or on another floor, their wounds stay their own, and the share starts again the moment you are back within ten. The three minutes run either way, so letting go is still your decision rather than the map's. You can die of a fight you were never in: there is no floor at one hitpoint, and what you cannot pay is simply lost rather than handed back to the person you were carrying. The death itself is not shared, and the experience, the skull and the spilt purse are yours alone. It ends the moment either of you strikes the other, and a swing that misses counts, since it is the same swing that locks you; only that one bond goes, and anybody else carrying them goes on carrying. A dragon that catches you both does not end it, which is what the spell is for, and neither does standing in a protection zone — a share is a wound you volunteered for, so the zone will not soak it. It also ends if either of you dies, logs out or drops out, or when the three minutes run out, and the console says which of those it was. The chain among the status icons reads Bonded to name m:ss in its hover while you are carrying somebody and Bonded by names m:ss while somebody is carrying you, and each bonder's share shows on their own health bar over their own head. Chain lightning — angwedh calad: 45 mana, which is the whole pool of a man at level ten, and it is the one spell cast at something rather than on yourself. Click a monster, say the words, and a bolt leaps from your hand to it — up to 3 tiles, as far as a bow reaches — then on to the nearest monster within 2 tiles of that one, and on again from there: three in all. It rolls 34 to 62 on the first and halves at every jump, so a beginner’s chain reads 62, 31, 15 and the most one cast can do is 108. The roll grows with your magic level: 86, 43, 21 at magic 20 and 111, 55, 27 at magic 40. The skill is asked once, before the roll is shared out down the chain, so a trained caster’s chain is the same shape as a beginner’s and only bigger — the tail grows with the head, and it stays a spell for a crowd rather than a cheaper way to kill the one thing in front of you. Nothing you or it wears or holds is put in the way of it. It is energy, so the Balrog and the Witch-king take none of it and a dragon takes all of it. It leaps to anything it can hurt before anything it cannot, however much nearer the immune one stands, and a link that takes none of it shows immune over its head. The button is gold when nothing in its reach would take any of it. It cannot be cast from a protection zone, any more than a sword can be swung from one. It will not arc through a wall and will not reach into a protection zone. It takes people too, as your stance allows, on the same terms as a swing — the person you hold, if your stance allows them, or anybody the bolt jumps to after the first link, never you, and never a person as the first link unless you picked them — and striking one locks you as a blow would. If it would strike anybody your stance forbids it will not go off, at any link: a white hand’s bystander, a yellow hand’s somebody unlocked who has not attacked you. It says who is in the way and your stance, costs nothing and starts no cooldown, and the button is red. It always jumps to a monster before a person, an immune one included, so a person is only on the chain, and only refuses it, when no monster is in its reach. A red fist’s chain takes everybody on it. It does not care whose business it is interrupting either: a monster two tiles from the one you picked is on the chain whether it had noticed you or not. It always has a target: yours when it can reach it, and otherwise it picks the nearest monster it can (of two as near, the more northerly, then the more westerly) and makes that your target. The button is gold when it will pick rather than red: the spell goes off, you simply did not choose the first link. Only a room with nothing in reach of it refuses. Casting it is being in a fight, so it shuts the Eagles for ten seconds, and 45 mana is several minutes of standing still to earn back. Fire nova — naur: 45 mana, which is the whole pool of a man at level ten — chain lightning’s own rung, because the two are siblings and a level ten gets a choice rather than a ladder. It goes off where you are standing and needs nothing clicked. The ground catches out to 2 tiles and everything in it burns at once: the eight tiles you can be touched from take the whole roll, 24 to 48, and the ring past them takes half — chain lightning’s falloff said in rings instead of links. It grows with your magic the same way, 33 to 67 at magic 20 and 43 to 86 at magic 40. Chain lightning is for a crowd you are walking into; this is for a crowd that has got round you. IT IS FIRE, so a dragon takes none of it and neither does a fire elemental or the Balrog — nothing at all, not a reduced number — which means it is the spell for the kobold caves, the bats, the orc yard, the dwarf corridors and the barrow, and never the answer to the two hardest things in the world. You are not left to find that out by spending the mana: the button goes gold whenever the only things in reach of the fire are things the fire cannot touch, and says which they are. Nothing anybody wears or holds is put in the way of it. It cannot be cast from a protection zone either. It will not burn through a wall, will not reach into a protection zone, and never burns you. It burns people in the ring too, as your stance allows, on the same terms as a swing, lock and all; it will not go off while anybody your stance forbids is in the ring, says who and your stance, costs nothing and starts no cooldown, and the button is red. With a red fist it burns everybody in the ring. An empty ring is gold rather than red: the fire goes off on the ground you stand on whether anything is there or not, so it is never refused for want of something to burn. Casting it is being in a fight, so it shuts the Eagles for ten seconds. It is drawn as a square front going out from your feet to the edge of its reach, a square and not a ring because the tiles it catches are a square and a circle would show the corners being spared when they are not. Istari light — lacho calad!: 50 mana, which is the whole pool of a man at level eleven, a rung above chain lightning and the fire nova. It goes out the way you are facing and needs nothing clicked: a shaft of light 5 tiles long, across or along a diagonal, stopped by the first wall, and everything standing in it takes chain lightning’s first hit, 34 to 62, the whole length, with no halving — 47 to 86 at magic 20 and 61 to 111 at magic 40. Turn to aim it: you face the way you last stepped, and Shift+direction turns you without a step. Chain lightning is for a crowd you walk into and the nova for one round you; this is for a line of them, down a corridor or a stair. The dead and the Nazgûl take half again — skeletons, wights, the Dead, the Nine and their lord — and nothing is immune to it, so it is the one spell that hurts the Witch-king. Nothing anybody wears or holds is put in the way of it. With nothing in its line the button is gold. It is not cast from a protection zone and does not reach into one, and it takes people in its line as your stance allows, else it is refused, says who, and costs nothing, as the nova is. Casting it is being in a fight. Provoke — tolo glamhoth!: 20 mana, which is the whole pool of a man at level five, and every monster on your floor within ten tiles turns on you, walls or no walls — whoever it was after, and however far off it is. For twenty seconds it will not change its mind about whom it wants, and it follows you from distances it would normally give up at, so long as it can see you, so a monster at the edge of the screen that had never noticed you comes anyway. It hurts nothing, but it is picking a fight: the Eagles wait the usual ten seconds after it. It is for somebody who means to stand in front of the others. With nothing in reach the button is gold, and in a protection zone it is refused, since nothing can reach you there to answer it. The icon is four arrowheads pointing in at you. Challenge — tolo enni!: 20 mana, provoke’s rung, so a level five has the choice of the two, and anything that hears it walks to where you shouted: out to its alertness and the 15 tiles speech carries together, walls or none, for twenty seconds, and when it gets there it notices you by the usual rule, so if you have moved on it may not find you. It does not change your clank (since 2026-10-22; before then you were as loud as speech for twenty seconds), so you are no easier to see than before you shouted. It turns nobody, which is the difference from provoke: a monster already after somebody else stays on them. It hurts nothing, but like provoke it is picking a fight, and the Eagles wait ten seconds after it. Its button is never gold, since you cannot know what can see you; in a protection zone it is refused. The icon is a horn blown, and everyone near hears it: three blasts, as Boromir blows the Horn of Gondor, on a real ox horn (a public-domain recording from the USC sound library). Elbereth — a Elbereth Gilthoniel: 30 mana, which is the whole pool of a man at level seven, and 15 for a hobbit, who can say it from level four. For three seconds every monster lets go of you and none takes you up: whatever was after you turns away at once, and nothing picks you again, by a blow you strike or any other way, until the three seconds are up; then you are anybody’s again. It hurts nothing and moves nothing. A white star kindles over your head as you say it. It has a ten-second cooldown of its own, so it is a breath in a fight rather than a way to stay out of one. With nothing after you the button is gold. The icon is a star. Convince — mellon nin: wizards only, so you need the wizard’s staff in your off hand. Target a monster within 3 tiles and say it, and for three minutes that monster fights for you. It costs as much mana as the monster has hitpoints: 10 for a rat, 70 for an orc, 280 for a cave troll, so your pool decides how big a thing you can win over. It follows you and fights any ordinary monster it sees within 8 tiles of you, using only its plain attack (no breath or fire to catch you in); something with a name or a title of its own it fights only if that comes after you or it. A monster it strikes turns on it. Its name is written in your colour, nobody may attack it, and it never fights a player or anybody else’s ally. You get the full experience for whatever it helps to kill, as if you had struck it yourself, but it trains none of your skills; the loot falls as usual. You have one at a time: convincing another lets the first go. It goes its own way when the three minutes are up, or when you log out, die, take another floor or get more than 15 tiles from it, and then it is a monster like any other and may turn on you. It will not follow you into a protection zone, and waits outside. If it is slain it leaves nothing. NPCs, players, anything with a name or a title (Gollum, Bullroarer, Shelob, the chiefs and kings, the Watcher), the undead (the Nazgûl and the Witch-king among them), the Ents, Old Man Willow, the sirens and the Balrog will not be convinced by anybody. The icon is a staff with a creature beside it. Heal — nesta: 20 mana, which is the whole pool of a man at level five, and it closes your wounds at once: 20 hitpoints, and 3 more for every level of magic you have, never past full. It casts itself whenever your mana is full and your health is not, so a full pool is never sitting idle on a wounded character. Green crosses rise off you as it goes. The icon is a cross. Sanctification — utúlie’n aurë: said over a thing rather than into the air: stand beside a stirring pile of bones and press its button, or click the pile, and the words are said over them for you. With no evil remains on your tile or beside you the button is red and says so. It costs what the remains ask, and the button shows that price while you stand beside them. It is the one spell that pays you: everything a rising kind is worth comes with the laying to rest rather than with the kill. See Skeletons and wights below

Spear

A melee weapon that takes both hands, so no shield is up while it is out. It reaches the tiles beside you like anything else you swing, and trains melee

Bow

Shoots your target from up to 3 tiles away, for attack 13, with a clear line — over trees and water, but not through walls or rock — so you stop at range rather than walking up to it. The line is the same read from either end, so nothing can shoot you from where you cannot shoot back, and a corner you are standing beside can be leaned around: press yourself against the wall and you can shoot past it. With no target in range the reflex shoots by itself: the monster in range with the fewest hitpoints left, and of two as weak the closer. A target you picked is still shot first whenever it is in range. A bow needs arrows: every shot uses one up from your bag, whether it lands, misses or goes wide, and with none you do not shoot at all — you are told once and the fight is dropped, and the reflex waits until you have some again. Grubb and Elrond both sell arrows ten for 1 gold, and buy them back 25 for 1, and now and then a skeleton leaves a quiverful. The elven longbow, 160 gold from Elrond in Rivendell or Galadriel in Lothlórien and a rare find off barrow wights and skeletons, shoots arrows the same way from up to 4 tiles, and hits for 14 against the bow’s 13. The crossbow is the bow with a tile of reach traded for three points of attack: 16 against the bow’s 13, harder than the elven longbow too, from up to 2 tiles, both hands, and it shoots bolts instead of arrows, one a shot. It comes off dwarf soldiers, who also carry bolts, and Grubb sells bolts five for 1 gold, and buys them back 13 for 1. Arrows and bolts go 100 to a slot

Fishing

Fish swim about in the lakes and rivers, and you can see them. Any fish you can see within 5 tiles is fair game — walk up to the rest — click the fishing rod to take it in hand (it takes both hands, so the shield comes down and you fight with your fists) and it fishes by itself, casting at the nearest fish within 5 tiles every second and a half (since 2026-10-20; it was the whole screen before), diagonals included, as long as nothing is in the way: walls and rock stop it, and so does anything standing on the tiles between, though a corner at your elbow can be leaned around the way an arrow can. It fishes from above too: from a roof, a hilltop or a ledge it casts down at any fish in the water below that you can see from up there, within the same reach. Water with a roof or rock over it is hidden from above and is not fished, and up there only what stands on your own level is in the way. Below the ground there is no water to fish. A quarter of casts bite at first, more with skill, and the fish you catch is the one that was swimming there. Only a catch trains fishing (since 2026-10-01): a cast that comes up empty teaches nothing, and a fish teaches what the casts it took to land used to — four uses while a quarter of casts bite, fewer as the odds improve — so the skill climbs at the pace it always did, in steps on the catches. Water with nothing in it gives you nothing, so it is worth walking the bank to find a shoal. The rod does not cast from a protection zone: go out of the village to fish. Fish are food, and every death hands you a new rod

Levels

The dwarf hold’s summit, where dragons live, is up the wide stairs at the west end of its hall. Tracks climb the Blue Mountains in three places: up one face, along the path on top and down the other side. Some are ramps, with steps cut into them, and some are slopes of smooth turf; they walk the same, and each is drawn climbing the way it climbs. Like a stair, a ramp lets you off at its far end, in line with it, whichever way you go: one that climbs north puts you on the path north of it going up and on the ground south of it coming down.At the northern end of the Blue Mountains the range widens into the dragons’ peaks. Five separate ledges ring it, each with its own slope up from the ground and dragons on it, so you choose your fight by choosing your way up. Two shelves stand higher on the crag in the middle, each reached by steps from a ledge below, and the dragon lord waits alone on the summit above them, up a flight of steps from the west shelf. Dragon fire runs along the ground it is breathed on, so it stops at a ledge’s edge and at a wall of rock, and the pass over the mountains just south of the peaks never comes within reach of a dragon. It is the one place in the world two levels above the ground: the level buttons go up to it, and from up there the peaks and the country below are all in view. The orc camp is under Lake Evendim, north of Hobbiton, where the north road ends: the bridge out to the small island in the lake is broken, so go down the hole on the shore beside it into the tunnel under the water. The island’s own hole comes down into the same tunnel, with a ladder back up, and at the tunnel’s end under the island a second hole drops a level further, into the cavern where the stockade stands, with a ladder beside where you land to climb back. In the camp, walk into any corner tower and climb the ladder in it to reach the walk along the top of the wall, a level above the yard; the hatch beside it comes back down. The cavern is one open space, as the fort was under the sky: from the walk you see down into the yard and out over the cavern floor, and from below you see up to the walk and the towers and whoever is on them — wherever a light in the cavern reaches (see The dark). A dark hole in the wilderness drops into caves below, with a ladder beside each landing to climb home, and a deeper hole at the first cave's far end. The Lonely Mountain is climbed by a path that winds round it, a ramp up each terrace from Dale to the summit, with dragons round its foot; north of it, between the Grey Mountains’ spurs, the Withered Heath has more dragons, winter wolves and three cold-drakes. The Mountain’s Front Gate is walled up: the way in is the hidden door on the west face, three terraces up, and inside it a stair down on every level to the hall behind the gate, where a last stair goes down to the lair under the Mountain, a great dark cavern where a dragon lord lies; coming back up lets you out on the hall’s last row, behind the stair. Changing level takes two ordinary steps, so stairs cannot be hopped to shake off a fight. A ladder carries you on the way you were going: you climb it from the south and come out on the tile north of the hole or hatch at its top, and stepping back south into that hole takes you down to the tile south of the ladder’s foot. The foot of a ladder is always lit by the light coming down it, so the way up shows even in the dark. Stand at a passage and you can see down it: whoever is on the tile it lets out on shows in the mouth itself, down in the hole looking up. Levels see each other but never interact: no bite, arrow or pickup crosses between them, and monsters cannot climb. Every roof in Hobbiton is protected like the floor under it; the caves below are not, being underground, which is outside every law

Roofs

From outside, a building shows its roof, and whoever is inside is drawn as an outline over the roof rather than as themselves under it: in the colour their name is written in — a player in their own, one of the people in orange, a monster in red — and whatever you are fighting in red or yellow as always, with their name and health bar over them as anywhere. Somebody at the eaves, half behind the roof, is outlined over the part of them it hides, and somebody walking in or out of a doorway is outlined until they are out from under it. The roof lifts, and everybody under it is drawn as themselves, while you are inside the building or can see in through its doorway. The pointer over a roof is over the room under it, so a click there walks you in, unless somebody or something is up on the roof: then a look, a click or a long press there is at them, up on the roof, and not at the room under it

The dark

Under the ground you see only what is lit and what is within your own dark sight. Nobody carries a light of their own, whatever their people: without a lamp the only floor you see by is the square of your dark sight round you, one tile (two with the Ring of Barahir, five with a Great Ring on), a torch lights three tiles and a light spell five. Torches are 2 gold at Grubb’s, Barliman’s, Bard’s, Éomer’s and Dáin’s counters, and an orc or a dwarf drops one to three one kill in twenty. A torch is held where a shield goes: with no shield carried you hold one by yourself, and with a shield you click a torch to take it up in the shield’s place (click the shield to put it away again); both hands on a bow put it down. It burns only while it is in your hand where it is dark, under the ground or above it at night, fifteen minutes in all, and is out on the surface by day. You are told a minute before it gutters out, and when it does the next torch in your bag is lit. A look at your torches says how long the one in your hand has left, and what is left of it is kept when you log out. Its light is red, as fire’s is. How bright the world is drawn comes in steps, the same above the ground and under it: ground you know is drawn at half its brightness; inside the reach of any light, yours or anybody’s, at full brightness; within your own dark sight — one tile round you, five with a Great Ring on — at three quarters where no light reaches, so in a cave with no lamp, or past the edge of your light with a great ring on; a floor you look at up or down is drawn as bright as if you stood on it, but for your dark sight, which stays on your own floor, and the floors drawn round the one you look at are a quarter dimmer than it. Above the ground by day the sky lights everything as a light does: all the country you have seen is at full brightness, the floor you look at with it, and a roof over you or the country under the floor you look at at three quarters. There is no fade between the steps: the edge of a light is where the floor drops from full brightness to a half. Nothing alive is drawn outside the light and your dark sight at all: a kobold three tiles off is not on the screen, dim or otherwise, and neither is its name, its health bar nor the box round it if it is the thing you are attacking. It arrives whole at the edge of your light or your dark sight rather than fading in, so a cave is a place you listen to as much as look at — a monster out in it can see you coming and is walking towards you whether you can see it or not. Past your dark sight a thing is seen, and can be picked, only standing in a light you can see, and only as far off as your alertness and its clank together: a rat is seen as far as your lamp reaches, five tiles, and a rat in the dark three tiles off cannot be attacked at all. A friend’s lamp shows what stands in it too, and so does a lamp whose bearer is too far off or too quiet to make out (since 2026-10-20): you see the light, and what stands in it, though not who carries it. Except a lamp carried by somebody a Great Ring is fading, which goes into the Unseen with them: only other players and wraith-sight see it (see Sight). Under the ground, and above it at night, a light is noise: your clank there is at least as far as your light reaches, so a torch or a fire sword makes you 3, a light spell 5 and the phial 6 (see Clank), and monsters hear you that far off. Most monsters need light too: an orc, a dwarf, a troll, an elf, a man — anything shaped like a person — has a short dark sight, mostly a tile or two, and past it notices you under the ground only while you stand in a light, and only as far as its light sight (see Sight), so without a lamp you can pass one closer than your clank would let you. Beasts, bats, spiders, dragons, worms, fire, the undead and Gollum see you in the dark as well as in the light, out to their sight (see Sight). Whatever is fighting you finds you by the blows, light or none. The cave itself stays faintly there. Ground you have already walked past is left at half its brightness rather than black, so the shape of the place — the corridor you came down, the room you are in, the wall you are following — can still be read right across the screen, with whatever is lying on it dimmed down into a smudge. Ground you have never seen is black: what you are being shown is a memory of where you have been and not a map of where you have not. The memory is kept with your character, so a cave you have lit once is there, dim, the next time you come down, however long you were away (see Your map). Speech is heard whatever the light is doing, because words are a sound; a damage number, a miss or a splash of blood is not, since one floating up out of the dark would say exactly where the thing that hit you is standing. Fire is its own light and is seen wherever it is. So is a fire elemental, which lights the floor two tiles round it for everybody, the way a friend’s lamp does, and the Balrog, which lights five. So is Sting, out of the trolls’ hoard: held underground while an orc — an orc or an orc berserker — is within six tiles of you on your own level, it glows, and lights two tiles round you. Anybody who can see you sees by it too. Glamdring and Orcrist glow near orcs the same way. Two things shine whatever is near, to the same two tiles: Andúril in the hand and the Elendilmir worn as your helm; a light spell is the brighter. A fire sword in the hand burns to three tiles, red. The phial of Galadriel held as your shield shines brighter than either, lighting six tiles, further than a light spell; it goes down with a shield’s when both hands are on a bow. Some light has a colour: a torch’s, a fire sword’s, a fire elemental’s and the Balrog’s are red, and the elven lights are blue — the phial, and Sting, Glamdring and Orcrist while they glow — so the floor and whoever stands in them take the colour as far as that light reaches. A light spell, Andúril and the Elendilmir are plain white. Where two colours meet they blend, each strongest near its own light, so the floor between the Balrog and the phial goes from red through a vivid purple to blue. It is only how the light looks: what it lights and who hears it are the same. Above the ground by day, where the sky lights everything, a coloured light still shows as a glow of its colour on the ground round whoever carries it, fading out to the edge of its reach. The orcs’ cavern is one open space across its two levels, the yard and the cavern floor below and the walk along the top of the wall above: there each level sees the other, and a light lights both — a lamp on the walk lights the yard under it as far as it reaches, and a lamp in the yard the walk over it, whoever is carrying it. What stands on the other level is seen in that light as it would be on your own floor, and ground lit once is left dim as on your own. The tunnel under the lake beside the cavern is in the rock and sees none of it. Everywhere else under the ground a floor sees only itself. Above ground by day none of this applies: the sky lights everything. At night it all does (see Day and night)

Day and night

Above the ground there are ten minutes of day, then five of night, over and over, the same for everybody. By day the sky lights every tile at or above the ground. At night it lights nothing, and the surface is like a cave (see The dark): you see only what is within your dark sight or standing in a light, a torch, a light spell, the phial or a glowing blade lights the ground round you and burns as it would underground, and the light you carry is noise, so monsters hear it from as far as it reaches. Monsters see by their dark sight and light sight as they do underground (see Sight): beasts, bats, spiders, dragons, worms, fire, the undead and Gollum see you as well at night as by day, while anything shaped like a person — an orc, a man, an elf, a dwarf, a troll — has a short dark sight, mostly a tile or two, and makes you out further off than that only if you stand in a light, so at night a lamp is seen from further off and without one you can pass closer. Other players you still see as far as you hear them. The sky darkens over the half minute either side of dusk and lightens the same way at dawn. Which it is shows last among your statuses, a sun by day and a moon by night, with how long until it turns on its clock, under the ground as well as above it. Admins can ask the time of day with /sky, and hold it at day or night with /sky day or /sky night (/sky clock gives it back)

Ping

The stats panel shows the last round trip to the world, taken every two seconds: not how long a packet takes to cross the room but how long the server takes to hear you and answer, through the very loop that moves you. Green under 100 ms, amber to 300, red past it — and a dash when nothing has come back, which is a connection gone rather than a fast one

Colours

Every character has a colour of their own: tunic, name, and the damage numbers they cause. Monster damage is always red, and no player colour is ever red-like. A monster’s name over its head is bright red too, and the names of the world’s own people, the ones you can talk to, are orange; a monster’s name stays readable at the very edge of your light, where its health bar fades into the dark. Everybody’s eyes are plain dark, whatever their level (since 2026-10-23; they used to take on the character’s colour as they levelled). A skull is the exception: red eyes, straight away, at every level

Dropped skulls

The bone a death leaves where it happened belongs to whoever died: its eye sockets are drawn in that character’s colour, so a glance at the ground says who fell there, and a look says the name — “You see Ann’s skull. Ann lost their head.” Skulls stack by whose they are: four of Ann’s are one pile of four, and Bob’s lie beside them as a second pile, on the ground, in your bag and on a trade table alike. While the owner is in the world the eyes are the colour they are actually wearing; once they have logged out, the colour they wear when they are alone. A skull nobody can name — one dropped long ago, or off a character since deleted — keeps the plain dark sockets. Not the skull over a head, which is a mark and not a bone

Announcements

Everyone online is told when a player enters or leaves the world, is slain, or advances a level, and when the One Ring is found or unmade

On a phone

The four corners in the top right corner of the world fill the screen; the back gesture gives it back. The floor chip beside it, pressed, looks a floor up and a floor down, the icon for whatever you are standing on is in the opposite corner, and the panels — the slots and the spells among them — open from the row of icons under the world. The marks in the corners are over the world itself, so none of them can be folded away, scrolled past or dragged somewhere you then have to look for. Which way round you hold the phone is your own affair — the view fits either way. Better still, add the game to your home screen — it then opens with no browser around it at all without asking. A menu longer than the screen is tall scrolls, the one behind the three bars at the top right with the phone on its side most of all, and so do the small menus that pop up beside what you press: drag it up and down with a finger. Long-press stands in for right-click throughout: a press on the world looks at it, a press on a bag slot opens its menu, a press on a spell names it, says what it does and offers to cast it — which is where the spell names went when the buttons became drawings — and a press on any of the marks over the world names that one and offers to do it

Hobbiton

Where you start, and where you come back to: a Shire village where the keep stood. Bag End is dug into the Hill north of the green, its round door opening onto the north road, and the holes of Bagshot Row are in the Hill’s foot along the lane under it. On the green the roads cross; west of the crossing is the Mathom-house, with doors north, west and east, the depot boxes, the stair down to the undercroft and a stair up against the west wall to the museum, where the mathoms worth showing stand on plinths behind a red cord, and a ladder from there up onto the roof: Bullroarer Took’s club, Bilbo’s mithril shirt, an oliphaunt’s tusk and more, each with its card to look at; and east, through a gap in its hedge, the Party Field. In the middle of the field stands the Party Tree, a mallorn with silver bark and golden leaves, and the grass at its foot is where new characters wake and the dead come back. South-east is Bywater: the Green Dragon, where Grubb keeps shop at the door, a taproom with a bar, a hearth and tables, and a stair up to three rooms with a bed in each, the Bywater Pool with Sandyman’s mill on its bank and its wheel in the water, and more hobbit holes past the Water, which the south road crosses on a bridge three timbers wide. Inside the Mathom-house and round the Party Tree is a protection zone: nothing is attacked in it, no monster sets foot in it, and you may always log out there, so a chase ends at its edge. A skull shuts it to you until it fades, which is most of what a skull costs

Somebody in your way

Walk into another player and they step aside — in a doorway, on a bridge, or on the tile a ladder lets out onto, where two people used to be a wall to each other. They go one tile, somewhere they could have walked themselves, and never onto a stair, a hole or a ladder. Nobody is pushed out of a protection zone, though: stand at the village’s edge and everyone going past shoves you further into it, never out. A monster smaller than you is pushed aside too, the way a bigger monster on the hunt pushes a smaller one: one tile, the way you were walking if there is room there and turning off it a little at a time if not, once it has finished any step of its own, and you step onto the tile it was on. Every player is medium, an orc’s size, whatever their race: anybody moves a rat, a bat, a forest troll, a kobold or a wild hobbit, and not a dwarf, a snaga or a wolf, who are an orc’s size too; a warg or a winter wolf is a bear’s. A forest troll is an orc’s size, but anybody pushes it aside all the same; a bear on the hunt shoves it out of its way, and a dragon or anything that big crushes one with nowhere to go; the hill, cave and stone trolls are large and stand their ground. A monster your own size or bigger is not moved — it is there on purpose. A monster is never pushed onto a stair, a hole or a ladder, or into a protection zone, and one with nowhere to go stays where it is: walking into things pushes them and never crushes them. The world’s own people — Grubb, Elrond and the rest in People — are pushed aside too (since 2026-10-09), by anybody whatever their size, the same way: but only about their own home, so never out of their protection zone or more than 4 tiles from where they live, and one with nowhere there to go stays where it is. Only somebody standing still is pushed (since 2026-10-08): a player, monster or NPC has to have been on its tile for 2 seconds, so anyone still on the move, or just pushed, stays put and the log says they are on the move. Coming out of a stair, a hole or a ladder still moves whoever stands where you come out

The Water

A stream that rises at the west end of the village, runs east through it and under the south road’s bridge, and fills the Bywater Pool. The bridge is the one dry way over it in the village; round the spring at its west end is the long way. The keep’s moat and its three drawbridges went with the keep

Your map

Nobody is handed a map. The map fills in as you explore: every tile you have seen is drawn, and everything else is black, at every zoom — the far zoom is a map of where you have been and nothing more. Above ground you see ten tiles every way, on the ground and on every roof and hilltop above it, and the map takes in one tile more all round what you see, so that a wall or a shore at the edge of your sight is drawn as it really runs on, not cut off; walking a road draws a band of country twenty-three tiles wide. Under the ground you see only what is lit, yours or another player’s light (see The dark), and the one tile round it, so a cave is drawn a lamp’s width at a time. Your map is remembered: it is saved with your character, and logging out and back in, or coming back after a month, you find it as you left it. A character from before the map was kept starts with a blank one. Clicking out into the black walks you there if there is a way (see Click ground): you head straight for it, the world finds the way round whatever turns out to be in the road, and the map fills in as you go and not before — walking somewhere tells you no more of the map than you see on the way. Zoomed out, the map is named: from the closest of the map’s zooms out, the name of every place you have seen any of is written across it — the towns and other built places first, then the lands — and a name that would sit on another waits for a closer zoom. Only above the ground, and only the places you have been, so the names fill in as the map does. Looking at another floor from where you stand (Look up / Look down), that floor is drawn as you remember it, evenly: your own light is on your own floor, and does not light the one you are looking at. A floor under the ground you are looking at is drawn at a quarter of its brightness, half where a light reaches it; one at or above the ground at half, over the country under it just as dim (see Look up / Look down and The dark)

The world’s shape

The world is laid out like Middle-earth, from the Bay of Forochel in the north to the river Harnen in the south, and from the sea a few leagues west of Lindon to the forests beside the Sea of Rhûn in the east. Hobbiton is in the Shire, in Eriador, the country west of the Misty Mountains: the sea to the west of it, the Blue Mountains either side of the Gulf of Lune, and the Misty Mountains to the east. The world is 423 tiles across and 293 from north to south, half the ground it had. It was 601 by 412 until 2026-10-16, when it was halved: the country between the places was squeezed again, harder, while every town, dungeon, upper and lower level kept its size, so the walk from Hobbiton to Mount Doom is about 640 tiles where it was about 845, and every journey is about a quarter shorter. It was 768 by 571 until 2026-10-12, when the empty country between the places was first squeezed out, and the walk to Mount Doom was about 990. Along the north edge, east of the Ice Bay of Forochel, lies the frozen waste of Forodwaith: ridges and spires of ice that nobody can cross or shoot over, where nothing lives. It was drawn again on 2026-09-29 from one map of the whole of Middle-earth: every place in it is the size it was, tile for tile, and only the country between the places shrank, so a walk across Eriador is about two thirds of what it was and the walks east and south are shorter still. Umbar and the lands south of the Harnen are off the map. Three ways lead out of Eriador: the High Pass east of Rivendell, which sits back in a cleft of the mountains’ west face; the East Road climbs the pass by ramps, up the west face, south along a shelf, back north along the snowy crest and down the east face, on to the Great River, Mirkwood, the Lonely Mountain, the Iron Hills and the Sea of Rhûn; the mines of Moria, in at the Doors of Durin on the mountains’ west face and out under them at the Dimrill Gate on their east face, on the Dimrill Dale above Lothlórien; and the Gap of Rohan, down the coast past the southern end of the mountains, into Rohan, where a road runs from Isengard through Edoras to Minas Tirith and on across Ithilien and Harondor, over the Harnen and off the south edge of the world. Mordor is walled in by mountains on the north, west and south and has three ways in: the Black Gate in the north-west, the pass of Cirith Ungol above Minas Morgul, and its open east, where the Ash Mountains and the Mountains of Shadow end short of the edge of the world, from Rhûn round the end of the Ash Mountains onto the ash plain of Lithlad, or from Khand round the end of the mountains south of the Sea of Núrnen. Nothing green grows on Gorgoroth or on Mount Doom: they are ash, dirt and rock. Inside, the plateau of Gorgoroth, the plain east of it and the north of Nurn are broken up by rock to fight among and run round — outcrops, broken ridges, slag heaps, fissures, boulders, ruined orc watch-towers and walls — and ten crags each have a ramp or two up onto a hilltop, where a Black Orc may be keeping watch. The name of wherever you are is at the top of the view, and every piece of ground has one: in Eriador the old map’s names, from Forlindon and Harlindon, the two halves of Lindon either side of the Gulf of Lune, the Grey Havens at its head and Ered Luin behind them, through the Shire round Hobbiton in its four farthings, the Old Forest, the Barrow-downs, Bree-land, Weathertop and the Lone-lands, to the Trollshaws and the Ettenmoors below Rivendell, Angmar and Forochel in the north and Eregion, Tharbad, Minhiriath and Dunland in the south, with the old kingdoms of Arthedain, Rhudaur and Cardolan under them where nothing smaller is named; beyond the mountains, Rohan, Gondor, Mordor and theirs. The difficulty is a matter of distance: the further out you walk, the worse what you meet, and a ring at thirty tiles means the same walk whichever gate you left by; Mordor and Harondor are the far end of it. The two places worth walking to stand where the old maps put them — the orc camp in a cavern under Lake Evendim, to the north, down a hole on the lake’s shore where the north road ends; and the dwarf hold in the Blue Mountains to the west-south-west, along the road that leaves the south road west, with the dungeon’s mouth beside it — each out past the fields round Hobbiton, the camp the nearer of the two. The Greenway, the old North-South Road, runs from Bree down to Tharbad, a ruin on the north bank of the Greyflood where a Ranger keeps watch, fords the river beside the two piers left of the old bridge (follow the river down its south bank to the sea and you come to Lond Daer, the old haven of Númenor, a hall and two houses by a stone quay), and on down the Dunland side of Enedwaith to Isengard, where it meets the road out of Isengard’s gate a little above the Fords of Isen. The road crosses the Isen there by the ford and runs on into Rohan, to Edoras and Minas Tirith. Watch the road south of Tharbad: bandits keep to Dunland and lie up along it, and wait at the Fords. There was a nursery east of the castle once, over the third bridge, kept for level 5 and below with nothing but rats and kobolds in it; it is gone, and the east is ordinary country like everywhere else

Your bag

Any number of kinds of thing: what limits a bag is its weight alone (see Weight below). Everything stacks, so each kind is one slot however many of it there are: five hundred rocks are one slot and five thousand gold coins are another. The depot holds any number of kinds too, in a building rather than on your back

Weight

Everything you can carry weighs something, counted in coins (cn) — the weight of one gold coin. A coin is 1 cn, a potion 25, a sword 110, a suit of plate 450. What you can lift is 10 000 cn at level one and 500 more for every level after it, more in a belt (see Belts), and the bag’s icon fills from its foot as you load it — amber from four fifths, red and hatched past the line — and its hover, or the small menu a right-click or long press on it opens, says the numbers; the same menu sorts the bag by kind or by weight. Gold is what fills you, not gear: hauling a hoard home is a trip to plan, and the depot is where the rest of it waits. A pile on the ground too heavy to take whole is taken as far as you can carry, the rest left lying and the log saying how many; anything else too heavy to take is left where it is and the log says the numbers; nothing is ever taken out of your bag to keep you under the line, and weight never slows you. Over the line you keep everything but can take nothing more until you are back under it. It went on 2026-09-23, when a slot held only so many of a kind instead, and came back on 2026-10-04 with every kind one slot again

Belts

A belt is worn at the waist, a place of its own beside the armor and the cloak, and lets you carry more: the silver belt of Lórien, clasped with a golden flower as the Lady gave the hobbits, 1000 cn more, and the golden belt 2000 more. Galadriel sells both, at 100 and 300 gold. Like a cloak, the bag puts on the best you carry unless you click one (click it again to take it off), and everybody sees it on you. A belt turns no blow and never wears out

Where the slots are

In the Inventory panel, opened by the bag in the row of icons under the world, like any other panel. How many slots stand across is whatever the panel is wide enough for. Only the slots with something in them are drawn (since 2026-09-29), so there is a square for each thing you carry and none for the room left; hover over the panel between the squares to see how many of your slots are in use, and an empty bag says so. What your bag weighs is on its icon (see Weight above), not in the panel. They were a mark in the corner of the world with a box behind it for a few hours on 2026-09-22; a panel does the same job without taking a piece of the world to do it, and without putting the way in behind a button

What is within reach

Stand on something, or next to it, and a lit icon appears in the bottom right corner of the world for each thing in reach, showing the piece a pickup would take and how many of it there are. The same thing lying on more than one tile shares one icon, counting all of it — a steel shield on one tile and two on another are one icon of 3 — and a press on it takes the nearest pile first, your own tile before the ones beside it, and the ones square on before the corners; a thing that differs from another, a made piece or a named Ring, keeps an icon of its own. The one under your feet comes first, in the corner. Upright they run along the bottom of the world from the right; sideways they run up its right side from the bottom. Click one and it goes in your bag — it is the same pickup a click on that tile already sends, with a target you can hit. Step away and it goes. Under a pile it shows the top piece, which is the one a press would take, and its hover says how much else is down there and that taking this one uncovers the next

Gold

Coins are loot like anything else: they fall beside the body and are picked up off the ground. A coin weighs one coin, so a purse can be too heavy to add to, and then you take as many as you can carry and the rest stay where they are

Experience

Everybody who hurt a monster gets its whole experience, however much or little each of you did: two players on a wolf both get all of it, whether one landed every blow and the other a single scratch. Anybody who has left the world by the time it dies gets nothing and is not counted. What you earn floats up over your head in white, for your eyes only. Kills that land together are added into one number rather than stacking up one at a time. An admin can set a level rate with /levelrate, like /levelrate 2 for double: every monster is worth that many times its experience and every use of a skill counts that many times, for everybody, until it is set back with /levelrate 1, or for a while if a time follows, like /levelrate 2 3d or /levelrate 1.5 2h, after which it goes back by itself and everybody is told. It lasts through a restart, time limit and all, the login screen says it and how long it has left, and your status row shows it while it is up. It does not change what a death costs

Monster attention

Anything already beside you shifts its feet every few seconds, to another tile square on to you — never to a corner, and never out of reach — so a fight moves about a bit instead of two things standing still and trading blows. A monster reconsiders who it is chasing every ten seconds or so, picking by lot among whoever is in range, so a pack spreads over a party instead of all mobbing one person. It also changes its mind the moment it cannot find a way to its target, so walling yourself off sends it after somebody it can reach

Crowded stairs

Somebody standing where a passage comes out does not bar it: arriving pushes them a tile aside, and if they are hemmed in, whoever is hemming them in is pushed first, and so on until there is room — everyone in the chain moving one tile, and only onto ground they could have walked to. Only when nobody can move at all does the way refuse, and the log says who is in it. Something heavy lying there, a depot box or a chest, cannot be pushed and closes the passage until it is gone

Shuffling

Something already beside you shifts its feet every few seconds instead of standing still, working its way around you a tile at a time. Every one of those steps is a straight one — never a diagonal slide, which would cost it two and a half times as much — and it never steps out of reach, so waiting for one to wander off you is not a plan

Clank

Gear makes noise, and noise is what monsters notice you by. Your clank is on the stats panel, debug or not: the pieces actually in use added up — the weapon in hand, the shield held, the armor worn, the cloak over it and the helm on your head — and it is added to every monster’s own keenness before it decides whether it has heard you. Your racial clank, what a body walking makes on its own, is 5 for a man — 4 for an elf, 6 for a dwarf and 3 for a hobbit — and since 2026-10-20 every monster is a tile less keen than it was, so a rat and an orc, which have none of their own, hear a bare man at 5 tiles. Ten pieces add one tile each — plate armor, dragon-scale mail, Easterling scale mail, the carapace, the tower shield, the Balrog shield, the Uruk-hai shield, the helm of Dol Amroth, the Elendilmir and the hobbit saucepan — no weapon among them — so the loudest a man or a dwarf gets is 8, and everything else you can wear or swing is silent. What is only in the bag is silent too: a suit of plate carried is not a suit of plate walked in. A new character’s kit — a club, a buckler and a fishing rod — adds nothing, so you leave the temple at the 5 your own feet make. Two pieces go the other way: the elven cloak at −2 and the spidersilk cloak at −1. Radagast’s brown cloak makes no noise either way, but it takes 3 off the keenness of the beasts toward you instead, until you strike one (see The spiders of the eaves). The mithril shirt is silent, adding nothing, where plate adds 1, and a carapace clacks, adding 1. Quiet does not add up the way noise does: the quiet pieces you have on take off only what the quietest of them takes, so if two of them are ever on you together you take off only the more, while an elven cloak over plate takes the plate’s ring away and 2 besides. An elven cloak and a bow is 3 for a man, the quietest he gets by wearing things; the spidersilk and a bow is 4. That is not silence, and the difference matters — a rat hears you at four tiles where it hears a bare man from five. Nothing anybody can wear reaches 0 without a great ring: the quietest there is, a hobbit in an elven cloak, is at 1, and at 0 with a Ring of the Seven or the Nine on (see Rings). At 0, where only a great ring takes you, a monster hears you only as far as its own keenness reaches: a rat or an orc not at all, a dwarf geomancer, a wight and a giant spider at a tile, a dragon at three, the Balrog at five. Every tooltip and every row at the counter says what a piece costs you. Players hear by it too: you see somebody when they are no further off than their clank and your alertness together, and every player’s alertness is 1 (since 2026-10-17), or 3 while a great ring is on (see Rings). Every monster makes 5, so monsters are seen from 6 tiles, and so is a man in nothing; a knight in the loudest kit (8) from 9; a hobbit (3) only from 4 tiles, a hobbit in an elven cloak from 2. Somebody you cannot see is not on your screen and cannot be picked, nor do numbers float over them: the damage, poison and healing they take are theirs to see. A pick who goes too quiet to see is let go. Under the ground a light counts as clank as well: your clank there is the larger of the sum and how far your light reaches, and what is seen there past your alertness has to be standing in a light (see The dark). An admin gone /invisible, or with /seeall on, sees everything in sight however quiet it is. Fighting is loud: every attack, a swing, a shot, a spell or a dragon’s breath, adds 1 to the attacker’s clank for two seconds, and 1 to the clank of whoever it is made at, landed or not (until 2026-10-21 it was 2 for the attacker and nothing for the attacked). Neither stacks: another attack only starts the two seconds again, and somebody set on by a whole pack is 1 louder, not 1 a wolf. Somebody trading blows is both, so 2 louder; a beat of poison or fire still on you is no attack and adds nothing. Two seconds after a fight you are back to your own. It goes for monsters as for you: something biting somebody is seen from further off, and so is something being shot. A monster you shoot from beyond what it can notice comes for you only if that 1 tile brings you into its hearing

Losing a monster

You can run from a fight. A monster follows you two tiles past the distance it would have noticed you from — for a silent person, 2 for a rat and 5 for a dragon, and your clank moves both ends of that together — and then gives up and drifts home, at a wanderer’s pace and not in a straight line: about one step in three goes wherever it likes. Fighting it suspends that: anything you swing at it, landed or turned aside, keeps it after you at any distance until 4 seconds have passed with nothing more from you. So you can leave a fight, but not by hitting something and walking off mid-swing. Rats and wolves run when they are in the red — three tenths of their health or less, where their bar turns red — and still bite as they run: whenever their bite comes round with you beside them it lands, and they keep going without stopping or turning back for it, so whoever runs one down takes its bites on the way. Anything running in the red goes at half its pace, so a wounded thing can be run down. A dragon that runs still breathes: its fire goes back at whoever it is running from, on the same clock as ever, so turning your back on a hurt dragon is no safer than facing it

Three trolls

There are three kinds, and every one of them knits back together as you fight it, wounded or not, so a troll is finished in one go or not at all — chipping at one with rocks and coming back later gets you nowhere. The forest troll is the one everybody meets first, the hill troll is the mountains’ and the cave troll is the worst of the three, down in the dark

Forest trolls

The green, hunched trolls of the wild country, with a club and a wooden shield — what used to be called just trolls. A forest troll mends two hitpoints every couple of seconds, which on its fifty is worth about a bite of whatever you are doing to it, and it runs when it is in the red and comes back whole. A kill leaves something about three times in five: most often the club, two to four rocks or the wooden shield, otherwise a leather armor, a purse of 7 to 31 gold or two to four meat: about 2.02 gold a kill

Hill trolls

The trolls of the High Pass, east of Rivendell: a cyclops’ size, grey as the rock, swinging a great club, and much the tougher cousin of the forest troll — two hundred and ten hitpoints that knit back three every couple of seconds, a club that hits for up to forty-six, and they do not run in the red. They live on the shelves and the snowy crest the road climbs over, among the orcs and the cyclopes, and wade the snow no quicker than you do, and hear you coming a tile further off than most things do. Each carries a boulder in its free fist and throws it at you from up to two tiles off whenever you are not beside it — the same blow as its club, on the same swing, and met by your armor and shield the same way — so keeping your distance from one is no escape from it; standing next to it, it clubs you instead. They roam the troll-fells of the Ettenmoors and the Coldfells too (see The Rangers’ camp). A kill leaves something three times in four: a purse of 11 to 42 gold, the club, two to six rocks, two to four meat, chain mail, or a troll hide one kill in ten, about 7.90 gold a kill

Cave trolls

The trolls of the deep places, and the worst of the three: bigger than a hill troll, slate grey from never seeing the sun, knobbed with stone along the back, iron manacles still on their wrists, and swinging a club like a felled tree for up to sixty-two, the hardest blow of any troll. Two hundred and eighty hitpoints knit back four every couple of seconds, so there is no wearing one down, and they never run. What they are not is quick — slower than any character can walk — so a fight with one can always be left. They live below the ground, on the second floor down of the wilderness caves north of the dwarf hold, whose mouth is a hole in the open ground; the first floor down has forest trolls instead. Like the hill trolls they hear you a tile further off than most things

Gnolls

Hyena-headed raiders far out in the wilds with the cyclopes, tougher than an orc berserker, each carrying a spear. They are the only place a spear comes from, one in ten

Bandits

Hooded outlaws of the hills under the southern Misty Mountains, in green cloaks with scarves over their faces, each with a sword in one hand and a bow in the other (since 2026-10-20). They shoot whoever they are fighting from two tiles off, as hard as the sword hits, and still walk up to use the sword, which they do once you are beside them. They are quieter than most, seen a tile closer than a man would be. They live in Dunland, lie up along the Greenway where it runs down the Dunland side of Enedwaith from Tharbad to Isengard, and wait on both banks at the Fords of Isen. Between an orc and a gnoll in a fight: ninety hitpoints, a blow of up to twenty-four, a jerkin and a parry, and quick enough on their feet that they are not easily walked away from. A kill leaves something two times in five, any of six things as likely as each other: a purse of 6 to 24 gold, their sword, their bow, 8 to 20 arrows, their jerkin or a meat or two: about 1.87 gold a kill on average

Crebain

Black crows of Dunland, over Dunland itself, the Gap of Rohan and the Swanfleet. Fourteen hitpoints and a beak, quick on the wing, and they flee once they are hurt. A kill leaves a meat one time in four, and nothing else: 0.25 gold a kill

Snagas

Slave-orcs of the mountains, small and ragged, each with a club: on Mount Gram, in the Ettenmoors and the Misty Mountains, and on the shelves of the High Pass among the bigger orcs. Thirty-five hitpoints, and they run when they are losing. Sting, Glamdring and Orcrist glow near them as near any orc. A kill leaves something about one time in two: a few coins, the club, a jerkin, a fistful of arrows or, one kill in twenty, a bow, about 1.63 gold a kill

Wargs

Wolves that think, near black and bigger than a winter wolf, in the Vales of Anduin round the Carrock and the Old Ford and out in Rhovanion. As quick as a winter wolf, a harder bite, and they never run. A kill leaves something one time in two: a warg pelt one kill in six, or a meat or two, about 1.00 gold a kill

Southron archers

Men of Harad in scarlet with gold in their ears, in Harondor, Near Harad and the south of Ithilien, and marching with a mûmak’s war-column on the road through north Ithilien. Each has a bow, and unlike a skeleton a Southron keeps its distance: walk at one and it backs away, shooting, so it has to be cornered or out-shot. A kill leaves something one time in two: a purse of 5 to 20 gold, the bow, or arrows, about 2.97 gold a kill

Dunlendings

Wild hill-men of Dunland in hide, with spears, in Dunland, over the ford from Tharbad and in the Swanfleet. Eighty hitpoints and slow on their feet. A kill leaves something one time in two: a purse of 3 to 15 gold, the spear, a jerkin, or a meat or two: about 2.50 gold a kill

Corsairs of Umbar

Sea-robbers: every corsair of Umbar has a red rag on his head and a curved Umbar cutlass. They hold Pelargir, in and round its walls, and the coast from the Mouths of Anduin to Lebennin and Belfalas. A hundred hitpoints. A kill leaves something one time in two: a purse of 10 to 35 gold, the cutlass, a corsair’s key one kill in sixteen, a jerkin or a fish or three, about 5.49 gold a kill

Easterlings

Men of Rhûn in red lacquered scale and black helms, with axes, in Rhûn, the Brown Lands and Dagorlad. A hundred and twenty hitpoints and a blow of up to thirty-two. A kill leaves something one time in two: a purse of 8 to 28 gold, the axe, Easterling scale mail one kill in fifteen, a health potion or a jerkin, about 7.52 gold a kill

Uruk-hai

The great orcs of Isengard, in black iron with the White Hand on their helms and shields, carrying an Uruk-hai pike and an Uruk-hai shield. They hold Isengard, and range out to the Fords of Isen, the Gap of Rohan, Fangorn’s eaves and the Wold. A hundred and thirty hitpoints and a blow of up to thirty-five. Sting, Glamdring and Orcrist glow near them. A kill leaves something one time in two: a purse of 8 to 30 gold, the shield about one kill in nine, the pike, chain mail or a health potion, about 6.30 gold a kill

Black Orcs

The black Uruks of Mordor, bigger again than the Uruk-hai and near black, in black mail with the Red Eye painted on their helms, each carrying an Uruk-hai scimitar. They hold Mordor and nowhere else, in bands: in Udûn behind the Black Gate, across Gorgoroth, among the rocks of the plain east of it and in the north of Nurn, and on top of the crags they keep watch. A hundred and eighty hitpoints, a blow of up to forty-two, more armor and better defense than the Uruk-hai and a quicker step: the toughest orcs that come in numbers, though a berserker still hits harder, and Bolg and his bodyguard under Gundabad are more again. They notice you as far off as an orc does. Sting, Glamdring and Orcrist glow near them. A kill leaves something three times in four: a purse of 12 to 42 gold, the scimitar, chain mail, a steel shield, a health potion, or one kill in thirty-seven or so plate armor, about 12.54 gold a kill

Stone trolls

Bert, Tom and William’s kind, bigger than a forest troll and grey-brown as the rocks they will turn into, each with a club. They live in the Trollshaws, close together in the wood west of Rivendell, in the valley of the Ettenmoors where Narsil’s hilt lies, and on the troll-fells of the Ettenmoors and the Coldfells (see The Rangers’ camp). A hundred and seventy hitpoints that knit back two every couple of seconds, slow on their feet, and no keener of hearing than a rat, so you can creep past one. A kill leaves something three times in four: a purse of 15 to 50 gold, a troll key one kill in seven, the club, three to six meat, chain mail, or a troll hide one kill in ten, about 9.26 gold a kill

Huorns

Trees that walk, in the Old Forest and in Fangorn. They are not Ents, and they hate whatever walks free (see Ents). The slowest thing in the world, so a huorn can always be walked away from, but 110 hitpoints that mend two every couple of seconds, branches that hit for up to 15, armor 3 and defense 0–7, no blood for a poison to work in, and big enough to shove anything smaller out of its way. A kill leaves something half the time: one to four sticks three kills in ten, a purse of 5 to 15 gold off those it swallowed three in twenty, or a jerkin one kill in twenty, about 1.90 gold a kill counting the sticks at what they would fetch if anybody bought them

Ents

The shepherds of the trees walk in Fangorn: in Derndingle, at Wellinghall and on the forest’s paths (see Fangorn). An Ent leaves you alone, however near you walk, and your auto attack never swings at one, until you wrong it: strike it, shoot it, cast at it, set it alight or poison it, or call it with provoke. Then it turns on you, and so does every Ent within eight tiles of it, and an Ent does not forget who wronged it until it is felled. Anybody who did nothing is still left alone. Twice a man’s height and too big to push aside, an Ent has 600 hitpoints that mend 3 every couple of seconds, hands that strike for up to 54, armor 8 and defense 0–36, and no blood for a poison to work in, but it walks slowly. One is a fight for level 30 with potions and the heal spell, and a level 30 beats one without needing either; a level 25 wins on under a mana potion a fight, but without potions or the heal spell only two fights in twenty. A kill leaves something two times in five: one to three Ent-draughts one kill in four, or one to three sticks, about 30.10 gold a kill

The Nazgûl

The Ringwraiths wait in the strongholds of the Enemy, and nowhere near the Shire or Bree: in Minas Morgul, in Dol Guldur in the south of Mirkwood, and on the scorched ground about the walls of Barad-dûr. Each is black-hooded, with nothing in the hood but two cold lights, and a Morgul-blade. Its cuts poison, it takes back half of what it deals, poison does nothing to it, and it does not stay down: like a wight it rises from what it leaves until somebody lays it to rest, for 50 mana, and its experience is paid then. It has 750 hitpoints and a blow of up to 70. What it drops is held in its remains until then: three times in four, a purse of 40 to 140 gold, the Morgul-blade one time in nine, a soul orb or two, health potions or plate armor, about 34.38 gold a kill, and a Ring of the Nine one time in twenty-five while none of the Nine are out, half as often for every one that is, and never once all nine are (see Rings). Laid to rest, a Nazgûl is back in three minutes (since 2026-10-22), where most things are back in ninety seconds to two minutes. Their lord is the ninth (see The Witch-king). An admin can have a red arrow at the edge of the screen pointing to each of the Nine in the world, on any floor and however far, with how many tiles off it is: the arrows are off until they ask for them with /nazgularrow (again puts them away), and /nazgul says where each one is, or that it is dead and when it comes back

The Witch-king

The Witch-king of Angmar, the Lord of the Nazgûl, stands at the heart of Minas Morgul, at the foot of its tower: a Nazgûl a head taller, crowned in steel over a cold green light. He is the hardest thing in the world short of Durin’s Bane, and pays more experience than anything but the Bane: 1000 hitpoints, a blow of up to 72 with a Morgul-blade whose cut poisons harder than a Nazgûl’s, armor 11, defense 0–33, and the pace of a level twelve. He takes back half of what he deals, mends 6 hitpoints every two seconds, poison and lightning do nothing to him, and every nine to twelve seconds the ground for three tiles round him is torn open, 40 to 70 that nothing worn meets, as round the Balrog — though his own Nazgûl stand in it unharmed. His shriek paralyses: every fifteen to twenty seconds, when somebody is within six tiles of him and in his sight, he shrieks, and every player that near cannot move, strike or cast an attack for 2 seconds. Potions and the heal spell still work, and a pillar between you and him is cover. His cry is heard thirty tiles off. Like a Nazgûl he rises from what he leaves until somebody lays him to rest, for 100 mana, and his experience is paid then. Anybody can finish him, a man as well as an elf, a dwarf or a hobbit (since 2026-10-15; until then no man’s blow could take his last hitpoint). What he drops is held in his remains until they are laid to rest: three times in four, the Witch-king’s crown one kill in thirteen or so, his Morgul-blade, a purse of 100 to 300 gold, two to five health potions, or plate armor, about 72.10 gold a kill, and since 2026-10-22 a Ring of the Nine on the same terms as any Nazgûl (see Rings). The crown is a helm, armor 8, the most any helm does, silent, 220 cn, and worth 100 gold to a vendor; nothing else in the world drops it and nobody sells it

Mûmakil

The great beasts of Harad, as big as a house, with war-towers on their backs: each alone in Harondor, Near Harad and the south of Khand, and one marching up the road through north Ithilien with a war-column of Southron archers (see Henneth Annûn). Seven hundred hitpoints, tusks that hit for up to sixty-four, and so big that anything in their way is crushed rather than walked round. They trumpet from far off and walk slowly, so they are seen and heard long before they arrive. A kill leaves meat, a mûmak tusk one kill in ten, the war-tower’s purse of 80 to 240 gold, its arrows, one kill in eight the Harad banner off its tower (see The banner of Harad), or one kill in forty a Haradrim spiked shield, about 42.23 gold a kill; nine kills in ten leave something. The spiked shield, round, yellow and black, block 6 like a tower shield, weighs two thirds as much and does not clank

Shelob

On the stair below the tower of Cirith Ungol, where a giant spider used to wait, waits Shelob: the giant spider grown vast and old, black, green-eyed and silent. Nine hundred hitpoints, a bite of up to seventy-two, and twice a giant spider’s poison; poison does nothing to her. Her web entangles: every ten to fourteen seconds she throws it at whoever she is after, from up to five tiles off, two tiles further than a bow carries, and whoever it lands on cannot move or levitate for 3 seconds, though they can still fight. A wall or a pillar stops it as it stops an arrow. A kill leaves something three times in four: a carapace, a spidersilk cloak, a spider-fang dagger, chain mail, a purse of 50 to 150 gold, health potions, or a mithril shirt one kill in sixty-eight, about 38.38 gold a kill

Ungoliant and Sauron

The two worst things in the world stand nowhere in it: no place on the map has either, and only an admin can bring one, with /summon Ungoliant or /summon Sauron. Neither is meant to be fought alone. Ungoliant, Shelob’s mother, who drank the light of the Two Trees, is Shelob bigger again and black over black, red-eyed, in a cloud of her own Unlight: 2200 hitpoints, a bite of up to 100 that poisons half again as hard as Shelob’s, armor 14, and Shelob’s web; she takes back half of what she bites out of you, mends 6 every two seconds, poison does nothing to her, and she sees in the dark and sees the faded. Sauron is the Dark Lord in black plate, a crown of spikes on his helm with the fire of the Eye in its slit, a great mace in one fist and the One on the other hand: 3000 hitpoints, a blow of up to 120, armor 25, the pace of a level twelve, the Witch-king’s rift of torn ground about him, a third of every blow taken back, 8 mended every two seconds, and nothing done to him by fire, lightning or poison; he gives off three tiles of red light and sees far, lit or dark, and sees the faded. Each pays twice its hitpoints in experience, 4400 and 6000. A kill leaves something about half the time off Ungoliant and three times in five off Sauron: off Ungoliant a carapace, a spidersilk cloak, a spider-fang dagger, pearls, a purse of 350 to 1050 gold, three to eight health potions, or a mithril shirt one kill in forty, about 121.92 gold a kill; off Sauron a purse of 600 to 1800 gold, three to eight health or mana potions, two to five soul orbs, plate, a tower shield, a Morgul-blade or the black rod, about 190.50 gold a kill

Mount Gundabad

Where the Misty Mountains meet the Grey Mountains, north of Rivendell and north-west of Beorn’s, stands Mount Gundabad, where Durin the Deathless awoke and the orcs of the north have their stronghold now. The Great Gate is in its south face, above the springs of the Anduin; behind it is the gate hall, and a stair at its back goes down to the halls of Gundabad. On the first level down are the pillared muster hall, the warg pens west of it, the barracks east (orcs, snagas and a berserker), the bat roost north-west, and north-east the guard chamber, with a stair down to the Hall of Durin’s Waking. Its own orcs: Gundabad orcs, grey mountain-orcs in rust-red mail with swords, a hundred and sixty hitpoints and blows of up to 38, between the Uruk-hai and the Black Orcs; three kills in five leave a purse of 10 to 34 gold, a health potion, chain mail, the sword, a steel shield or, one kill in twenty, a bow, about 8.04 gold a kill. Bolg’s bodyguard, goblins of huge size in black mail round their master: 320 hitpoints, an Uruk-hai scimitar that hits for up to 52, armor 9, and they notice you further off; three kills in four leave a purse of 20 to 50 gold, a health potion or two, the scimitar, a steel shield or, one kill in fourteen, plate armor, about 17.00 gold a kill. And on the dais at the west end of the hall, Bolg of the North, son of Azog, who led Gundabad to the Battle of Five Armies: a thousand hitpoints, blows of up to 70, armor 8 and defense 0–22, and he mends 4 hitpoints every two seconds. A kill leaves something four times in five: a purse of 60 to 180 gold, 2 to 4 health potions, plate armor, his scimitar, or a mana potion or two, about 46.35 gold a kill. He is for level 25 with potions and the heal spell, which wins nearly every fight for a health potion and a mana potion or two; a level 20 needs about five potions; without potions or the heal spell a level 25 wins one fight in seven, a level 30 three in four and a level 35 all. Fight his bodyguard first, one at a time if you can. Sting, Glamdring and Orcrist glow near every orc of Gundabad, Bolg too

The crypt’s dead

In the crypt under Sauron’s temple on the Isle of Meneltarma, and nowhere else. Drowned King’s Men, in the galleries: soldiers of Númenor in sea-green mail, each with a Westernesse blade (the sword the barrow wights carry), three hundred and sixty hitpoints, heavy mail and a blow of up to 44. Temple Shades, in the galleries too: priests’ ghosts that throw the altar’s fire from up to two tiles like a geomancer’s lava, 30 to 45 through any armor, and back away while they do; a hundred and seventy hitpoints, and they go out in a flare when they die that sets fire to whoever killed it, wherever they stand, and to anybody beside it: sixteen, then fourteen and so on down to two, every two seconds, seventy-two in all, through any armor. The status icons show a flame with the next beat’s number while it burns; nothing puts it out but time, and a protection zone keeps it from biting. Charred Dead, by the inner tomb: slow, deaf, hard-shelled, five hundred and twenty hitpoints, and blows of fire up to 55. And the High Priest of Melkor in the inner tomb: a thousand hitpoints, armor 9, the black rod in his hand and fire in his blows up to 91, and like a Nazgûl he gets up again unless you lay his remains to rest, for 80 mana. Poison does nothing to any of them. Each kill leaves something three times in four: coin, black silver and pearls to sell, potions, and now and then a Westernesse blade, a helm of the King’s Men (armor 5 on the head) or, off the High Priest, the black rod (two-handed, shoots a little fireball up to two tiles off on the ranged skill, magic +6)

Wood-elf archers

Wood-elves of Mirkwood, hooded in green over brown, each with an elven longbow: along the Elf-path, at the boat over the Enchanted River, in the feasting glades, on the ledge road and in the Elvenking’s halls. Like every Wood-elf they are hostile to anybody who walks in the King’s wood, elves too. Like a Southron, an archer keeps its distance: walk at one and it backs away, shooting, so it has to be cornered or out-shot. Ninety hitpoints and arrows of up to thirty. A kill leaves something one time in two: a purse of 6 to 24 gold, arrows, lembas, a health potion, leather armor, or about one kill in sixty-four an elven cloak or an elven longbow, or one kill in fifty dragon ham (see Food), about 4.02 gold a kill. A man with sword and shield can take one alone from about level 10, and so can an elf with a bow

Wood-elf wardens

Wood-elves in brown under dark green hoods, each with a spear, keeping the paths, the glades and the halls with the archers. A hundred and thirty hitpoints and a thrust of up to thirty-two, armor 3 and defense 0–8. A kill leaves something one time in two: a purse of 8 to 26 gold, the spear, a health potion, leather armor, lembas, or about one kill in fifty-eight an elven cloak, about 5.05 gold a kill. One alone is a fight for a man of level 10, or an elf archer of 15

Guards of the Elvenking

The Elvenking’s household guard, in green over silver mail under tall pointed helms, each with a sword and a steel shield: in the gate hall, about the throne and in the dungeons and cellars. Two hundred hitpoints, a blow of up to forty-two, good armor and better defense, and they notice you as far off as an archer does, a tile further than a warden. A kill leaves something three times in four: a purse of 16 to 46 gold, a health potion or two, the sword, the shield, chain mail, lembas, about one kill in sixteen the Elvenking’s keys (see The Elvenking’s cell), or about one kill in twenty-five an elven cloak, about 11.07 gold a kill. One alone wants a man of about level 15, or an elf archer of 25

Thranduil

The Elvenking, crowned with leaves and berries, on his dais in the King’s hall a level under his gate, with his guards about the throne. Nine hundred and fifty hitpoints, a blow of up to sixty-eight, heavy armor and great defense, and he notices you from far off. A kill leaves something three times in four: a purse of 60 to 180 gold, an elven cloak, two to five health potions, an elven longbow about one kill in eight, mana potions, lembas, or one kill in ten one to three dragon ham (see Food), about 36.72 gold a kill. Drawn off on his own he wants a man of level 40 alone, two of 30 or four of 25 (elf archers: two of 40 or four of 30); with all his guards at once, a party of four of level 50, or of 40 with potions

The Wight-lord of Carn Dûm

The evil spirits that went into the barrows came out of Angmar, and this is the one the Witch-king left to hold his fortress when he went south: a barrow wight taller than the rest, crowned in iron, before the empty throne of Angmar two levels under Carn Dûm’s keep (see Carn Dûm). Nine hundred hitpoints, a Westernesse blade that hits for up to sixty-four, armor 8, defense 0–22, and the pace of a level nine. It takes back half of what it deals, and poison does nothing to it. Like a Nazgûl it rises from what it leaves until somebody lays it to rest, for 60 mana, and its experience is paid then. What it drops is held in its remains until they are laid to rest: three times in four, a purse of 60 to 160 gold, its Westernesse blade, a barrow-blade, two to four health potions, or plate armor, about 40.60 gold a kill. One to one, a man with his level’s gear wins nearly every time at level 25 with potions and the heal spell, drinking about two health potions and two mana potions; without them he wants level 30 or more

Drowned Dúnedain

Arvedui’s men, who went down with the last king of Arthedain when the ice of Forochel crushed his ship, and walk its wreck under the Ice Bay still, in the dark mail of the North with sea-water running out of their hoods (see The wreck of Arvedui’s ship). Each has a sword. Two hundred and twenty hitpoints, a blow of up to forty-six, armor 4, defense 0–11, the pace of a level five, and they notice you a tile further off than a cyclops would; poison does nothing to them. A kill leaves something one time in two: a purse of 10 to 34 gold a kill in four, a health potion, a pearl or the chain mail they drowned in, about 8.38 gold a kill. One alone is a fight for a man of level 10 with potions and the heal spell (about one and a half mana potions), or 15 without; two at once want 12 with them and 20 without

The troll chief

The biggest troll on the fells, a hill troll grown old and grey as a cairn, with a ring of iron through one ear, and the other trolls keep out of its way. One lairs in a nook under the Mountains of Angmar at the head of the Ettenmoors; Halbarad will tell you where. Five hundred and twenty hitpoints that knit back four every couple of seconds, a club that hits for up to fifty-four, a boulder thrown from two tiles off like a hill troll’s, and it hears you coming from as far as a hill troll does. With potions and the heal spell a level 15 beats it every time, for a couple of mana potions; without them a level 18 wins seven fights in ten and a level 20 every one. Every kill leaves its head, which Halbarad wants (see The star of the Dúnedain), and something besides four times in five: a purse of 30 to 90 gold, one to three health potions, its club, chain mail or a troll hide, about 17.55 gold a kill

Woses

The wild men of Drúwaith Iaur (see Drúwaith Iaur): Drúedain who stayed in the old wilderness when their people went east, and have gone wild there, short and broad and brown as wood, in skirts of grass. Each has a bow, keeps its distance as a Southron archer does, and its arrows are poisoned: one that lands leaves a dose of 8 in you, as a giant spider’s bite leaves 10, so carry athelas. Two hundred and forty hitpoints, arrows of up to forty-six, armor 3, defense 0–9, the pace of a level eight, and they notice you a tile further off than a cyclops would. A kill leaves something two times in five: a purse of 15 to 45 gold a kill in five, arrows, a leaf of athelas or their bow, about 7.26 gold a kill. One alone is a fight for a man of level 10 with potions and the heal spell (about two mana potions), or 15 without; two at once want 15 with them and 20 without

The dead and the drakes of Belegost

Under the ruins of Belegost in the Blue Mountains (see The ruins of Belegost), and cold-drakes on the Withered Heath too. Dwarf shades, in the halls, the deeps and the tomb: Broadbeams who died when their city broke, grey as smoke, each with an axe. Three hundred and eighty hitpoints, light armor, a blow of up to seventy-two, and they take back a quarter of what they hit you for. One alone is a fight for about level 18, three together for 25. Half their kills leave something: a purse of 20 to 60 gold, a health or a mana potion, or now and then a steel shield. Cold-drakes, in the deeps and the tomb, and three on the Withered Heath north of the Lonely Mountain, among its dragons, where the Grey Mountains bred them: dragons of the north, grey and wingless, with no fire at all, but a dragon’s bite of up to sixty-eight and a dragon’s scales, five hundred and sixty hitpoints, and they mend. One alone is a fight for about level 20, two together for 30. Seven things in ten kills: a purse of 60 to 200 gold, meat, a steel shield, plate armor or, one kill in ten, dragon ham (see Food). And the Shade of Azaghâl, Lord of Belegost, who wounded Glaurung at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, on his dais in the tomb: twelve hundred hitpoints, his axe up to ninety-two, and he takes back half of what he hits you for; a fight for about level 30. Three kills in four leave something: a purse of 150 to 400 gold, potions, plate armor, or one kill in ten his war-mask. Poison does nothing to the dead.

Variag axemen

Variags of Khand on foot, dark bearded men in dark scale over red with a broad axe, who hold the ring of their camp in the sand of the far south-east (see The Variags of Khand). Two hundred and twenty hitpoints, a blow of up to forty-six, armor 6, defense 0–14 and the pace of a level seven. A kill leaves something three times in five: a purse of 12 to 40 gold, the axe, a health potion, Easterling scale mail or a handful of dates, about 11.08 gold a kill. They hold the ring of the camp, and out on the sand they ride in war-bands of three axemen and two horse-archers. One alone is a fight for a man of level 12 with potions and the heal spell, or 15 without; they come together: an axeman and a horse-archer want level 15 with potions and the heal spell (25 without), three axemen 20 (35 without), four of them, the worst of the camp, 25 (45 without), and a war-band level 30 (50 without)

Variag horse-archers

Variags on small hard desert horses, with short bows of horn, who ride the sand round the camp. A bow reaches, and like the Southron archer a horse-archer gives ground to keep you at the length of its shot; it rides at the pace of a level twelve, so a player of the camp's levels can run one down. A hundred and seventy hitpoints, a shot of up to forty, armor 4 and defense 0–8. A kill leaves something eleven times in twenty: a purse of 10 to 34 gold, its bow, ten to twenty-five arrows or a few dates, about 5.51 gold a kill. One alone is a fight for level 10, with potions and the heal spell or without; with an axeman, 15, or 25 without

The chieftain of the Variags

The lord of the camp, a head taller than his men in black scale and gold, with a great axe, alone in his dugout under the great tent (see The Variags of Khand). Eight hundred hitpoints, a blow of up to sixty-six, armor 8, defense 0–18 and the pace of a level eight, and he notices you two tiles further off than his men do. A kill leaves something three times in four: a purse of 60 to 160 gold, two to four health potions, Easterling scale mail, a steel shield, or plate armor about one kill in fourteen, about 41.58 gold a kill. One to one he is a fight for a man of level 25 with his level’s gear, potions and the heal spell, or 35 without

The Dead of Dunharrow

The Oathbreakers, the Men of the Mountains who swore to Isildur on the Stone of Erech and would not fight for him, haunt the Paths of the Dead under the White Mountains: the first hunting ground for levels 40 to 55. Dead Men of Dunharrow, on all three levels, grey shapes in rotted mail with dim swords: six hundred hitpoints, blows of up to 60, armor 8, and defense 0–46 that stops a lot of blows. Nothing in them for poison. A kill leaves something three times in four: a purse of 40 to 110 gold, one to three mana potions, a health potion or two, chain mail, or plate armor, about 31.35 gold a kill. They come in groups in the halls. Four together are a level 40’s fight with potions and the heal spell, for two or three mana potions; without them it takes a level 70; one alone is a level 20’s. Their King keeps the dais of the deepest hall with his guard round him: 1550 hitpoints, blows of up to 93, armor 10 and defense 0–60. A kill leaves something four times in five: a purse of 150 to 350 gold, two to four health or mana potions, plate armor, or his Westernesse blade, about 83.75 gold a kill. With potions and heals a level 35 wins every fight for a mana potion or two, and from 45 it is no trouble; without them a level 50 wins two in five, a level 55 four in five and a level 60 all. With two of his guard beside him he is a level 50’s fight with potions and heals, and a level 80’s without them, so fight his guard first. The Dead rise again unless you lay them to rest, as every walking dead thing does. And they wait for Isildur’s heir: whoever carries Andúril they leave alone until struck

Hobbits

Wild hobbits live in the Shire’s fields about thirty tiles out from Hobbiton, on every side of it: barefoot, curly-headed, and each with a stick in one hand and a rock in the other. They are the next thing up from a rat — sixteen hitpoints and a blow of up to five with the stick — and shy with it: one that is losing runs off once its health is in the red. The rock is held, not thrown. More than half leave something: a few rocks, its stick, a handful of meat, mushrooms or fish, or leather armor, each one kill in twenty, a purse of 5 to 10 gold one kill in five, or its hobbit saucepan about one kill in seventeen, which makes a hobbit worth about two gold a kill. The saucepan, worn upside down, is a helm, armor 2, half a Rohirric helm, and it clanks (+1, so monsters notice you a tile further off) and it is fragile, a coin toss whether it lasts fifteen minutes of being hit. Grubb, in Hobbiton, is a hobbit too, and nobody’s fight

Shed rats and shed kobolds

The rats and kobolds that have got into Tobold Hornblower’s drying-sheds under Longbottom (see The drying-sheds of Longbottom): a rat and a kobold in every way — ten and twenty hitpoints, the rat running off once it is in the red — but for what they leave. One kill in four leaves something: from a shed rat a bundle of stolen leaf or three (15% of kills) or a meat (10%), from a shed kobold two to four bundles (15%), six to nine gold (5%) or a buckler (5%). They live in the sheds and nowhere else, and nothing in the sheds climbs the stair

Monster speed

How fast a monster moves is set as the player level that moves at the same pace, so it can be read against the Speed on your own stats: a bat or a winter wolf runs like a level 20 character, a wolf like a level 14, a dragon like a level 7, a cyclops or a cave troll like a level 0, and a rat or a forest troll slowest of all, like a level −4 — a rat can be walked away from, which is part of it being the first thing anybody fights. What runs when badly hurt is slow on purpose: rats, wolves, forest trolls, dragons and dragon lords, so one that turns tail can be caught; a hobbit is the exception and keeps its quick little feet. Anything above your own level outruns you on open ground. Since 2026-10-13 a level adds half the pace it did, to monsters and characters alike, so each still matches the level it is written as

Armed monsters

Anything that fights with a weapon is drawn holding it: a kobold’s stick, a hobbit’s stick, an orc’s sword, a bandit’s sword and the bow in its other hand, a snaga’s club, a Southron’s bow, a Wood-elf archer’s elven longbow, a Wood-elf warden’s spear, the swords and steel shields of the Elvenking’s guards and the Elvenking’s own sword, a Dunlending’s spear, a corsair’s cutlass, an Easterling’s axe, an Uruk-hai’s pike and White Hand shield, a Black Orc’s scimitar, a stone troll’s club, the Nazgûl’s Morgul-blade, the Witch-king’s bigger one, a skeleton’s bow, a dwarf’s pick in one hand and a lit torch in the other (since 2026-10-17; the torch lights three tiles round it under the ground, as yours does, so a dwarf is seen coming across a dark hall), a dwarf soldier’s crossbow, a forest troll’s club, a hill troll’s bigger one, a cave troll’s bigger again, a cyclops’ great axe, a barrow wight’s Westernesse blade. A weapon that takes both hands lies across the body and goes on the back when the thing is walking away from you, the same as on you — except a crossbow, which is aimed level the way it faces in profile and held out at an angle ahead of it walking towards you or away, again the same as on you. A hobbit has a stick in one hand and a rock in the other, and throws the rock at whatever it is fighting from two tiles off, the way a hill troll throws its boulder (since 2026-10-18): it hits as hard as with the stick, and it comes no closer than those two tiles (since 2026-10-19), standing there throwing until you walk up beside it, when it hits you with the stick instead. It never runs out, and keeps throwing over its shoulder as it runs in the red. A kobold carries a buckler on its other arm as well, and leaves it behind one time in eight: the cheapest shield there is, and the first one most characters ever hold. What a monster holds is what it fights with rather than a promise of loot — most of their gear is too battered to be worth taking — and a shield on a monster's arm is for show: its armor and defense are its own. Each kind carries its weapon at its own size — a kobold’s stick is four fifths of the one you would swing and a cyclops’ great axe a third again, because the sprites are drawn to a person’s hand and neither of those is a person

Archers

Anything seen holding a bow shoots with it from up to 2 tiles — shorter than the 3 the same bow gives you, so there is a tile you can shoot it from that it cannot answer; a crossbow in a monster’s hands reaches 2 as well, as far as your own, and an elven longbow, a Wood-elf archer’s, 3 against your 4. Monsters never run out of arrows or bolts. What an archer shoots at you is met by your shield and parry and then your armor, the same as a blow by hand. Shots land by distance: nine in ten from two to three tiles off, and three in four at anything on one of the eight tiles round you, diagonals included, or four tiles off and further. That is every ranged weapon, yours and a monster’s alike — bows, crossbows, thrown rocks and a hill troll’s boulder — and a *miss* rises off the tile when a shot goes wide; a shot that goes wide still uses up its arrow or bolt. Those odds are for shooting on the move: whoever has stood on the same tile for a second, with no step under way, never misses, you and a monster archer alike, and being pushed or taking stairs counts as moving. A bow is for fighting at a distance, so step back out of reach before you shoot. A rooftop is out of its reach. Every skeleton is an archer: the bow is what a skeleton is. A skeleton does not give ground — it shoots you while you cover those two tiles, goes on shooting once you are standing over it, and dies where it stood. Nor does the dwarf soldier, a dwarf in a quilted coat and an iron cap with a crossbow, which shoots bolts for up to 34 from two tiles off and holds its post. The one thing in the world that walks backwards is the dwarf geomancer, which throws its lava just as far and backs off to the length of it; the pillars in its room are the answer to that, since a tile it could not see you from is a tile it will not take. A bow comes off about one skeleton in six, which is the ordinary loot rate rather than a promise — a bow is 20 gold from Grubb, and one off every body would bury the caves in them

Magic

A skill like melee or shielding, and the only one nothing is swung, shot or cast into the water for: what trains it is the mana, one use for every point spent, whatever it was spent on. So every spell in the world trains it and the dear ones train it most, and there is nothing to seek out — a haste is worth exactly the first level of it. What it is worth back is harder spells: every level adds 2 in the hundred to what a damage spell rolls. It scales no gear, so the loop closes on itself — spending mana teaches you how to have more of it. One piece of gear scales it instead: the geomancer’s staff, a rare find off dwarf geomancers, counts as five more levels of magic while it is in your hand, for how hard your spells hit, the wizard’s staff Círdan gives a Ring-bearer counts as ten while it is in your off hand, where a shield goes (it parries 2, and blocks nothing), and makes you a wizard who can cast convince, and so do the magic rings on your finger: three for the ring of lore, five for a Ring of the Nine or the One. The skills panel writes what they add in blue after the level you earned. They teach nothing, and take them off and you are back to the magic you have earned

Bodies

Whatever dies and stays dead leaves its body where it fell: a monster in its own colours, a player in theirs. A player’s body is plain to see as one (since 2026-10-07): it lies on a cloak in their own colour, the colour of their name, in the shape of their race — an elf with long fair hair, a dwarf short and broad with a beard, a hobbit small with curls and bare feet — and when only bones are left, a wooden cross with a strip of their colour tied to it stands at the head. No monster’s body has a cloak or a cross. People bleed on the ground as monsters do (since 2026-10-13): a blow that gets through leaves red flecks where they stand, and a death leaves a pool of blood under the body, bigger the more hitpoints they had. A body is fresh for two minutes, rotting until six, and remains until twelve, and then it is gone. Nothing can be done with one — it cannot be picked up or opened, and a click on it reaches whatever else is there — and a monster’s loot lands on a tile beside it, never on the body unless every tile within three of it is taken. Looking at the tile describes the body first: a monster's by its kind, a player's by name, race and what killed them. Skeletons and barrow wights leave their pile of bones instead, and a fire elemental leaves nothing at all: it goes out

Loot

A kill leaves one thing or nothing, never two. How often it leaves anything depends on the kind: about one kill in four, a third at most for the small things at the doorstep — rats, hobbits, kobolds, wolves — and more often the bigger and more dangerous a kind is, up to about three kills in four for the worst things in the world. Each kind’s own entry says how often. Bats and fire elementals leave nothing at all. What it leaves is picked from that kind’s own list, where some things are likelier than others: the common things on a list come up often, and a rare find on it seldom. Coins, meat, rocks, arrows, bolts, mushrooms and potions come in a handful at a time; anything worn or wielded comes one at a time. So most kills leave little, and now and then a body is carrying a purse worth several of them

Skeletons and wights

They throw bone chips when struck, but crumble rather than pooling when killed — and they always get back up. Every one leaves a red-eyed pile of bones and climbs out of it about fifteen seconds later, where it fell. Nothing it carried comes out of it while the pile is stirring: its loot stays in the remains until they are laid to rest, and then falls beside them. Nothing lands on a stirring pile either, so anything you drop while standing on it falls beside it. To stop it, stand beside the pile and click it, or press sanctification in the Spells panel: that casts it and lays the remains to rest for 5 mana (a skeleton) or 15 (a barrow wight). They pay no experience for being killed — what they are worth is in the pile, and laying it to rest is what collects it: 40 for a skeleton, 185 for a wight, paid in full to everybody who hurt it before it fell and to whoever says the words. The remains remember who that was, so the words can be said by any of you, or by a passer-by who then takes an equal share. If the pile gets up before anybody lays it to rest, it forgets them: nobody is paid for that fall, and only whoever brings it down next shares in the remains it leaves. Look at a pile and it names both its price and what is in it. It cannot be collected twice: leave a pile alone and it gets up, taking what it owes and what it carried with it, and you have to put the thing down again before there is anything to say the words over. The kind is not gone from the world — its spawn goes back to waiting its ordinary turn elsewhere — and bones with nothing left in them are a mark like any other, so a click reaches past them for whatever is underneath. Either may have an elven longbow in its remains: about one wight in fifty, one skeleton in a hundred. Elrond sells them too, for 160 gold

Rocks

Rocks stack in the bag, being carried by the handful and thrown one at a time. A rock that comes apart is gone, the same as anything else that gives out: one off the stack, and the log says how many are left. Nothing in the world goes as fast as a thrown stone

Grubb

Grubb, of Grubb, Grubb and Burrowes, is a hobbit who keeps shop at the door of the Green Dragon in Bywater and potters about in front of it, never more than four tiles from the door: health potions, meat, a fishing rod, rocks by the handful, a club, a sword, a bow, a crossbow, arrows by the ten and crossbow bolts by the five, a wooden shield, leather armor and torches. Click Grubb and choose Trade, and the Vendor panel opens with what he sells, once you are within three tiles of him; the click walks you up that far, and he stands still, turned to you, while you shop. A click on a line in the panel buys one, a right-click (or a long press) asks how many to buy, in the same box as selling, and a shift-click tells you what the thing is; anything you cannot afford is dimmed rather than hidden. He keeps the market’s ledger as well, though it is worked at the depot: ask him about it and he tells you the way (see Market). He cannot be fought and he never leaves the village. He does not sell what the wilderness pays out — the axe, the Westernesse blade, the steel shield, the mail and the plate are all still out there to be earned

Selling

Grubb buys as well, at 20% of what a thing is worth, rounded down: 2 gold for a health potion, 1 for a club, 120 for a Balrog horn. While his shop is open your bag shows what he pays for each pile in yellow; drag a pile onto what he sells to sell it, or right-click it for the how-many box, pick the number and press Sell. With the shop shut the bag says nothing about what things are worth and offers no Sell, even standing beside him. He buys what he will not sell — the axe, the plate, the Balrog shield, everything the wilderness pays out — because his not stocking them is about where they come from, and taking one off you is not a way for anybody to get one. A fifth is meant to be a poor price: selling turns what you will not use into potions, and never into the thing itself. He does not buy gold. Where a fifth comes to less than a coin he pays a coin anyway: one at a time if it is at least half a coin, as for the buckler, and otherwise a few at a time — two mushrooms for a coin, three rocks for a coin — and the bag says how many. Nobody buys a stick (since 2026-10-20). Anything he refuses is said in the console with the reason. Elrond, in Rivendell, and every other shopkeeper (see People) buy the same things at the same price

Market

Grubb keeps a market for players, at no charge, and it is worked at the depot: beside any depot box, wherever it is, the depot screen has it, with every lot players have left with him, with its price each, to filter by name and sort by newest, name or price; long press a lot (or right-click it) to look at what it is. Click Grubb and choose Market (or say market within three tiles of him) and he sends you to the depot, with roughly how far and which way the nearest box is — the Mathom-house’s, from his door (until 2026-10-19 the market opened beside him). Buy takes as many of a lot as you ask for, into your depot, paid from the gold in your depot first and your bag after it; it is refused, with the reason, if you are short of gold, and you cannot buy your own. To sell, pick something from your depot under Sell (what you carry is not offered: store it first), say how many and the gold each, and press List: it leaves your depot at once and Grubb keeps it until it sells or you Take back what is left of it, which goes back into your depot. Sellers are not named: you see only which lots are yours. You keep one lot of each thing with him, up to ten lots at a time: listing more of something you already sell adds it to that lot, at the lot’s price, fallen as far as it has: to price a lot again, Take it back and list it anew (the form’s button reads Add and it asks no price). A different make of a thing is a different lot. Other sellers’ lots of one thing at one price are one row, and a buy takes from the oldest listed first, running on into the next. Prices halve each day a lot is unsold, falling a little every hour from the gold each you asked (since 2026-10-24); what you add to a lot takes its price as it stands. Under a gold each, a lot sells in batches: as many as come to about a gold, for a gold, the batch growing as the price falls, and Buy takes whole batches. A lot never falls below a gold for all of it: once that is all it is worth, it stays on sale at a gold for the lot. Whatever sells, whether or not you are in the world, Grubb holds the gold for you; you are told when it happens, and Collect at a depot puts it all in your depot and lists every sale since you last collected, what, how many, for how much gold and how long ago. He will not take gold or Gandalf’s letter, which is an errand rather than goods; any ring is fine. Lots and held gold outlast a restart. When you log in, a server message lists what is on the market (up to twenty lots, by name, with the price each and which are yours), or says nothing is

People

Twenty-nine more people live out in the world besides Grubb and Elrond. Nobody can fight them, each walks only the protected ground round their home (the Gaffer, whose lane is not safe ground, any ground round his), never more than four tiles from it, and each answers what is said within three tiles of them, in sight of them, and nowhere further: a greeting, at most once a minute to you, and more on the words that matter to them, every time you ask. Click one for a menu of what to ask them, quests first (see Click a person). Eighteen keep shop as Grubb does — click them and choose Trade for the Vendor panel, which is where their wares and prices are; asked to trade aloud they only greet you — and buy what Grubb buys at the same fifth. Every one of them, Grubb and Elrond too, sells a sword for 20 gold. Gaffer Gamgee, the old Gaffer, digs on Bagshot Row’s lane under the Hill in Hobbiton; ask him about a letter. Bilbo Baggins sits by the pool in Rivendell; ask him about the trolls. Barliman Butterbur keeps the Prancing Pony at Bree, the inn on the east side of the Greenway just north of where the East Road meets it, behind its counter at the back of the room, and sells for the road: a health potion for 12 gold, meat for 3, arrows ten for 1, bolts five for 1, a wooden shield for 6, leather armor for 15 and a torch for 2; a stair in the inn's floor climbs to its one room upstairs, with four beds in it, and another beside it goes down to the cellar, where rats are at his barrels; ask him about the cellar, and take a torch. Tom Bombadil, in his blue jacket and yellow boots, sings between the Old Forest and the Barrow-downs; ask him about the barrows. Beorn stands on the west bank of the Great River by the Carrock and sells his honey cakes at 4 gold; ask him about wargs. Bard the Bowman, on the planks of Esgaroth on the Long Lake, sells a bow for 20 gold, a crossbow for 40, arrows ten for 1, bolts five for 1, a fishing rod for 8, chain mail for 60 and a torch for 2; ask him about the dragon. Galadriel, in the open glade at the south-west edge of Lothlórien, sells lembas at 8 gold, a health potion at 12, a mana potion at 20, an elven cloak at 150, an elven longbow at 160, arrows ten for 1, a silver belt of Lórien at 100 and a golden belt at 300. Treebeard the Ent stands at Fangorn’s south-east eaves by the Entwash, below the hill where the Eagles come down; ask him about axes. Quickbeam, a young Ent, stands among his rowans in a glade off Fangorn’s north path; ask him about his rowans, the Entmoot and Wellinghall (see Fangorn). Éomer, before the doors of Meduseld in Edoras, sells a Rohirric helm for 60 gold, a spear for 15, leather armor for 15, chain mail for 60, a steel shield for 25, a health potion for 12 and a torch for 2; ask him about the Uruk-hai, and about horses (see Horses). Ioreth, of the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith, sells a health potion for 12 gold, a mana potion for 20, athelas for 20, chain mail for 60, plate armor for 250 and a steel shield for 25. Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, is inside its walls and sells plate armor for 250 gold and a steel shield for 25; ask him about the corsairs. Círdan at the Grey Havens and the harbour-master of the Harlond below Minas Tirith give passage by sea between the two (Círdan also gives anybody who has unmade the One a wizard’s staff, once for each time they have unmade it: ask him about the staff), and a swan-ship captain on a jetty under Dol Amroth’s walls and the swan-ship’s master on the Isle of Meneltarma give passage between those two (see Ships). Galion, the Elvenking’s butler, is among the barrels in the cellars two levels under the Elvenking’s halls in Mirkwood, and sends you down the river in one (see Galion). A Ranger of the North keeps a camp at Tharbad, between the Greenway and the river at the north end of the ford, and sells arrows ten for 1 gold, a bow for 20, meat for 3 and a health potion for 12; ask him about the bridge, the ford, the country over the water and Lond Daer. Dáin Ironfoot, lord of the Iron Hills, stands at the foot of the eagles’ crag there and sells plate armor for 250 gold, a steel shield for 25 and a torch for 2; ask him about plate, Azog and the Mountain. The vintner of Dorwinion keeps his casks in the wine cellars under his vines on the north-west shore of the Sea of Rûn, down the stair in the press-house floor, and sells a cask of Dorwinion for 25 gold, a torch for 2 and a health potion for 12; ask him about the wine, the raiders, the cellars and the King (see Dorwinion). Tobold Hornblower stands at his door at Longbottom in the Southfarthing and sells Longbottom Leaf at 2 gold a pinch; ask him about his sheds (see The drying-sheds of Longbottom). Radagast the Brown, the wizard of beasts and birds, keeps his house at Rhosgobel on the western eaves of Mirkwood, and sells athelas for 20 gold, mushrooms for 2, a health potion for 12, and a mana potion for 20; ask him about the spiders, Dol Guldur, herbs, his beasts and birds, and Beorn (see Rhosgobel). Halbarad of the Dúnedain keeps the Rangers’ hidden camp in the Coldfells, a level under the ground, and sells arrows ten for 1 gold, meat for 3, a health potion for 12 and a mana potion for 20; ask him about the star, the trolls and the troll chief (see The Rangers’ camp). The Old Wose, an elder of the Drúedain, sits among the Púkel-men in his glade at the tip of the Andrast cape and sells athelas for 20 gold, a health potion for 12, arrows ten for 1 and a bow for 20; ask him about the stone, the wild Woses and the Púkel-men (see Drúwaith Iaur). Faramir, Captain of Gondor, is in the refuge of Henneth Annûn behind the falls in north Ithilien, a level below the ground, and sells a bow for 20 gold and arrows ten for 1; ask him about Harad and the mûmakil (see The banner of Harad). Gamling the Old keeps the refuge in the Glittering Caves under Helm’s Deep, a level below the ground, and sells a health potion for 12 gold, a mana potion for 20, arrows ten for 1, meat for 3 and a steel shield for 25; ask him about the caves, the crystal halls and the Horn. Hánar, a dwarf stonewright, is in the refuge with him; ask him about the crystal (see The Glittering Caves). The headman of the Lossoth stands in the snow-house village on the Ice Bay’s shore in Forochel and sells a fur cloak for 40 gold and meat for 3; ask him about the Ring of Barahir and the king’s ship (see The Lossoth’s village). The merchant of Harad waits by the pool at the oasis west of the Variags’ camp in Khand, in the far south-east, and sells for the desert: dates at 3 gold, a health potion for 12, a mana potion for 20, arrows ten for 1 and a torch for 2; ask him about his caravan, the Variags and the oasis (see The Variags of Khand). the Prancing Pony’s ground floor (not the room upstairs, nor the street outside), Tom’s hollow, Beorn’s bank, Esgaroth’s planks and the walkway out to them (not the lake round them nor the shore), the whole of Lothlórien, Treebeard’s eaves, Quickbeam’s rowans, Edoras, Minas Tirith, Dol Amroth, the jetty at the Grey Havens, Dol Amroth’s jetty and the isle’s, the Hallow on top of the Meneltarma, the Harlond’s jetty with the river’s west bank within two tiles of it, Galion’s corner of the cellar, Dáin’s ground at the foot of the crag, Dorwinion’s houses and wine cellars, Tobold’s garden at Longbottom, Radagast’s house and herb garden (not the doorways), the hollow of the Rangers’ camp, the refuge of Henneth Annûn, the refuge in the Glittering Caves, the three camps the Púkel-men guard in Drúwaith Iaur, the headman’s ground in the Lossoth’s village and the merchant’s ground at the oasis in Khand are protected ground, like Hobbiton and Rivendell: nothing is attacked there and no monster sets foot there

Rivendell

Far to the east, where the Great East Road meets the Misty Mountains, a valley is cut into the mountains’ face: Rivendell. Just south of the valley the road forks: the northern way runs into the valley and up to the terrace where Elrond stands, and the road itself goes on east into the mountains, over the High Pass to the lands beyond. The pass climbs: a ramp at the foot of the mountain takes the road up onto a shelf of the mountainside, a second ramp up onto the crest, and two more bring it back down the far side to the ground and on east. Up on the crest the ground is deep snow: every step onto it takes half as long again as one onto grass, for you and for everything up there with you, and only the road along it is kept clear. Orcs, cyclopes and hill trolls hold every stage of it, the hill trolls thickest on the crest and the cyclopes fewer up top than at the foot, and nothing up there follows you down a ramp. A level 10 can get over with potions and the heal spell, but not easily; at level 8 it is more likely to end in a death. The valley is protected ground, like Hobbiton. Elrond walks there. He fights nothing, and he keeps a shop: mana potions, 20 gold each, which put back 40 mana over four seconds, health potions at 12 gold as Grubb sells them, the elven longbow at 160 gold, the Westernesse blade at 80 gold, and arrows ten for 1 gold. Click him and choose Trade, and the Vendor panel lists them, as it does for Grubb, and he buys what Grubb buys at the same fifth of its worth. Click him, or say anything within three tiles of him, and he greets you in Elvish — “Aiya” is hail — and the word he greets you with is worth remembering. It is a different word every hour. Ask him of Moria, from his menu or in words, and he tells you where its doors lie from him. Dealing with him at all heals you to full at once — a click on him, anything said within three tiles of him, anything asked from his menu, a trade — as long as you are standing in a protection zone, as the whole valley is; outside one he tells you he will not tend wounds under the open sky, and heals nothing

Moria

South of Rivendell, at the head of the Sirannon, the Gate-stream, the Doors of Durin stand in the rock face between two holly trees. The stream is dammed below them, and a dark pool fills the valley in front of them; the way to the doors is the strip of shore between the pool and the cliff, from the north. Below the dam the Sirannon runs south-west to the Glanduin, with a ford halfway. The doors are shut, and no hand opens them from outside; what is written over them is “Greet elf, and enter”. Say the word Elrond greets you with, within three tiles of the doors, and they swing open for a minute. The word changes on the hour, so it has to be this hour’s; say it again while they stand open and the minute starts over. They do not shut on anybody standing in the doorway. From inside, right-click the doors to push them open again, so you are never walled in. Behind them a stair goes down into the mines: four levels, quiet at the top and packed at the bottom, where a one-tile bridge crosses to the hall of the worst thing under the mountains. It is a Balrog, Durin’s Bane, a Maia of fire out of the Elder Days that the dwarves woke when they delved too deep, and it may be wearing a mithril shirt: about one kill in twenty finds one. It does not wait alone: fire elementals stand in its hall, either side of it, and nothing else is past the bridge (see Fire elementals). Moria goes right through the mountains, and is the way east from this end of them: there is no pass over them here. Go down three levels to the Chamber of Mazarbul, out of its east door, and back up three flights on the far side, the last of them over the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, one tile wide across a chasm, to the stair up to the Dimrill Gate. The gate stands open in the east face of the mountains, over the Dimrill Dale and the Mirrormere, so Moria can be walked into from that side without the word. The fourth level, with the Balrog, is off the way through. In the east wall of the Balrog’s hall a stairway winds on down four more levels, empty all the way, to an experience door: only players of level 200 and above can walk through it, and anybody else is told so and stays on the landing. Through the doorway you can see the shore of an underground lake. Anything else said before the shut doors is the wrong word, and the pool hears it (see The Watcher in the Water)

Lothlórien

South of the Dimrill Gate, where the Silverlode runs east out of the mountains to the Great River, is the Golden Wood: groves of mallorns with glades of grass and flowers between them, the eaves still thick with trees and lanes cut through them to the heart of each part of the wood. The north wood is a short walk down the dale from the gate. The Naith, the wood south of the Silverlode, where Galadriel stands in her glade, is across the river: the lane down through the north wood ends at a rope bridge over it, the one crossing there, and from its far end the glade is a few tiles west. The Naith can also be walked into from the open country west and south of the wood. All of it is protected ground, like Hobbiton and Rivendell: no monster sets foot in it, nothing is fought there, and you can log out under the trees

Mirkwood

The great wood east of the Great River has three ways through it. The Old Forest Road runs east from the Old Ford to the Iron Hills, with a way north off it to Esgaroth; its eastern end runs through marsh. The Elf-path goes in at the Forest Gate, a few steps east of Beorn’s over a ford of sand across the Great River just below the Carrock, and runs east through the dark, two tiles wide: over the black Enchanted River on the Wood-elves’ planks, past their feasting glades to the north and the spiders’ glades to the south, and out onto the road to Esgaroth. Beorn’s to Esgaroth is about a hundred steps by it, against a hundred and sixty round by the Old Ford and the road. A track from the feasting glades runs north to the bridge of the Elvenking’s halls on the Forest River, which runs on into the Long Lake under a bridge on the road to Esgaroth, past the raft-elves’ landing. The Mountains of Mirkwood stand between the Elf-path and the road, and can be climbed (see The Mountains of Mirkwood). The Wood-elves keep the path, the glades and the halls, and they are hostile to everybody, elves too. Levels, for somebody who got there fighting things of their own level, alone and then in a pair (a man with sword and shield; an elf with a bow in brackets): the Old Forest Road 10 and up (10); the Elf-path as far as the Enchanted River 20, or 15 in a pair (20, or 10); the feasting glades 30, or 25 in a pair (20, or 15); the spiders’ glades 50, or 35 in a pair (50, or 30). A giant spider on its own wants about 25 (35 to 50). Mirkwood spiders keep the glades with the giant spiders, and hunt the clearings in the wood south of the Old Forest Road, which are reached from the south (see Mirkwood spiders)

Mirkwood spiders

The spiders of the wood, the ones Bilbo met: the giant spider a size down, about as tall as you are rather than as a horse, brown and yellow-eyed, and as silent. One keeps each of the four spiders’ glades with the giant spiders, two wait in a blind clearing in the wood south of the Old Forest Road, which is reached from the south and not from the road, and two more hunt the clearings south of that, toward Dol Guldur. A hundred hitpoints, a bite of up to 26, armor 4, defense 0–16, and the pace of a level eight. Its bite poisons: a dose of 5, where a giant spider’s is 10, fifteen hitpoints in all, and poison does nothing to it. One alone is for level 10, which wins it without a potion; a level 6 wins it with potions and the heal spell, for about four mana potions; without potions or the heal spell a level 8 wins nine fights in ten and a level 10 all of them. A kill leaves a purse of 8 to 24 gold one kill in four, a health potion or two one kill in seven, or a spidersilk cloak one kill in two hundred, about 6.78 gold a kill

The Mountains of Mirkwood

A ridge of three dark peaks in the middle of Mirkwood, between the Elf-path and the Old Forest Road, where the Enchanted River rises; the Shadow out of Dol Guldur lies on them. Three ramps climb onto the terraces a level up: from the river’s spring, a short walk south of the boat up the stream’s bank; from the end of a track that leaves the Elf-path south about halfway between the spiders’ glades and the boat; and from the clearing where the Old Forest Road bends north. A bat and orcs are on the terraces, wargs lie up in the high glen of grass between the west peak and the middle one, and giant spiders keep a webbed hollow on the east peak’s shoulder. A ramp goes up onto each of the three peaks, two levels up, and two onto the middle one, the crown, where barrow wights walk; another walks the west peak, and a giant spider sits on the east. From the crown a last ramp climbs to the summit, three levels up, with the whole wood under it and nothing on it. No monster takes a ramp, so each terrace and peak is a fight of its own. Levels, for somebody who got there fighting things of their own level, alone and then in a pair (a man with sword and shield; an elf with a bow in brackets): the terraces and the glen 10 and up (10); the west peak’s wight 10 (20); the crown’s wights 25, or 25 in a pair (30, or 25); the east peak’s spider 30, or 20 (40, or 20); the webbed hollow 40, or 25 (not alone, or 25)

The Elvenking’s halls

A hill on the north bank of the Forest River in Mirkwood, a short walk west of Dale and Esgaroth along the ledge road by the river, or north up a track from the feasting glades. A bridge of two planks leads to the doors; behind them is a gate hall with guards either side and at its end a stair down to the King’s hall, pillared, where Thranduil sits on his dais with his guards about him, wardens in the ways round it and archers in the feasting hall. From its west way a second stair goes down to the dungeons, a corridor of cells, one of them with a locked chest in it (see The Elvenking’s cell), and the wine cellars, with the river running under them. It is dark like every cave, so bring a light, and nowhere in it is safe but Galion’s corner of the cellar, which is also the quick way out (see Galion). Levels, alone and then in a pair (a man with sword and shield; an elf with a bow in brackets): the ledge road 15, or 15 (15, or 10); the gate hall’s guards 25, or 20 (25, or 25); the dungeons’ guards 25, or 25 (not alone, or 40). For Thranduil see Thranduil: with all his guards about him it is a party of four of level 50, or 40 with potions

Carn Dûm

The Witch-king’s fortress in Angmar, a ruin his servants hold again, at the south foot of the Mountains of Angmar in the far north, north of the North Downs and north-east of Lake Evendim. A short road runs up to its gate in the south wall; inside is a walled ward with a barracks either side of the road, a breach in the east wall onto the crag beside it, and at the back the keep, built against the mountain, with a stair down. Orcs and orc berserkers hold the ward with a hill troll, and wargs lie at the gate. A level down, under the mountain, are its halls: a landing at the foot of the stair, a pillared great hall with orcs and a hill troll, the troll pits west of it with cave trolls, and the barracks east, with an armory behind a door. A second stair at the north end of the great hall goes down again to the crypt: a gallery between graves, where barrow wights and skeletons walk, and south of it the throne of Angmar, the dais the Witch-king left empty, where the Wight-lord of Carn Dûm waits with more wights and skeletons (see The Wight-lord of Carn Dûm). Behind him, at the back of the dais, stands a chest of what Angmar carried off from Fornost: once a life, the shield of Arthedain and 200 gold. The shield blocks 7, as much as the Balrog shield, with none of its clank. No monster takes a stair, so each level is a fight of its own. It is dark below like every cave, so bring a light, and nowhere in it is safe

Azanulbizar and the Mirrormere

Out of Moria’s Dimrill Gate lies the Dimrill Dale, that the dwarves call Azanulbizar, where they beat Azog’s orcs before the Gate and burned their dead on the field; the scorched ground of the pyres is there still. A dirt track runs east from the Gate down to the Mirrormere, Kheled-zâram, a long lake in the middle of the dale, and to Durin’s Stone, a broken pillar on its west shore. Look into the water: the stars of Durin’s Crown shine in it by day as by night, as they did when Durin first looked in. The orcs that fled the battle still hunt the field, with orc berserkers and wargs, a ground for levels 10 to 15. In a knoll of rock south-east of the lake a stair goes down to the orc-hole under the field, where more of them lair, berserkers among them; it is dark, so bring a light. At its back is a dwarf-chest that Dáin Ironfoot wants opened (see Náin’s axe)

Dorwinion

The vineyards whose wine the Elvenking drinks, on the north-west shore of the Sea of Rûn, far east past Mirkwood, between the river’s mouth and the edge of the wood. Four rows of vines run across the slope, with a path down the middle to a lane, and below the lane by the shore stand the press-house and a cottage; the houses are protected ground. A stair in the press-house floor goes down to the wine cellars, under the vines, where the vintner of Dorwinion keeps his casks and his counter (see People); the cellars are protected ground too, and dark like every cave, so bring a light or buy one of him. The west ends of the rows are torn up: an Easterling raiding party out of Rûn has its camp on the bare ground north-west of the vines, most of them together at the camp and a few more in the torn rows. Levels: those in the rows 8 with potions and the heal spell (10 without); the camp all together 12 with potions and the heal spell (15 without). Keep west of the trees: the were-worms of the Last Desert are past them

The Lossoth’s village

The Lossoth, the Snowmen of Forochel, live in snow-houses on a patch of snow on the east shore of the Ice Bay, in the far north-west, a short walk west of Carn Dûm. Their headman stands on safe ground in the middle of the village and sells fur cloaks (40 gold: a cloak of winter-wolf fur, armor +3 over your armor, the most of any cloak, but no quieter) and meat. He will give back the Ring of Barahir for winter-wolf pelts (see The Ring of Barahir), and he knows where the king’s ship went down. Forochel round the village is a hunting ground of stone trolls, a hill troll and winter wolves (the cyclopes that were there are gone): level 10 with potions and the heal spell, 15 without

The wreck of Arvedui’s ship

A stair by the water at the Lossoth’s village goes down to an ice-cave a level down, and west under the shore to a cavern under the Ice Bay, where the ship that came for Arvedui, the last king of Arthedain, lies on its keel among its broken timbers. His drowned men keep it (see Drowned Dúnedain), and his chest stands at the stern of the deck: once a life, 150 gold, a barrow-blade and three health potions. The headman of the Lossoth tells of it and it goes on your map. It is dark below like every cave, so bring a light

The Variags of Khand

In the empty sand of the far south-east, east of Mordor, the Variags of Khand are camped: horsemen who rode to the Pelennor for Sauron. Their camp is a ring of trampled ground with hide tents round it and the chieftain’s great tent in the middle; axemen hold the ring and horse-archers ride the sand round it (see Variag axemen, Variag horse-archers). Out on the desert round the camp six Variag war-bands ride, three axemen and two horse-archers each, and three mûmakil of Harad wander its south: Khand is a hunting ground for levels 25 to 30, beside Mordor. A stair in the floor of the great tent goes down to the chieftain’s dugout under it, where the chieftain waits alone with his chest (see The chieftain of the Variags, The trader’s strongbox); it is dark, so bring a light, and nothing climbs the stair after you. West of the camp is an oasis, a pool among palms, where the merchant of Harad sells for the desert (see People); his ground is protected

Longbottom

South of Hobbiton, where the road down through Bywater bends west for the dwarf hold, a path runs off the south side of the road into Tobold Hornblower’s garden at Longbottom, where the first true pipe-weed in the Shire was grown. His round door is in the little hill by the road, looking south over his pipe-weed beds, and on the east side of the garden stands his thatched drying-shed, its door on the west side. In the shed’s floor a stair goes down to the drying-sheds dug under the hill a level down: a long shed hung with racks of drying leaf and two curing-rooms off it, dark like every place under the ground. The garden is protected ground; the shed and the sheds below are not

Sarn Ford and the Brandywine Bridge

The Shire’s two ways over the Brandywine. The Brandywine Bridge carries the East Road over the river east of Hobbiton, on its way to Bree: a bridge of planks with the road either side. Sarn Ford, the stony ford, is far down the river at the south end of the Shire, below Longbottom where the river turns south-west for the sea: no bridge, only sand right across the water. Two roads leave it. One runs north-west: over the island under Longbottom, through a ford in the river’s western arm, north through the Westfarthing, over the dwarf hold’s road and on to the west road by the Tower Hills. The other runs east to the Greenway just above Tharbad. The name of each crossing is at the top of the view while you are on it

Rhosgobel

Radagast the Brown’s home, on the western eaves of Mirkwood between the Great River and the trees: from the Old Forest Road east of the Great River, a dirt path goes south through the edge of the wood to it. A ring of trees stands round a clearing, with gaps on the north and the west; in it is his thatched house, with Radagast inside (see People), and behind it his herb garden and a pool for the birds. The house and the garden are protected ground; the doorways are not. Wolves roam the open ground round about, and giant spiders hunt the eaves to the south-east, toward Dol Guldur: a giant spider alone wants level 18 with potions and the heal spell (25 without)

Fangorn

Fangorn Forest lies at the southern end of the Misty Mountains, between Isengard and the Wold, and since 2026-10-21 it can be walked into. Paths run in from the north eaves (the way from Lothlórien), from Treebeard by the hill on the east eaves where the Eagles come down, from the Rohan side in the south, and from the open ground at the mountain’s foot in the south-west. They meet in Derndingle, the round dingle in the middle where the Ents hold their Entmoot. West of it, in a bay in the mountain’s foot, is Wellinghall, Treebeard’s house, where a spring rises and runs down through the forest into the Entwash, with fords of sand where the paths cross it. Off the north path is a glade of rowans where Quickbeam stands; his glade is protected ground. Ents walk the forest and leave you alone unless you wrong one (see Ents); huorns stand among the trees and do not, and Uruk-hai from Isengard come over the eaves

The Rangers’ camp

The Dúnedain hunt the trolls of the Ettenmoors and the Coldfells, the troll-fells north of the Trollshaws and Rivendell, and keep a camp there that few find. A rock ridge stands on the east side of the Coldfells, under Mount Gram; a dirt gully runs into its west face, and at the end of it a cleft turns south into a stair down. A level under the ridge is the hollow where Halbarad keeps the camp by the light of his lantern, safe ground like a town’s, and sells arrows, meat and potions (see People). The Ranger of the North at Tharbad will tell you where it is. Out on the fells hill trolls and stone trolls go about, and at the head of the Ettenmoors, in a nook under the Mountains of Angmar, lairs the troll chief (see The troll chief). With potions and the heal spell the Coldfells suit a level 12 and the Ettenmoors, with the chief, a level 15; without them, a level 15 and a level 20

Drúwaith Iaur

The Old Púkel-wilderness, on the Andrast cape at the far south-west of the map, where the White Mountains run out into the sea past Anfalas: the ridge’s end, the strip of shore west of it, the plain east of it down to the river’s mouth, and the cape’s tip. The Woses hunt it with poisoned arrows (see Woses) on the ground, a hunting ground for levels 10 to 15: one alone is 10 with potions and the heal spell (15 without), two together 15 (20 without). A dirt track comes in at the river’s mouth and goes round the ridge’s end to the tip, and on it are three camps, each with a Púkel-man at every corner, squat stone men the Drúedain carved to watch the ways: nothing evil passes one, and each camp is safe ground, where no monster sets foot and nothing is attacked. The last is the glade of the Old Wose (see People), who sells athelas against the poison and wants the faithful stone back (see The faithful stone). A stair at the ridge’s foot on the shore side goes down to the old house of the Drúedain, a cave under the ridge where more Woses keep it; it is dark like every cave, so bring a light. Past the glade, at the very end of the cape, a giant spider has its lair, a fight for level 18 with potions and the heal spell

The ruins of Belegost

Belegost, the city of the Broadbeam dwarves, was ruined when Beleriand went under the sea; its gate is a small ruin of broken walls in the east face of the northern Blue Mountains, south of the dragons’ peaks and north of the Grey Havens, with a stair going down in it. Below are three levels, side by side under the mountains, each a stair down from the one before: the halls of Belegost a level down, a pillared hall and a guardroom where the dwarf shades walk, a hunting ground for about level 25; the deeps of Belegost two levels down, a cavern round a black tarn where cold-drakes lie among more shades, for about level 30; and Azaghâl’s tomb three levels down, where cold-drakes keep the antechamber and the Shade of Azaghâl stands on his dais, for about level 35. Those levels are with health and mana potions and the heal spell; without them, add ten or more. His chest stands on the dais: once a life, 400 gold, the war-mask of Belegost and four health potions. The war-mask is a helm of black iron, armor 7, as good as the helm of Dol Amroth and better than the helm of the King’s Men, and nobody sells it. It is dark below like every cave, so bring a light.

Dunharrow and the Paths of the Dead

South of Edoras, at the head of Harrowdale, the road climbs to the Hold of Dunharrow, a walled terrace of stone, and above it in the cleft of the Dimholt’s black trees stands the Dark Door in the Dwimorberg. Behind it go the Paths of the Dead, three levels down under the White Mountains: the hall inside the Door, with Baldor’s passage east of it (see Baldor’s helm) and a gallery west to the Hall of Shadows; the Narrows and the Hall of the Oathbreakers below that; and at the bottom the hall of the King of the Dead. From the King’s hall a stair climbs three flights to the hill of Erech in Lamedon, and the Stone of Erech. It is dark all the way, so bring a light. The Dead of Dunharrow keep it, a ground for levels 40 to 55

When gear gives out

It is gone. Nothing stays in your bag and nothing mends it — the forge is cold. The pieces fly where everyone can see them, the log says what you are down to, and the next best thing in the bag takes over by itself; a stack loses one and the log says how many are left

Player kills

Killing another player is counted on you for good, and has a board of its own at the end of the highscores beside the deaths. Monsters do not count here; they have the Monsters killed board, which counts each kind

Ships

A ship goes between the Grey Havens at the head of the Gulf of Lune and the Harlond, the quays of Minas Tirith on the Great River a little south of the city, the way the fleets of Gondor came to the Havens of old: out of the Gulf, down the coast, across the Bay of Belfalas and up the Anduin past Pelargir. At each end a grey ship lies at the end of a wooden jetty, and somebody stands at its foot: Círdan the Shipwright at the Havens and the harbour-master at the Harlond. Click them and choose the passage, which walks you up to within three tiles of them first, or say “passage” that near them, and for 50 gold you are put ashore on the jetty at the other end. Neither will carry you while you are protection zone locked, both jetties being protected ground, nor straight out of a fight unless you are standing on safe ground already, as the Eagles will not. Nobody sails into the West: ask Círdan about it. The swan-ships of Dol Amroth sail west to the Isle of Meneltarma, the peak of the holy mountain of Númenor, which rose again out of the sea when the rest of the island was drowned: a captain stands at the foot of a jetty under the city’s walls, and the ship’s master at the foot of the isle’s jetty brings you back: 100 gold out and free back, on the same terms otherwise. West of the mountain stands the ruin of Sauron’s temple to Melkor, a broken ring of wall black with old fire, with a stair down in its middle to the crypt under it: a hall, two long galleries of the dead and an inner tomb, one level down. The crypt’s dead are the only things on the isle that fight: see The crypt’s dead. A road climbs the mountain round and round, up one ramp a level, a quarter of the way round from the last, to the Hallow on its top, four levels up: a wide green hollow, protected ground

Galion

The Elvenking’s butler dozes over the King’s wine among the empty barrels in the cellars, two levels under the Elvenking’s halls, on a small corner of protected ground, the only safe ground in the halls: nothing is fought on it, no monster sets foot on it and you can log out there. Click him and choose the barrel, or say “barrel” within three tiles of him, and he sends you down the river with the empties, out under the water-gate and through the forest to the raft-elves’ landing by the Long Lake, a few steps from Esgaroth, for nothing. It is one way: nothing carries you back up. He will not send anybody protection zone locked, nor anybody straight out of a fight unless they are standing on his safe ground already, as the ships will not

Deaths

Every death is counted against your character for good. It shows on the highscores and to anyone who looks at you. Dying costs a tenth of your experience, and any level that goes with it, and a tenth of the practice under every skill; your panels show what is left. Every coin you carry spills where you fell. Your gear comes back with you, and so does everything you were carrying but the coins and anything that falls: each single thing in your bag, worn gear included, has a one in a hundred chance of dropping where you fell, so a stack of a hundred potions loses one or two and a lone sword is lost one death in a hundred — and nothing at all is lost by being away. The log says one thing when you die: what you dropped, counts and all (“You dropped 12 gold, a sword and 2 health potions.”), or “You dropped nothing.” The view stays where you fell, on your own skull, with “You are dead” across the screen, until you ask the temple to take you, and you wake there with a fishing rod. Everybody else is told you died

Dragon fire

A dragon breathes as well as bites: a wave of fire along the way it is facing, one tile at its mouth and three abreast beyond, five deep — further than anything else in the game reaches, a bow included. Everyone in it burns at once, for 30 to 60 each — sixty is more than a whole new character and there is no roll small enough to stand in. Everyone, that is, except another dragon: fire is what a dragon is made of, so a dragon standing in a wave loses nothing at all, and leading one onto another is no way of being rid of either. It comes every eight seconds or so on a clock of its own, so it never costs the dragon a bite, and it reaches far further than teeth do — backing off is a walk, not a step. The wave runs north, east, south or west and never on the diagonal, so the corners are the safe ground: stand corner-on to a dragon and the fire goes past you on one side or the other. The tiles it covered stay alight for a couple of seconds so you can see exactly what to step out of before the next one. Almost nothing you wear or carry takes any of it off — armor is for edges and a shield goes between you and a thing, and fire is the air you are standing in, so it goes through all armor and defense in the game. The one exception is dragon-scale mail: fire that reaches you through it does half, a dragon’s breath, the fire round the Balrog and the lava included. What does stop it is a wall, like an arrow, and the tiles it misses: fight one where there is something to put between you, and stand corner-on. The dragon lord on the summit over the dragons’ peaks breathes the same fire and further: seven deep rather than five, and the last two rows five abreast rather than three, so stepping out of its way is a longer walk and the corner has to be a wider one. It does not burn either

Dragon

A dragon keeps the far north-west of the map, as a giant spider keeps the far south-west. Nothing else on the surface is worth as much. It bites on the same two-second clock as everything else and about as hard as a hill troll, up to 48 a time, so what makes a dragon a dragon is the fire rather than the mouth. It also knits back together, a hitpoint every couple of seconds. That is nothing while you are hitting it and everything once you stop, so a dragon is finished in one visit or not at all — come back an hour later and it is whole. More live on the dragons’ peaks at the north end of the Blue Mountains, spread out, and above them on the summit is their master, the dragon lord, with another of its kind in the lair under the Lonely Mountain, in by the hidden door on the west face and down through the Mountain: bigger, dark red and gold and crowned, twice as tough as a dragon, biting for up to seventy-nine — harder than anything but the Balrog — mending twice as fast and breathing further. It is worth three and a half dragons, and it sits on the best hoard in the world — the biggest purse there is, plate and the tower shield more often than any dragon gives them up, and the only fire swords in the world. Six dragon lords in a hundred leave dragon-scale mail, which a plain dragon never does. One dragon in ten leaves dragon ham, and three lords in twenty (see Food)

Fire elementals

Living flame, taller than a man, and Durin’s Bane’s own: they stand either side of it in its hall past the bridge at the bottom of Moria, and they are found nowhere else. Tougher than a dragon and well short of the Balrog — six hundred hitpoints, blows of up to fifty-six, as quick as a dragon — but with nothing to breathe and no whip: what they have is what they are made of. Their blows are fire. Armor and a shield meet them like any blow, and what gets through burns, so dragon-scale mail halves it. They do not burn themselves, so a nova, the fire off a Balrog helmet and the Bane’s own fire do them no harm, and they have no blood to poison. Fire is its own light: underground each lights the floor for two tiles round it, so you see them flickering across the dark hall before your own light reaches them (see The dark). They crackle and roar. When one dies it leaves nothing — no body, no blood, no loot — it goes out in a flare where it stood

Balrog whip and fire

The Balrog does three things to you, and only one of them is its claws. Its whip reaches five tiles, two past a bow: every six to nine seconds it lashes whoever it is after and holds them where they stand for a moment (just over a second, entangled: you can fight, cast and drink but not move), then pulls back and drags them in to the free tile beside it nearest where they stood, where they are entangled again for a second. The Balrog stands still while it holds the whip. The whip itself does no harm; what it is for is bringing you to the other two. It needs to see you, like an arrow, so a wall or a pillar is cover from it; it will not reach into protected ground; and it does nothing to somebody already beside it or with every tile round the Balrog taken. Its fire burns everything on the eight tiles round it every second, 8 to 16 a time, player or monster alike, whether it is fighting or not; nothing worn meets it except dragon-scale mail, which halves it, and a fire elemental or a dragon beside it takes none. So there is no fighting a Balrog from range and no standing next to one for free: every second beside it costs, and the whip brings you back if you walk out. It had a rift and an energy beam instead until 12 October.

Siren

One of the two things in the world that live in the water (the other is the Watcher in the Water), and the only ones that can be there at all: water is a wall to you and to every other creature that walks, and a siren is an exception — it may not come ashore any more than you may wade out. What has wings goes over it: crebain, bats and dragons fly across water as readily as over land, so a lake will not shake one off. One killed over the water falls at the water’s edge nearest where it died, body and loot together, rather than sinking. They keep the coast out past the fields — the sea round the island and never an inland pond — never nearer the green than an orc, and no two share a shore. It does not bite. Its whole attack is the song, which carries 2 tiles, needs a clear line the way an arrow does, and is met by nothing you are wearing or holding — the roll is what you lose, and the line ends “armor is no answer to it”. What makes that fair is that it cannot follow you: step three tiles back from the water and it has nothing at all, no chase and no second attack, so a siren is the one fight in this world you can leave for free. If you want the kill: a bow reaches 4 and its song 3, so an archer on the bank shoots it and is never sung at; and in narrow water — a river, the shallow end of a lake — keeping its distance runs out of room against the far bank and it stands there, within reach of a sword on the near one. Out in the middle of a wide lake neither of you can touch the other, which is a stalemate and not a trap. It is also the one creature that leaves no blood: a stain wants ground, and its ground is water

Quest

Two chests stand in the treasure room of the dwarf hold, off the west side of the king’s hall on its bottom floor, and need no key: one holds 500 gold and the other a dwarven helm, each once per life. Dying lets you take both again

The Shards of Narsil

Narsil, the sword of Elendil, lies broken in five pieces across the North: Narsil’s hilt, Narsil’s crossguard, and its blade in three — the lower blade, the middle blade and the point. Each waits in a chest of its own with something guarding it, and each is yours once per life like the other quest chests. One is among the trolls of the Ettenmoors, one with the dwarves of Ered Luin, and the rest are for Elrond to tell you. Speak to Elrond in Rivendell of Narsil and he names every piece you lack and where it lies; look at any piece you have found and it tells you where the next one is. Bring all five to him and say Narsil (or shard, reforge or Andúril) within three tiles of him, and he forges them anew into Andúril: attack 19 with both hands, the hardest blow there is beside Orcrist’s, over the giant sword’s 17, parry 6 like Herugrim and the Westernesse blade, the best of any blade, slow to break, and underground it lights the dark around you wherever you go (see The dark). The pieces themselves are worth a coin apiece to a vendor. Dying lets you take them again

The people’s errands

Most of the people out in the world want something, and say so when you ask them about the right thing: listen to what they talk about. Each errand pays once per life, like the quest chests, and dying lets you do every one of them again. Nobody tells you that it has reset: you simply find them asking again

Quest marks

When somebody sends you somewhere for a quest, the place goes on your map and the log says so: “The trolls’ hole is marked on your map.” It is a gold pin with the place’s name beside it, on that tile at every zoom, close in and zoomed right out, whether or not you have been there, and on whichever floor you are looking at: something below the ground is marked on the ground over it. Marked are the Prancing Pony when the Gaffer sends you for his letter and the Gaffer when Barliman sends you home with it, the Great Barrow from Tom Bombadil, the trolls’ hole from Bilbo, Pelargir from Imrahil, the Elvenking’s cell from Galion, the vineyards of Dorwinion from Galion and his cellar from the vintner there, and from Elrond each shard of Narsil still to find, where Isildur fell, the smithy of Ost-in-Edhil and, for the bearer of the One, the Cracks of Doom, from Treebeard the gardens of the Entwives, from Faramir the Harad war-column, and from the merchant of Harad the Variag chieftain’s tent. Directions are rough: they say roughly how far and which way, from “just a little way” through “a short way”, “not far”, “a fair way” and “a long way” to “a very long way”, to the north, the south-west and so on, never a count of tiles; the pin is the exact spot. Once the quest the place is for is done the pin turns grey with a tick, and a death, which lets you do the quest again, turns it gold again. Marks are kept with your character. Talk in passing marks nothing

Gandalf’s letter

A first errand, for anybody of any level. The Gaffer, in Hobbiton, is missing a letter. Somebody at Bree, east along the road, has it and has forgotten all about it until you mention it — but only once the Gaffer has sent you. Bring it home to Bagshot Row and he pays 50 gold

The drying-sheds of Longbottom

A second first errand, for levels 1 to 3. Tobold Hornblower, at Longbottom (see Longbottom), has rats and kobolds in his drying-sheds, dragging his leaf off. The first time he asks you, he gives you a torch for the dark under the hill (at your feet if you cannot carry it). Go down the stair in his shed and kill them: about one in seven leaves a bundle of stolen leaf, a few at a time, and ten bundles are about thirty kills. Bring him ten and he gives you a pipe and a pouch of ten pinches of Longbottom Leaf, once a life. He sells more leaf at 2 gold a pinch. Click the pipe or the leaf in your bag to smoke a pinch: you blow a smoke ring, and for a minute a pinch, while you sit without taking a step and stay out of a fight, every tick of your mending mends twice as much and your mana comes back twice as fast. While it does, a green +X of what closed rises over your head each time a wound closes, and a blue +X each time mana comes back. It hurries a rest and starts none: on an empty stomach and off protected ground it mends nothing. When a pinch’s minute is up and you are still sat there, the next pinch from your bag goes in by itself, so the pipe keeps going as long as you do not move and the leaf lasts; it burns out only when your bag has no more. You cannot light it in a fight, nor on protected ground, where it would do you no good (a pipe lit outside goes out if you are carried onto it); taking a step of your own or being drawn into one puts it out, but being shoved, dragged or pulled along does not. While it burns the Statuses line shows a leaf with the time left in the pinch

The trader’s strongbox

The Variags fell on the merchant of Harad’s caravan in the sand, and their chieftain keeps his strongbox. Ask the merchant, at the oasis in Khand, about his caravan and the chieftain’s tent goes on your map. The chest at the back of the chieftain’s dugout needs no key, only the chieftain got past: in it are the strongbox and 60 gold. The strongbox is no use to anybody else and no counter takes it; bring it to the merchant and he pays 150 gold and three health potions, once a life

The Barrow-blades

Ask Tom Bombadil about the barrow, and he tells you which way. The Great Barrow is a mound with no way up it on foot: you will need levitate to stand on top, and the way in is from there. It is dark inside, so bring a light, and wights keep it. At the back is a chest with a barrow-blade and 80 gold. Tom gave you a rhyme to sing if the dark grips you: inside the barrow it is worth remembering, once

The trolls’ hoard

Bilbo, in Rivendell, will tell you where Bert, Tom and William kept their hole in the Trollshaws. The chest in it is locked, and trolls never leave a door without a key on one of them: the stone trolls round about carry the troll key. Inside are Glamdring, Sting and 150 gold. Sting: attack 13, parry 4, and it glows near orcs underground (see The dark)

The Elvenking’s cell

When the Wood-elves caught Thorin and his company in Mirkwood, the Elvenking took Thorin’s sword and locked it away. Galion, his butler in the cellars, will tell you where if you ask him about it. The chest is in one of the cells of the dungeons, and the guards of the Elvenking carry the keys: about one guard in sixteen leaves the Elvenking’s keys. Inside are Orcrist and 150 gold, once a life like every quest chest, and the keys are not used up

Náin’s axe

Dáin Ironfoot, in the Iron Hills, slew Azog at the Battle of Azanulbizar, where his father Náin fell; ask him about his father, or the axe. He tells you where the orcs dug in, and it goes on your map. The chest at the back of the orc-hole under Azanulbizar needs no key, only the orcs got past: in it are Náin’s axe and 60 gold. The axe is no use in a fight, and no vendor wants it; bring it to Dáin and he gives dwarf-wrought plate armor and a dwarf-wrought axe from his own forges (two more armor than shop plate, an axe that hits and parries one more than a shop axe, both tougher), once a life

The King’s wine

Galion, in the cellars under the Elvenking’s halls, has had no wine up the river from Dorwinion since the Easterlings came raiding there. Ask him about the wine and he tells you which way the vineyards are; the vintner there sells the casks, and asked about the King he tells you the way back. Carry a cask of Dorwinion down to Galion, and he and the chief of the guards will drink it, as they did when Bilbo was in the halls: he gives you the Elvenking’s keys off the guard’s belt (see The Elvenking’s cell) and 75 gold for the carriage. Once a life, like every errand. A cask is heavy, and the way to Galion is through the halls

The spiders of the eaves

Radagast, at Rhosgobel, says the giant spiders are breeding in the eaves of Mirkwood and the Wise will not believe him without proof. Bring him a giant spider’s carapace (they drop one about one kill in thirteen) and he gives you his brown cloak, once a life: +2 armor over armor like the elven cloak, no clank either way, and the beasts take you for a friend of his. Wolves, winter wolves, bears, wargs, rats, bats, crebain and the mûmak are 3 tiles less alert to you while you wear it: a wolf notices a bare man at 2 tiles rather than 5, and a hobbit not at all. A beast you have struck at, shot or cast at knows you for what you are, and the cloak does nothing more with that one. Giant spiders are no beasts of his: it does nothing for them

Baldor’s helm

Ask Éomer, in Edoras, about Dunharrow, the Dead or Baldor: he tells you where the Dark Door is, and it goes on your map. Baldor son of Brego went in at it on a boast and never came out. His bones lie in the Paths of the Dead, at the end of the passage east of the hall inside the Door, before a door of stone that nobody has opened, and his chest stands by them. It needs no key, only the Dead got past: in it are Baldor’s helm, armor 6, as good on the head as the Balrog helmet, and 300 gold, once a life

The oath at Erech

Carry Andúril to Elrond and ask him about the Dead, the Paths or the oath: he tells you where the Stone of Erech is, and it goes on your map. Go to the Stone, by the Paths or over the mountains, and say oath beside it with Andúril about you: the Dead are called to fulfil their oath, and their King lays down his crown, armor 6, as good on the head as Baldor’s helm and silent as the Dead, once a life. Without the sword the Stone is silent

Beorn’s wargs

Beorn, by the Carrock, has no love for wargs. Ask him about them, and bring him what he asks for: a meal at his table is 100 gold and ten honey cakes

The Ring of Barahir

Arvedui, the last king of Arthedain, left the Ring of Barahir with the Lossoth for their help the winter he lived among them. Ask their headman about the ring (see The Lossoth’s village) and he will give it back for five winter-wolf pelts, once a life. A winter wolf leaves its pelt about one kill in eight (it leaves meat three kills in eight, and nothing the rest, about 0.75 gold a kill); a pelt sells for 3 gold. The Ring makes your alertness 3 while you wear it (see Rings)

The star of the Dúnedain

Halbarad, in the Rangers’ hidden camp in the Coldfells, wants the trolls of the fells thinned. Bring him three troll hides, which hill trolls and stone trolls leave one kill in ten, or the troll chief’s head, which the troll chief always leaves, and he gives you the star of the Dúnedain, once a life: a Ranger’s grey cloak pinned with the silver star. It is worn over your armor like the elven cloak, turns 1 where that turns 2 and takes 2 off your clank as that does, and counts for two levels of the ranged skill while you wear it

The faithful stone

Long ago a carver of the Drúedain made a little stone man in his own likeness and put some of his strength into him, and he kept the old house of the Drúedain under the Andrast ridge. Ask the Old Wose, in his glade at the cape’s tip (see Drúwaith Iaur), about the stone: he tells you where the stair down is, and it goes on your map. At the back of the cave a big Púkel-man sits with the faithful stone between its knees, and Woses keep it; click the Púkel-man to take the stone, once a life. It is no use in a fight and no vendor wants it; bring it to the Old Wose and he gives 120 gold and five athelas, once a life

The White Hand

Saruman’s servants have two enemies who will pay for proof. Éomer in Edoras wants the shields of the Uruk-hai, three of them, and gives a Rohirric helm and 100 gold. Treebeard at the eaves of Fangorn wants three axes that bite his trees, and gives three Ent-draughts. Ask each about orcs and Saruman

Henneth Annûn

In north Ithilien a stream comes down out of the Mountains of Shadow, passes under the Harad road and runs west through a gorge in a knoll of rock, and falls over its lip into a pool. A ledge runs along the foot of the cliff and on behind the falls: walk through the curtain, and behind it a stair goes down to Henneth Annûn, the Window of the Sunset, the hidden refuge of the rangers of Ithilien. The refuge is protected ground, and Faramir keeps it (see People). South of the falls a Harad war-column is on the road to the Black Gate: a mûmak with its war-tower and Southron archers before, beside and behind it, a hunting ground for level 20 and up with potions and the heal spell: the mûmak and the archers beside it are a fight for level 20 (30 without potions or heals), the whole column at once for 25. Keep well clear of the vale of Minas Morgul to the south

The banner of Harad

Ask Faramir at Henneth Annûn about Harad, the Southrons or the mûmakil, and he tells you where the war-column is on the road, and it goes on your map. A mûmak carries its column’s war-banner on its tower, and one kill in eight leaves it: the Harad banner, a black serpent on scarlet. No vendor wants it. Bring it to Faramir and he gives 300 gold, ten health potions and ten mana potions, once a life

The gardens of the Entwives

Long ago the Entwives crossed the Great River and made gardens east of it, and Sauron laid them waste: that country is the Brown Lands now. In the middle of it is what is left of one garden, its walls broken on every side, a withered orchard in its west half, the old beds in its east half and a paved walk up from the gap in its south wall. Nothing lives in it but the last apple tree, at the head of the walk. There is nothing to fight in the garden itself, but the orcs, gnolls and Easterlings of the Brown Lands are not far off

The Entwives

Treebeard at the eaves of Fangorn lost the Entwives long ago. Ask him about them and he tells you where their gardens were, and they go on your map. Something lies in the long grass at the roots of the last apple tree there: click the tree. Bring Treebeard word of the gardens, or what you found, and he gives you five draughts of Wellinghall from his own jars, once per life. A draught of Wellinghall is an Ent-draught three times over in one swallow: it heals as three health potions do, one after another, and puts back 120 mana

Horses

Éomer in Edoras lends a horse of the Mark to whoever kills ten orcs for him: ask him about horses, and every orc you have a hand in killing after that counts, of any breed and anywhere, an Uruk-hai or a black Uruk as much as a camp orc. Go back to him at ten. The horse is yours for good; a death does not take it, though it does clear a count under way. /ride, or the horse’s head below the info button in the top left corner of the world, gets you on it and down again. Riding you go three tiles a second over grass, whatever your level or gear, and 3.3 with a haste. It is only above ground: going down a stair, a hole or a ladder puts you on foot, and you cannot get on below. Any fight puts you on foot: any attack on you throws you, a swing that misses as much as a blow, fire or an arrow, and attacking anything yourself, a swing or an attack spell, gets you down to fight. Your horse will not stand for you to get on again until four seconds after the last attack you made or that was made on you, every one starting the four seconds again, and the horse’s head counts those seconds down. Something only chasing you does not stop you getting on and riding away

The Corsairs of Umbar

Imrahil in Dol Amroth tells of the corsairs who hold Pelargir and of their captain’s strongbox. The corsairs carry its key. What is inside is worth 200 gold to you and more to Imrahil: bring it to him for the helm of Dol Amroth, the best helm there is short of the Witch-king’s crown

The Elendilmir

An epilogue to Narsil. Once you carry Andúril, speak to Elrond of Elendil and his star, and he tells you where Isildur fell. Something there is sealed for the heir of Elendil, and opens to nothing but his sword; Isildur’s dead still guard it, and so do the orcs who killed him. Inside is the Elendilmir, a star on a fillet of mithril worn as your helm, that lights the dark as Andúril does, and skeletons and barrow wights let its wearer be until they are struck, cast at or called, as they do a Ring of the Nine; the Nazgûl, the Witch-king and the High Priest do not

The Light of Eärendil

Galadriel keeps a gift for those who have walked long in dark places. Ask her about it and she will tell you whether you are ready; at level 40 speak to her of Eärendil (or Elbereth) and she gives you the phial of Galadriel, a light held in the off hand as a shield. And in Minas Tirith, Ioreth of the Houses of Healing knows an old saying about the hands of the king: come to her carrying the king’s sword, and she has a gift for you too

The rings of Eregion

Ask Elrond about Eregion or Ost-in-Edhil and he tells you where the elven smiths worked. Their smithy is in the ruins by the meeting of the Sirannon and the Glanduin, just above the Swanfleet's fens; in it three small chests stand side by side, a lesser ring in each: the ring of lore, the ring of quiet and the ring of clean blood. Open whichever you like; the other two stay shut. One ring a life, as with every chest. A lesser ring, the Ring of Barahir included, is worn and can break as armor does, on blows that get past your defense, but it is hardy: one in twenty is gone after a quarter of an hour of fighting. The Great Rings never break

The One Ring

There is only ever one. It was lost in the Gladden Fields, which keep a small shoal of four fish of their own that never swims out of them, and once in a long while a fish caught there is not a fish — but only while nobody in the world has it, in a bag, a depot, on the ground or listed with Grubb, and the whole world is told when it comes up. A fish caught while it could have been the One shows a glimpse of it: “You caught a fish. Something glints gold in the mud below, and is gone.” Worn, you make no clank at all, so a creature notices you only as far off as its own alertness reaches, your blows land 15% harder (it no longer adds magic of its own, since 2026-10-13), you gain twice the experience from every kill, and the levels a great ring adds to what your people learn fastest are doubled (ten and twenty rather than five and ten); but the Nazgûl and the Witch-king know where you are and come for you from anywhere on their floor, and from other floors too: they follow you up and down stairs, ladders and holes, and walk home the same way once it is off. From far off they come on slowly, a step every second or so, and only march once they are within twelve tiles of you (since 2026-10-16): from their strongholds to the far north is some five to ten minutes. While it is on your finger you know where every Ring of the Seven and the Nine being worn is: an arrow at the edge of your screen points to each wearer, orange for the Seven and violet for the Nine, with their name, roughly how far and the floors between, for as long as both rings are worn. It runs one way: no other ring can feel the One or its bearer. A look at it in your bag tells you where every Ring of the Seven and the Nine is, worn, carried or on the ground; the lesser rings it does not feel. Carried at all, worn or not, it makes you hungry twice as fast, and it fades you from the moment it is in your bag, evenly, from however faded you were to wholly faded at the end of its week, past the 30 any other ring stops at; nothing comes back while you carry it. Faded wholly, by anything, you die. It always falls from you when you die, for whoever reaches it first, but your depot will keep it. It cannot be traded or sold, to a vendor or on Grubb’s market. Its week runs on in a depot as in a bag. Take it to the top of Mount Doom, five levels up: two ramps climb onto each terrace from the one below, on the west and east faces from the ground and a quarter turn round the mountain at each level after, and the Cracks of Doom are in the middle of the very top. Beside them, choose Cast it into the Fire when you right-click or hold it in your bag (away from the Cracks that only tells you where the Fire is; clicking it or equipping it there only puts it on, as anywhere else): it is unmade, you gain a whole level of experience (what it takes to go from the start of your level to the start of the next, so you go up one and keep about as far into it as you were), your name goes on the Ring-bearers highscores for good, and every Ring of the Seven and of the Nine in the world, worn, carried, in a depot or on the ground, crumbles with it, and everybody’s fading is undone at once; everybody in the world is told who threw it in, in red, in the log and over their own head, where no filter hides it. Whoever finds it has a week from its finding to unmake it, whoever carries it by then; once the week is up, you are wholly faded and it betrays its bearer to their death: whoever has it, in the bag or the depot, is slain on the spot, or the moment they are back in the world if they were out of it, and the Ring is lost to the Gladden rather than falling with them, wherever it was, the ground included, and can be fished again straight away. An admin’s /cracktimer says how long is left of the week, and can make it shorter or longer, or end it now. The login screen says whether it is lost, found and how long is left to unmake it, or destroyed, though never who has it. The Gladden gives it up again a day later, or sooner if an admin ends the wait with /ringrest; an admin’s /ringrest also says how long is left, and /rings ends with it. Ask Elrond of the One Ring while you carry it and he will tell you the way

Were-worms

East of the Iron Hills, from the hills down to the north shore of the Sea of Rhûn, is the Last Desert, and were-worms live under its ground, never far from one another: long wingless dragons without fire. You cannot see one or shoot one while it is down, but you may hear it, the ground shifting or a grinding deep down. Walk within five tiles of one and it bursts up on a tile beside you with a bite as it comes. When it is badly hurt it goes back under, once it has been up ten seconds, and stays down ten seconds before it comes up again at whoever is still within five tiles; stay near and it comes back to be finished. 550 hitpoints, a bite of up to 57 and a dragon’s thick hide. One kill in twelve leaves dragon ham (see Food)

Gollum

There is one Gollum in the world at a time, and he can be anywhere on the surface outside the protection zones: each time he is killed he comes back 2 minutes later somewhere new. He is the fastest thing in the world and not much of a fighter, and he runs when he is badly hurt. He is quiet and keen (since 2026-10-13): his clank is 3 rather than a monster’s usual 5, so you see him only from 4 tiles off, and his alertness of 1 hears a man in nothing from 6. Like a troll, he heals as he goes, so let him get away and he comes back whole. While the One Ring is lost, a kill of his has a 1 in 10 chance of giving it up, in place of anything else he drops; it is found as a fished Ring is, and its week starts. While somebody carries the One, worn or not, he hunts them: he knows where they are anywhere on their floor, chases them on foot wherever they go, up and down stairs, ramps, ladders and holes to whatever floor they are on, and never jumps: a teleport puts you as far ahead of him as the walk back is long; and fights them to the death without running. Safe ground keeps you from him, but he waits nearby. An admin has a pale green arrow at the edge of the screen pointing to him, with how many tiles off he is, until they put it away with /gollumarrow (again brings it back), and /gollum says where he is, whom he is hunting, or when he comes back

Bullroarer Took

Bandobras “Bullroarer” Took, the hobbit so big he could ride a horse, who knocked the goblin-king Golfimbul’s head off with a club and down a rabbit-hole and so invented golf, rides the fields round Hobbiton. There is one of him at a time: he comes up when the server starts and then on every hour if he is not already about, somewhere between eight and thirty tiles out from the village, and everybody of level 20 and up is told when he does. He fights only players of level 20 and up, and nobody under level 20 can harm him: he takes no notice of them, a blow at him is refused and says why, and their spells, fire and poison do nothing. He has 400 hitpoints and hits with his golf club for 23 to 46. Every kill leaves his hobbit saucepan, which he wears on his head, and his golf club: a one-handed club that hits nearly as hard as a sword (attack 12, parry 2). Three kills in four also leave a purse of 40 to 120 gold, 2 to 4 health potions or 2 to 5 honey cakes, a quarter each, which makes a kill worth about 43 gold

Old Man Willow

The Old Forest is a wood on the east bank of the Brandywine, south of the East Road, between the river’s bank and the Barrow-downs. The Withywindle runs down out of the downs past Tom Bombadil’s and through it into the Brandywine, with a ford of sand below Tom’s. In the deepest part of the forest, on its south bank with the stream at his back, stands Old Man Willow: a huge grey willow that never takes a step. He has 400 hitpoints, boughs that strike for up to 36 at anybody within two tiles, armor 3 and defense 0–9, and he mends 3 hitpoints every two seconds; poison does nothing to him. A blow of his that lands catches your ankle in a root, and your next step waits a second. His song puts you to sleep: every fifteen to twenty seconds, when somebody within six tiles is in his sight, he sings, and every player that near sleeps for 2 seconds, unable to move, strike or cast an attack. Whoever was further off than his boughs reach stumbles in and wakes among his roots. Potions and the heal spell still work. A bow does not outreach the song, so fight him close or keep more than six tiles off. A kill leaves something about two times in three: a purse of 60 to 160 gold, one to three Ent-draughts, three to six honey cakes, two to four health potions, or an elven cloak one kill in twenty, about 41.57 gold a kill. He is for level 10, which wins on a mana potion or two a fight; a level 8 needs four or five, and without potions or the heal spell a level 10 wins two fights in five and a level 12 nearly all

The Dead Marshes

North-west of the Black Gate the marshes have crept over the graves of the battle of Dagorlad, and the dead of it lie in the pools with their faces turned up: Men, Elves and Orcs. Over each burns a pale light, a corpse candle, and they hang over the swamp among the skeletons there. Do not follow the lights: one that is after you and sees you from up to 5 tiles off, further than its touch, draws you in to stand beside it, every twelve to eighteen seconds, and you stand staring into the pool for 1 second, though you can still drink and heal. So there is no keeping your distance from one: a bow is no answer, and running only brings you back. It hits for 18 to 36, has 250 health, is slow, and a poison does nothing to it. It is one of the dead that rise: put out, it leaves its remains in the pool and lights again out of them unless you lay them to rest (15 mana), and its experience and whatever it carried come out only then. What it carried is grave goods: coin, chain mail, an elven cloak now and then, and the Westernesse blade of the Men who fell there. One alone is a fair fight from about level 10 with potions and heals, but the lights draw you on to the next: two at once want about level 15, three about level 18

The Watcher in the Water

Something lives in the dark pool before the Doors of Durin. Say anything but the word of the hour within three tiles of the shut doors, or cast a line into the pool, and it comes up: a mass of long pale arms out of the water, near whoever woke it. There is only ever one. It cannot leave the pool, but its arms reach 4 tiles up the bank, which takes in the doorstep and the shore before it, and a blow that lands holds you where you stand for a second. Its arms are met by armor and defense like any blow. Five steps back from the water and it cannot touch you. It hears you three tiles further off than most things, as a dragon does. Left alone for a minute, with nobody fighting it or saying a wrong word, it sinks back. Killed, it does not come up again for five minutes, whatever is said at the doors. It is upper tier: 360 hitpoints, and three kills in four leave something of what went into the pool — coin, a fish, a dwarf’s axe or a coat of chain mail

The Horn of Helm Hammerhand

At the back of Helm’s Deep, behind the wall across the gorge, stands the Horn of Helm Hammerhand on its stand of stone. Click it from beside it to blow it, and everybody online hears that it has sounded: the army of Isengard comes up the coomb against the wall in three waves, the first ten seconds after the horn. First 6 Dunlendings; then 6 Uruk-hai and 2 Dunlendings; then 8 Uruk-hai and 3 orc berserkers. Each wave is half as big again for every defender past the first, up to four, counted as it comes, and the next one comes when the last of the one before is dead or two minutes after it came, whichever is first. They make for the horn and fight whoever they find on the way, and every kill pays its experience and loot as it always does. A defender is anybody in the Deep, on the ground: the coomb in front of the wall, the gorge behind it back past the horn, and two tiles east of the gorge’s rock. If there has been nobody in the Deep for 30 seconds, the army goes back down the coomb and the siege is lost. When the last of the last wave falls, the Deep has held, and everybody who hurt the army, did not die since the horn and is in the Deep has survived the siege. Only whoever blew the horn is rewarded, and only if they survived it too; everybody else who held the Deep keeps what they killed. The first siege a character blows the horn for and survives is paid in Herugrim, Théoden’s sword: one-handed, attack 15 like Glamdring, parry 6 like Andúril and the Westernesse blade, the best of any sword, slow to break, and never of a make; a vendor pays 40 gold for it. Every one after that pays half as much experience again as the whole army was worth. The horn can be blown once an hour, counted from the last time it was

The Glittering Caves

Aglarond, the Glittering Caves, are a level under Helm’s Deep. A stair at the back of the gorge, beside the Horn, goes down to the refuge where the folk of the Westfold shelter in war: it is protected ground, and Gamling keeps the stores there, selling potions, arrows and food to whoever holds the Deep (see People), and a depot box stands there (see Depot). The crystal halls beyond are not reached from the refuge: their way in is the stair at the culvert, at the foot of the wall in front of the Deep where the stream runs out. Columns of crystal stand in them, each lighting the cave two tiles round it, and pools. Uruk-hai hold the outer halls, a fight for level 10 alone and 15 two at once with potions and the heal spell (12 and 18 without), and cave trolls the great hall and the trolls’ hall at the far end, level 20 alone and 25 two at once (25 and 35 without). Hánar, a dwarf in the refuge, wants what the trolls took (see The heart-crystal)

The heart-crystal

Ask Hánar in the refuge under Helm’s Deep about the crystal, and the culvert and the trolls’ hoard go on your map. The hoard is a chest at the far end of the trolls’ hall in the crystal halls: open it, once a life, for the heart-crystal of Aglarond and 100 gold. No vendor wants the crystal. Bring it to Hánar and he gives 400 gold, ten health potions and ten mana potions, once a life

Choose your race

Every character is one of the free peoples of Middle-earth, and each is good at something and pays for it somewhere else. Your choice is kept; while races are not locked in, /race brings this window back at your next login. The help’s Race entry has the numbers.

Changes

What the console shows

One switch per kind of message, with how many of its lines the console is holding, hidden ones included. A kind switched off is hidden rather than dropped: switch it back on and its history is still there.

Highscores