Original Release Date: April 24, 2007
Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar

Ered Luin is one of the original starter regions in LOTRO. The stories of the Elves and Dwarves are woven together – beginning in the high mountain valley of Thorin’s Gate. Eventually their experiences splits, sending Elves to explore the open world from the south in Celondim, with the Dwarves continuing their journey in the snowy north of Thorin’s Gate.

As with the other launch regions, the World Design team all worked together in creating Ered Luin. My original contributions focused on Thorin’s Gate, the Vale of Thrain, Rath Teraig and portions of Haudh Lin, as well as a number of caves and other interiors found across the region. I was the principle world designer in the construction of the Thorin’s Hall interior – a full city contained within a dungeon space (which has its pros and cons). While much of the original landscape of Ered Luin has been updated by the team to help modernize the look and gameplay of the region, the thumbprint of our original creation can be seen throughout.

Ered Luin remains a region of intrigue to many players of LOTRO. For years, it remained as isolated as the one piece of landscape that was not contiguous with the rest of the game world (which was just Eriador at the time), and it was eventually connected with the introduction of the Yondershire region between it and The Shire proper. Due to its close proximity to the not-yet-implemented Grey Havens as well as numerous other blocked paths leading out of the region, players regularly speculate about what more could be to come for this humble starter zone.

This region includes two of LOTRO’s four original housing neighborhoods and I was deeply involved in the planning, layout and construction of both of those locations. The Thorin’s Gate Neighborhood was an early experiment in creating a large scale “landscape cave”, utilizing physics objects as the rocky ceiling of the neighborhood. This construction method met with limited success and the neighborhood itself is one of LOTRO’s least popular. However, the work done in it, as well as the sprawling dungeons and caves of Sarnur, helped to inspire what would become the ceiling heightmap system that was introduced with the Mines of Moria expansion pack a few years later.