LotRO Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel Talks Moria, Monster Play, and Boar Quests

By Steven Crews | April 10, 2009 | | Filed under: Events, Features, Interviews | Tags: GDC09, Lord of the Rings Online, Mines of Moria, Turbine

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The MMO Gamer: Speaking of land, Forochel was an area that was patched into the game about a month or two after our last interview. And it was a very interesting because it’s not exactly one of the high-ticket areas in the book.

Jeffrey Steefel: Yeah, a whole paragraph.

The MMO Gamer: There was no great battle that took place there, I don’t think the ring passed within a thousand miles of it.

How did you manage to take that one paragraph and flesh it out into an entire zone, with quests, mobs, and an entire new faction?

Jeffrey Steefel: It’s kinda the same way we do, you know, everything, no matter if it starts with something that is iconic and has a lot information or not.

Even Angmar, you know, even though it’s a pretty important part of the North history, there’s not a lot of discussion about it by Tolkien. So, first thing we do is look at what we do know.

There was this very small paragraph in the books, and I think there’s one other mention in the Appendices about this place in the North that had these people called the Lossoth, that there was a shipwreck that happened there, you know, some explorers that had actually gone exploring up in the North and… that’s pretty much all we knew.

Then you start building out what we think the personality of that region is. Why is it there, who are these people, the Lossoth, what on earth would they be doing up in the North, what’s their objective in life, what are their towns built around, what are the things that they have to deal with in a cold and frozen environment?

Then you start to create the personality of the area. In fact, that’s what we do in our design, we build out a whole document, a personality document, which basically says: these are who the people are, this is what the history is, this is the kind of things that they do there…

We do the same thing even with something like Rivendell, because the books focus very much on what’s happening in Elrond’s house, but what we really want to talk about is: what is Rivendell, what happens there, besides the fact it’s where the Fellowship’s at? Then we create this whole story and history around the area.

It’s a lot easier to build quests, then, because we’ve essentially extended the lore in a way that isn’t as rich as anything that Tolkien wrote, because we’re not Tolkien, but at least has enough depth and history and information about the culture that’s there.

Then, once you have that, we can do what we normally do: work out what kind of faction will this be like, how does this fit into our overall story, where does Forochel factor into the quest of the Ring-bearer, or does it, ’cause not everything has to.

But then it’s, well… then what does it have to do with the War of the Ring and all that kind of stuff?

Moria was a huge example of that. We wrote a book, practically, in terms of “what is Moria,” because there you had a lot of information you had to thread:

The history of Moria, when the elves and the dwarves were closely entwined with each other, what parts of Moria were built when the elves were very influential and what parts of Moria were built when it was just the dwarves, how’s the architecture different, you know, how does this place work…

That’s what the Waterworks is all about, the mirrors and… you know, that’s kind of fun, basically creating history.

The MMO Gamer: Now you’ve gone and invoked Tolkien, so I’m going to have to base this next question on storytelling.

Storytelling is a subject very near and dear to my heart as a writer. And, I don’t know how should I phrase this…

Is there room enough in The Lord of The Rings Online for the player to have a story of their own? It almost seems like the story of the War of the Ring, and Frodo, and the quest to Mount Doom almost overshadows everything else, overpowers it.

Jeffrey Steefel: Well, those are two different stories. Or one is a subset of the other.

The story of the Ring, the story of the Ring-bearer, which is sort of the linear path, certainly that the movies trace, is pretty iconic and obviously not something that that players are going to be participating in very often. It wasn’t, you know, Frodo, the Fellowship and, you know, a few hundred thousand of his best friends that walked down to Mordor and…

But what we try to do is step back and see what’s the big story. The big story is that the War of the Ring is a chapter in the War of Middle Earth that’s been raging for a long time between good and evil…

To the people of Middle Earth, then, it’s always been Sauron, but there are different incarnations of that, and where are the various front of this war, right?

Getting the ring to Mordor is very, very important, but even in the books, and the movies, you know, they focus on the fights at Helm’s Deep, the, you know, what is Saruman doing down at Isengard, he’s amassing his own front on the war.

We’ve created another front in Angmar that it was very important to participate in; the whole story of Amarthiel, and Amarthiel’s ring, was another threat to Middle Earth that had to be dealt with.

As we get further across the Misty Mountains, Moria is another example, right? Moria has been sort of busted open and stirred up by the passage of the Fellowship, and now all kinds of different factions beyond just the warring goblin factions that are in there…

Now you’ve got the white-headed orcs coming in there, and you’ve got other orc factions coming in, and you know, it’s really important that the free people of Middle Earth help get that under control.

Because if that becomes another corrupted part of Middle Earth, that’s just another thing that’s gonna threaten the Free People.

The player’s story is about being part of the heroic Free Peoples of Middle Earth, that are helping fight back this evil, in this struggle, in every way they possibly can.

It’s talked about a lot in the books too, you know, there’s things going on in lots of different places. There’s a lot of that kind of “Meanwhile…” Someone disappears for a while and they’re, you know, down in Rohan, or Gondor or somewhere.

The MMO Gamer: This is a very interesting discussion that I would like to continue but, unfortunately, I have to run to my next appointment.

So before we go, any hints on what we’re going to be talking about at GDC next year?

Jeffrey Steefel: Wow, there’s a lot of cool things that we can talk about next year and, of course, I can’t talk about them now!

But, you know, just for the franchise in general everything from where we’re going now that we’re crossing the Misty Mountains to the way that we believe we’re going to be growing our audience over the next year or two, both globally and the existing audience.

We’ll be launching in Asia, China this year and my belief is that when we talk next GDC the community audience for LoTRO is going to be even bigger than it is now, and that people will be really excited about where it’s going.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, we’ll see you at GDC…

Jeffrey Steefel: Twenty-ten.

The MMO Gamer: Twenty-ten! I was wondering how to say that. Do you just say ‘ten’ or ‘two-thousand ten’?

Jeffrey Steefel: Twenty-ten I think they say. But, yeah, good lord that was like a science fiction book.

The MMO Gamer: Welcome to the future.

Jeffrey Steefel: Yeah.

The MMO Gamer: Well, once again, it was a pleasure speaking with you. We enjoyed it and we hope we can do it again, maybe sooner than next year.

Jeffrey Steefel: Yeah, maybe!