Our ongoing assault on The Shadows of Angmar saw a welcome leap forward last night, with the hapless band of Hobbington Crescent managing to complete Book IV and almost without realising it, plough right into Book V and get several chapters into that too.

We'd been off the narrative trail a bit over these last few weeks, and it was nice to push onward with what I'm regarding as the Main Point of the whole adventure; the cleverly interwoven tale that is The Other Lord of the Rings, which as far as I'm able to make out, is the story of an entirely different Fellowship, the Fellowship That's Not Got The Ring, (i.e. us) as we essentially stalk Frodo and Company, lurking just behind that hedge, or round the back of this mountain, doing all the really heavy lifting, while Gandalf and Aragorn smirk up their sleeves at how well the so-called real 'Fellowship of the Ring' are doing. Elrond is in on the gag too, and has recently sent us off out on clean-up detail after his showboating at the Ford of Bruenin. Seem not all the Dark Riders are accounted for, so he's sent us to go and make sure they really were washed away out of the plot until well into The Two Towers. Meep!

The Book follows a now established pattern, with a large number of travelling quests that pretty much anyone can do, a few solo-grade hunting expeditions, and one or two really quite difficult elite-grade group-based instances to negotiate, which seem to be the main cause of 'LFF!' calls I see while out and about. This one was no different, and toward the end, we end up helping Legolas track down a lone ring-wraith through an instanced bit of the Trollshaws. It really brought back to me how much I hate Escort Missions, although to be fair, Legolas is a FAR more capable tank than I am. That really threw us the first couple of goes at it, and my ingrained and reflexive taunting of everything it throws at him onto my significantly more frail self cost us a few attempts. He has about three times my hit points and is quite up to holding his own, provided the group throws him enough healing now and then.

He does Leeroy Jenkins about the place a fair bit though, and that in itself cost us a few more attempts last time; we simply couldn't deal with it all fast enough, before he went and aggroed the next wave of very angry wood trolls. A few weeks doing Other Stuff (Fornost, mostly), and some more levels and gear to show for it and the trip went much more smoothly; with me at L43 and the lowest in our five-man team at L40 it was all a lot more comfortable, as the thing is a L42 Fellowship quest.

After handing that in we accidentally ended up in Book V, which continues right on from the same NPC and at broadly the same level. The plot thickens and now we're up in the Misty Mountains, doing all sorts of recon around evil dwarf forts, and the next big group mission looks to involve Gimli, who I hope is a lot less of an out-of-control aggro magnet than the elf was. I do enjoy these little cameos, but I wish they all didn't have quite such a forcefully realised sense of their own heroism - it's murder on the spawn management!