Lorebook

The Lorebook

Back in the early days of the Lord of the Rings Online, Turbine provided a resource called "The Lorebook."

The Lorebook existed from the initial beta and release of LOTRO in 2007 up until 2013.

• In July of 2013, a major revision of Turbine's web presence -- the Forums (forums-old.lotro.com), the Lorebook (lorebook.lotro.com) and data.lotro.com eliminated the Lorebook and data.lotro.com

A major portion of the Lorebook can be accessed on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20100318023501/https://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Lorebook_home

History

In 2007 Internet gaming was still in its infancy. Massively-multiplayer online Role Playing games (MMORPG or MMO) were still new and Turbine's LOTRO was breaking new ground with a well-known literary source - JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Turbine's Acheron's Call (AC1) being one of the earliest MMOs, and Turbine's DDO - Dungeons and Dragons Online preceding LOTRO.

The Lorebook WIKI was originally written by Turbine Employees and contained many definitions and descriptions of events, locations and individuals in Tolkien's Middle-earth. It also contained explanations of what was then a world with game-play techniques new to many people.

The Lorebook existed from the initial beta and release of LOTRO in 2007 up until 2013.

• In July of 2013, a major revision of Turbine's web presence -- the Forums (forums-old.lotro.com), the Lorebook (lorebook.lotro.com) and data.lotro.com -- eliminated all but the forums, with the Internet URL addressing scheme revised accordingly.

Today, only the Forums at "forums.lotro.com" still exist.

Many historical Developer Diaries (Dev Diaries) were also "lost" at that time.

Gory details

• Data.lotro.com provided access into LOTRO's active game data. Using that resource it was possible to "look-up" the specifics of virtually any item, skill, or effect in LOTRO. This was a major source of information found in the Lorebook. This was a database extract that was refreshed on a periodic basis.

• The Lorebook, also contained descriptions of Quests and the like. In later years these were written by players who took-over the chore of maintaining and updating much of the Lorebook. However, it still contained "Official" game entries, i.e. descriptions provided by Turbine.