It's here: the yule eve and our last yule calendar surprise! Like in the past years, it's miss Lina's yule video she makes each yule with the help from some Laurelin server hobbits. Below, you will find the video and a short text by Lina where she tells a bit about the background of this project. You can find the whole text here in her burrow. If you think this looks like fun, join us roleplaying hobbits on the LOTRO Laurelin server. We have do many fun things together throughout the year, and there's always room for new hobbits!
Also, I would like to thank everyone for following this calendar! Also a warm thanks to everyone who sent their submissions and shared the calendar to others. I hope I didn't forget to include anything, the times have been busy for me. I also hope that you have enjoyed this humble little yule calendar. Feel free to take a look at the older ones as well! I hope we can make another calendar next year.
As promised, here is also the link to the yule Discord party at our virtual Green Dragon inn. There you will find rooms for music, yule entertainment, food related posts, and a voice channel where you can listen to yule music and chat with others who are present. I will be hosting there as miss Pycella. Let me know if you need assistance. The server is open on 24th and 25th, and maybe on the 26th too to wrap things up.
The virtual inn is closing now, so the link has been removed. Thank you all for joining, and we might see you next year!
Pie Hard
Die Hard is my favourite Yule movie.
Sure, there are lots of other grand movies: A Muppet Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, Elf… the list goes on. Still, I can’t help it, I get right into the holiday spirit when I see this warm and comforting tale about a lad who just wants to celebrate Yule with his family, but who runs into a lot of mean grinches on the way.
The explosions, snappy dialogue and smart action sequences are a nice bonus, of course.
So, one early autumn day, after seeing yet another claim from a grouchy Bree-based sourpuss that hobbit roleplaying is only about pies and nothing else, the title just popped up: Pie Hard. I could play around with the ultimate hobbit RP trope, while stroking the cognitive biases of folks who aren’t really interested in hobbit roleplaying anyway. Perfect!
Making the movie was a bit harder, though. This is the first early “script” for the Pie Hard segment, with some initial ideas I jotted down in Notepad:
Starting with boat travel.
Rolling pins = weapons
Now I have a brandy bottle … ho ho ho
Shooting it in the Mathom house?
Lots of dumb bounders
The six dozen pies in your cupboard
Oven blowing up, pies doused with brandy
That all evolved over time, of course, through discussing ideas with others involved, exploring the limits of the LOTRO game engine, searching for suitable music, and working within the general limits of these projects: It’s all to be shot within a 2-2,5 hour run-and-gun session, coordinating more than 25 players on the fly (although this year, we shot the first riverside scene + some exterior shots early).
Location turned out to be the biggest challenge. Where to shoot the segment? Options included the Mathom house, the Great Smials and even our own kin hall. None were particularly brilliant options for this video. However, one week before the shoot, we visited a Yule-themed kin hall down in the Belfalas housing area. It was large, it had a staircase, and it was suitably decorated for about three dozen Yuletides at once. That gave both space and good backgrounds for the shoot. So, a special note of thanks to Geoadoc, who generously allowed us to use the Radix Lecti Yule-themed kin hall. It was a grand place for this project!
Apart from that, another challenge was to make a hobbity version of a wild action film, reducing the number of active characters, the body count and the amount of swear words in the process. Hobbit roleplaying in LOTRO is rather wholesome, after all… So I simplified things by telling the tale of Pie McCrust, who travels from Buckland to the Shire to help prepare for the Yuletide, only to run into several culinary ruffians planning to raid the pie larder. I lifted some dialogue and scenes straight from the movie and the trailers. And I needed explosions. Lots.
That all evolved into a 3+ minute “trailer” for Pie Hard. It was grand fun making it. I hope yer enjoy it too!
The second segment is the more relaxed “credits” scene, where we just walked around for 90 minutes or so, trying scenes that would fit within a theme of hobbits preparing for the Yuletide. With some in-jokes thrown in (the Yule bath is a recurring issue within the Shire RP community). Sadly, a lot of the best scenes here were ruined by the general choppiness of the LOTRO servers. We had numerous lag spikes, people disconnecting (one player DC-ed at least five times), hitching, characters freezing in one place, etc. etc. So it was a bit of a job to salvage enough scenes for this segment.
Here, you also get lots of Yule screenshots sent in by Laurelin hobbits. I am still amazed that so many spend their time helping make these videos, it really wouldn’t be possible without yer all.
Thank you again, and a happy Yule to everyone!
