Many folks have asked why I have chosen to base my Guild LoL mod on v8 rather than xenia's incredible final version.

The fact is, the average age of our Guild is dead, and we don't need 3.2 zillion areas to conquer boredom. Most of our clan members play on 28k in rural areas; some are lucky enough to have ADSL in their town. Some have that mix of good and bad luck; they have cable, but they live in a brick, concrete, asphalt and smog-ridden environment called a Big City. Pity.

I am 62 years young, have written my own (blush) admittedly popular mods in various game formats, have written dozens of 3d killer-thriller action shooters, and am delighted with my chosen profession(s): very published sfwwa scifi/fantasy author; 3d action game designer with millions of dl's to my credit and games played by royalty and celebrities; listed American artist, jazz composer/performer and a few more things that prove that with luck, you can get paid just enough to live on, in exchange for having fun.

We here at Clan/Guild LoL don't get bored because, although the playing world stays the same, we tend to change. We can tell the difference between the character and the player and that, in essence, is what we are using this game to achieve.

You will note that I have taken the liberty of removing tons of what I consider gratuitous sounds, NPCs, &tc. and have edited the conversation to actually reflect the languages used by J.R.R. Tolkien and his literary sources. for instance, the word orc was in the dictionary before Tolkien was born, and much of his early material, such as the Beorn incident and Tom Bombadil, are clear and obvious direct lifts from mythological and historical literature sources, similar to the sources used by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague deCamp (for whom I did illustrations and published a novel) in their epic multiple novels contained under the general title, The Complete Enchanter.

Keep in mind that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his fantasies out on paper, first for his young son, to whom the original Hobbit stories had been told as bedtime tales, beginning with the most memorable Key Line of all -- In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.

From that simple beginning erupted the millions of threads of logic and emotion and interaction that produced the works we know today as the Silmarillion, which is the complete history of three major ages of Middle-Earth, Lord of the Rings which was issued first as a fantasy novel, Fellowship of the Ring with no real idea of ever finishing the thing, and The Hobbit which was originally published in a very small edition.

The point is, Tolkien then adapted this harmless little children's fantasy called There and Back Again, or a Hobbit's etc. etc. etc... which is today referred to as The Hobbit in the same way that many titles get dumbed down to a common denominator determined strictly by sales figures.

He wrote the whole thing to give substance to the cultures whose languages he had singlehandledly invented -- well, with the help of a few graduate students, which generally tends to string the process out well past its intended deadline.

In short, he put all that stuff down in notes, then organized the notes, and had students do so as well, in order to provide for his philology students a full psycho-emotional view of an enormous, interpenetrated inter-trading civilization -- actually many cultures within a single civilization, some in harmony, some in conflict, with a central character unifying the whole war...a tiny furry, unimportant hobbit, from whose point of view we are told the History of the War of the Ring, and we may make from this hobbits'-eye view, for the Red Book of Westmarch is in several hands, those of Bilbo, Frodo and Samwise, who tells us what finally became of Bilbo and Frodo.

The crux of Tolkien's graduate course was to master Feanorian, which is High Elvish. Yes, it is true; there are many dialects of Elvish, just as there are of any language, and that was Tolkien's point -- language does not, other than Esperanto, develop in a vacuum, and dialects happen from social interdictions arising from a variety of causes from war to famine to simple inquisitive explorations on foreign shores.

The whole thing -- meaning Tolkien's literary output -- was, from the very beginning, really all about The Science of Language. It's important not to forget this glaring fact when we read Tolkien, because he does borrow, and quite freely with little alteration, from early literature and ancient and medieval folk tales passed down to the present day by word of mouth, and that's the beauty of this incredible tale -- it weaves together the cultural literary heritage of the West and delves deeply into the literature of the East for additional inspiration. One could verily say that Tolkien stole from the dead and gave to the living.

I therefore have taken into account this very powerful element of Tolkien's so-called Fantasies, so-called because they were not, at least at first, intended to amuse a wide audience. They were stories written in the languages that Tolkien had invented, and which the students were supposed to master.

I have read LotR over 100 times. My father, H.L. Gold, was the founding editor of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine and as a result, we were in contact, somewhat, with the Tolkiens since the early 1950's.

However, just because I am very familiar with the actual story written by J.R.R. Tolkien, does not mean total literal translation. I take plenty of liberties, just as the makers of the recent big screen superhit blockbusters, Lord of the Rings, Two Towers and the big big hit, Return of the King did, bending the story so far as to have Gandalf walk with them to Bree and Frodo deliberately flips the ring into the air.