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Notable Custom Systems

Larger persistent systems layered on top of the base game — the things you will interact with most.

Appraise & Selling to Merchants

A high Appraise skill raises the maximum gold a merchant will pay you for an item. Many shops cap how much they will hand over for any single piece; Appraise lifts that cap for you specifically — up to double (+100%) at an Appraise check of 65 (you always "take 20", so your Appraise skill + 20). The benefit is per-character and never shared with other shoppers. You need at least one point of Appraise before it helps; with none, you sell at the shop's normal cap. Merchants that don't buy from players still don't, and shops with no buy cap are unchanged.

Banking & Family Accounts

Bank NPCs (in Bree, Minas Tirith, and elsewhere) let you deposit and withdraw gold and XP. Beyond a personal balance, a family account is shared across every character on your account, so you can pool gold and pass items between your own characters. XP banking is capped so it cannot be used to over-level past the module's ceiling.

Merit Reward System

You earn merit points when your reported bugs get fixed, your reported exploits get closed, or your suggested features ship — defects are worth 1, features 2, and exploits 3. Points are tracked per account and never expire. Spend them from the rest menu (or with a DM) at the Keeper-of-Records, Barliman Butterbur, in the Prancing Pony. See the Roadmap & Player Ideas page for what has shipped and who earned merit for it.

Merit Redemption Shop

Spend merit on any of the following. Costs may still be tuned over time.

Teleport & travel (rest-menu features)

These are live rest-menu teleports, unlocked in order — each one requires that you already own the one above it (the menu shows a locked option as "buy the previous one first" until then). Once unlocked, the teleport appears in your rest menu permanently.

Merit	Reward	How it works
3	Teleport to your party leader	Rest-menu jump to wherever your party leader currently is.
4	Return to your last Well-of-Eru point	One-shot: armed only when you take the rest menu's "To. The Well of Eru." teleport, and consumed when you use it (death never arms it). Brings you back to exactly where you left.
6	Save-slot teleport (Slot 1)	Five dedicated, rewriteable save points. Set a slot to your current spot, then teleport back to it any time. Each saved location is per-character and persists across reboots.
7	Save-slot teleport (Slot 2)
8	Save-slot teleport (Slot 3)
9	Save-slot teleport (Slot 4)
10	Save-slot teleport (Slot 5)

Premium boosts (2× gold & XP)

Merit	Reward
1	1 week of 2× gold & XP for you (all your characters)
3	1 month of 2× gold & XP for you
4	1 week of 2× gold & XP for the whole server — your name joins the login welcome message
8	1 month of 2× gold & XP for the whole server — your name joins the login welcome message

What is boosted. The 2× multiplier applies to gold and XP you earn: killing creatures (kill XP and the gold they drop) and turning in quests. It never stacks beyond 2× — a personal boost and a server boost do not multiply together.

What is not boosted. Withdrawing gold or XP from a bank (the Bree gold bank, the family bank, or the XP bank) is not boosted — banking just moves value you already have, it does not create it. Selling items to merchants is not boosted either. (Separately, several merchants had their per-item buy cap doubled, so a genuinely valuable item can now fetch its full price — but the sell rate is unchanged.)

Queueing — boosts never overlap. Running two boosts of the same kind at once would waste one, so extra purchases queue instead of stacking:

Buy a second boost of a kind you already have and its time is held in reserve; it starts counting down only when the current one runs out.
A live server-wide boost pauses everyone's personal boost — you are already getting 2× from the server, so your personal time is frozen and resumes, undiminished, once the server boost ends.
Server boosts from different players queue into a single server-wide chain, one after another.

When you log in, the server tells you every active and pending boost — server-wide and your own — who bought each, and the estimated date the whole chain ends.

Vanity & swag

Merit	Reward
5	Permanently graffiti the Well of Eru: add a floor/wall placeable with your name & description (within reason, DM approval)
10	A piece of Tournament gear — pick one from the curated list below, delivered on the spot
25	A real, hand-made duct-tape wallet mailed to you — pick up to 3 colors and a logo/design
100	Become a DM

Tournament gear (10 merit). The shop opens a picker with one solid piece per weapon type plus armour, a tower shield, gauntlets, and bows. You choose one and it is created in your inventory immediately. Each links to its full stats on the item wiki:

Player Housing

Turn an unused town door into your own home. Claim any unoccupied locked door in any town as your home (1 per player / CD key; moving or upgrading later refunds nothing). You build the area in the toolset and send the file; a fast-travel option to it is added to your rest menu. You teleport in, and leave through the front door to your chosen city.

Cost scales with area size (Length × Width). An area may be split at no cost across up to 2 areas with transitions (basement, attic, arena, etc.).

Area size (L×W)	2	4	8	16	32	64	81	100
Merit	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8

Optional add-ons:

Merit	Feature
2	Persistent storage chest shared across your characters
2	A Well-of-Eru store with a 100K max buy limit — you pick the NPC name & appearance
5	Add a Tagget-tier forge to your home
10	Add a Rivendell-tier forge to your home
15	Add a Balrog-tier forge to your home

MeaningWave Philosopher Guides

Eight philosopher NPCs are scattered across Middle-earth. Answer each one's questions to unlock them as a powerful summonable companion that persists between sessions. See the dedicated MeaningWave: A Guide to the Guides for routes and details.

Instant Resting & the Rest Menu

Resting is fully custom. There is no rest cooldown — you can rest whenever you are not in active combat, and each rest is an instant full rest (HP and spells restored immediately, no waiting). Resting opens a custom rest menu that also lets you take other actions from the same place, including teleporting to key destinations and summoning henchmen and Legend companions.

Party Loot Rolls

When you pick up a valuable item and other party members are in the same area, a clickable Need / Greed / Pass window pops up for everyone in the party — a fair way to decide who gets the drop, with no out-of-character arguing. It is loosely modelled on the loot roll from MMOs.

Need beats Greed: the highest Need roll wins; if nobody needs it, the highest Greed roll wins. Pass bows out and can never win.
The finder rolls too and keeps the item if they win. Otherwise the item is handed to the winner automatically.
Only loot rolls. A roll comes from taking something out of a body or a container in the world — a corpse, a boss, a chest, a bag you found in one. Nothing else does: not an item you crafted, dyed or reverted at the forge, not a purchase or a trade, not a pickpocket, not your own weapon picked back up after a disarm, and not moving something around inside your own pack.
You have 30 seconds to choose; no answer counts as a Pass.
The window shows the item's type (e.g. Scimitar, Wand, Heavy Armor), its gold value, and a grouped list of its magical properties.

Unidentified items. If the item is not yet identified, every player who would roll first makes a Lore check (your Lore skill plus a d20 against a difficulty based on the item's value — the same rule the Rod of Fast Lore uses). The results are shown in your combat log. If anyone succeeds, the item is identified for the whole party. If nobody does, the popup reveals only the item's type and marks it Unidentified — its name, value, and properties stay hidden, so you roll on a mystery.

Configuring it (rest menu → Party loot roll settings).

Any player can opt out of party loot rolls (you will never be prompted, and rolls won't trigger just for you).
The party leader sets the minimum item value that triggers a roll (default 10,000 gp; choose 5k, 10k, 50k, 100k, 250k, 500k, or 1M), or disables party rolling entirely.
You get a green confirmation message of the current settings whenever you join a party, become a party leader, or the leader changes a setting.

Boss Respawn Tracker — the Roll of the Fallen

A billboard in the Well of Eru (next to the Recent Updates sign) that shows which of Middle-earth's great powers are currently slain and when each will walk again — so you can plan a boss run instead of hiking to an empty lair.

Only bosses that are dead right now are listed, sorted mightiest first (by challenge rating), with the time until it returns at the end of each name — e.g. The Mighty Smaug — returns in 12m 30s.
Click a name to see the boss's lair and the player or party who last slew it (party credit uses the same damage-contribution rules as the Bestiary).
Every unique boss is tracked — the board covers each of Middle-earth's named great powers (formally: any creature with a challenge rating above 60 that exists as a single, unique foe rather than a repeatable spawn).
The full list of tracked bosses is on the wiki under Creatures → Bosses — the page is generated from the very registry the game loads, so it always matches the board. Think a boss is missing? Suggest it on Discord.
A server restart revives every boss, so the board starts each session empty.

Respawn timing: every tracked boss returns on the same 20-minute timer — lair bosses included, no exceptions — and the board shows a live countdown for each. Every tracked boss respawns on its own; none are stuck until a reboot.

Boss Enrage on Retreat

Retreating from a great boss makes it stronger. Disengage from one of the Roll of the Fallen bosses and it will taunt you by name, grow in power, and claw back part of the damage you had done. This applies only to those unique bosses — ordinary creatures you walk away from behave exactly as before.

You are "in the fight" from the moment you damage the boss — in melee, at range, with spells, or through your summons, animal companion or henchman (their damage counts as yours).
You have "retreated" if you leave the boss's area, move more than about 40 metres away, or log out — and stay that way for roughly 12 seconds. Landing another hit resets the count, so an archer or caster fighting from long range stays engaged as long as they keep contributing.
What the boss gains, each time: a shouted taunt naming you, +2 to all six ability scores for the rest of its life, and an instant heal of 25% of its missing HP.
The enrage stacks — every retreat is another +2 and another quarter-heal — and it cannot be dispelled.
It fires per player: if you run while the rest of your party keeps fighting, the boss still enrages.
Dying is not retreating. If the boss kills you, it gains nothing.
The enrage never carries onto a respawn — a boss that returns to its lair is back at its base statistics.
Leave it alone and it recovers. Once nobody is fighting it, a boss waits 30 minutes — longer than the 20 minutes it would have cost you to simply kill it — and then fully resets: every enrage stack gone, back to full health, spells and abilities restored, back at its lair, and anything taken from it put back. It shouts when it happens. Landing a hit restarts that clock, so a boss is only ever "left alone" if you really have left it alone — and the party after you never inherits a half-dead, over-tuned boss.

Every retreat undoes a quarter of your progress and leaves you facing a stronger enemy than the one you ran from. The winning line against a great boss is a single sustained engagement, brought with the gear and build to see it through — not attrition in shifts.

This is the companion mechanic to Soul-fatigue on Heal: fatigue makes chain-healing lethal, and enrage removes the option of backing off to wait the stacks out. Design background: Endgame Difficulty — Enrage-on-retreat.

Caster Signature Gear

A planned line of boss-drop gear that boosts specific spells, giving Clerics, Druids, Sorcerers, and Wizards a real way to threaten high-tier bosses instead of relying on damage shields and lucky epic-spell rolls. Each piece pairs top-tier stats with one signature effect — amplifying a spell's damage, retyping it past an immunity, or supercharging your summons — and every item grants a stronger version to pure single-class casters.

Twenty items (five each per caster class), each looted from a thematically matched boss already in the world — see the full catalogue with stats and drop sources on the Caster Signature Gear page.
Builds on Scaled Summons (for the summon-boost pieces) and the same spell-effect machinery as Doubled Spell Duration.
The whole system uses one dedicated slot — the amulet. Only one signature effect can ever be active, and a second copy of the same effect does not stack.

First pieces built; nothing obtainable yet. The four Damage Retyper amulets — one per caster class — now exist in the module: they turn Implosion (Cleric), Finger of Death (Druid), Wail of the Banshee (Sorcerer) and Weird (Wizard) from a death effect that bosses simply ignore into real damage they have to survive. Where each one drops has not been decided, so none of them is placed in the world yet. The rest of the catalogue is still a preview and its numbers may change. Track it on the Roadmap.

Dungeon Solitaire

A custom card-game-style encounter arena: a sequence of drawn challenges with its own creatures and dialogue, distinct from the open-world encounter zones. It is an in-game port of Dungeon Solitaire — which can also be played stand-alone on any computer with the .NET framework.

Pipe-Weed & the Smoking Chamber

Through the door at the Well of Eru lies the Smoking Chamber, a low room of cushions and water pipes. Bring a pouch of Shire leaf, use a pipe, and the smoke settles on you for one full hour of real time.

Every strain is a genuine trade — a real gift bought with a real penalty — and, this being the point of the whole business, resting will not clear it. Both halves ride with you into the next fight, so choose your leaf before you set out rather than after. Logging out will not shake it either; the hour is counted in real time and picks up where it left off when you return. Lighting a second pipe replaces the first entirely — there is no stacking and no mixing.

Strain	Price	What it does
Longbottom Leaf	150 gp	Wisdom +4, Intelligence −2, Spot +5, Listen +5
Old Toby	600 gp	Wisdom +4, Charisma −4, Lore +10
Southlinch	600 gp	Charisma +4, Wisdom −4, Persuade +10
Hornblower's Garden	1,200 gp	Constitution +4, Dexterity −2, +2 on saves against fear
Witch Weed	~2,000 gp	Intelligence +4, Wisdom −4. Ten smokes to the pouch, and it does something with chickens that nobody has satisfactorily explained.

Where to buy it. Odo Proudfoot keeps a leaf counter at the Green Dragon in Hobbiton — but only for someone who has settled his genealogy dispute and won it (see Concerning Hobbits). He sells and does not buy: bring gold, not loot. Hobbiton is now a fast-travel destination from the Guardian of Light at the Well of Eru, so the round trip is two teleports and a door.

A pipe clears soul-fatigue. Light any strain at a water pipe and every stack of soul-fatigue you are carrying lifts away with the smoke — a sense of calm washes over you and the next heal is free. This is the only cure there is besides waiting the stacks down three minutes at a time. It works the same whichever leaf you bring, the pouch is still spent, and the strain's own gift and penalty ride on as normal. The Smoking Chamber is one door from the Well of Eru, so the price of the cure is the leaf and the trip home.

Four of the five strains are a single fill and burn up with it. Witch Weed is a ten-smoke pouch and spends one charge at a time.