Dear visitors, we have added a new section to our Housing Guide entitled Furniture Catalogue. This is still a beta version, but you will find new furniture items and categories every day. If you have any suggestions or contributions please let us know. We hope this catalogue will give you some new ideas for house decoration.

Housing in LotRO seems to be the focus of attention for many players, therefore we expanded our housing guide with a section dedicated to special Housing Trophies obtained by providing the Taxidermist vendor with special items that are a rare drop from certain animals. We give you the locations of the drops as well as screenshots of each of the special housing items and all you have to do is do the grind :). Visit our LotRO Housing Taxidermist Trophy Guide here. (no actual animals were harmed during the making of this guide - except a couple of flies - but they are insects so it doesn't count)

Codemasters Online and Turbine, Inc. announce the details of the first annual Harvest Festival in The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™, the hit MMO that has taken Europe and North America by storm. The Harvest Festival, the second of many planned seasonal celebrations in Middle-earth, will offer players a variety of quests, vendors and events to highlight this special time of year.

"The Harvest Festival is the second of many seasonal events that we have planned for The Lord of the Rings Online," said Jeffrey Steefel, Executive Producer of The Lord of the Rings Online. "These festivals coupled with content updates demonstrate our commitment to delivering the best online experience for our subscribers through a fun, compelling and evolving game."

Players can celebrate throughout Middle-earth from October 26th to November 12th by interacting with special vendors, earn unique items and participate in quests designed just for the Harvest Festival including:

• Horse Racing – Players can compete against each other in a horse race! Winners will receive a horse race token that can be used to purchase the Harvest Festival Horse. Go to Bree Land - HorseFields and take your chance.
• Games of Chance – The Harvest Festival will host four games of chance. Players can bob for apples in the Shire or try geode picking with the Dwarves in the Torin's Hall, or try picking the Scrolls with Elves in Duillend in Ered Luin, or picking the pumpkins with Men in the Bree land  to earn Harvest Festival tokens that can be used to buy special festival items.
• Harvesting the Crop – This new collection of quests enables players to harvest the crops they planted during the Summer Solstice Festival in June and earn a special item for their house.
• Dancing – There will be dancing quests with new race-specific dance emotes as a reward.

Have fun in our autumn celebration!

The PC Game of the Year 2007 - sponsored by PC Gamer, has been awarded to Turbine's Tolkien-powered MMO The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. The award was given out during the 2007 Golden Joystick Awards which we reported about some time back. Lord of the Rings Online beat off WoW, Football Manager 2007, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to grab the gong. Congrats to Codemasters and Turbine.

Just wanted to let everybody know that the EU servers are up and the Book 11 patch is live for the EU customers. The house hunting is still not at full swing - not that many people verified their files still and a lot of prime property is still available. Silriel and me already bought a house and we almost missed it though - the first neighborhood we went to was completely empty and all the houses were for sale so we went house browsing and by the time we decided we wanted the first house we saw - it already got taken. We rushed to another neighborhood and luckily it was still available so from now on you can find us at Ornen, 1 Twinfall path on the Evernight (EU) server. Pics incoming soon...

We have added a new section to our Housing Guide entitled Top Properties. While looking at what house we would like to buy for ourselves we came across a plethora of property scouting information from other players on the forums and thought it would be nice to have them all in one place. Hope it helps you snag that hot property you always wanted. We also added some new pictures and links to interactive maps. Go check them all out here.

In other (housing) news:

As you may be aware kinship houses have Huge Yard enhancement slots. It turns out you can buy your very own kinship Stone Tower and have all those lesser kinships gasp in awe at your might. The screen has been grabbed from this forum thread here.

Silriel is very excited about the new housing feature in Book 11 so she set down and compiled an article with as much information as she could dig up. First she put it in the news, but as the information started piling up she just decided to dedicate a whole page to it. You can find our housing guide from now on at http://www.lotrolife.com/lotro_housing_guide/. If you have suggestions or additions to the guide please post on our forums in this topic here.

Additional Housing Brokers Provided!
Due to the high level of interest in the new Housing feature of Book 11 there will be additional Housing Brokers available to help you to find and purchase your new property! These extra Brokers are in addition to the Housing Brokers that are located near the entrances to the neighborhoods. There will be two additional Housing Brokers available for each neighborhood, and they will be at the following locations:

• For the Bree-land Homesteads you will find a Housing Broker just outside of The Comb and Wattle Inn in Combe, and also in the center of Staddle.
• For the Shire Homesteads you will find a Housing Broker at the Post Office in Waymeet, and also in the center of Tuckborough.
• For the Falathorn Homesteads in the Elvish lands of Ered Luin you will find a Housing Broker near the docks in Celondim and also near the Scholar's Enclave in Duillond.
• For the Thorin's Hall Homesteads in the Dwarvish lands of Ered Luin you will find a Housing Broker in the courtyard of both Noglond and Gondamon.

NOTE: These additional Housing Brokers are temporary and may depart at any time.

Are there enough houses?
As Denour (Game Systems Engineer)said:
"Just to cut the panic off at the pass, there are plenty of houses. The system is set up to roll out more houses as they are needed; this is the beauty of instanced neighborhoods.
So take a deep breath, relax, and enjoy patch day!

Prices
The small houses are about 1g to purchase, with a 55s upkeep.
The deluxe houses are about 8g and 71s per week upkeep
The Kinship houses are 15-17 gold  but purchasing limited to Kinship Rank 7 .

How to buy a house?
If the house is for sale you click on the for sale sign and buy it on the spot.
Or you can go to the vendor that is outside of the instance entrance and buy it from the vendor without seeing it first.

Where:
Dwarf housing is outside Thorin's Hall, just follow the road south of the stables.
Elf housing is just off the road between Duillond and the portal that leads to Needlehole, across the great bridge.
Man housing is south of the gobbie swamp between bree and the forsaken inn
Hobbit housing is in south farthing ... remember the shrew holes, just go a little more south of that.

Where to purchase:
Brokers can be found close to the housing areas, just outside of it, though the bree one is a bit more of a walk than the rest. Also you can enter a neighborhood and scout one. Some may have a "For Sale" sign in front of it, detailing costs and upkeep and how much stuff you can put in.

24 hour cooldown timer:
Please be aware that there is a 24 hour cooldown timer between when you first purchase a house and when you can purchase your next one. Additionally, houses are not immediately released for sale when you choose to abandon a dwelling.
Players who are in the cooldown period must simply wait for the timer to expire prior to trying again.
You can only by 1 house per account, alts could not own a house!

Additional house usage
One of the useful features is storage. A 30 slot chest. Only non-quest items can be place in the storage. You are restricted from placing BOUND items in the chest.
You also get a travel skill to map right to the door of your house. So you get another travel skill for your main character (alts might get it too at some later date).

Permissions
You can set permissions for

• Entering the home.
• Paying Upkeep.
• Accessing the storage chests.
• To manage the permissions.

This just in from Meghan Rodberg - the US community manager:

'nuff said

We dug this video up on YouTube. After seeing it Silriel immediately demanded from me to buy her a new house. I just wonder if she'll be letting me live in the house as well or is it just for her.