LOTRO Legendarium: Could LOTRO use its monster player classes for something other than PvP?

To my knowledge, Lord of the Rings Online is unique in the MMORPG space in that it had to create a special faction of enemy creatures so that the “good” player characters would have something to fight in PvP. This was done for lore reasons, as the Tolkien Estate wasn’t too crazy about the idea of the Free Peoples of Middle-earth turning on each other in huge PvP bouts. (Reasonable.)

Thus, we’ve had this unusual monster play PvP scene nested inside the MMO and confined to a single zone. But with the announcement of a brand-new creep class in the works — the Angmar Sorceress — my mind started whirring. With all of these creep classes existing, could Standing Stone Games do something with them other than Ettenmoors PvP?

From where I’m sitting, the creep classes are fascinating because of their differences to our normal races. They’re all a baked-in race/class combo, so it’s not like you can become a spider wizard… no matter how awesome that sounds. There’s the Orc Reaver, Orc Defiler, Spider Weaver, Uruk Blackarrow, Uruk Warleader, Warg Stalker, and as previously mentioned, the upcoming Angmar Sorceress. That’s seven classes purposed for PvP in a single zone!

To be honest, I’ve been mulling this over for a while, ever since I read that the original Middle-earth Online was contemplating player-controlled monsters. As I wrote back in 2016, “Yes, you could join Team Sauron and begin as a free-roaming Orc. The more you leveled up, the bigger and badder you became — but you’d start to become tied to locations. Eventually you might even become a superbad villain like a Balrog, but you’d be confined to, say, Moria.”

So one obvious way to repurpose these classes would be create a special server where the entire game — or at least Eriador — became a huge free-for-all PvP zone with some capturable keeps. I envision this like World of Warcraft’s original world PvP, where players would try to get their questing done amid surprise ganking attacks and roving zergs on their way to their next objectives. On a scale like Eriador, this would probably be messy and too large and too random… but it might be fun, too.

That said, I don’t think that there’s much appetite for large-scale PvP in LOTRO. I suspect that the monster play system we have continues to exist thanks only to the high passion of a handful of players and devs. After all, those odd limited-time PvP servers that SSG tried back in 2020 were a huge flop and were quietly brushed under the rug shortly after their release.

But what if there’s a different way to go here? SSG is already pouring in resources into improving Ettenmoors and giving monster players more goals and systems to enjoy. So why not give those monsters the ability to vacation outside of that zone?

Think of it this way: The Ettenmoors would continue to be the base of operations for all creeps. But every week (day?), there might be a new mission available that would give those characters the ability to port to a certain spot in the world to carry out a mission for the Army of Angmar. Maybe this would be instanced, maybe not, but in either case, this would repurpose areas already made.

In those excursions, the creeps could team up to accomplish a task for the Enemy, such as infiltrating a Dwarf fortress, or sabotaging an earthworks, or delving into Moria for a powerful artifact. This would be an alternative PvE mode that could have implications for PvP if successful (think “additional buffs” or “siege equipment”).

Another idea would be to allow creeps to head out into the world for a different version of chicken runs. See if those characters can make it to certain landmarks without being spotted or killed or what have you.

Are there other ways that creeps could leave the Ettenmoors and have some fun without disrupting the normal flow of PvE gaming? You could argue for actual quests and storylines out in the world, if SSG had the time and interest to do that, but that’s even more far-fetched than most of what I’m daydreaming here. But c’mon, who wouldn’t want to pilot a spider through the Shire on a mission to wrap up a tasty Hobbit and drag it back to the nest?

What do you think? Is there any path or purpose to expanding the activities that monster players can do? Would any of these ideas inject more interest into LOTRO?