A few weeks ago, I began reading The Hobbit to my younger kids (Bilbo escaped from Gollum yesterday). Tolkien's imagery and characters never fail to lead me back to The Lord of the Rings: the Card Game (Listening to the audio book of Fellowship of the Ring on a road trip ended a hiatus years ago). FFG knocked it out of the park with the art and feel. So it looks like it's time to shuffle up again and deal some shadow cards!
But I had sold off the majority of my collection years ago and only had a few Revised boxes sitting around. I wasn't playing the game at the time, I could use the office space, and why not let someone else take joy in the set? When the out-of-print announcement came, I figured I'd swing by my local game store at some point and (maybe?) buy the revised boxes I was still missing just for the heck of it. That turned into a few weeks. Then turned into the store being full sold out, except for a corse set.
Calling around other local stores netted nothing. Then I remembered that Wizard's Chest in Denver always had a decent stock. But they also have a great player base and hosted Fellowship events in the past, so the odds felt against me. Lo and behold, they had Two Towers and Return of the King! The worker also said he might have seen some old promos and would throw in any if he found them.
(Side note - A good sense of how much time has passed is not my strong suit. I told the worker at Wizard's Chest that I had played a Fellowship event there, "Four or five years ago." No, friends. Looking at my past posts, it was December 2016 when I participated in a Fellowship event at Wizard's Chest.)
So what do I find in my bag when I show up? The Eowyn & the Witch-King playmat! Really debated getting rid of this in the past, even when I liquidated the rest of the collection. An amazing thing to have back in my hands.
Now I'm slowly (yeah, right) buying back older sets and missing revised pieces. I may not get back to a 100% collection, but I'll have plenty of content for quite a while.
Then the question is: Do I just play on my own or actually get the blog going again? Writing up sessions adds a lot to my playtime and I think the act of doing that has contributed to my burn out in the past. I signed back into Blogger to give the stats a peak, expecting this place to have been a ghost town for years. But around a hundred views each day? What the heck was happening. I headed over to r/LoTR and found The End May Be Dark listed under "Notable Archived Blogs and Podcasts." That really warmed my heart. And it helped push me to start the write-ups again.
This is not the first time I've planned on firing the blog up again. After my huge hiatus starting in 2017, a few attempts were made to get back on the bandwagon and they came to nothing. This time I saved up a few quests (3) which I will publish weekly, buying myself a little bit of time in my pattern of flood & drought with write ups. I had intended to wait longer, but I'm impatient to get this thing going again.
Welcome to a new dawn!
