As some of you may have noticed already, I’ve changed the layout of my blog again! I was ready for a new theme and a fresh look that will make this blog “Rohan ready”. The new layout allows for slightly larger pictures, so when you visit older posts you will notice that they don’t quite fit the entire body of the new layout, but such is blog-life.
This week I received an email from Winterwolf, a reader, with the request to help him out with an outfit. He wrote me the following description: “The outfit is for my latest character, Marthord who hails from the swan-city of Dol Amroth in south Gondor. I’ve been looking for an outfit that has that big heavy armour look about it, with lots of silver and some swan references, while still looking like an elite soldier of the nation of Gondor.” Whenever people mail me seeking advice, I usually help them out and point them in the direction that I think would be what they are looking for, but this request in particular triggered my inspiration and I just had to make a Swan Knight for my blog. My Champion is from Gondor and he usually rides his Steed of Minas Ithil. When I first got him the steed I created an outfit for it, but this was over a year ago, long before the release of Rise of Isengard and all the beautiful armour that it brought us, and long before I learned how to take proper screenshots or created any worthwhile outfits at all, ha ha. I didn’t have the cosmetics to work with that I have today, so revisiting this concept and using it for a Knight of Dol Amroth outfit was a great idea. If you still don’t own the Rise of Isengard expansion, but would like to travel there some day, check out the generous giveaway from Casual Stroll to Mordor for your last chance to obtain a Legendary Isengard edition that comes with all cosmetic goodies.
My very respected, awesome and inspiring fellow blogger Starry Mantle once made a Knight of Dol Amroth outfit too, and it’s very much worth visiting her creation for inspiration on the same theme as well.
The final countdown toward the release of Riders of Rohan has started and we now have less than a month to go before we will ride our War-steeds out onto the plains. For this reason I will be doing a number of Mount-inspired outfits this month, hoping that this will put us in the right mood. In this context I also want to point you to the Equestrian Fashion Contest that the Windy Acres Ranch is hosting on their blog. If you love horses and love outfits, this is your chance to participate and win 100 Turbine points! Windy Acres regularly hosts Equestrian events such as horse races and shows on the Landroval server. Please check out their schedule of events as they are worth a visit.
Head: Reinforced Leather Dunlending Helm, white blue dye (Dunland quest reward, medium armour)
Chest : Hyrde-Bréost, Evendim blue dye (reward from Vol.III, Book 4, heavy armour)
Shoulders: Barrow-warrior’s Shoulder Pads, white dye (Classic vendor, Great Barrows heavy set)
Hands: Barrow-warrior’s Gauntlets, white dye (Classic vendor, Great Barrows heavy set)
Feet: The Berserker’s Sabatons, white dye (RoI instance armour set, Champion)
Back: Swan-cloak, Evendim dye (Lotro store exclusive, cosmetic)
Horse: Steed of Minas Ithil (Lotro store exclusive)
Cosmetic Lotro 
Haha! Thank you so much for creating this outfit Hymne! This truly amazing and beautiful! And it fits the Dol Amroth Theme so fantastically!
It all goes beautifully with the Steed of Minas Ithil!
And thank you for responding so quickly and with such a great outfit!
Keep up the fantastic work!
-Winterwolf
Thank you for the inspiration! I don’t think I have ever made an outfit based on someone’s request (and I don’t plan on making that a habit!), but your description of a Swan Knight just brought this out and I had to post it to the blog. I hope you find ideas here to create your own knight according to your taste!
Thank you. Well as my main is only about lvl 41 and i’m a very casual player it’s going to be a while untill I get my hands on some of the gear in the outfit. But when I do and I make my own outfit i’ll make sure to show you what your amazing outfit has created.
very nice outfit – you really managed to make respected warrior’s outfit around swan theme. I also love the mount, unfortunately I didn’t have enough TP when it was on sale 😦
I also like your new blog design, bigger screenshots are amazing! 🙂
WordPress does not have a lot of themes available that allow for larger pictures, unless you switch to a one column layout which I really don’t want because I think the sidebar is an integral part of the useful information on this blog. So the choice of themes for screenshots becomes quite limited. On top of that, I need my theme to offer me several other features like single page headers, so it wasn’t easy choosing something that suits me. I think blogspot.com offers wider themes, but the disadvantage of that is that people on laptops and smaller screens need to scroll from left to right to see the sidebars, which is something I want to avoid as well. I’m going to work with this theme for a while and will hopefully be able to fit those gigantic Rohan steeds into my pictures!
How funny, I’m going to be moving my blog to wordpress (announcing it soon) and I’m using this exact same theme. 😉 I’ve been working on it for the past few days and it’s nearly ready. It’s a good one for games. 🙂
I’m a member of an alliance called ‘The Swan Knights’ and some of the members use some of the same pieces.
Great minds think alike all around I suppose! 😀
There aren’t a lot of Swan themed items in the game so coming to these isn’t very far fetched, especially if your alliance is The Swan Knights! Ha ha. I’m happy with this theme so far, I don’t think any WordPress theme is perfect for what I want though, and I’m not savvy enough with CSS to write my own. Good luck moving your blog!
That’s true about the Swan Stuff. It is cool that you used the same colour theme and horse as well though. 🙂
Yeah, I’m running into things I can’t do on WordPress that I could do on Blogger (like changing font and CSS for free) but I couldn’t make things look as good on Blogger. But the theme we’re using is nice and polished I think. 🙂 Well done on your transition and thanks for your well wishes. 🙂
Really nice! The silver helm, shoulders and gauntlets really make it pop for me with the border on the hauberk.
The new theme looks beautiful, too! 😀
Thank you Starry. I just wish we had a slightly lighter shade of blue dye in the game. The Evendim Blue is just a touch too dark for what I want for this knight, but it’s the best I could find.
O.O
I’ll leave a more coherent response after I can stop just staring at the pretty.
Oh, the horse is just lovely:) If it only came with a different colored…whatever the fabric is called…it would be perfect for my champion, who also is from Gondor. Burgundy and silver would be my choice:)
I love this outfit, one problem though. I missed out on the head and chest piece. Is there any way to get them? Or are there any other options that look good with the rest of this outfit?
Head and chest piece are only available as quest rewards from several quests in Dunland. They appear more than once, the chest piece is a reward from the Epic line as well as a regular reward. Unfortunately they are not regularly available through other means.
Ok, I was just wondering because I’m a maxed char and I already passed these quests a long time ago but thanks for responding 🙂