BUCKLAND

Bucklebury Tavern. The hobbit in this house will be rather rude unless Merry is present. Nazgul attack.

Questions Bartender Witch Athelwyn White Council, Saruman, Gandalf, News

Stores & prices Bucklebury Tavern ale 2

• Body language: Athelwyn will follow you whether you recruit her or not – in fact, whether you talk to her or not, as long as you walk up to her. This appears to be intentional.
• If Druin is present, he will leave the party when you enter Bucklebury Tavern, just like at the Hobbiton Inn. You can simply recruit him again on your way out.
• You can bypass the Old Forest altogether and leave The Shire by the road. You cannot avoid the Black Rider who appears along a straight line north and south of the X on the map, but you can fight him. Since the Rider gets one attack in before you can do anything, you may want to put the pony in the lead as cannon fodder. Keep the character with the !Elbereth word of power in the rear. The road to Bree is cleared! – Note that you can use the !Elbereth word of power once only. If you wish to leave by the East Road, you need to pass the Brandywine River by the ferry, not the bridge.
• In the standard version of the game, you are warned that someone is waiting for you on the bridge even if the Black Riders have been destroyed at the Ford. (No rider appears, just the warning.) The bug was fixed in the enhanced version. (By the way, the bug fix was apparently a quick patch. When the riders are dispersed at the ford, a global variable is set. All other scripts that need to test for the event use that variable. For the quick fix, though, someone did not bother to check the scripts, but introduced a new and redundant variable at the ford plus a few lines of code here to test it.)