We started small. In fact, for quite awhile the kinship consisted of just me, Forjo, and my wife Nitaraen, and our alts.

Once we convinced our old Guild Wars friends, Berendir, Galacticus, and Izrbluer (all friends in real life) to join, the kinship grew a little more.

Mostly, LotRO was used as a way to catch up, play together, and generally spend time together. This was especially useful as we all lived in different cities and one of us in a different state.

On occasion, we'd group with someone (who was nice and without a kin) to whom we'd extend an invitation. This trickle-recruiting added only a few to our ranks, but that was ok.

Then I met Avrileen.

She convinced me that I should broaden our horizons (and our membership). So to that end, I downloaded and installed PHP, MySQL, MyBB; and learned how to install and operate them. I then began posting recruiting threads to the main forums and advertising in-game.

This website, our forums, and our rather sudden increase in membership, are the results of that effort.

In the mean time, Avrileen, myself, and several of our officers have been extending invitations; and we continue to grow.

As a casual kinship, our members have irregular play schedules (if any at all) and cannot be (and will never be) expected to be online at a specific time. We do not and never will have play time requirements. In order to compensate for this, we are increasing our membership in order to provide overlap to these disparate schedules. As of this writing, we have good coverage in the evenings and are starting to extend into the afternoon and daytime. As recruiting efforts continue, we hope to have most play-periods covered.

Currently, we have two recurring events:

1. Questing Saturday (Q.S.) every Saturday from 12:30pm to 4:30pm central time. We have a group consisting of characters in the middle 40s. If you are on Arkenstone on Saturday and would like to join us for questing (kinship membership not required), send an in-game tell to Forjoros, Berenadan, Izrbluer, or Galacticus. (We would like to start additional groups for the other level bands and for the epic quests.)

2. Instance Friday (I.F.) every Friday from 8:30pm central onward. Our first Friday we completed Urugarth; but we expect that I.F. will, over time, visit all of the instances in LotRO. For an invite, please contact Forjo or Berendir (again, kinship membership is not required) or post a message in the Events & Scheduling forum.

We have just promoted Tadgo as our first Events Coordinator to assist in planning and running social events. With this and other efforts I believe we are well on our way to becoming a great family kinship for casual players.