What won't you find in Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online MMO? Lines like "No one tosses a dwarf!" But while Turbine trades cheap laughs for careful adherence to canon, their online rendition of Middle-earth is also radically different from the books because of all the world-building author J.R.R. Tolkien didn't do.

Mines of Moria, the new expansion to LotRO that's out today, adds even more content, inviting players to delve into what Turbine calls "the greatest dungeon adventure you have ever seen and played." I spoke with Turbine's executive producer Jeffrey Steefel yesterday to get the lowdown.

(This is Part One.)

Game On: I gather you're sleeping little and working lots this week?

Jeffrey Steefel: Getting ready to not sleep most of the week, probably. We've been through this a few times, so we've got all hands on deck, and we're going to be here 24/7. You know, it's just watching things, and hopefully we'll just get to enjoy watching players drill into the new content, but we're mostly here in case anything tricky happens. You just never know with these things.

GO: A little icebreaker for my readers who may be wondering who you are. You're actually an actor, it seems.

JS: Well I was an actor. I guess once an actor, always an actor, right? Yeah, that was one of my many careers. Engineer, then actor in New York, and now whatever it is that I do.

GO: You were actually in Godspell with Harold Perrineau, who people probably best know as Michael on ABC's Lost.

JS: Yep. We were all young then, and that was before Harold was Harold. But yeah, it was a great group of people. In fact I had a reunion with them about a month ago. We all got together in New York for our 20th anniversary, and everybody showed up.

GO: Any of them Lord of the Rings Online players?

JS: Sadly no. I'm the only geek in the crowd.

GO: So how do you pitch LotRO to someone who hasn't heard of it, or MMO players who haven't yet tried it?

JS: Well first of all, if they haven't ever tried an MMO before, I say to them we built this game with a more casual audience in mind, and that this does not have to be the all-consuming change your life, live in your house and be in front of your computer 50 hours a week game. In fact increasingly, we spend more and more time making sure the game is something you can play for an hour at a time if you want to. You can jump in and play by yourself any time if you want to, you don't have to get with a large group of people, though that's of course always an option too.

The first thing I'd say is that LotRO is intended for people to participate in different ways. You don't have to be that lifer to play the game, although we certainly have lots of those folks playing as well.

The second thing is that the folks who'd probably be attracted to the game have probably seen the movies and perhaps even read the books. This is just a natural extension of that. If they enjoyed reading about this place and all these characters and they enjoyed seeing Peter Jackson's vision of it, then it's really fun just to be in that world. We've created the opportunity for them to do that, even if they're just walking around and talking to people and enjoying seeing the places they saw in the movies or read about in the fiction.

There's that, and then there's also a lot of really interesting story in the game, and it's an extension to the stories they already know. Also, our audience is more casual and slightly older than the average MMO player.

GO: I've