Like all Bree Commons Day events, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony” will be on hiatus for the holidays from December 14th into mid-January. This means that this week’s “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony” will be the last before we return after the holidays!

This Week’s (December 13, 2025) Hook:

It is the day of Bree’s Yule-feast, held annually at the Prancing Pony, and Barliman Butterbur is incensed!

‘That no-good, honey-headed, tart-tongued harridan—,’ or some variation thereof, echoes throughout the Prancing Pony as the innkeeper rails against Miss Lizbeth Honeymeade, proprietor of the Comb and Wattle, for words she has given in a recent letter. Words that are, or at least in Nob’s account of them to the Pony’s various gossips, as follows:

‘“To Mister Butterbur (Mr, I reckon, would fail to contain a man of your circumference),

I bid you a good Yule-tide, and write to ask that you (or, rather, one of your servants, for I guess a walk to Combe and back would do you in deader than a doornail) collect the kegs of honey-wine that remain beneath my roof ere day’s end. If you fail to make it so, I will abide by the contract of our trade, and dump the contents of each and every keg into the Midgewater (which, indeed, you would fail to recover, for you are more liable to float atop the marsh like a great barge than plumb its depths like a diver).

The Comb and Wattle is an inn and, when it is not, a tavern-house of honey-wine. It is not a store-house. Collect your toddy, Barliman.

Your most humble &c. servant,

Miss Honeymeade.”’

Beset by tending to the Yule-feast and thereby unable to journey—or to spare any of his already preoccupied servants to journey—to Combe, Barliman finds himself on the precipice of a great financial loss. Though the innkeeper has collected all the honey-wine required for the Yule-feast, copious amounts of the well-paid-for drink remain in Combe, under the precarious thumb of Liz Honeymeade. To lose the remaining supply of mead, which could water the Pony into Spring, would devastate even the well-to-do Mr Barliman Butterbur.

Now, on this Commons Day as the Prancing Pony’s Yule-feast carries on, Barliman begs any and all feasters not half-a-drunk and with at least half-a-leg to journey to Combe and fetch his wine. He promises a bottle of mead to any such courier and a good word put in to Bree-town’s various masters. It is up to these folk to make Barliman’s Yule a very happy one indeed!

The first 8 characters to journey to the Comb and Wattle Inn and retrieve a cask of honey-wine (not an in-game item, but an imagined one) for Barliman Butterbur will receive a free trade license OR have a crime stricken from their criminal record (the choice is yours).

Please let Nenaras know in-game on Marmaduke or on Discord at Roleplayers of LOTRO if your character(s) participate in this hook to claim a reward.