In many MMOGs, there appears to be a plague of seemingly useless items you find along your travels. These usually include various animal parts in some disgustingly descriptive state. Many of these items are simply merchant fodder, but there are a fair majority of them which are used in crafting. The frustrating part is discovering which ones are worth the 25 copper the merchant gives you, and which ones are worth 5 gold to another player at the auction house.
In LOTRO, this can be especially confusing because you're even teased a bit in the item's description. "This item can be used in crafting" is a frustrating statement, because you're torn between saving the item for a potentially useful rare opportunity in future crafting, or selling it for a few silver and that precious extra inventory slot.
So for this reason, we've assembled a little guide to help you get better acquainted with these rare crafting items, namely the new crafting trophies for LOTRO, These trophies were introduced in Book 13 as a way to simplify and condense the more descriptive rare trophies that dropped previously. It was Turbine's hope that by doing this, the items would stack better, allowing cleaner inventory management and less confusion for who uses what. So what we've done here, is we've broken the items into categories according to trophy type.
For each type, we've list the specific trophy items, what crafting professions use them, what type of monster drops them and what they're used for. Plus, as a recent addition to the game in Book 13, a new Trophy Broker NPC named Taddyn in the Bree Crafting Hall will barter for any of these items on the list in exchange for other older items you may have had in your inventory prior to Book 13. We will list those bartered items as well, because you seriously need to get rid of them and make that upgrade.