Rivervale is the halfling home town, where those barefoot little mooks start their journey in Norrath.

Halflings are, of course, the hobbits of Tolkien lore… except only hobbits, wizards, and authorized agents of the Tolkien estate use the word “hobbits,” such that TSR was sued by the latter for using the word “hobbit” (along with “ent” and “balrog”) in early printings of Dungeons & Dragons, so had to change to “halfling” and “treant” (Nalrog became some kind of demon as I recall, maybe a pit lord?), terms which we now use freely when not wanting to face the wrath of Tolkien’s heirs and business managers. (Which now include the horrible Embracer Group.)  Anyway, that was back in the 70s, so by the time EverQuest showed up the naming scheme was a long established practice for any title not paying royalties to the Tolkien estate.  (Tolkien enterprises apparently also tried to take hold of “dragon,” “goblin,” “dwarf,” and “warg,” but there was so much prior art around those words that they couldn’t make it stick.)

But look at these guys, they are hobbits, right?

Kind of an unfortunate last name I suppose…

Also, the early Norrath obsession with alcohol is present… and is that a “G” run on that barrel in the back room? (You might need to click on the image to enlarge it to see.)  Are you just looking for the Tolkien estate lawyers to start climbing all over you?

Anyway, Rivervale is one of those locations in Norrath that I probably have stronger memories of from EverQuest II that the original EverQuest.  In part, that is because it isn’t exactly a memorable place.  While probably more intricate than Surefall Glade, it isn’t all that big, mostly being centered around the Fool’s Gold inn, which is about the middle of the town.

The Fool’s Gold Inn – BarcaLoungers in every room

Rivervale isn’t quite Hobbiton, or even Michel Delving.  The Fool’s Gold has a somewhat organic feel, like it might be built around the remains of a large tree trunk, but the town hall is a stone faced edifice, like a low rent Petra, where the mayor sits on the top floor running the place with an iron fist, enforcing his will with an army of masked deputies who are the most common sight on the paths.

A veritable halfling Mount Doom with that sky color…

There are some hobbit… erm… halfling holes around, though they lack the signature round doors that we read about in the description of hobbit holes back in The Hobbit.

Halflings adopt the right angle for technology based reasons

That is probably less to do with the Tolkien estate and more to do with the state of 3D world rendering technology in the late 90s.  The rest of the place is mostly buildings that feel borrowed from elsewhere in Norrath.

Are the feet weary or is the foot rest weary?

Anyway, going to the Project 1999 wiki for a map…

Rivervale Map

The legend for that map:

• 1. Pottery Wheel and Kiln
• 2. Nyla Gubbin’s House
• 3. Merchants selling Bags and Fishing Supplies
• 4. Weary Foot Rest – Inn
• 5. Vale Forge
• 6. Town Hall and Leatherfoot Hall – Bank, Warrior Guild, Merchants selling Various Weapons
• 7. Merchants selling Food and other Goods, Fishing Supplies
• 8. Priest of Discord
• 9. Fool’s Gold – Rogue Guild, Merchants selling Alcohol, Brew Barrel
• 10. Merchant selling Cloth Armor, Brew Barrel, and Loom
• 11. Merchants selling Potions and Crystals
• 12. Merchant selling Leather Armor and Patterns outside, Small Chain Armor and Small Chain Armor Patterns
• 13. Druid Guild with Merchants selling Ore, Veggies, Druid Weapons, and Druid and Ranger Spells, Forge and Oven outside
• 14. Pottery Wheel and Oven, Fletching and Bowyery Equipment, Weapon Molds
• 15. Merchant selling Potions and Crystals
• 16. Cleric and Paladin Guilds with Merchants selling Blunt Weapons and Cleric and Paladin Spells

That is a nice little burg, big enough to stretch your short legs, but not so large that you would get lost in it for more than 30 seconds.

What is odd about Rivervale is its location.  It is kind of shoved into an odd corner in the middle of Antonica, wedged between some less savory spots.

I mean sure, its front yard starting zone, Misty Thicket, is fine.

The Misty Thicket map

It even has some very halfling quests, something of a precursor to the Shire quests in LOTRO eight years later, like the one where you get a box and have to go around finding specimens of local plant and animal life for a collection.

The legend for that map:

1. Orc Camp
2. Goblin Camps
3. Haunted Obelisk
4. Gate through the wall
5. Merchant with Baking Supplies
6. Empty Huts
7. Empty Hut; Unoffically Blixkin Entopop’s “House”
8. Merchant with Small Leather Armor and Patterns
9. Merchant with Sewing Supplies, including How To’s, Large Kit, and Needle and Thimble Molds
10. Merchant with Pottery Supplies
11. Abandoned Tower
12. Merchant with Small Armor Molds
13. Druid Stone Ring
14. Lil Honeybugger’s Hut

I mean, there are some orc and goblins pretty close to hand, but that is why the mayor no doubt ran on a campaign to build a wall, which at least in fantasy worlds is a goal that can be accomplished.

Just another stone in the wall…

Misty Thicket is another one of those zones that got a revamp while the home town stayed in original condition.  I think there was some revamp of Runnyeye, which became Runnyeye Citadel in a later expansion, and this was the attached zone they chose to spiff up.  Anyway, it means that you get some 2007 level 3D rendering of actual curves in the place, as well as updated textures.

The rats however are still from 1999

However, the mention of Runnyeye brings me to the issues I mentioned above, which is that Rivervale and Misty Thicket are hemmed in by danger.  Not that you can’t find danger when venturing out from any hometown, but the poor halflings have Runnyeye on one side of things, with the Gorge of King Xorbb and East Karana beyond, and Kithicor Forest on the other side, a hazardous zone that lays between halflings and the Commonlands and Freeport.

Runnyeye isn’t so bad, and is the halfling fill-in for Blackburrow or Crushbone I suppose, though it always felt more dangerous and more like a dungeon than either of those.  And Kithicor can be traveled safely if you know what you are doing… hugging the wall… but any naive wee halfling wandering out to follow the road through Kithicor was in for a rough time of it.

I do wonder if, like so much of Norrath, this was influenced by Sojourn/TorilMUD where the halfling starting town, Beluir, was stuck way down south in the Calimshan Desert, which meant anybody who just had to make a halfling rogue would have a rough time of it traveling north to Waterdeep.  Not that Rivervale is that far off the beaten path… but it also isn’t attached to the Commonlands directly either.  I think dark elves have an easier time getting to Freeport.

Anyway, that is what I have on Rivervale… and really all the starting points I am familiar with.

I never rolled up any of the “evil” races, so have no memories of the home towns for dark elves, trolls, or ogres.  But there is always Erudin.  We’ll see if I can string together a few coherent paragraphs about that place.  It is, if nothing else, “different” than many other locations.

Series so far:

• EverQuest Starting Points – Surefall Glade
• EverQuest Starting Points – Qeynos Hills
• EverQuest Starting Points – Finding Qeynos
• EverQuest Starting Points – What Can I Even Say About Qeynos?
• EverQuest Starting Points – Under Qeynos in the Aqueduct
• EverQuest Starting Points – Is Blackburrow a Dungeon, a Zone, or a City?
• EverQuest Starting Points – Getting Out of Halas
• EverQuest Starting Points – West Karana Where the Scope of the World Begins
• EverQuest Starting Points – North and South Karana
• EverQuest Starting Points – East Karana and the route to Freeport
• EverQuest Starting Points – Highpass Hold and Kithicor Forest
• EverQuest Starting Points – Butcherblock and Kaladim
• EverQuest Starting Points – Greater Faydark, Where the Elves Are
• EverQuest Starting Points – Ak’Anon and Whatever Happened to the Steamfont Mountains

I am going to towards Freeport for real now, starting from East Karana, which was a crazy scary place back in the day.  I remember being high enough level to feel confident wandering North Karana and crossing the bridge into East Karana and seeing all the stuff wandering back and forth there… all higher level and more dangerous that North Karana mobs… and scurrying back across the bridge to the relative safety of the North Karana.

Tidbit: You can’t swim across the river to zone into East Karana, you have to cross the bridge.

It was a bit more sophisticated in my memory

But eventually I had to cross the zone because I wanted to get to Freeport and friends who were on the far side of Antonica or on Faydwer.  We’ll get to Faydwer eventually.

My memories of the place are pretty vague, but looking at the map brings back a few memories.  Once again, borrowing from the Project 1999 Wiki:

East Karana Map

The legend for that map:

• 1. Druid Ring with Druid and Treant
• 2. Bandit Camp with Tallus Holton
• 3. Shops selling Weapons, Food, Goods, and Cloth Armor
• 4. Sir Morgan (wanders east down the road and back)
• 5. Shops selling Archery Items and Food. Guards stand and patrol near the shops.
• 6. Gnolls
• 7. Haunted Obelisk surrounded by a gnoll reavers. At night, An undead reavers spawn.
• 8. Farm with farmers
• 9. Farm with farmers
• 10. Barbarian Fishing Village

Primarily I remember zoning in and being confronted with a ton of hostile mobs, including griffons flying back and forth.  As with North Karana, that appears to have been trimmed back considerably.

Still, there are a bunch of mobs I do remember, like the gnoll reavers we tried to camp once to ill effect.  Another corpse run in Norrath.

Gnoll reaver walking away in disgust

They hang out around the “haunted obeslik” in location 7 on the map, though it honestly isn’t as impressive as I remember it.

More like a stone paint scraper

I was going to mention that technically it doesn’t even meet the definition of an obelisk, but that name was probably applied because they didn’t know what else to call it.

I also have memories of the barbarian fishing village, which is another one of those places that brings back a feeling of the old days, including the disappointment that there wasn’t really anything to do at the village, save use the vendor to sell some stuff cluttering your inventory.

The barbarian fishing village… also probably the first waterfall I saw in Norrath

Back in the day you would run across a place like this, a little settlement or village, and it would make the world feel more real or alive.  And then you would find that there was not much going on… mostly just a few buildings and some NPCs who were standing around.

Tom of East Karana models probably…

It always left me for a sad longing for those little places to be more than they were.

There was another set of building, location 3 on the map, that was easier to get to… or at least not near the gnolls and the hill giant that still wanders around… which serves today as the last resting place of Aradune, Outrider of Karana, something I covered previously.

Aradune Mithara – Outrider of Karana

So there are some sights in the zone, and some mobs to hunt, but for me the zone mostly brings up memories of passing through it on the way eastward to Freeport and the Commonlands.

Looking at the map, there are actually two ways out of East Karana if you have come in from NK.

There is the Gorge of King Xorbb to the north.  I did probe this route back in the day as you can run through that to Runnyeye and then through Misty Thicket into Rivervale, the halfling home town.  However, the Gorge of King Xorbb and Runnyeye were directly dangerous and the route still left you needing to run through the dark horror of Kithicor Forest.

At the time the recommended path was to go through Highpass Hold to Kithicor, which you can see on the map above is pretty much straight east from the bridge, following the road.  You had to be careful on that road, but if you avoided entanglements with the locals, you would come to the road to Highpass Hold.

The road to Highpass Hold

We didn’t have much in the way of maps back then, save the hand drawn variety like you see up towards the top of this post… and that map misrepresents facts on the ground, like you might take a few steps down the road and see your destination.

No, back in the day, on my first run to Freeport, I had NO IDEA how far that road would go.

Also, while they are missing now, there used to be some bandits that patrolled back and forth across that opening, just to make things a bit more tense.  Once I slipped past them it was up the path which goes… and goes… and keeps on going.

The map pack I have for the in-game mapping tool now available gives you a sense of how much a map like the one above made me feel betrayed.

This map knows what is going on

You need to make sure you take the right side, the road up the valley.  There is a parallel lower road that pretty much goes nowhere.  I once explored it, just to check and it was a long run in and a long run out for no reward.  I recall there being a couple of mobs down there at one point and, of course, you can fall off of the high road and end up down below, which means running back out if you survived the fall and running to your corpse and back out again if you did not.

The road itself contains a sense of promise.  You run across several towers along the way that make you think maybe something is going on here, that maybe you will see something.

Passing a tower on the way up the road

Towers at least imply the need to defend something.  I was alert for mobs that might ambush me.

Meanwhile, I passed another tower with a large texture representing a carving in the side of the canyon.

It helped to have a druid with levitate to get that shot

More trees, more road, then another tower and another carving in the side of the canyon.

The third tower and a more elaborate texture map

The quiet, the lack of mobs or guards or any other travelers, the towers, the carving on the canyon walls, the trees growing on the road, it gave a sense of traveling through a past civilization, a place where people once lived but had died out or moved away leaving behind a world touched by the presence.

The quiet will do that… I don’t recall there being an atmospheric sound loop that played, just the thud thud of your feet as you trotted up the road, expecting to see somebody that never appears.

Eventually, after trotting along for what seemed like a long time, the duration heightened by the lack of anything besides trees and towers, the road narrowed into the telltale box canyon that hides a zone line.

The narrowing of the road

Something in my wants to say a gnoll or two were out there back in the day, but that might be a false memory.  You would enter the narrows, take a few turns, then suddenly freeze in place… and after a few seconds, you would get the message that you were zoning into Highpass Hold.

On the far side lay the gate to Highpass Hold.

Welcome to Highpass Hold, have your passport ready

That, of course, is not the Highpass Hold of 1999.  That is one of the redone zones from the late SOE era, the furthest east such updates extended on Antonica.  I was surly about the neglect of Qeynos and the western reaches of Antonica back in the day.  Now I am happy they were overlooked.  But we’ll get to the soulless nature of those changes soon enough.

Next up, a fast pass through Highpass Hold.

The tales so far:

• EverQuest Starting Points – Surefall Glade
• EverQuest Starting Points – Qeynos Hills
• EverQuest Starting Points – Finding Qeynos
• EverQuest Starting Points – What Can I Even Say About Qeynos?
• EverQuest Starting Points – Under Qeynos in the Aqueduct
• EverQuest Starting Points – Is Blackburrow a Dungeon, a Zone, or a City?
• EverQuest Starting Points – Getting Out of Halas
• EverQuest Starting Points – West Karana Where the Scope of the World Begins
• EverQuest Starting Points – North and South Karana

I’ve briefly written about Qeynos, the first city of Norrath, at least in my heart.  But I cannot move further afield until we get to the bottom of the city, for underneath the city lays the Qeynos Aqueducts.  Also, I apparently misspell “aqueduct” at every opportunity.  I think I have fixed them now.

Qeynos Aqueduct System

While there was a whole front yard of mobs to work on before north Qeynos, snakes, skeletons, beetles, a few gnolls, interspersed with a few higher level mobs including Fippy Darkpaw at least once a night, those were mostly very low level and the return on slaying them diminished quickly with a few levels.

As has become the normal pattern, this was meant to encourage you to move further afield, to go out and explore the world.  And there were opportunities not too far off.  Just north lay Qeynos Hills, which had some higher level mobs in the mix, and also led to the chaos that was early Blackburrow, which I hope to get to next, and the Karanas, where the real size and scope of the game would start to make itself known.

But, right beneath you in Qeynos, there was also the aqueduct, a zone seemingly less useful for supplying the city with water than providing a refuge for rats, bandits, skeletons, spiders, piranhas, sharks, and the occasional gelatenous cube… which were, in fact, perfect cubes just like in the Monster Manual of old.

Cube Ahoy!

Granted, the old school cubes were alleged to have been shaped by moving through perfectly squared off dungeon corridores, while the Qeynos cubes move like a six sided die rolling down a channel.

Cube in motion

You would think that would wear them down to spheres, but the limits on available polygons probably prevents that.

Also, in case you thought I was kidding about the shark.

As advertised

I don’t know what a shark in the aqueduct of a city whose only nearby water is a presumably salt water ocean says about the drinkability of Qeynos water, but there it is. (The whole place feels more like a sewer system, and I habitually refer to it as the Qeynos sewers, but what do I know?)  How it got there remains a mystery, though no greater of a mystery than the piranha I suppose.

Not a shark, but still bitey

The level ranges of the mobs down in the aqueduct varies greatly and a low level explorer looking for adventure could very quickly find themselves in over their head after defeating a few of the easier mobs that show up.  Also, I don’t think this should need to be said, but having seen enough corpses, don’t jump in the water with the shark.

But the trick of the aqueduct is less about the mobs and more about simply finding them and getting into them… not that there aren’t a number of ways in.  Go back to my previous post about Qeynos proper and look at the map legends and you will see a few ways in.  And good size bit of water, like that pond in the north half of the city, has a way into the aqueduct.

Down at the bottom of this pond

There is even a poorly hidden entry outside the city if you want your troll, ogre, and dark elf friends to come join your party down below the city.  There is bit of false wall, which is a different color from the rest of the city wall.

Move along, nothing to see here…

Furthermore, that bit of wall practically glows at night, guiding you to it.

Big red arrow probably not required

No, the problem was, and remains, how to swim in the game.

Being able to control your swimming to allow you to do simple things like swim down to the entry to the aqueduct or just get out of the water before you drown, requires you to be zoomed in to first person view.  If you have scrolled out and are playing in the third person, over the shoulder view, which I certainly prefer if only for the greater sense of situational awareness it allows, then you are going to drown.

The number of corpses I have seen in that pond above over the years… yeah, drowning is a real possibility.  So you really had to kind of commit to the swimming thing before you could even get started on getting to the aqueduct.

No, you need to be in first person view!

And not being able to swim was only the start of issues.  If, for example, you went down through the hole in the pond in front of Crow’s Pub, when you zoned in you were under water and your limited breath meter was counting down.

Trying hard to drown people here

Back in the early days of dial up internet, slow speeds, high latency, and frequent disconnects, it didn’t take much of a hiccup in the system to end up as another corpse floating around at the zone in point.

This is not such a big deal now, both due to better internet and the fact that they have since upped the breath timer, but it was a hazard early on.

All that aside, for many of us the aqueduct was the first dangerous, dungeon-like experience we had in EverQuest.

As with past posts, I am going to swipe the map from the Project 1999 wiki, where it is also referred to as the Qeynos Catacombs, a named derived from its zone name within the game.

All that stuff under Qeynos

The connections to Qeynos have letters on the map:

• A. Exit to Secret Entrance in Newbie Area of North Qeynos
• B. Exit to Pool between Crow’s Nest and Monk Guild in North Qeynos
• C. Exit to Rogue’s Guild in North Qeynos, Pits fall into Area #14
• D. Exit to Water by Magic Users Guild Halls in South Qeynos
• E. Exit to Hidden Entrance beneath Grounds of Fate
• F. Exit to Water near to the Bank
• G. Exit to Water in the Bay near Docks

And the locations on the map are numbered:

• 1. Spawn Area for Vin Moltor
• 2. Various NPCs appear here
• 3. An undead knight (Qeynos Aqueducts) who drops Limestone Ring
• 4. Bloated Alligator who drops Alligator Egg
• 5. An injured rat who drops Alligator Tooth Earring
• 6. Mercenaries with a shady mercenary who drops Thick Black Cape
• 7. Drosco and A Nesting Rat who drops Golden Locket
• 8. Temple of Bertoxxulous
  • 8a. Enchanter, Magician, and Shadow Knight Trainers, Banker, Merchants selling Spells and Weapons
  • 8b. Warrior, Wizard, and Necromancer Trainers, Merchants selling Necromancer Spells and Equipment
  • 8c. Shadow Knight and Cleric Trainers
• 9. Sewer Sentinels
• 10. Cuburt spawn area
• 11. Frogloks
• 12. an injured brigand
• 13. an exhausted guard
• 14. Shark Pool with two lvl 17 a shark
• 15. Smuggler Camps with a smuggler, a courier and Malka Rale
• 16. Various NPCs and Beggar Wyllin spawn here
• 17. Thug Camp with a thug

In addition, the wiki has a second map, which is a little more clear to me, and which calls the whole thing the Qeynos Underground.  That is apparently not the revolutionary movement I thought it was.

A little better map of the whole thing

The one thing is that, whatever you call it, the area under Qeynos lends itself to the classic graph paper mapping methodology.

And that is about all I have to say about the Qeynos sewers, or whatever you choose to call them.  I am finally going to get on the road out of Qeynos at this point, though we have one last stop in the Qeynos Hills first in order to visit some gnolls.

The locations so far:

• EverQuest Starting Points – Surefall Glade
• EverQuest Starting Points – Qeynos Hills
• EverQuest Starting Points – Finding Qeynos

• EverQuest Starting Points – What Can I Even Say About Qeynos?

Fippy Fest is coming!

Celebrating the Year of Darkpaw

Wait, what is Fippy Fest?

On Saturday, June 15th 2024, Enad Global 7… erm… Daybreak… no, not quite right… Darkpaw Games, the Enad Global 7 studio under the Daybreak Games… and I snicker every time I say that aloud as it sounds like “they break games” when I do… which is responsible for the two EverQuest titles, is holding a live online event to celebrate EverQuest, EverQuest II, which is part of the Year of Darkpaw events for the respective 25th and 20th anniversaries of the two titles this year.

Sorry, I may have gotten carried away and that last sentence somehow became a paragraph.

Sure, Blizzard can woo away Holly Longdale and borrow heavily from the EverQuest nostalgia playbook, but two can play at that game!

So Darkpaw is going to have an online Fanfest come June, their own version of BlizzConline I suppose, called Fippy Fest.

From the sound of it general access will be free and you will be able to watch the panels and such, but if you opt-in for paid access you will be able to aske questions live during the event as well as getting in-game items to commemorate the event.

But wait, there’s more.

For a few special individuals there will be tickets available to attend the event in person down in San Diego.  The number of tickets available for those wanting to attend live hasn’t been declared, the company has only said the following:

We are keeping the in-person event small and intimate as we delve back into the realm of in-person events.

This might be the first in-person Fanfest-like event since the end of the SOE days.  It has been at least a decade.  (There was some other “fans invited” event at their offices a few years back, but it felt a little more ad hoc.)

Depending how small they are keeping the in-person side of things, these tickets might be more exclusive than any BlizzCon ticket.

Anyway, tickets go on sale at 6pm Pacific time today.  No pricing has been announced yet.

In addition to Fippy Fest, Darkpaw has announced that they will be attending Pax East in March as well.  They are getting out there to celebrate the Year of Darkpaw.

Here is the link to purchase tickets:

• Fippy Fest Tickets

Sticker shock warning.  Digital tickets come in a variety of flavors with different rewards:

• Fan – $50
• Booster – $100
• Patron – $150
• VIP – $250

You do have to pick whether or not you want rewards for EverQuest or EverQuest II.

But if you want to attend in person the ticket will run you $1,500. over at Everbrite.

How badly do you want to go to this event?

Get the fuck out of here.  I mean, the digital event prices seem a bit steep, even if they are somewhat volentary.  You are paying to be able to ask questions live and for some in-game items.  But the price for in person… you really have to love Norrath if you’re going to put out that amount.

But, I am sure someone will pay it.

Related links, each title featuring its own item rewards:

• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024! (EverQuest version)
• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024! (EverQuest II version)
• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024 – Forum Thread (EverQuest version)
• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024 – Forum Thread (EverQuest II version)
• The EverQuest Show – Episode 24: PAX East and Fippy Fest

Fippy Fest is coming!

Celebrating the Year of Darkpaw

Wait, what is Fippy Fest?

On Saturday, June 15th 2024, Enad Global 7… erm… Daybreak… no, not quite right… Darkpaw Games, the Enad Global 7 studio under the Daybreak Games… and I snicker every time I say that aloud as it sounds like “they break games” when I do… which is responsible for the two EverQuest titles, is holding a live online event to celebrate EverQuest, EverQuest II, which is part of the Year of Darkpaw events for the respective 25th and 20th anniversaries of the two titles this year.

Sorry, I may have gotten carried away and that last sentence somehow became a paragraph.

Sure, Blizzard can woo away Holly Longdale and borrow heavily from the EverQuest nostalgia playbook, but two can play at that game!

So Darkpaw is going to have an online Fanfest come June, their own version of BlizzConline I suppose, called Fippy Fest.

From the sound of it general access will be free and you will be able to watch the panels and such, but if you opt-in for paid access you will be able to aske questions live during the event as well as getting in-game items to commemorate the event.

But wait, there’s more.

For a few special individuals there will be tickets available to attend the event in person down in San Diego.  The number of tickets available for those wanting to attend live hasn’t been declared, the company has only said the following:

We are keeping the in-person event small and intimate as we delve back into the realm of in-person events.

This might be the first in-person Fanfest-like event since the end of the SOE days.  It has been at least a decade.  (There was some other “fans invited” event at their offices a few years back, but it felt a little more ad hoc.)

Depending how small they are keeping the in-person side of things, these tickets might be more exclusive than any BlizzCon ticket.

Anyway, tickets go on sale at 6pm Pacific time today.  No pricing has been announced yet.

In addition to Fippy Fest, Darkpaw has announced that they will be attending Pax East in March as well.  They are getting out there to celebrate the Year of Darkpaw.

Here is the link to purchase tickets:

• Fippy Fest Tickets

Sticker shock warning.  Digital tickets come in a variety of flavors with different rewards:

• Fan – $50
• Booster – $100
• Patron – $150
• VIP – $250

You do have to pick whether or not you want rewards for EverQuest or EverQuest II.

But if you want to attend in person the ticket will run you $1,500. over at Everbrite.

How badly do you want to go to this event?

Get the fuck out of here.  I mean, the digital event prices seem a bit steep, even if they are somewhat volentary.  You are paying to be able to ask questions live and for some in-game items.  But the price for in person… you really have to love Norrath if you’re going to put out that amount.

But, I am sure someone will pay it.

Related links, each title featuring its own item rewards:

• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024! (EverQuest version)
• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024! (EverQuest II version)
• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024 – Forum Thread (EverQuest version)
• Daybreak – Introducing Fippy Fest 2024 – Forum Thread (EverQuest II version)
• The EverQuest Show – Episode 24: PAX East and Fippy Fest

I spent some time fiddling with settings for this post because I wanted to see if there was a way I could get the fog, the middle-distance mist that was used to hide the fact that back in 1999 the 3dfx Voodoo2 card 3D rendering card I was running in parallel to my actual video card had a draw distance that was comically small even relative to soon to be dominant nVidia TNT2 based cards.

This probably seems like trivia… something like draw distance and the atmospheric technique that SOE used to try and hide the fact that hardware wasn’t up to the task of drawing a lot of polygons out to much distance.  But I cannot emphasize enough both how effective this technique was and the moody, menacing effect it could have on play.

Rather than being like, say, MODERN DAY WOW CLASSIC, where it just doesn’t draw stuff like bosses who can murder you to death if it doesn’t feel like it, causing them to pop into existance against a background of terrain you could already see from a miles away, early EQ managed to make that limitation feel like a part of the game.  I’ve been over that before if you want more about that.

I did manage to get the fog to return to Surefall Glade by reigning in the LOD slider.  The trees now don’t obviously end in a ceiling.

Wait, those aren’t trees! They are just giant pillars!

Now they look a bit more organic.

Okay, I can pretend they are trees again

However, out in the wider world I could not get that similar fog effect to show up.  A bit of a bummer, that.

Why am I on about the fog thing yet again?  Because it explains some of my behavior back in 1999.  I mentioned previously that when I arrive at the road that led south from Qeynos Hills, that I was given pause and avoided going that way in part because the road led across an open plain that disappeared into the mist.  It seemed ominous.

Without that atmospheric fog however, it just seems to lead into… well… nothing?  Infinity?  Some undefined state?  You tell me.

The south end of Qeynos Hills

The other reason I did head south was… nothing indicated that I should.  When you get to that last crossroad there is a large stone marker giving directions.

Coming up on the marker

When you look at one side it has an arrow pointing back north to Surefall Glade, from whence I had come.  That was easy.

Been there and done that

On another side was an arrow pointing eastward declaring “To the Karanas.”

The Karanas this way

But nowhere on the stone was any indication of what lay to the south.  So not only did the plain to the south seem somewhat dubious, with higher level mobs wandering about, but as a destination from Qeynos Hills it did not even seem worth mention.

Later it would become clear that the stone was to guide people coming from the south, which was an important location in Norrath.  It was just that half elves weren’t allowed to be from Qeynos, but had to start off in Surefall Glade.

Qeynos Hills with the crossroad to the south

Eventually though, as I ranged further and further south in search of mobs to fight as the game became more and more busy each evening, I managed to stumble across the zone line.

There were two types of zone lines in old EverQuest.  There were the ones with a narrow path that often zig-zagged to keep you from expecting to see through to the other side, like the line to Surefall Glade or West Karana on the map above, along with the connections between different parts of a city.

And then there were the unmarked, invisible lines across a wide swathes of terrain that you could only discover by running into them.  That was how I managed to step through into North Qeynos, I hit that invisible line and everything froze.  I cannot recall if it put up a message about loading the next zone, the way it does now, or if it just left you hanging there with a static screen.  Either way, I landed on the other side and there was stuff to see.

From the zone line in North Qeynos

I suspect back in the day the mist kept you from seeing Qeynos from this distance, but the road led south and to the front gates of the city.

The Gates of Qeynos

I had discovered my first actual major city.  Granted, in this era half elves were not the only ones to start in their own little small town and then have to travel to Qeynos or Freeport.  Surefall Glade was just one of the more meager starting points.  Halflings and dwarves and elves, both high and wood, had much more substantial starting towns.  And I suspect I will get to them at some point here as I follow my initial path through Norrath.

But not yet.  First I have to explore Qeynos before moving further afield.

Having arrived at the gates of Qeynos, I went AFK for a few minutes standing there, the logout counter running, only to come back and find myself in one of those very Qeynos situations.

It was night, I had been standing there, and Fippy Darkpaw ran down the road, past the guard, through the front gate, and started beating on me.

Wait, how do you think this ends?

Being level 90, he couldn’t touch me, but I had to laugh at the absurdity of this.  I turned on auto-attack and one-shotted him, my reputation with many of the locals improve by the effort.

+1 all over for slaying Fippy… except Blackburrow

I had forgotten the faction standings aspect of the early game.  I cannot remember if it had any effect at all on what happened to me as a player in those days.

The story so far:

• EverQuest Starting Points – Surefall Glade
• EverQuest Starting Points – Qeynos Hills

I spent some time fiddling with settings for this post because I wanted to see if there was a way I could get the fog, the middle-distance mist that was used to hide the fact that back in 1999 the 3dfx Voodoo2 card 3D rendering card I was running in parallel to my actual video card had a draw distance that was comically small even relative to soon to be dominant nVidia TNT2 based cards.

This probably seems like trivia… something like draw distance and the atmospheric technique that SOE used to try and hide the fact that hardware wasn’t up to the task of drawing a lot of polygons out to much distance.  But I cannot emphasize enough both how effective this technique was and the moody, menacing effect it could have on play.

Rather than being like, say, MODERN DAY WOW CLASSIC, where it just doesn’t draw stuff like bosses who can murder you to death if it doesn’t feel like it, causing them to pop into existance against a background of terrain you could already see from a miles away, early EQ managed to make that limitation feel like a part of the game.  I’ve been over that before if you want more about that.

I did manage to get the fog to return to Surefall Glade by reigning in the LOD slider.  The trees now don’t obviously end in a ceiling.

Wait, those aren’t trees! They are just giant pillars!

Now they look a bit more organic.

Okay, I can pretend they are trees again

However, out in the wider world I could not get that similar fog effect to show up.  A bit of a bummer, that.

Why am I on about the fog thing yet again?  Because it explains some of my behavior back in 1999.  I mentioned previously that when I arrive at the road that led south from Qeynos Hills, that I was given pause and avoided going that way in part because the road led across an open plain that disappeared into the mist.  It seemed ominous.

Without that atmospheric fog however, it just seems to lead into… well… nothing?  Infinity?  Some undefined state?  You tell me.

The south end of Qeynos Hills

The other reason I did head south was… nothing indicated that I should.  When you get to that last crossroad there is a large stone marker giving directions.

Coming up on the marker

When you look at one side it has an arrow pointing back north to Surefall Glade, from whence I had come.  That was easy.

Been there and done that

On another side was an arrow pointing eastward declaring “To the Karanas.”

The Karanas this way

But nowhere on the stone was any indication of what lay to the south.  So not only did the plain to the south seem somewhat dubious, with higher level mobs wandering about, but as a destination from Qeynos Hills it did not even seem worth mention.

Later it would become clear that the stone was to guide people coming from the south, which was an important location in Norrath.  It was just that half elves weren’t allowed to be from Qeynos, but had to start off in Surefall Glade.

Qeynos Hills with the crossroad to the south

Eventually though, as I ranged further and further south in search of mobs to fight as the game became more and more busy each evening, I managed to stumble across the zone line.

There were two types of zone lines in old EverQuest.  There were the ones with a narrow path that often zig-zagged to keep you from expecting to see through to the other side, like the line to Surefall Glade or West Karana on the map above, along with the connections between different parts of a city.

And then there were the unmarked, invisible lines across a wide swathes of terrain that you could only discover by running into them.  That was how I managed to step through into North Qeynos, I hit that invisible line and everything froze.  I cannot recall if it put up a message about loading the next zone, the way it does now, or if it just left you hanging there with a static screen.  Either way, I landed on the other side and there was stuff to see.

From the zone line in North Qeynos

I suspect back in the day the mist kept you from seeing Qeynos from this distance, but the road led south and to the front gates of the city.

The Gates of Qeynos

I had discovered my first actual major city.  Granted, in this era half elves were not the only ones to start in their own little small town and then have to travel to Qeynos or Freeport.  Surefall Glade was just one of the more meager starting points.  Halflings and dwarves and elves, both high and wood, had much more substantial starting towns.  And I suspect I will get to them at some point here as I follow my initial path through Norrath.

But not yet.  First I have to explore Qeynos before moving further afield.

Having arrived at the gates of Qeynos, I went AFK for a few minutes standing there, the logout counter running, only to come back and find myself in one of those very Qeynos situations.

It was night, I had been standing there, and Fippy Darkpaw ran down the road, past the guard, through the front gate, and started beating on me.

Wait, how do you think this ends?

Being level 90, he couldn’t touch me, but I had to laugh at the absurdity of this.  I turned on auto-attack and one-shotted him, my reputation with many of the locals improve by the effort.

+1 all over for slaying Fippy… except Blackburrow

I had forgotten the faction standings aspect of the early game.  I cannot remember if it had any effect at all on what happened to me as a player in those days.

The story so far:

• EverQuest Starting Points – Surefall Glade
• EverQuest Starting Points – Qeynos Hills

On that first day in March of 1999 I ventured from Surefall Glade into Qeynos hills.  It was the first “real” zone I saw in EverQuest, the first place I slayed a mob, the first place there was danger, the first place I died.

A wolf passing by the Surefall Glade entrance

Danger and death were not hard to find.  They were literally in line of sight from the entrance cave to Surefall Glade, right over there at the haunted ruins.

The place is lousy with skeletons

You can see the cave there in the background.  And, should you emerge from the cave at night, you would absolutely see the unearthly glow of the ruins… and maybe even be drawn to it, thinking it friendly.  And, my low level friend, you would be in trouble should you venture too close.  The skeletons… sometimes roaming about, sometimes a seeming harmless pile of bones… would go straight for you if you got too close.  And mixed in with the low level skeletons that you might manage were a number of high level variants… high level for a newbie zone in a spot line of sight from their starting point into the world… that would kill you dead before you could make it back to the guards hoping they could be roused to defend you.

And that laugh they had.  That has to be one of the most distinctive sounds from the early game, one so well known that they carried it over to EverQuest II.

How crazy aggro were they?  Here I am trying to take a screen shot of Holly Windstalker, a notable NPC in the zone and where Holly Longdale got her “Windstalker” nickname, with a level 90 cleric and a freaking skeleton is coming for me.

Restless doesn’t even begin to describe it

Also, for some reason I turned on “shadows” in the settings and… frankly… they look awful and I promised to turn that off again for all future screen shots.

That is Holly’s updated NPC model.  She was a lot more stiff with far fewer polygons back in the day.  But so were we all.

She wasn’t even that special.  She didn’t have a quest or anything.  She would just beat the crap out of you if she caught you abusing the wildlife, which was kind of tough to deal with because the early useful quests in the zone let you trade in bear or wolf pelts for armor.  So you would be going after a wolf, struggling to come out on top, and then she would show and and pound you into mush.

Aside from Holly and the Millers, who had the hide quests, there was also the first of a number of like buildings in what I think of as the West Karana style.

Just out at the crossroads

There were vendors in there you could sell things to and buy crafting supplies from if you had the coin.  You probably couldn’t use any of it early on, but you could buy them.

As a zone Qeynos Hills doesn’t seem very big or complicated or surprising in retrospect.  Here is the map, once again swiped from the Project 1999 wiki.

Just a big rectangle really

But I have to admit that, while it feels small today wandering it with a level 90 character, its polygon hills and depressions, not pictured on the map, made it seem like a much bigger place at the time.  Back, exploring it as my first REAL zone, it seemed like there was a lot going on.  There was the big Gnoll head entrance to Blackburrow.

I’m glad they never revamped this, it should remain as ugly as it was on day one forever

There was a tower guarding a path that I would later learn headed to West Karana.  But the tower seemed a warning, and having died and struggled to recover my corpse from the freaking haunted ruins already I was heeding all warnings until I got my footing.

Meanwhile at the southern end of the zone, past the house and its crossroad, south of the tower, there was an open plain with a few trees.  The mobs there seemed to get higher in level. That was where the wisps were, a seeming high level mob for a mere newbie, but a mob that would drop a greater lightstone on occasion, a coveted light source in a game where the nights were menacingly dark… at least until I discovered the gamma slider in the settings… such that groups would get together to try and take them down.

And that plain of higher level mobs faded into the now missing mists such that I feared to tread very far down the road that led through it.  I mean, after the haunted ruins what else could be waiting for me.

So I lingered in the Qeynos Hills for a while.  With the distrotion of time it feels like I waited days, maybe even a week, before striking out down that southern road.  But it was probably more like a couple of hours.  But in that couple of hours I ran around exploring Qeynos Hills, trying to find its mysteries and hidden places.

One fond memory for me is always the small lake behind a ridge in the northwest of the zone.  On the shore there were a couple of boats.  And, on jumping into them the game told you how to control them and you could sail them around on the water.

Back on the lake, the boats are still there

This was kind of amazing for me.  That here, in this early zone, you could control a boat.  What else waited for us out in the world?  Surely this was just the start of amazing things!

Well, the boat, in the end, was something of an unfufilled promise, and idea never really expanded upon.  They were out in Ocean of Tears and Lake Rathetear, but were never much use and would not lead to other, more majestic options.

Out on Lake Rathtear during the Fippy Darkpaw Era

They were kind of thrown in there, an interesting little idea that was never expanded upon, so was left to itself.

Anyway, I eventually steeled myself up to head south to see what lay beyond the mists at the far end of that southern road.

Since my post last week I have I have chosen a path forward for the EverQuest 25th anniversary, which is to attempt to walk along my original 1999 route through the game zone by zone.  It will be easy for a few posts, then probably chaotically hard, but we’ll see how it goes.  I might change my mind.  But for now, this is the way.

Back on March 16, 1999 after having arrived home with the EverQuest box, fresh off the shelf at Fry’s, and installed it and managed to get logged in… easier for me over ISDN, but still not an easy trick that first night… I made my first character.

I made a half-elf ranger.

It is like I never learn.

It is as though the gaming community saw Aragorn and his rangers and thought, “that’s cool… we must thwart anybody who aspires to that!”  So I was abused for making a ranger back in the day, and as a class rangers have either generally sucked or become completely focused on bow and arrow ranged attacks such as to become Legolas rather than Aragorn.  It isn’t as though I dislike the bow, but I just want a warrior with some attunement to the magic of nature.

Anyway, that is a complaint for another day.  But part of why I made a ranger is that I was coordinating with some friends who were also starting out and they claimed druid first and to this day I regret not simply making a druid as well.  Few classes were as handy or beloved as the druid in early EverQuest, handing out buffs like candy and in demand by every group.

And so a ranger was born back in 1999, a half-elf which meant showing up in Surefall Glade, a little starter zone seperated from Qeynos and reserved for half-elves, because half-elves always get stuck in their own little ghetto, unloved by the elves and not trusted by the race of man.

Classic Norrath

Qeynos itself was on the unfashionable western end of Antonica, the largest continent of early Norrath.  The cool people started in Freeport or in one of the chic starting areas on Faydwer.  I will eventually get to traveling across Antonica to meet up with other friends who started as dwarves or elves, but on that first night we seemed to be a happy bunch of half-elves, as yet unaware of the cruel reality of our geographical situation.

Surefall Glade seems small when you first show up.  There is a modest pond… too small to be anything like a lake… on which the residents have built a solid guild hall under the soaring trees.  Or soaring trunks.  Back in the day when there was a mist to limit line of sight the trunks disappeared up into a fog that felt mysterious.  Now, however, with the mist long gone they seem seem more like textured columns that might be holding up a distant roof.

Wait, those aren’t trees! They are just giant pillars!

But the guild hall is still there.

Here, because we like to be on the water

Here was your first chance to fall in water and drown, because land was apparently at such a premium that they stuck the place on piers in the water.  When I say it is on the pond, it is not just fronting on the pond but literally in the pond.

Time to learn how to use a door!  This seems like a simple thing, yet this whole 3D world was strange and new and there was no World of Warcraft to set standards for interactions with the world… or maybe even suggest that doors were not strictly necessary.  How many doors do you see in Ironforge or Stormwind?  Even the Goldshire Inn lacks doors, and we all know what was going on in there.  When you tell somebody to “get a room” it implies a door to close to hide their shame.

One clicking on the door established how to open it up, inside there was one of the ranger guild masters and the fletching supplier.

Welcome to Surefall Glade

That was back when you had to go and train skills back at the guild every level or so.  And then there were spells, which were every five levels, modeled on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2.0 pattern that TorilMUD used.  The spells were available over at the counter from the triplets of Surefall.

There were not enough NPC models to waste any on half-elves

Meanwhile, hanging around outside were more rangers, some standing at an archery range pretending that archery was a useful skill to have in early EverQuest.

Here we are, practicing archery!

It was not.  Hager Sureshot?  More like Hager Pants on Fire!

I spent a long time with the fletching kit making a bow and some arrows and trying to shoot things and… and… I still wish I had just made a druid.  I mean, Spirit of the Wolf!  I think rangers got that at level 41 while druids picked it up at level 6.

My memories of the day involved me pretty quickly wanting to get out of Surefall and into the world, there not seeming to be all that much in the zone.  However, there is a whole hidden set of caves in the back of the zone… a lot more than I remember looking at the map that Project 1999 wiki has posted.

Surefall Glade Map – Circa 1999

That Project 1999 wiki is going to be very useful for these posts, and I am not going to be shy about swiping the maps since they themselves harvested them elsewhere.  I’ve posted a few of them here before from other sources.

My vague, 25 years in the past recollection is that there were some bears in the cave and a quest and a campfire or something.  But on day one I was on my way elsewhere, which meant going through the most awkwardly long tunnel in Norrath.  The map does not due justice to how long that tunnel to Qeynos hills feels… and how sudden that stop comes when you finally hit the zone line and thing the game has frozen, then how long you wait for the next zone to load.

And that next zone is Qeynos Hills.

Guarding Surefall Glade like anybody would want to get in there

We’ll get there shortly.  It is still loading.

I spent some time fiddling with settings for this post because I wanted to see if there was a way I could get the fog, the middle-distance mist that was used to hide the fact that back in 1999 the 3dfx Voodoo2 card 3D rendering card I was running in parallel to my actual video card had a draw distance that was comically small even relative to soon to be dominant nVidia TNT2 based cards.

This probably seems like trivia… something like draw distance and the atmospheric technique that SOE used to try and hide the fact that hardware wasn’t up to the task of drawing a lot of polygons out to much distance.  But I cannot emphasize enough both how effective this technique was and the moody, menacing effect it could have on play.

Rather than being like, say, MODERN DAY WOW CLASSIC, where it just doesn’t draw stuff like bosses who can murder you to death if it doesn’t feel like it, causing them to pop into existance against a background of terrain you could already see from a miles away, early EQ managed to make that limitation feel like a part of the game.  I’ve been over that before if you want more about that.

I did manage to get the fog to return to Surefall Glade by reigning in the LOD slider.  The trees now don’t obviously end in a ceiling.

Wait, those aren’t trees! They are just giant pillars!

Now they look a bit more organic.

Okay, I can pretend they are trees again

However, out in the wider world I could not get that similar fog effect to show up.  A bit of a bummer, that.

Why am I on about the fog thing yet again?  Because it explains some of my behavior back in 1999.  I mentioned previously that when I arrive at the road that led south from Qeynos Hills, that I was given pause and avoided going that way in part because the road led across an open plain that disappeared into the mist.  It seemed ominous.

Without that atmospheric fog however, it just seems to lead into… well… nothing?  Infinity?  Some undefined state?  You tell me.

The south end of Qeynos Hills

The other reason I did head south was… nothing indicated that I should.  When you get to that last crossroad there is a large stone marker giving directions.

Coming up on the marker

When you look at one side it has an arrow pointing back north to Surefall Glade, from whence I had come.  That was easy.

Been there and done that

On another side was an arrow pointing eastward declaring “To the Karanas.”

The Karanas this way

But nowhere on the stone was any indication of what lay to the south.  So not only did the plain to the south seem somewhat dubious, with higher level mobs wandering about, but as a destination from Qeynos Hills it did not even seem worth mention.

Later it would become clear that the stone was to guide people coming from the south, which was an important location in Norrath.  It was just that half elves weren’t allowed to be from Qeynos, but had to start off in Surefall Glade.

Qeynos Hills with the crossroad to the south

Eventually though, as I ranged further and further south in search of mobs to fight as the game became more and more busy each evening, I managed to stumble across the zone line.

There were two types of zone lines in old EverQuest.  There were the ones with a narrow path that often zig-zagged to keep you from expecting to see through to the other side, like the line to Surefall Glade or West Karana on the map above, along with the connections between different parts of a city.

And then there were the unmarked, invisible lines across a wide swathes of terrain that you could only discover by running into them.  That was how I managed to step through into North Qeynos, I hit that invisible line and everything froze.  I cannot recall if it put up a message about loading the next zone, the way it does now, or if it just left you hanging there with a static screen.  Either way, I landed on the other side and there was stuff to see.

From the zone line in North Qeynos

I suspect back in the day the mist kept you from seeing Qeynos from this distance, but the road led south and to the front gates of the city.

The Gates of Qeynos

I had discovered my first actual major city.  Granted, in this era half elves were not the only ones to start in their own little small town and then have to travel to Qeynos or Freeport.  Surefall Glade was just one of the more meager starting points.  Halflings and dwarves and elves, both high and wood, had much more substantial starting towns.  And I suspect I will get to them at some point here as I follow my initial path through Norrath.

But not yet.  First I have to explore Qeynos before moving further afield.

Having arrived at the gates of Qeynos, I went AFK for a few minutes standing there, the logout counter running, only to come back and find myself in one of those very Qeynos situations.

It was night, I had been standing there, and Fippy Darkpaw ran down the road, past the guard, through the front gate, and started beating on me.

Wait, how do you think this ends?

Being level 90, he couldn’t touch me, but I had to laugh at the absurdity of this.  I turned on auto-attack and one-shotted him, my reputation with many of the locals improve by the effort.

+1 all over for slaying Fippy… except Blackburrow

I had forgotten the faction standings aspect of the early game.  I cannot remember if it had any effect at all on what happened to me as a player in those days.

The story so far:

• EverQuest Starting Points – Surefall Glade
• EverQuest Starting Points – Qeynos Hills

On that first day in March of 1999 I ventured from Surefall Glade into Qeynos hills.  It was the first “real” zone I saw in EverQuest, the first place I slayed a mob, the first place there was danger, the first place I died.

A wolf passing by the Surefall Glade entrance

Danger and death were not hard to find.  They were literally in line of sight from the entrance cave to Surefall Glade, right over there at the haunted ruins.

The place is lousy with skeletons

You can see the cave there in the background.  And, should you emerge from the cave at night, you would absolutely see the unearthly glow of the ruins… and maybe even be drawn to it, thinking it friendly.  And, my low level friend, you would be in trouble should you venture too close.  The skeletons… sometimes roaming about, sometimes a seeming harmless pile of bones… would go straight for you if you got too close.  And mixed in with the low level skeletons that you might manage were a number of high level variants… high level for a newbie zone in a spot line of sight from their starting point into the world… that would kill you dead before you could make it back to the guards hoping they could be roused to defend you.

And that laugh they had.  That has to be one of the most distinctive sounds from the early game, one so well known that they carried it over to EverQuest II.

How crazy aggro were they?  Here I am trying to take a screen shot of Holly Windstalker, a notable NPC in the zone and where Holly Longdale got her “Windstalker” nickname, with a level 90 cleric and a freaking skeleton is coming for me.

Restless doesn’t even begin to describe it

Also, for some reason I turned on “shadows” in the settings and… frankly… they look awful and I promised to turn that off again for all future screen shots.

That is Holly’s updated NPC model.  She was a lot more stiff with far fewer polygons back in the day.  But so were we all.

She wasn’t even that special.  She didn’t have a quest or anything.  She would just beat the crap out of you if she caught you abusing the wildlife, which was kind of tough to deal with because the early useful quests in the zone let you trade in bear or wolf pelts for armor.  So you would be going after a wolf, struggling to come out on top, and then she would show and and pound you into mush.

Aside from Holly and the Millers, who had the hide quests, there was also the first of a number of like buildings in what I think of as the West Karana style.

Just out at the crossroads

There were vendors in there you could sell things to and buy crafting supplies from if you had the coin.  You probably couldn’t use any of it early on, but you could buy them.

As a zone Qeynos Hills doesn’t seem very big or complicated or surprising in retrospect.  Here is the map, once again swiped from the Project 1999 wiki.

Just a big rectangle really

But I have to admit that, while it feels small today wandering it with a level 90 character, its polygon hills and depressions, not pictured on the map, made it seem like a much bigger place at the time.  Back, exploring it as my first REAL zone, it seemed like there was a lot going on.  There was the big Gnoll head entrance to Blackburrow.

I’m glad they never revamped this, it should remain as ugly as it was on day one forever

There was a tower guarding a path that I would later learn headed to West Karana.  But the tower seemed a warning, and having died and struggled to recover my corpse from the freaking haunted ruins already I was heeding all warnings until I got my footing.

Meanwhile at the southern end of the zone, past the house and its crossroad, south of the tower, there was an open plain with a few trees.  The mobs there seemed to get higher in level. That was where the wisps were, a seeming high level mob for a mere newbie, but a mob that would drop a greater lightstone on occasion, a coveted light source in a game where the nights were menacingly dark… at least until I discovered the gamma slider in the settings… such that groups would get together to try and take them down.

And that plain of higher level mobs faded into the now missing mists such that I feared to tread very far down the road that led through it.  I mean, after the haunted ruins what else could be waiting for me.

So I lingered in the Qeynos Hills for a while.  With the distrotion of time it feels like I waited days, maybe even a week, before striking out down that southern road.  But it was probably more like a couple of hours.  But in that couple of hours I ran around exploring Qeynos Hills, trying to find its mysteries and hidden places.

One fond memory for me is always the small lake behind a ridge in the northwest of the zone.  On the shore there were a couple of boats.  And, on jumping into them the game told you how to control them and you could sail them around on the water.

Back on the lake, the boats are still there

This was kind of amazing for me.  That here, in this early zone, you could control a boat.  What else waited for us out in the world?  Surely this was just the start of amazing things!

Well, the boat, in the end, was something of an unfufilled promise, and idea never really expanded upon.  They were out in Ocean of Tears and Lake Rathetear, but were never much use and would not lead to other, more majestic options.

Out on Lake Rathtear during the Fippy Darkpaw Era

They were kind of thrown in there, an interesting little idea that was never expanded upon, so was left to itself.

Anyway, I eventually steeled myself up to head south to see what lay beyond the mists at the far end of that southern road.

Since my post last week I have I have chosen a path forward for the EverQuest 25th anniversary, which is to attempt to walk along my original 1999 route through the game zone by zone.  It will be easy for a few posts, then probably chaotically hard, but we’ll see how it goes.  I might change my mind.  But for now, this is the way.

Back on March 16, 1999 after having arrived home with the EverQuest box, fresh off the shelf at Fry’s, and installed it and managed to get logged in… easier for me over ISDN, but still not an easy trick that first night… I made my first character.

I made a half-elf ranger.

It is like I never learn.

It is as though the gaming community saw Aragorn and his rangers and thought, “that’s cool… we must thwart anybody who aspires to that!”  So I was abused for making a ranger back in the day, and as a class rangers have either generally sucked or become completely focused on bow and arrow ranged attacks such as to become Legolas rather than Aragorn.  It isn’t as though I dislike the bow, but I just want a warrior with some attunement to the magic of nature.

Anyway, that is a complaint for another day.  But part of why I made a ranger is that I was coordinating with some friends who were also starting out and they claimed druid first and to this day I regret not simply making a druid as well.  Few classes were as handy or beloved as the druid in early EverQuest, handing out buffs like candy and in demand by every group.

And so a ranger was born back in 1999, a half-elf which meant showing up in Surefall Glade, a little starter zone seperated from Qeynos and reserved for half-elves, because half-elves always get stuck in their own little ghetto, unloved by the elves and not trusted by the race of man.

Classic Norrath

Qeynos itself was on the unfashionable western end of Antonica, the largest continent of early Norrath.  The cool people started in Freeport or in one of the chic starting areas on Faydwer.  I will eventually get to traveling across Antonica to meet up with other friends who started as dwarves or elves, but on that first night we seemed to be a happy bunch of half-elves, as yet unaware of the cruel reality of our geographical situation.

Surefall Glade seems small when you first show up.  There is a modest pond… too small to be anything like a lake… on which the residents have built a solid guild hall under the soaring trees.  Or soaring trunks.  Back in the day when there was a mist to limit line of sight the trunks disappeared up into a fog that felt mysterious.  Now, however, with the mist long gone they seem seem more like textured columns that might be holding up a distant roof.

Wait, those aren’t trees! They are just giant pillars!

But the guild hall is still there.

Here, because we like to be on the water

Here was your first chance to fall in water and drown, because land was apparently at such a premium that they stuck the place on piers in the water.  When I say it is on the pond, it is not just fronting on the pond but literally in the pond.

Time to learn how to use a door!  This seems like a simple thing, yet this whole 3D world was strange and new and there was no World of Warcraft to set standards for interactions with the world… or maybe even suggest that doors were not strictly necessary.  How many doors do you see in Ironforge or Stormwind?  Even the Goldshire Inn lacks doors, and we all know what was going on in there.  When you tell somebody to “get a room” it implies a door to close to hide their shame.

One clicking on the door established how to open it up, inside there was one of the ranger guild masters and the fletching supplier.

Welcome to Surefall Glade

That was back when you had to go and train skills back at the guild every level or so.  And then there were spells, which were every five levels, modeled on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2.0 pattern that TorilMUD used.  The spells were available over at the counter from the triplets of Surefall.

There were not enough NPC models to waste any on half-elves

Meanwhile, hanging around outside were more rangers, some standing at an archery range pretending that archery was a useful skill to have in early EverQuest.

Here we are, practicing archery!

It was not.  Hager Sureshot?  More like Hager Pants on Fire!

I spent a long time with the fletching kit making a bow and some arrows and trying to shoot things and… and… I still wish I had just made a druid.  I mean, Spirit of the Wolf!  I think rangers got that at level 41 while druids picked it up at level 6.

My memories of the day involved me pretty quickly wanting to get out of Surefall and into the world, there not seeming to be all that much in the zone.  However, there is a whole hidden set of caves in the back of the zone… a lot more than I remember looking at the map that Project 1999 wiki has posted.

Surefall Glade Map – Circa 1999

That Project 1999 wiki is going to be very useful for these posts, and I am not going to be shy about swiping the maps since they themselves harvested them elsewhere.  I’ve posted a few of them here before from other sources.

My vague, 25 years in the past recollection is that there were some bears in the cave and a quest and a campfire or something.  But on day one I was on my way elsewhere, which meant going through the most awkwardly long tunnel in Norrath.  The map does not due justice to how long that tunnel to Qeynos hills feels… and how sudden that stop comes when you finally hit the zone line and thing the game has frozen, then how long you wait for the next zone to load.

And that next zone is Qeynos Hills.

Guarding Surefall Glade like anybody would want to get in there

We’ll get there shortly.  It is still loading.

In just a month and a half, on March 16th, EverQuest will turn 25 years old.

The anniversary tower looms, reminding us of the event

Part of me thinks this is a “very big deal” and that I should do “something” to mark or otherwise commemorate the passing of 25 years since I wandered into Fry’s on my way home from work that March evening and picked up the EverQuest box then went home and became fixated on this new virtual world.

That is at odds with another part of me which frankly points out that, aside from a brief flirtation with the Fippy Darkpaw progression server back in 2011… a dalliance that cut short by the Sony/SOE hacking event that took their games offline for weeks… I haven’t played EverQuest in any sort of serious way for over 20 years.

We had high expectations

I think the last expansion I was anywhere close to being around for was Planes of Power, and the the word “around” is doing some very heavy lifting in the sentiment.  After that I gave my account to a co-worker who was still playing because we were in a new house with crappy dial-up internet, a baby to care for, and I was pretending I had something like a career as opposed to a mere series of accidental events chained together to look like a career… and in the middle of all of that EverQuest was out the window.

It isn’t as though I have not played EverQuest at all.  I started poking my nose in when SOE gave us the Station Access pass when EverQuest II came out… you needed that for more character slots… and it included EverQuest as well.

So I have been back and through Glooming Deep a few times… a fun tutorial for the game that completely misrepresents what you’ll face after you leave it… and through some of the Serpent’s Scale leveling areas, and I even did a level 1 to 50 run, such that it was, back for the 20th anniversary, the highlight of which was my attempts to find the Scarlet Desert.

But the reality of the fact that I don’t actually play EverQuest really strikes home when I think about “doing” something in EverQuest. and not just due to the almost archaeological layers of features, currencies, and alternate advancement options that have accrued over 25 years and 30 expansions.  That alone is almost impenetrable for somebody walking up to the game after being away for years.

The simple scale of the world starts to get in the way of things pretty quickly.  I tend to think of Norrath, the setting of EverQuest, as something like this in scale.

Classic Norrath

But even back at the 20th anniversary the scale was more like… uh… the state of Delaware.

That is a lot of walking

One of my early thoughts was to visit every zone.  That is something I could, as an example, do in an afternoon in the soon to be 20 year old title of World of Warcraft, and still have time for something else.

EverQuest though… well… even with an in-game list of zones, finding them all is not a trivial task.

Scrolling through the zones

(As an aside, the team needs to stop naming zones with “the” as the first word, as when you sort by name there is a long, long stretch of “The thingy” and “The epic place” and “The sodding other one” and so on.)

That was before I even considered that having a level 90 character to go explore with in a game where the level cap is 125 might be problematic.  There would certainly be comedy value in some of that, but it would also be a lot of work because all I really have is a list of zones so even were I to try traveling to them all there is no way I could do so with any efficiency.

So that plan quickly got narrowed down to zones I could actually survive in to zones from expansions I have actually played to maybe zones of the first five expansions to just the original zones to maybe I’ll just walk around Qeynos and take some screen shots and mention how many people drowned in that pond in the city because they couldn’t figure out how to get out.

I am still thinking on all of that, looking for an angle that will be memorable an possibly informing.  Maybe a pass by some key landmarks from the early days?

Just this bridge in West Karana brings back memories

Or maybe I’ll write some over wrought nostalgia piece at the last minute.

This is a work in progress, and I still have a good six weeks before it is due.  By college standards that isn’t close enough for me to even begin to worry.