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