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?