#13 - Morden - Born 8 October 2001 - 3 days 19 hours

Well, that didn't go how I thought it would. 

I should get that printed on a T-shirt, right below the EverQuest logo.

So, what I thought I was going to do this morning was log in Morden, my Level 14 Cleric on the Roleplaying server, Firiona Vie. take a couple of screenshots and then write something about the history of the server, or at least the opening day or two, which is pretty much all I remember. 

This being EverQuest, things turned out rather differently.

After a very minor delay, when I guessed wrongly which account he was on, I logged Morden in to the where he logged out whenever he was last played. That, as it is for almost all my characters, turned out to be Plane of Knowledge. 

It's usually there because from PoK you can get to just about anywhere you need to go by way of the many portals posted all around the place. It's also one hundred per cent safe for any class and race, which isn't something you can say about everywhere in Norrath, as we're about to find out.

If I don't find someone in PoK, odds are they'll be in the Guild Lobby, an adjacent instance with the added advantage of being the place where altruistic players unload their best buffs before logging out, meaning you can get yourself raid buffed if you hang about long enough. Since time stands still in both the Lobby and Plane of Knowledge, you get to keep those buffs, which can last for several hours, until you go somewhere else, so there's no incentive to leave unless you're going to go kill something.

It was night when I logged in. It's always night when I log in to any game to take screenshots. I realize this is perception bias but that doesn't mean it's not true. And night-time in Norrath is dark, or it is in Plane of Knowledge, anyway. Much too dark for a good picture.

It was while I was considering the light that I noticed Morden was holding a fishing rod. Don't ask me why. I guess he was fishing last time I played him but that was probably more than twenty years ago. Whatever the reason, it gave me an idea. 

I thought I'd get a shot of him "fishing" in the ornamental pool where the fishing vendor stands. There aren't any fish in the water there but who's to know? I got there and it was nice and bright with the street lights and the pale, blue tiles so I had him hop up on the low wall surrounding the pond and he fluffed it and fell in.

No problem. The water's only a couple of feet deep. Even a dwarf can't drown in two feet of water. He just can't get out.

Here's a thing that happens in EverQuest: if you fall into some water, especially water contained inside a walled structure like a pond or a fountain, sometimes you can't get out again. I've seen it happen lots of times. Someone jumps into a water feature, either by mistake or for fun or to practice swimming and then it comes time to get out and they find they're stuck. You can't jump in water and there's no climbing out without steps or a ladder like they have in the Cabilis canals.

What's supposed to happen, I think, is that whoever made the pond or the pool or the fountain is meant to include a spot where the physics changes and you just shoot out of the water onto land when you push against it. Only sometimes they forget.

They forgot when they made this one. Morden swam all around the pool, pressing against the wall, several times. He got about twenty skill-ups for his swimming skill but he couldn't find a way out of the water.

Fortunately, Morden is a Cleric and Clerics get the Gate spell. I figured he'd be bound in Plane of Knowledge - most of my characters are, for obvious reasons of convenience and practicality - so he'd just port out of the pool and appear on dry land somewhere nearby. 

Except that's not what happened. If I'd been given fifty guesses where he would have appeared I wouldn't even have come close.

For some reason long lost to the mists of time, when Morden last cast Bind Affinity to set his respawn point, he must have picked a spot right in the middle of Firiona Vie. That's the city, not the server or the Princess. Obviously.

Firiona Vie, as has been mentioned in previous posts, is a coastal port city on the continent of Kunark. It's where the boat comes in if you travel there by sea. It is also currently under the control of the Teir`Dal, Norrath's Dark Elven race. Dark Elves do not like Dwarves. Boy, do they not!

There was a big event some time around 2002-3, when the Teir'Dal wrested control of the city from the Feir'Dal, aka the Wood Elves. EverQuest used to go in for huge, game-changing events back then. People were much more tolerant of having the furniture re-arranged. Several cities changed hands and whole races turned refugee. It was a different time.

I can only imagine that when Morden bound himself in Firiona Vie, the Wood Elves (Good Elves.) were firmly in control. It still doesn't explain what he was doing there at Level 14, a good ten levels at least below where he'd need to be to do anythig in the zone, let alone why he'd have thought it was a good idea to bind there. Still, it would at least have been safe for him to do it.

It bloody well isn't now! Before I'd had time to take in my surroundings and figure out where the hell we were, some hyperactive Dark Elf Dragoon charged up and killed Morden in a couple of hits. He was dead on the boardwalk before I'd worked out what was happening.

This posed something of a dilemma but I can't say I haven't been there before. Quite a few times, actually. Getting suddenly and unexpectedly killed and having to figure out what to do about it is something of an occupational hazard in EQ.

I had a couple of ideas. The easiest solution would be to log out to character select and use the Return Home button that was added a few years into the life of the game to make things easier for customer service players by allowing people to log in to their starting towns instead of whatever dumb location they'd left their character in when they had to go answer the door or let the dog out.

By a bizarre co-incidence, however, when I'd logged in this morning, the first thing I'd seen was a message telling me it was Morden's birthday (It's tomorrow by my count but close enough.) and the second was a note telling me he was entitled to reset his home city to either Crescent's Reach, the newbie starting zone for The Serpent's Spine expansion or North Kaladim, the racial home of the Dwarves

To Return Home you have to have one, obviously, as I assume Morden must have, once but I was starting to doubt whether he had one any more. Not being interested in moving in with the Dragon-kin in Crescent's Reach, I tried to use the command to reset to Kaladim but apparently you can't do that when you're dead.

I couldn't bring him back to life to do it because his respawn spot was literally where his corpse was lying. He was in a classic death-bind loop, or he would be if I let him stand up. 

Never mind. There are ways. 

I tried to close EQ from the task bar and got the message "You can't camp while you're dead". So many things you can't do when you're no longer breathing. I tried Alt-F4 and Ctrl-F4 to no effect so I hit Alt-Ctrl-Del and closed the application from there. That worked.

I relogged and checked Return Home on Character Select. Greyed out. Looked like he didn't have a home after all. My next plan was to log him in and see if I could use the command to set one before he got killed again. 

Fortunately, this time, no-one attacked him right away. It seemed the guards were patrolling and didn't happen to be close enough to spot him immediately. I took the chance to scuttle down to the water's edge, well way from any patrol routes to re-assess the situation. Even at Level 14, I thought I had a fair chance of following the zone wall to the long tunnel through to Lake of Ill Omen. There's a Plane of Knowledge portal in a cave at the end of those tunnels or I seem to remember one there. 

It was a risky plan but it might have worked. Unfortunately, it failed before it really got started. 

First I had to swim across the river to what looked like some steps on the far side. Except they weren't steps, jut a line on the wall. Once again, I couldn't get out of the water, or not on the side I needed to be. And by then night had fallen because yes, that again, too.

I could barely see anything but I could see guards patrolling the walls. I seemed to recall there weren't any on the bridge, though. Even if there were, I could always jump off before I got to the end. As a plan it had even less to say in its favor than the last one but it might also have worked - if I could have seen where I was going. 

Sadly, it was far too dark. Before he even got to the bridge, Morden was smacked into oblivion by a twenty-foot tall Golem. Couldn't even see something that size - that's how dark it was.

At least I'd had the foresight to use that reset command to set his starting city to Kaladim before he went running off into the night. All I needed to do was hit Return Home... and it was still greyed out. 

A quick google told me there's a known bug with Return Home that frequently leaves it unusable for no particular reason. It's been like it at least all this year and no-one's done anything to fix it. Old game is old.

My back-up back-up plan of using a Level Boost at Character Select to bang Morden up to Level 85 or 100 failed when it turned out he didn't have any available. I know I have some on the account but they're probably still in Claim, waiting for me to collect them. Anyway, I didn't really want to waste one on him.

I logged back in yet again, once again avoiding the attentions of the local constabulary, and as I was thinking about my next move, the ship from Antonica (Or is it Feydwer?) sailed into view. After a moment's hesitation I had Morden leg it over to the dock to see if he could jump on board.

It was a very risky move in the darkened streets of a hostile city and I'd love to say my courage (Or recklessness.) paid off... but it neither did nor didn't. I got to the dock without mishap but not before the ship had sailed. I did at least manage to find what seems to be a safe spot to hunker down and wait and that's where Morden is now.

He may be there some time. There's no real urgency to move him, after all. It's not as though I'm going to play him. Do I really need to spend another hour trying to get him to safety just to park him for another twenty years? 

Even if I can get him on the boat, I'm not sure where it goes. If it's coming to an Evil port it most likely came from one, didn't it? I'm not sure ending up in the Evil Outpost in The Overthere would be much of an improvement.

What I'm probably going to do is leave Morden where he is for a bit and hope the Return Home button starts working. Supposedly the bug is intermittent. If that doesn't happen then he can just bide his time until I'm in the mood to do something about it. He's got his fishing rod and he's right next to the ocean. He's not going to starve.

All of which leaves me not much time to talk about the Firiona Vie server itself and how Morden came to be created there. It's an interesting and complicated tale but I'll keep it to the bare bones.

Firiona Vie was created about a year and a half after the launch of the game to provide something that had been a constant demand from day one, a server dedicated to roleplaying. There'd always been at least one unofficial RP server - it was Brell Serilis when I started Tarquinn there - but "the community" wanted more.

It didn't work, of course. Not even in the days when there were people employed to make sure the rules were kept. I forget now what the full ruleset was (There's a little more detail here.) but I remember there were plenty of clauses. All but two of them were withdrawn in a matter of months.

The two that stuck were Free Trade and no Common language. The first made sure the server prospered by attracting large numbers of players with no interest in roleplaying. The second proved how skin-deep any real interest in playing a role was even for the rest.

"Free Trade" meant almost no No Drop and Heirloom flags. If you had it you could sell it. That brought in a particular demographic, players mostly interested in becoming rich and powerful, arguably the antithesis of roleplaying unless you happened to be playing an oligarch or a railway baron. 

The language rule was more curious. There's a common tongue everyone speaks - called Common, naturally - but every race in EverQuest has its own language that any other race can learn. Prior to the arrival of a dedicated server catering to their needs, roleplayers traditionally spoke in the language proper to their chosen race, at least some of the time, so it seemed logical to remove the Common option and have them all learn each other's languages or not be able to communicate at all.

You can imagine how that went down in a group-oriented game with a culture of partying up with strangers. It didn't last the first day. In a matter of hours after the server came up someone decided there was going to be a common language after all and it was going be Elven. Thereafter, Elven was what everyone spoke but first they had to learn it. Which turned out to be no problem at all.

In Norrath you quickly pick up languages just by hearing them spoken. I remember sitting in a circle with a bunch of other people as one person gibbered away in Elven and the rest of us watched our skill tick up. Sometimes other races would chip in in their languages and those would go up too. I imagine now, after more than twenty years, Firiona Vie must be a server filled with polyglots, everyone fluent in every language. 

Or more likely they all speak Elven and no-one even thinks about it any more. So much for the great experiment.

Mrs Bhagpuss and made characters on Firiona Vie the day the server came up. The next day, we were gone. I don't at all remember it as being our grand farewell to the game  but from the timing I guess it must have been. I also have no clue how I came to play Morden for nearly four days, which amounts to over ninety hours in game. I suppose I must have but when it happened or what we did is lost to me now.

Firiona Vie launched on 8 October 2001. Dark Age of Camelot launched the following day. 

It would be over a year before I made my next character in EQ.

***Addendum***

After I posted this I went and made a cup of tea then came back and logged into EQ again, whereupon I found the Return Home button was working normally. I used it, ran Morden from North Kaladim to Plane of Knowledge and bound him there.

On the way through Kaladim I somehow once again managed to fall into some water, this time an underground stream, and once again I couldn't get out... until I thought to swap from third-person perspective to first, at which point getting out of the water became trivial. 

I now recall that that's how it always worked. EQ was designed as a first-person game with third being a buggy, awkward also-ran. I never even used third-person until I'd been playing for a couple of years and it didn't work reliably for a couple of years after that. Even when it did, I never used third in water. Always swap to first when you go swimming, that's the rule. Can't believe I forgot!