#2 - Bogle - Born 29 November 1999 - Time Played, 28 days 13 hours

First of all, let's get one thing straight. His name is Bogle, not Boglex. 

I rarely run into naming issues after server merges, mostly because few of my characters have the kind of names anyone else would want - or take if they were offered. Someone other than me must have wanted "Bogle", though, because last time he moved server he got that annoying "X" tacked on to the end of his name.

It could have been worse. Mrs Bhagpuss once had a character who woke up one morning with no fewer than three "X"s trailing along behind them like the string on a cheap kite.

If I'd still been playing him, I'd have changed his name to something more suitable, of course, but it's a very long time indeed since he's done anything more than stand around in the Bazaar. For a very short while, though, a very long time ago, I was playing him several hours a day, every day.

I won't say he was my "Main" because it's a concept that felt alien to me all through my years in Norrath but for a couple of weeks I did only have two characters in EverQuest and I wasn't playing the other one, so I guess he's as entitled to the description as anyone.

As a dwarven cleric, it will almost certainly surprise everyone who knows anything about early EQ to hear that Bogle was the first character I created with the specific intention of soloing. It won't be such a surprise to hear that he was really bad at it. The time did come, eventually, when clerics became really quite good soloists but that was many years away.

EverQuest was primarily a group-oriented game but as I tire of explaining, it was, by design, never intended to be a game in which grouping was the only option. Brad McQuaid and his team deliberately included a handful of classes that were meant to be capable of reaching the original level cap of 50 without outside assistance. At the head of the very short list of soloable classes came the Necromancer. The Cleric wasn't on the list at all.

I did quite a bit of research before I even bought the game so even before I began playing, I knew players were broadly expected to group up. Nevertheless, I was determined to solo right from the start, first out of fear but fairly quickly out of misanthropy. 

In 1999, online gaming was very far from being a mainstream choice even for gamers and I was very nervous about the whole idea. The idea of playing online with actual people, who might try and talk to me was positively terrifying.

I figured at the least I ought to spend some time on my own first, working out how to play my character without making a complete fool of myself. A couple of days with Daline the Warrior had firmed me up on the basics but it was already clear she wouldn't get me much further so I did a little research to find out who might.

Unfortunately for me, whoever wrote the guide to soloing EverQuest I found online had some rather idiosyncratic ideas on the best way to go about it. I can't remember now which other classes they recommended but I do know one of their top picks for going it alone alone was the Cleric. 

What the reasoning was I no longer remember but I find it hard to imagine it was because the writer had personal experience. I'm guessing they just saw self-heals, resurrection spells and plate armor and thought "Can't get much safer than that."

I believe they also specified the Cleric should be a dwarf, probably for the racial bonuses, which could be quite significant in the early days. I'm not sure I'd have rolled a shortie otherwise, although as I soon discovered, once you go low...

What puzzles me more than why I played Bogle at all is that, although I played him every day for two weeks straight, I remember next to nothing about the experience, other than a couple of significant incidents. Then again, it was a quarter of a century ago...

He must have started in Kaladim, the starting city of the dwarven race, an underground maze carved into the hillside in Butcherblock on the Fey continent of Faydwer. I don't believe Dwarves had any choice about that. Still, I can't remember much about it. I know Kaladim itself pretty well. I've been lost in its tunnels many times. I just don't remember Bogle being there when it happened. 

I do vaguely remember leveling him in Butcherblock for a while, although where he went and what he did there I have no idea. He also must have been the first of my characters to take the long ocean voyage from Faydwer to Antonica by boat, a rite of passage I really ought to remember but sadly don't, probably because it was an uneventful trip. 

He'd just have walked to the dock from Kaladim, waited for the boat to arrive, passed the journey on deck, watching the waves go by, then walked down the gangplank into Freeport twenty minutes later. I have much clearer memories of doing the journey as a Gnome Necromancer a little later. That was an adventure.

There are two things I do remember very clearly indeed about Bogle's progress to Level 9, other than that it took me two weeks, playing several hours every day. One of those things is chasing rattlesnakes up and down the narrow strip of sand outside the East Commons Tunnel, trying to club them to death with a hammer. 

As I remember it, my rationale was that no-one else wanted to hunt them because they had a vicious poison. As a Cleric I could cure that, so I had them to myself most of the time, not something you could say about many spawns in the over-populated early days of the game.

I'm not surprised no-one else wanted to hunt them. It takes a long time to do a level on rattlesnakes alone or it certainly did in 1999. That's possibly why I relocated to nearby Nektulos Forest, although what I went there to hunt instead escapes me. It's possible I was after Wisps for the lightstones that sold for big money but I'm not sure I would have known about those at the time. 

What I do know for sure is that I took Bogle there at Level 9 and he fell in the river and got eaten by piranhas. It's an experience I'm not likely to forget. It marked the first time I died and couldn't get my corpse back. 

I did try but I got eaten by piranhas a second time and almost a third and decided to call it quits. It was upsetting to lose my corpse and all my stuff, not to mention all that xp, but absolutely nowhere near as traumatic as when it happened to another of my characters a short while later. But we'll get to that in due course.

I think the blow was softened considerably by the fact that by then I was already pretty fed up with coming home from work every evening to nothing but snakes. I did hunt other creatures as well but they were even slower to level on and I was getting disillusioned with the prospect of soloing a dwarven Cleric at all. I imagine I was relieved to have an excuse to stop and try something else instead. 

One aspect of early EQ that doesn't always get as much attention as it should is the way it strongly encouraged experimentation at the early stages, something modern MMORPGs rarely do. Once you got into the mid-levels, the sheer weight of sunk cost, in terms of time spent, could lock you into carrying on with whatever class you'd recklessly or foolishly chosen, but the first few levels, while incredibly slow by modern standards, didn't always feel particularly slow at the time, so starting over often seemed like a better plan than carrying on. 

Better yet, starting over as a new class or race always felt like a new beginning. If you changed class and race it felt almost like a new game.

Because of that, the temptation to re-roll and try again was always there in the background when anything went wrong or even when xp just slowed to a crawl. Apart from the hours you'd put in so far, you were unlikely to lose much if you switched to something else. And the classes and races were so different, each from the other. 

There was a modicum of sharing but most races had their own starting cities and low-level areas, so beginning again always felt fresh. Races were also more substantively different in gameplay than would be acceptable today. No two damage-dealers or healers or tanks played alike and even the experience of playing the same class could be radically altered by a change of race. Playing a Shaman as a Barbarian was a significantly different experience from playing one as a Troll, for example. 

When Bogle lost his corpse in the shallow river in Nektulos Forest I'd only been playing for a couple of weeks but I was already itching to try something new. As will become apparent, that itch never truly went away as long as I played the game. My history with EQ is as much a string of new beginnings as anything.

My dwarven Cleric took a lengthy break at Level 9 but as you can see from the mugshot at the top, he eventually made it into the mid-20s. I have no clear memory of how or when or where he did it although I do seem to recall him grouping in Lake of Ill Omen and Paludal Caverns at some point, most likely after I'd leveled another cleric to the cap and knew how to play one in a group. I can certainly remember Bogle complaining bitterly about the inadequacy of low-level cleric heals (They are terrible, or they were then...) so he - or rather I - must have had some experience of better by then.

Later still, Mrs Bhagpuss borrowed him to use as a Bazaar vendor because we'd long since traded accounts and we each had a few of the other's legacy characters sitting around, doing nothing. I carried on playing EQ long after she stopped and at some point I must have taken him over again because he's still in the Bazaar but he now has a bunch of my crap in his trading satchels.

I don't imagine he'll be moving anywhere else, any time soon. Or ever.