#4 - Tarquinn - Born 3 January 2000 - 7 days, 22 hours

Tarquinn was the first character I made with anything less than serious intent. I'd been playing for not much more than a month when I created him and I'd only just begun to loosen up a little.

EverQuest at the turn of the millennium wasn't exactly what you'd call a laff-fest and on top of that I'd already begun to develop a tendency towards the po-faced, an unfortunate attitude which would only get worse over the next couple of years. By the time I got to my fourth character, though, I was ready for some light relief. So I made a Troll and gave him a posh name. I thought it would be funny and it might have been, too, if he'd ever gotten as far as joining a group.

I'll pause so anyone who played EQ back then can have a good laugh at the idea of anyone playing a Troll and imagining it would be fun. Trolls were the least-played race for a long time, probably still are, and with good reason. 

Before the Iksar arrived with the first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, Trolls were the most hated race in Norrath. They were kill on sight in every city other than their home town of Grobb. Their neighbors, the Ogres, grudgingly tolerated them in Oggok but only if they kept out of sensitive areas like the Shadowknight Guild. The Dark Elves allowed Trolls into the Neriak Foreign Quarter but they certainly weren't welcome there. Trolls weren't welcome anywhere.

Somehow, not only did I think playing one of these social outcasts would be fun, I also didn't think it would be enough of a challenge, so fairly soon after I started playing him, I decided Tarquinn was going to move to Qeynos. It seems like a crazy idea but there was some logic to it. 

In his first few levels, Tarquinn died so many times to froglok tads, frogloks, swamp alligators and every other damn thing in the filthy swamp that Mrs Bhagpuss could not stop laughing. She was watching because at that point we were still sharing a PC, taking turns to play our characters. I think it was sheer humiliation that drove him to cross the continent at around Level six or seven.

Obviously he wasn't going to live in Qeynos. That would literally have been suicide. No, I had this super-smart idea to get him bound outside the city walls so he could level up in Qeynos Hills and Blackburrow. 

I think my reasoning was twofold: Innothule Swamp and The Feerrott, the two starting zones he had access to by birth, were dark, fetid, depressing and all too frequently fatal, whereas I'd found Qeynos Hills much more open, light and cheery during my time there with Raiffe. So long as Tarquinn could avoid falling down that hollow log in Blackburrow, I thought he'd do just fine.

The only problem (Not the only problem as it turned out...) was getting there. Travel in EQ back in 2000 was infamously slow and dangerous for just about anyone. Travel for a character whose levels were still measured in single figures was like running a deadly gauntlet. No, not "like". That's exactly what it was.

Nearly twenty-five years later I can still remember the zones he had to cross. In order, they were Innothule Swamp/The Feerrott/Rathe Mountains/Lake Rathetear/South Karana/West Karana/Qeynos Hills/South Qeynos. I can even remember the paths he took through each of them but the part I remember most clearly of all, the bit that quite literally had me on the edge of my seat, willing him not to die, was the trip across Lake Rathetear.

When they were developing EverQuest, someone at Verant Interactive must have had thought it would be cool to have boats you could steer. There were the big ships to take you from Feydwer to Antonica but all you did was sit on them while they followed their prescribed route. Wouldn't it be cool if you could get on a boat and make it go where you wanted it to go?

So you could. Except the boat in question was a tiny rowing boat that went in a straight line at what felt like walking pace. You couldn't pick those boats up and carry them, either. They were moored in a few places, one of them Lake Rathetear. If you wanted to cross the lake you either used one or you swam.

I knew where the boats were from the EQAtlas maps, all of which by then I had printed out (On the printer at work.) and kept, neatly bound, in a ring-binder file next to my PC. Unfortunately, when I got to the Lake Rathetear waterline, late at night, there was no boat to be seen. 

The small rowing boats in EverQuest, just like the big ships that crossed the Ocean of Tears, were physical objects in the world. You got in them and they moved. If you missed the ship, you had to wait for the next. If someone was using the rowing boat you needed, tough luck. The server would eventually put it back where it belonged after they left it wherever they got out but who knew how long that would take?

Certainly not me. I remember dithering for a bit and then making a decision. Tarquinn would have to swim. Across the whole lake, which meant swimming the length of the entire zone. 

In normal circumstances, playing a level-appropriate character, I'd probably have gone along the zone boundary instead, clinging to the vertiginous sides with that amazing bio-magnetism all Norrathians seem to have been born with. Unfortunately for Tarquinn, Lake Rathetear has a bunch of camps dotted around the perimiter, all filled with mobs ready and willing to tear a young Troll's head clean off. At his level, if any of them spotted him it would have been a quick trip back to his bind point in Grobb and start all over again.

I decided open water was the safer option although I had no clue what might be lurking below the surface. The entire time he was swimming I was terrified some freshwater shark would start tearing chunks out of him and he'd die in deep water and I'd never get his corpse back. And of course, since he was moving home, he was carrying everything he owned in his backpack - although realistically, how much could that have been?

Remember what happened to Bogle with the piranhas? And that was in a shallow river!  Lake Rathetear is deep. Anything that sinks there is not coming up again.

I'm happy to say that, unlike the Dwarf, the Troll made it to the far side in one piece. There are sharks in Lake Rathetear but they must all have been at a party with the aqua goblins that night. But his troubles weren't over yet.

It was dark when Tarquinn made the swim, which meant, when he came out of the water on the far side, the slightly less terrifying Gnolls that block the exit had been replaced by the much scarier night shift - higher level undead. It is just about possible to edge past them but in the dark it wouldn't be easy to find a safe path.

I don't recall exactly how he got past them. I just know he did. Chances are they were camped so he would have been able to take advantage of the slowish respawns. Everything was camped in those days and Gnolls/Undead was a fairly popular spot. Not as popular as the Aviaks across the zone line in South Karana, though, which was where Tarquinn found himself next.

Fortunately, although there's plenty in South Karana that will kill you as soon as look at you, it's mostly wide-open space with good visibility. After that, the rest of the trip is a long but almost completely safe run along the riverside all the way to Qeynos with very little chance of bumping into anything nasty. Unless you happen to be a Troll, of course, in which case the supposedly friendly guards are just another KoS mob to avoid.

There are no hair-raising near misses to report. Tarquinn made it to the walls of Qeynos in one piece. I think the whole trip took about thirty or forty minutes although it felt like several years. Once there, all he had to do was find someone to bind him before he had an unfortunate accident and woke up back in Grobb with the whole damn journey to do again. 

Let me just catch anyone not in the know up on "binding" in early EverQuest. Everyone had a "bind spot" which was where they'd respawn when they died. Obviously, you'd want that to be quite close to where you were planning on hunting and you'd want it to be safe. The problem with that was... well, there were a couple of problems...

First off, only seven classes got the Bind Affinity spell: the four cloth casters - Wizards, Enchanters, Necromancers and Magicians, and the three priests, Clerics, Druids and Shamans. Tarquinn was a Shaman so he could bind himself... when he reached Level 14. As you can see from the screenshot at the top of the post, he still hasn't.

Second, while those classes could bind themselves just about anywhere they liked, they could only bind other people in specific areas. Mostly cities. Qeynos was a city and it had a small strip of grass between the city wall and the zone line to Qeynos Hills. Players of races or classes not tolerated inside the walls often hung around a little way down from the gates, out of aggro range of the gate guards, shouting for someone to come bind them there.

In 2000, binding people who couldn't do it for themselves was good business. Not as good as casting SoW or using portal spells to taxi people around but still worth doing. Most casters would do it for tips and no-one expected much from a low level so it was a pretty safe bet you'd find someone willing to do it for next to nothing... if only you waited long enough.

I don't think it took too long for Tarquinn to get a bind. If it had, I'm sure I'd remember because being unbound that far from your respawn point was scary. I know for sure he got one before he died again and in fact I don't think he did die very often after that, which was part of the reason I wanted him there in the first place.

Even so, it didn't turn out quite like I'd planned. Quite literally every NPC on that side of the Rathe Mountains was ready to kill Trolls on sight. Not only could Tarquinn not use a bank or a crafting station, he couldn't even sell his trash loot to a merchant. As for training at a Shaman guild, you could forget it.

He tried Blackburrow but that didn't work out. Eventually he made it as far as Level 11, somehow, but it wasn't much fun. When I finally decided to retire him, he was in North Karana trying to learn how to kite on the big beetles there. It didn't feel much different from being back in Innothule, except the scenery was better.

I decided to move on from Tarquinn to another Priest class - one I'd noticed doing just about everything rather better than he could. That was the Druid. But before I made the move - and even before I was done with Tarquinn for good - I thought I'd have a go at being a Wizard. I mean, everyone wants to be a Wizard in a fantasy game at some point, don't they?

Maybe so but guess what? That didn't work out too well, either. More on that next time.