Before we get started, I feel I really ought to apologize for the abomination you see directly above. I have no idea what Osterberg is wearing but clearly he ought not to be allowed out in public dressed like that. He looks like a still from a slasher flick with the polarities reversed.
And he's such a nice chap, too - for an Iksar Shadowknight. Arguably the most evil class and race combo you can get in EverQuest, although I wouldn't say it out loud anywhere near Neriak. Dark Elves have a rep to keep up.
It might be quite surprising, looking back, to hear it took me exactly a month after the launch of EQ's first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, to get around to making an Iksar, the new race that came with it. I can remember exactly why it happened. It was because I was worried that if I made one right away I'd find it too distracting. At the time, I was on a break from Rachel, my druid, after her disastrous introduction to the new continent but I was planning on getting back on the Druid horse and I felt having a whole new city and no fewer than four fresh starting zones to explore might pull focus from that plan.
Instead of bolting the new content on to the top of the level range, as has become the custom for most expansions in most MMORPgs ever since, Kunark simply duplicated the entire base game in a different setting; specifically a jungle. It came with a huge, new city, Cabilis, big enough to need splitting into two separate zones, East and West, in which lived a new, playable race, the reptilian Iksar.
In the classic language of Dungeons and Dragons, Iksar were Lawful Evil, with a complicated, hierarchical society largely dominated by Necromancers and Shadowknights. There were other class choices available to them, most notably the new Monk class, which turned out to be extremely popular, but I kept my own monkish experiments for the PvP server, Rallos Zek, about which we will hear no more, mostly because whoever my character there was, he no longer exists.
I decided to make an Iksar SK rather than a Monk because... No, at this remove, your guess is as good as mine. Possibly I'd enjoyed the Necromancer and fancied something similar but more robust. Who knows?
One thing I do remember is that I was very impressed by the starting options available to new Iksars. They had four full-size starting zones! What the heck were the devs thinking?
The zones were Field of Bone, Swamp of No Hope, Warsliks Woods and Lake of Ill Omen. Strictly speaking, I suppose only the first was a pure starter zone, with mobs tapping out around level 20. The others all had content that went right into the low 30s. But all four could be accessed directly from Cabilis and all began at Level 1. It was perfectly possible to level up in any one of them or in any combination.
If you could find your way out of the damned city, that is. I never could, not without going wrong half a dozen times first.
Eventually I became quite fond of Cabilis but for a long time I found it extremely frustrating. Not only was it a confusing maze of streets, it also had canals everywhere and more three-dimensionality than any of the original cities, even treetop Kelethin. There were ladders in Cabilis and you could climb them, which was just as well because when you fell in the canals that was the only way you were going to get out.
I don't remember a huge amount about hunting in any of the starting zones other than Field of Bone, where I spent most of the first ten or twelve levels. As you might guess from the name, FoB is full of undead, which worked out very nicely for a Shadowknight - or at least it did when they got spells at level 9. Until then it was all straight-up melee combat much like a warrior.
I know I got spells well before I decided I needed a change of scene. In fact, I got to the second set at level 15. By then, xp in Field of Bone was slowing down somewhat and it was a few years later because I hardly played Osterberg most of the time. He quickly became one of the many characters I was "working on", which meant I logged him in now and again, when I remembered, for bit of leveling before I rested him for another few months.
For most of my first decade in EverQuest I didn't just make a lot of characters, I played several in every session. I would routinely spend two or three hours on whoever I was supposed to be leveling at the time, then another thirty minutes or an hour or so each on two or three others, often on different servers. It's no wonder it took me years to get any of them to the cap.
Osterberg got played non-stop for about two weeks, which seems to have been the limit of my attention span back then, after which he was mostly forgotten. He was stuck at level 15 for a very long time until finally I decided I'd had enough of Kunark and moved him to Antonica. In a way, it was a repeat of the Tarquinn episode, undertaken for much the same reason and with much the same result.
I don't have any clear memories of the trip except that it was a lot easier because by then we'd had the Plane of Power expansion so getting from one continent to another was very straightforward. You just clicked on one of the new books that popped up on pedestals all across Norrath, particularly in starting zones, and ported yourself up to the Plane of knowledge. From there, you just needed to find the Portal for the city or zone you needed and port yourself back down again.
That got Osterberg out of Kunark but it didn't endear him to anyone in the old world, where Iksars are even more reviled than Trolls. Even Dark Elves won't tolerate them, mostly for reasons of religion, I believe.
Or so the rumor has it. Osterberg wouldn't know. Back when he was in the leveling business, SKs didn't get Feign Death until level 30 and Shroud of Death not until fifty-five. But it didn't matter. He could always jog back to the book and port himself up to Plane of Knowledge, where everyone's money is good. Or use the Spires to go to the moon of Luclin, another egalitarian society.
One of the defining factors of Norrath is how its inhabitants became progressively less psychotic, less ready to kill strangers on sight, as the years rolled by. With the exception of the xenophobic Iksar, just about every subsequent outpost of civilization that revealed itself in an expansion was happy to open, if not its arms, then at least its banks and stores to outsiders.
If I wanted to go back and play Osterberg now, which having written this I feel I just might, I could do it with little more difficulty than any of my more broadly-tolerated characters, always provided I took care not to stray into any of the unreconstructed pits of bigotry that pass for towns and cities in Antonica. Or the strongholds of Faydwer, either, obviously, although no-one goes where there are that many elves, not if they have any sense.
There's only one thing left to say about Osterberg and that's to tell how he got his name. I named him after Iggy Pop because Iggy does look kind of like a lizard and "Iggy" just sounds reptilian. Then, having thought of it, I decided Iggy was too obvious. Everyone would know why I'd picked it and I couldn't be having that! So I borrowed from Iggy's real name, James Jewel Osterberg, instead.
Even then,I was sure someone would spot the reference and ask me about it. Of course, they never did. No-one ever does with any of the names I pick. In all the time I've played EQ, a few people have sent me tells saying they like the name of a character I'm playing but only one person has ever asked me why I chose it.
That was when I was playing Osterberg but it had nothing to do with Iggy Pop. I got a message one day while I was playing him, asking me aout the name and when I explained how I'd come up with it, they clearly had no idea who I was talking about.
"Oh, I thought you might be a friend of mine. That's his name. Osterberg" was all they said and I never heard from them again.
Social gaming, eh? It's so overrated.
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