And so we come to Magmia. As should be obvious by her excessively long Played Time, she's one of my most important characters. Remember, too, that those numbers are actual hours logged into the game, which means that - if we say an average, full session in EverQuest takes about three hours - I must have played her, at a minimum, more than eight hundred times.
Of course, MMORPGs don't really work like that. Magmia's been around long enough that there would have been plenty of times when I spent all day with her and also long enough that she'll have been woken up for an hour here, an hour there before disappearing back into whatever quiet limbo game characters inhabit when they're not being played.
As we'll hear later, there was a full year when all she did was Overseer dailies, which meant she was online for only about fifteen minutes every day and never left the Guild Lobby. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Magmia was the character I made to play on Stromm when it became obvious Magmus wasn't cutting it. Apparently that took me a day to decide. I made him on the third of May and Magmia on the fourth.
I was hedging my bets, too, because as you'll have noticed, Magmia has an equals sign by her numeral in the title. That's because I made two characters on the second day Stromm was up, clearly not having figured out what class I wanted to play yet.
The other character, who we'll meet next time, was a Druid (Still is, in fact...), which suggests I was looking for someone with both utility in a group and also strong solo potential, a description that fits both Magicians and Druids well.
That makes perfect sense. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I got off to a flying start on Stromm, meeting a bunch of new people, starting a guild, running around in a gang having fun, so classes welcome in groups, especially at low levels, were ideal. Even in 2003, though, Stromm was very far from being my first new server rodeo and I would have been well aware of the likelihood that almost all the new people we were adding to our friends lists and inviting into the guild wouldn't be there in a few weeks' time.
The Stromm server itself was pretty successful, off the back of being a genuine, fresh start server, to which transfers were not permitted. It went on to have a long life before it was eventually rolled into Luclin. Lots of people did make it their permanent home but not many of them were the people we'd been cultivating. I can't remember how long we lasted on Stromm that first time around except that it was long enough for almost everyone we'd met to leave before us.
Before then, though, we had a lot of fun. I remember doing a great deal in the Luclin early zones, particularly the infamous Paludal Caverns, which at one time had a much higher Zone Experience Modifier than most, leading to every possible grinding spot being camped 24/7. The trains were legendary and I can still hear those awful echoing screams - sound samples that looped constantly in the dark, dismal caves.
Oh, yes... we know how to make our own fun in those days!
Well, I did. And one one way I did it was running a one-gnome trading service. I figured out that there were tradable items you could buy from vendors in Katta Castellum that you couldn't get in Luclin's main city, Shadow Haven, so I started running out there to buy them and bring them back to sell in the Bazaar.
I can't remember what they were any more - probably either crafting mats or reagents I imagine - but I do remember the route; Paludal Caverns>Hollowshade Moor>Grimling Forest>Tenebrous Mountains>Katta Castellum. That took me through a whole series of dark, confusing, extremely dangerous zones and although Magmia could make herself invisible that didn't help much with all the vampires along the way.
It was the sort of thing I really loved to do back then, though. Long journeys alone through treacherous territory, always at the risk of sudden death and a difficult corpse recovery. I prided myself on my ability to get to places characters of my level shouldn't go and if I could use that to turn a profit I liked it even better.
In Magmia's case it all went so well I made a small fortune or what seemed like it at the time. She made enough money to buy herself a horse before anyone in her social group and indeed before most of the rest of the server. That was when even having a mount was still something of a status symbol and Magmia certainly made the most of it. She was never off that pony and she reveled in the attention it brought her. It was her one moment of fame.
Backtracking a little, as I recall, we held out on Stromm until we were in the low thirties, not an
insignificant achievement back in EQ in 2003, but then we moved on to somewhere else. Looking at the timings on my list I think it must have been back to Antonius Bayle, where we did the core of our serious guild and group play for a couple of years.
Magmia went into semi-retirement after that, coming back now and then, whenever I felt like having some time on my own, away from the never-ending guild drama that dogged those social years. And that might have remained her fate, had Mrs Bhagpuss and I not then come back to Stromm much later for what turned out to be our swan-song as an EverQuest duo.
That, though, is more Ratha's story than Magmia's. We haven't met Ratha yet. Don't worry. She'll be along soon enough.
On that return to Stromm we brought characters with us, so we didn't strictly need our old ones but Magmia got plenty of play anyway. According to that 2014 post, she was Level 69 when I boosted her and I can remember wrecking around with Mrs Bhagpuss's Necromancer through a whole load of Planes of Power, Gates of Discord and Omens of War zones, having enormous fun for a while. Two mildly over-levelled, highly over-geared (Thanks to expansion-led power creep.) pet classes with a healer mercenary apiece can do a whole lot in EverQuest and make great xp while they're doing it.
That was Magmia's second act and it was a good one but after Mrs Bhagpuss finally gave up on EverQuest for good in favor first of EverQuest II and later Guild Wars 2, I mostly dropped the game as well. It wasn't until much later - specifically 2014 and that level boost - that I came back for the first of several moderately intensive stints in the elder game.
Level 85 was higher than I'd ever been in EQ and it opened up the prospect of several expansions-worth of new content. Magmia's third act consisted of some quite serious solo play as I slowly and carefully edged my way up into the 90s, eventually topping out at 92, by when zones giving good xp had become too dangerous and difficult to be fun any more.
Some of that seven-level journey is told in sporadic posts here on the blog although you'd have to have more gumption than I do right now to go dig the details out. I do remember having a lot of fun in Secrets of Faydwer and Seeds of Destruction, though, which brought me up to Norrath circa 2009. And that's where she'd have stopped, either forever or at least until Daybreak saw fit to increase the level range on the boost program (Something they eventually got around to only last year.), had it not been for the Overseer feature.
Mercenaries give you a healer or a tank on tap, letting you kill mobs that would otherwise wipe the floor with you. Overseer lets you level up without having to kill any mobs at all.
When the Overseer system was added just over five years ago it didn't immediately seem like anything very impressive or even useful. That's because it takes a good while to wind up before you let it go. Once you've got it primed, though, it can make you casual-rich and push you up the level ladder like nothing else outside of a decent group.
This isn't a post about Overseer so I'll leave it at that. The reason for bringing it up at all is that for about a year I "played" Magmia just about every day and she never moved off the spot where I logged her in. I set her Overseer dailies, concentrating on missions with xp rewards and in that way she went from 92 to the then level-cap of 115 in... well, not in no time but at a considerably faster rate than I would have been able to level her in the conventional manner, at no risk whatsoever, in a fraction of the session time.
The only problem was that it was so efficient it spoiled me for the real thing. I did actually take her out a few times to take a look at a few of the new zones her new levels had opened up but although she was able to hunt quite safely there, the xp-per-hour was so slow compared to staying home and doing the Overseer missions, it felt like a bit of a fool's move leaving the lobby.
In the end I just left her where she was, safe and comfy, and plugged away until she hit the cap. After that I kept on doing missions for quite a while, shifting my focus to those that gave rewards she could pass to my Bazaar trader to sell for good money to other players with less patience and business acumen. That made me a lot of platinum for a while, until I finally lost interest and stopped logging in.
And that's where Magmia stands now. The level cap moved on to 120 and then to 125 and will most likely go to 130 with this year's expansion. I keep thinking of starting up on Overseer again to catch her up but it's certainly not going to happen before I finish doing the same in EQII. I can't face setting two lots of missions every day for a year...
You might well ask what would be the point anyway? There's no realistic chance I'll ever play EverQuest with serious intent again. Not only has that ship sailed, it's come back to port, hung about for a while, gone back out and come in again. Several times. I've given the game a good go but time moves on.
All of which doesn't mean I won't ever play again - I just won't play even slightly seriously. I might do some sightseeing, though. Another ten or fifteen levels would open up at least two more expansions, probably more, with zones I've never visited and content I've never seen, all of which would make for prime tourist opportunities. The last expansion I really know to any meaningful degree is probably 2013's Call of the Forsaken so the potential for seeing new things is huge.
And if anyone's going to realize that potential it's surely going to be Magmia. It was never planned and for a long time it wasn't even dreamed of but somehow she's ended up being my EverQuest "main".
It couldn't have happened to a more deserving gnome!
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