The Final Five... Er, Wait, No... There's Six Of Them

Not some super-villain troupe, although it would make a good name for one, if I could count. No, this is the final installment in my much-delayed series commemorating EverQuest's twenty-fifth anniversary. If the filings from the ongoing lawsuit against pirate server The Heroes' Journey are any indication, we may not get to the thirtieth so I guess I ought to get on with wrapping this up before it's too late.

And as I intimated last time, I'm going to bundle the remaining characters up into one post because I don't have an awful lot to say about any of them. We've reached the point where I'd pretty much stopped making new characters, or at any rate new characters I had any real intention of playing. I didn't stop playing EQ, I just mostly relied on the characters I already had and any new ones I made were mainly to try out various retro servers or to perform basic admin functions like banking.

In order of creation, the Final Five Six are: 

20 - Nikolaiovitch - (Level 18) - Born 6 January 2006 - Played 14 hours 45 minutes

21 - Lyrielle - (Level 35) - Born 29 June 2006 - Played 6 days 6 hours

22 - Woolhat - (Level 23) - Born 20 July 2008 - Played 8 hours 30 minutes

23 - Gladwaller - (Level 85) - Born 22 August 2008 - Played 1 day 17 hours

24 - Cofferstone (Level 2) - Born 7 March 2015 - Played 1 day 9 hours

25 - Telza - (Level 85) Born 17 March 2017 - Played  3 hours 23 minutes

Nikolaiovitch is the Gnome Necromancer I made to replicate my original Gnome Necromancer, Nickolai. I don't have any clear memory of exactly why I needed another Necro at the start of 2006 and with a played time of a little less than fifteen hours, I clearly never did much with him. 

Since he's currently on Luclin-Stromm, the home of the bulk of my most regularly-played characters over the last twenty years, I'm guessing I had some plan to level him up that never really went anywhere. I have the vaguest memory that I ended up not liking the way I'd made his name so similar to a much more established character and that it put me off playing him but I probably didn't need much of an excuse to leave him where he is now, in the Bazaar, hanging around the bank.

If Nickolaiovitch is a bit of a mystery, Lyrielle is a giant enigma. I have no memory of her whatsoever and yet she's somehow managed to get to Level 35, with over six days played. That's a hundred and fifty hours of online time and looking at her skills I can see she's been played normally for pretty much all of that, which is at least fifty full-length sessions. 

Her casting skills are all close to maxed for her level, she's worked on tailoring some, she's almost maxed in Forage. Her bags have stacks of fish scales, suggesting she's done some fishing in her time. She's wearing a mish-mash of exactly the kind of gear I'd expect one of my characters to have if they'd been played properly or at least the way I usually play.

And yet I remember nothing about her at all. She's another Druid, so nothing about the gameplay would have been likely to have stuck in my memory. She's on Xegony/Druzil Ro, two servers I have never knowingly played on, although Xegony is where Mrs Bhagpuss and I ended up moving our Ant. Bayle crew, right before we stopped playing them altogether.

The only real clue is her birth month, June 2006. Thanks to the extremely useful EverQuest Servers list at Bonzz.com. I'm able to say that two new servers launched that month - The Combine and The Sleeper. As I write, a faint memory is coming back to me that I did indeed play on The Combine when it launched and Bonzz notes that The Combine was merged into Druzzil Ro three years later, which is pretty conclusive proof that Lyrielle was the character I played.

 

So, it appears that in the summer of 2006 I made a new druid to play on a new TLP/Classic/Level Restricted server and stuck it out long enough to get her to Level 35, which would have required some fairly serious commitment. A hundred and fifty hours' worth, in fact. That means I must have played Lyrielle for longer than nearly every game on my Steam account - and I still can't tell you a damn thing about her!

I can't even remember why she's called Lyrielle. Most of my characters are named for some other character in some book I read and this certainly sounds like one of those names but it's not ringing any bells at all.  

With Woolhat, on the other hand, I know exactly where the name comes from. He's an Iksar Monk and he used to be called Nesmith. Then there was some server merge or other and he ended up with an X on the end of his name so I renamed him Woolhat. 

I imagine most people reading this (People read this stuff?!) don't need any further explanation but for the few that may, Mike Nesmith was one of the Monkees and I thought it was clever to name a Monk after a Monkee. I bet no-one else ever thought of that! And his nickname in the TV show was Woolhat. Because he always wore a wool hat. So the renaming was even cleverer! 

(The Monkees were a pop group. They had a TV show in the sixties. Ask your grandparents.)

Nesmith/Woolhat did get played a little but for the longest time his main function has been as one of my Bazaar traders and bankers. He holds and sells a lot of stuff for other characters. These days, hold it is all he does because I haven't set him to trade for years. But he's happy enough.

Gladwaller, it will surprise no-one to know, has been boosted. I didn't level him to 85. He was played, though, for a while, before that happened. He's a Gnome Enchanter and I made him when I fancied playing the class and didn't have one to hand. I messed around with him for a bit and got him into the teens or twenties then dropped him, I think because we moved servers. 

I have no clue why I boosted him years later. The idea of jumping in at Level 85 and trying to play an Enchanter, either solo or in a group, is just fatuous. Maybe I wanted a buff-bot. I'm pretty sure he's never left Plane of Knowledge since he drank the potion.

His name would appear to be taken from J.D. Salinger, which would make him my most literary of steals. As a massive Salinger fan, I may well have chosen it deliberately because of that, although I don't recall doing it. More likely I just had the name in mind from reading some Salinger around the same time.

Cofferstone's name probably comes from Frances Hardinge's  Fly By Night or Twilight Robbery, two excellent novels from which I've borrowed several names for characters in various games. If he seems to have a lot of played hours for a Level 2, that's because he's my other Bazaar trader. I have one on each of the two accounts I (used to) play regularly. Cofferstone got a lot of use when I was leveling Magmia by doing Overseer missions every day. You can make very good money like that. And I did, for a few months, until all the swapping between accounts to hand the stuff across got on my nerves.

And finally we come to Telza, about whom there really is nothing to say. Another boosted character, this time a Shaman. I have never played a Shaman beyond the teens so, like Gladwaller, the idea of starting at 85 is fanciful. Then again, I have played a Beastlord, all the way to 84, and the skill sets are extremely similar, so maybe it's not such a crazy idea after all.  

Still never did it, though. Again, Telza has almost certainly never left PoK.  She's named for Telzey Amberdon, lead character in a series of novels by James H. Schmitz, all of which I have now read, although I'm not sure I had back in 2017, when I created her. 

In the first of the series, which I read in the 1970s, Telzey has an intelligent great cat as a companion, and I'm fairly sure my original plan was to use one of the free boosts to make a Beastlord, for whom the reference would have been highly appropriate. When the time came, though, I decided against it on the grounds that I already had a perfectly good Beastlord and I went for a Shaman instead, which is a less-good fit for the name. 

And then I never played her and made another Beastlord later and boosted her instead. So much for planning. Should have saved the name.

As that last sentence suggests, I didn't stop making characters after these twenty-five. I did slow down a lot but there are maybe half a dozen more out there, including a few I've actually played, like Shadbaggle (Yet another boosted Necro.), Clatterhorse (Who had a run on one of the TLE servers for a while.), Taffetty and Corella. All of whom I remember more clearly than poor old Lyrielle the Forgotten Druid.

Will I ever make another? I wouldn't bet against it. Every time I write one of these posts I start to feel the old itch.

For now, though, that's it, I think. No more characters to write about. Anniversary celebration complete.

I do have another idea for a series of ad hoc posts, where I wax nostalgic about the days when I actually played games instead of just wrote about them. Something about EverQuest II, this time. We'll see how that goes...