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... 

#19 - Ratha - Born 4 July 2004 - 59 Days 21 Hours

Here she is. Ratha, the last of the significant characters we're going to meet on this long, slow, much-delayed journey through EverQuest's first quarter-century. As her close on sixty played days suggests, she got out quite a bit. Also, if this series didn't have an established format for the titles, I'd definitely have called this post Born On The Fourth Of July.

One thing this series has taught me, as if I didn't know it already, is that my memory is shot. Even that suggests it was ever any good to begin with, which it most certainly wasn't. I have always had a bad memory and waiting a couple of decades to write anything down sure isn't making it any better.

It'd be lovely if I could say for sure why I decided to roll up a new character on July the fourth, 2004, which would have been very close to the end of my second stint playing EQ as my main MMORPG. To recap a little, the first run lasted from November 1999 to whenever Dark Age of Camelot went live (9 October 2001) and the second from about six months after that until I got into the EverQuest II beta sometime around the end of August or the start of September 2004.

There was a third substantive phase that began when EQII puttered out about six months after launch, a fourth around the time of the Serpent's Spine expansion in September 2006, (That was the expansion that was intended to re-boot the franchise and nearly succeeded) and a fifth and final hurrah, at least as any kind of group player, when Seeds of Destruction arrived in October 2008, bringing with it the game-changing Mercenary feature. 

Since then, I've been back a good few times, occasionally for quite long runs lasting several months, but always as a solo player. After I created Ratha in June 2004, though, I never again felt the need to start over from scratch with a brand new character, or at least not one that stuck. I may well roll the final five names on this list into a single post because there won't be much to say about any of them.

Ratha, though, has a very substantial history. And if I could remember it, I'd tell you what it was. Here's what I do remember...

Her name, for a start. She's named after the central character in a novel called Ratha's Creature by Clare Bell, the first in a series of novels collectively known as "The Books of the Named". She's a sentient, prehistoric great cat, who learns how to use fire, so you can see why I went there. 

There are five books in the series, published sporadically between 1983 and 2008. I used to review books for a semi-pro comics zine back in the eighties, which is how I got hold of the first and second books in the series. They were review copies. I still have them and they made a big impression on me at the time although not so much that I've re-read either of them since or hunted down the three remaining volumes. 

Looking at them online now, I'm not too surprised to see they're all out of print (Although you can get them all on Kindle.) but more so to find they're quite collectable. I'll have to see if I can complete my set and finish the story.

As usual with just about every name I've ever given a character in any game, no-one sent me any tells saying they recognized the name or commented on it in any way. There seems to be very little common ground between the kind of books I read and the tastes of people who play these kinds of games. Which, of course, makes those books ideal sources for naming characters.

So that's why she's called Ratha. As for why she's a Beastlord, not too long before, we'd been spending a great deal of time grouped with an Eastern European guy around college age, young for our crowd, whose name I forget although I have a feeling it will come back to me [Edit - it didn't.] so I'd had plenty of opportunities to study the Beastlord gameplay as it was then. And boy was it OP!

A lot of EQ players strongly disapproved of Beastlords when they were introduced. The pushback was a factor in why the class didn't carry over into EQII, only being added there years later.

They were widely seen as easy-mode upstarts, created by the devs as some kind of sop to the idea that EQ was too difficult - too difficult to play solo and too difficult to get groups, both of which problems Beastlords seemed designed to fix.

Beastlords could do lots of things other classes could do, making them almost as good all-rounders as Norrath's famous jacks-of-all-trades, Bards. The big difference was you needed a lot of skill to play a Bard but any fool could play a Beastlord. That was their reputation, anyway. And it was half-way true. Having spent a lot of time with a couple of the best bards on the server, I knew what an incredible class it was but also how much chance I had of playing one well - none. The Beastlord, though, looked manageable. 

It also looked far more nuanced and interesting than its bad reputation suggested. Played competently, let alone well, a Beastlord could tank, heal, buff, handle crowd control and provide decent dps both at range and in melee. There was always something for a Beastlord to do in almost any situation or any group make-up. Shamans hated them for it because they did everything people wanted a Shaman for - not as well but well enough for most groups - and a lot more besides.

As I'd seen, though, since we frequently played in groups with a top-class Shaman, the two classes were perfectly able to sync if the players were willing. But then, in those happy days most of the players I grouped with regularly were both skilled and socially competent. I know! Hard to believe, isn't it? Shame it didn't last.

I do remember that those were my reasons for making a Beastlord. I just don't recall now why I needed a new character at all. Just looking at the dates, it's unlikely verging on impossible that whatever it was Ratha was meant to do ever got done. Not unless it only took a couple of months and in those days very little in EQ took as little time as that.

What actually happened that summer before the beta is lost to time but afterwards, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I finally abandoned the listing wreck that was EQII six months post-launch and returned to the safe harbor of the original EQ, literally no-one we knew there was still playing. They'd all left for... who knows? We only ever saw one of them again.

For that and other reasons, we declined to pick up where we left off on our established characters and instead started playing new ones. I've already written about our times on Stromm, which I remember relatively clearly, but how Ratha fits in is much more cloudy. She might also have been on Stromm for a while but if so I've forgotten about it.

What I remember very clearly are the times I spent playing her in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss. We had a good go at Depths of Darkhollow, the September 2005 expansion that all happens underground and we did a lot of the Serpents Spine expansion together. Ratha was my main character for both of those. I think we got to about Level 50 in TSS, probably stopping before we got to the end of Goruka Mesa, a zone that goes to the mid-fifities.

When we came back for our final duo tour in Seeds of Destruction three years later, it was for a hugely enjoyable romp through dozens of zones that had previoulsy been far out of our range. Playing as a "duo" comprising a Necromancer with a powerful pet, a Beastlord with an even more powerful pet and two full-time, dedicated Mercenary healers made us not that far off being a full group. 

It certainly allowed us to explore most zones in every expansion from Gates of Discord through to the opening of Secrets of Feydwer, few of which either of us had seen before. If the game was a theme-park, then anything earlier, even the once-impenetrable Elemental Planes and the Plane of Time itself, was the equivalent of the kiddies' tea-cup ride.

We had a great time. We kept it up for months, working our way through expansion after expansion, starting all the way back in Planes of Power and working our way up, swapping to the next if it ever got too hard, picking up AAs by the thousand and adding real levels steadily too, thanks to EQ's deep vertical progression that means expansions several years old frequently still bring in at least a dribble of xp, providing you can kill mobs by the score.

All good things... as they say. By the starter zone of Secrets of Faydwer, the expansion immediately preceding SoD, our levels had almost caught up with the cap and we had to play properly. Duoing was still practical and fun but it was clear we weren't going to get much further and knuckling down to grind out a few per cent of a level each session, while taking care not to get killed, wasn't nearly as much fun as romping across whole zones leaving a trail of smoking corpses in our wake.

That was the last time we visited Norrath together. We moved on to duo in several more MMORPGs, eventually settling down for another decade in Guild Wars 2. Mrs. Bhagpuss is probably done with MMORPGs now, after two full decades playing them pretty heavily. I continue to pick away at the genre, albeit with considerably less enthusiasm these days.

As for EverQuest, as I said, I've been back plenty of times since that final run in Seeds of Destruction. As I recall, the first time I returned alone, I did pick Ratha back up in the expectation of adding a few levels. She did get a couple more but, while she's a competent soloist with a mercenary behind her, it seemed awfully slow compared to what I'd been used to doing with her. It didn't last.

She ended up, beached in the mid-80s (Like a lot of us...) I did think about using last year's free Level 100 boost on her but there's not really much point. I would never play her and if I was going to boost anyone it'd probably be my Necromancer... who we'll meet next time. 

Didn't I already have a Necro, though? I did! Well remembered! He's still around. Somewhere. Just not in the right place. So the new Necro it would have to be.

Nikolaiovitch is his name. I'll tell you all about him another day. 

Trust me, it won't take long.

#17= Cassice - Born 4 May 2003 - 4 days 20 hours -

This is going to be a very short post. No, really. I mean it this time.

It's going to have to be because I don't have much to say about Cassice, my level 48 Druid and #17= on the list. Other that I'm quite surprised she's made it that far.

If I could remember how it happened, I'd be glad to tell you but I don't really have much of an idea, which is somewhat worrying when you realize I must have spent well over a hundred hours playing her. There's no short-cut to the high 40s that I'm aware of, no Instant Forty-Five potion you can drink or boost you can buy. I mean, why would there be?

No, she must have clawed her way up to the dizzy heights of just shy of the original level cap by her own efforts. Or my efforts, anyway.

Not that it's so much of an achievment these days. It surely would have been, back when I started in 1999. In those days, Level 50 seemed like a dream that might never come true. My original Druid, Rachel, took years to get into the fifties and I still remember even today how proud of myself I felt to see her become my first character to make it into the thirties.

But then, Rachel was a real character, with history and personality. Even without my roleplaying them in the traditional sense, all my characters from the first few years developed distinct quirks, traits, foibles and ways of speaking that made them feel like individuals.

By the time Cassice came along, which was only four years after the launch of EQ, that was no longer necessarily true. As we'll see when I come to the next character on the list, I wasn't entirely done with inhabiting the characters I made but by 2003 the vein was was pretty much tapped out.

Cassice stands out as a bit of a transitional character in that sense. She really doesn't have anything that could pass for a personality but she's not a complete cipher, either. What she mostly is is a function masquerading as a form. 

I can't remember why I wanted a Druid back in those early days on Stromm although as I speculated last time it was most likely an attempt at a viable solo character. I was relatively experienced in playing a Druid, too, so it probably seemed like a safe choice.

If she ever grouped up and did stuff with the guild we had, briefly, on Stromm, I have no recollection of it. I suspect she mostly got played when I didn't want to be particularly sociable. And as I already said, how the heck she managed to get forty-eight levels under her leather belt, I have no idea. That's a lot of root-dotting and snare-kiting.

What I do know about Cassice, though, is that in latter years she took up a second career as a photo-journalist. Of all the twenty-five characters in this series, she's probably second only to Magmia in appearances here on the blog because she's long been the one I wake up and send out to take screenshots, every time I write about something happening in Old Norrath.

There are lots of great things about EQ Druids, second only to Bards as they are in terms of range of utility, but surely the greatest is their extreme mobility. Druids can go anywhere, pretty much. They get teleport spells from an early level that allow them to pop up in Druid Rings all across Norrath, at first on their own and later with friends (Or paying customers) in tow.

I think Wizards can port to more places but I never got a Wizard high enough to compare. I've been very happy with Druids as my travel specialists and Cassice has done me great service in that role over the years.

Despite never having been much of a character in her own right, even now, after more than two decades, she remains the one most likely to be asked to do something, when I'm in an EverQuest frame of mind. She's perpetually on call but also she doesn't carry the responsibility of the two or three characters I might actually care about leveling, any of whom would require much more in the way of commitment from me if I ever decided to take them out of their cosy resting place in the Guild Lobby.

I do sometimes take Rachel out for a spin for the same reason but she's loaded up with buffs and the moment she leaves the general vicinity of the Plane of Knowledge they start to fade so usually I don't. Cassis, though, is self-buffed, not least because not much from an MGB will land on a level 48, so she's free to come and go as she pleases.

That's why the pictures of Cassice that I took today, especially for this post, show her out in the world, not posing against a backdrop in either the Guild Lobby, Plane of Knowledge or Plane of Tranquility as usual. Instead, she's on the beach in North Ro because that's where the 25th Anniversary tower was and she was there last year, taking photographs. She still has some anniversary related stuff in her bags, too, because this is EverQuest and no developer has ever, in living memory, programmed any such item to disappear when an event comes to an end.

She has some stuff in her bag I can't entirely explain, too. Part of a key to something in Lavastorm, for example, which appears to be one of four for some quest she's been doing. I think that was back when something happened in the volcanic zone and I did a post on it. Maybe...

The most mysterious item in her bags, which I had a rummage through just before I started this post, is a rather nice two-hander called Pestilence, useable only by Paladins and Shadowknights. Not only can Cassice not wield it because she's the wrong class, she's also too low. It has a required level of 75. 

Where she got it and why she's lugging it about I haven't a clue.  I've tried to look it up but I can't even find where it drops so it's a mystery. I don't think I even have a character on the server who could use it. 

If I had to guess, I'd say maybe she saw it on an NPC vendor for a pittance and bought it to resell, which is something I used to do all the time. Or she could have bought it on the Broker, although why she (Or I.) would want it, I can't imagine. 

She has clearly spent a good while browsing the Bazaar, though, spending Magmia's hard-earned money, because she's kitted out in all kinds of things she couldn't possibly have gotten on her own. 

She's clearly had quite some care and attention devoted to her over the years.

Pity I can't remember doing any of it. 

#17= Magmia - Born 4 May 2003 - 101 Days 12 Hours

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.

Attrition on new servers was ferocious back then. Hordes of players descended on every launch like a flock of sightseeing locusts, most of them playing throwaway characters they had little intention of sticking with for longer than it took for the new server smell to wear off. I should know. I was one of them. Consequently, anyone planing on sticking around had probably better be ready either to join up with one of the guilds that was planning on making a name for itself or have a plan for going solo. 

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.

But I already told that story (Rather better, too) back in 2014, when I was writing about the first time SOE gave away a Level 85 Booster. Free level-jumps were new and exciting then, not ho-hum like they are now, and I had a good, long think about who to give it to. Magmia was the one I chose and I have not regretted that decision, even once, since.

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.

In my opinion, Overseer for EverQuest (And to a lesser extent EQII.) ranks second in significance only to Mercenaries, when talking about game-changing innovations, for the simple reason that both allow a casual player access to far more of the content of the game than they otherwise might get. 

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! 

#16 - Magmus - Born 3 May 2003 - 12 Days 12 Hours

I said I was going to finish this 25th Anniversary feature and I will, although it might take until the 30th to do it. So, where were we when we left off?

Out of sequence, that's where. The last entry was for Shonki, the gnome cleric I took over from Mrs. Bhagpuss and ended up playing as my main for more than a year. That post went up back in October last year and naturally, when I decided to write another, I'd forgotten where I'd got to. 

Surprisingly, I did make some notes for the project back at the start and I still have them, so I was able to check who was up next. I looked at the last post and saw Shonki was #14 so I looked down the list for #15 and found it was... Shonki. My Shadowknight, Timblewoot, was actually #14, as it says in the title of his own post.

I thought for a moment maybe they'd both been created on the same day. I do have a couple of  characters ranked 17= for just that reason. In fact, they'll be in the post after this one because, as you can see from the title, I'm up to #16 now. But no, I just got the numbers wrong. Shonki is really #15.

That leaves me with the dilemma of whether to go back and edit the title of a post that's over half a year old, something I'd never normally do. I've kind of solved that problem by writing about it here, though. If I did go back and change it, this introduction wouldn't make any sense any more (That's assuming it does now..) so I guess I'll leave everything as it is.

Which brings us, at last, to the true subject of the post: Magmus. It's just as well I had something to vamp with up to now because I don't have an awful lot to say about him.

Perhaps the most interesting thing, from my perspective at least, is that he's the original Magmus. I have a whole load of characters of that name now, scattered across a bunch of games |I barely remember, but he was the first. 

I didn't specifically pick "Magmus" as the name I was going to use for throwaway characters but that's what it ended up being. Later, when I was starting to feel a little tired of making up a new name for every single character I rolled in what was an ever-increasing number of games and servers, his name came to mind as a useful generic. It had three very attractive features as far as I was concerned: it was short, I could remember it and no-one else ever seemed to want it. 

When I came up with it the first time, though, it was just another in an  ever-increasing liturgy of one-offs. And anyway, the original Magmus wasn't even supposed to be called "Magmus". I wanted to call him Magnus (God knows why.) but to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, that turned out to be taken. So, employing all the wit and subtlety David Walliams has become famous for, I changed one letter of his name and voila! There he was. 

Magmus was the first character I created on the exciting new, non-transfer server, Stromm, which came online on 3 May 2003 and which was the first what we'd now call "fresh start" server we'd seen in the game for quite a while. I had to fact-check those dates for this post but I'm pleased to say I found a very authorative source to confirm my memory of the event:

 

It's hard to say whether that gives me more or less confidence in AI. 

Magmus is a cleric, currently Level 63, making him my second-highest of that class, only three levels behind Shonki but with a quarter of the time played. He must really have gone hard at some point but I honestly can't remember much about it.

Not to pre-empt a couple more entries that will be coming later in the series but Stromm eventually became a server on which Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent a good deal of time duoing. That was later, though, when we came back to the game after a year or two away.

When the server was new, we were still heavily into proper, old-school EQ grouping. We started on Stromm on Day One, knowing no-one and yet in a matter of days we'd made acquaintances who soon became friends and then became a guild. It goes without saying I can rememember none of their names now.

On our first run on Stromm, none of that lasted too long. Two or three months, maybe. And Magmus didn't feature much in any of it. The day after he was borne I gave him a sister called Magmia (He's a Dwarf, she's a Gnome. Don't ask how that works...) and she pretty much shunted him into the shadows right away.

Magmia, however, deserves - and will get - her own post, so she can wait to tell her story then. This is Magmus's biography, such as it is, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to share any of his time in the sun with his annoyingly bumptious little sister.

It's just a shame I have so little to say about him. I have no idea when or how he got into the sixties. It sure as hell wasn't back in that original run, when I think he'd have been lucky to have made it into double figures. Maybe he was one of the featured players in all that duoing we did a few years later. A cleric is always good in a duo.

I can see, looking at his bags, which are, of course, full, that he's been out relatively recently. He's carrying several rabbits from the Pride events and they haven't been around that long. That may well turn out to have been his final outing, though. I think his chances of doing much more are extremely limited. He's probably retired already, if I'm going to be realistic about it.

So that wasn't much of an entry in the series, was it? Never mind, Magmia will make up for her brother's shortcomings. Like she always does.

Also, since I'm here, I'll just mention one other thing that happened when I logged in today to take some screenshots for the post. 

They've just added a button to server select that lets you see the names of all your characters on each server without having to log in. ABOUT TIME!!!

The time and stress that would have saved me last year, when I was doing the background research for all of this! That'a  few hours of my life I'll never get back. 

Still, at least it encourages me to carry on with the rest of the series. You can thank Daybreak for that.

 

#14 - Shonki - Born 13 April 2003 - 49 days 4 hours

Shonki may have fewer played hours than some of my other characters but he racked up nearly all of those in groups. He's without doubt my most-grouped character, the time I spent with him marking the apogee of my social career in EverQuest, which was, for a time, all-consuming.

Before I played him, I already knew I liked healing for groups. I'd done a fair bit of it with Rachel. Main-healing at max level as a Cleric for a static group in EQ in the early years, though... that was a lot different to playing a Druid, healing for mid-20s pick-up groups at back door behind the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen.

I was a purist back then. It was okay for a Druid, being something of a Jill of All Trades, to be doing other things between heals but a Cleric had one job and one job only: to keep everyone alive. 

I was pretty good at it, too. I ought to have been. I sure took it seriously. I took a dim view of Clerics who didn't. The kind who thought it was okay to get a few licks in with the hammer now and then or cast the odd Smite. I hated it when one of those narcissists turned up in any group I was tanking for, so I made sure never to be That Guy in any group I joined as a Cleric.

Not that everyone appreciated such thoughtfulness. There was a term in use at the time - Sit-and-Heal Cleric. It sounds now as though it might have been an insult and it was, on occasion. If the group was cruising, sometimes resentment could attach itself to the poor old Cleric, just sitting there at the back with his spell-book in his lap and his mind on God, raking in the xp and doing sod all.

My semi-static group didn't feel like that, fortnately. We had maybe fifteen or twenty regulars from whome we permed groups most evenings and all of them were more than happy to have me as main healer, even if I did meditate the day away. They all knew the value of a trustworthy, reliable Cleric one who wasn't going to run out of mana on a bad pull. 

A lot of PUGs were also happy to get a true Sit-and-Heal Cleric. Someone who could be relied on not to have blown all their mana when it came time to bring the heals because they'd used it all up nuking. Someone who wouldn't be caught round the side of a mob, flailing away with a hammer for next to no damage, while not even noticing an add had arrived. 

Someone who could be trusted to do the damn job they'd be invited into the group for in the first place in other words. That was me.

For a while I was damn near religious about it. I used to rate my performance and the performance of the group as a whole on how little I'd had to do. A perfect two-hour session would involve me sitting on my backside at full mana for maybe an hour and fifty minutes. I'd pride myself on having done absolutely nothing apart from standing up occasionally, casting a perfectly-timed Complete Heal, then sitting down again.

That was the dream but there weren't too many sessions that went that way. I imagine if there had been we'd all have gotten pretty bored and if there was one thing I never suffered from as a Cleric in EverQuest in those days it was boredom. Anxiety, stress, blind panic - sure. Every night and twice on a Sunday. Boredom, rarely.

What generally happened was that the session would start with some tense moments just getting to the pull spot, followed by some more adreniline rushes as we got it cleared. Then we'd settle into a ryhthm and start chatting, between and even during pulls, until we'd all relax and slip into a false sense of security.

At which point whoever was pulling would stumble back, close to dead with an add or several on their tail or the group down the corridor would get into trouble and run, leaving us to deal with their train or some careless twonk would break mez or aggro a passing mob that ought to have kept walking and it would be Deal With It Or Die time. Again.

That was when I'd have to jump up and start throwing the heals. It was a bit like being a museum guard. Nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens but you daren't fall asleep because when it does you have to be the one to stop it. 

I loved the quiet but I also loved those moments of chaos and although I would certainly have taken a peaceful session over a chaotic one, it was the frenzied, desperate battle to survive our own or someone else's mistakes that created the memories that lasted, some of them until this day a couple of decades later. Blurry, sure, but still recognizeable.

As time went on and the game changed around us, the need for Clerics to do nothing but sit and heal diminished and my personal commitment to the abastract purity of the calling began to fade, too. Eventually even I used to cast that hammer that hit things without needing me to hold it, because why not? I even threw in the occasional nuke here and there. And when the all-instance Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion arrived in September 2003 I added pulling to my clerical duties. 

I'd done some pulling as Druid and I loved the role. Druids and Rangers get a spell called Harmony. It's an AE, it's unresistable and it causes mobs that would usually come to the assistance of their nearby colleagues to just stand there, oblivious, ignoring their best pals as they scream for help. It's ridiculously overpowered outdoors but it doesn't work at all in a dungeon. 

I'd used Harmony with Rachel, acting as puller for groups at the Sarnak Fort and especially outside the Tower of Frozen Shadows, so I knew how to pull, which at the time was a very particular and specialised role in any group. Clerics get a line of spells that does much the same thing, except it's nowhere near as good, being both single target and resistable. 

It does, however, work in dungeons and when LDoN led to Mrs Bhagpuss and I spending almost every evening for six months doing nothing but instanced dungeons with our semi-static group, I became the puller on the nights we didn't have a Bard, Bards being the undisputed kings and queens of dungeon-pulling. Or they were back then, anyway, just as Rangers held that title out of doors.

Clericking suited me. I loved pulling, I loved healing and quite liked buffing, too, which was something else Clerics became increasingly valued for. There was a time when no-one would even leave Plane of Knowledge without Virtue or Temperance, whichever would stick at their level. You could get rich, casting those for a fee or a donation.

Buffing your own group cost money, though, which is why a lot of Clerics got grumpy about being asked to do it for free. I was lucky. Playing mainly with people I knew, I'd get handed Peridots to replace the expensive gems I was using as reagents, sometimes so many I'd come away with a small profit.

As must be obvious, I really loved being the main healer in groups. Indeed, it was many years before I stopped thinking of myself as that in every MMORPG I played, despite there being precious little evidence to support the claim. 

I drew the line at healing raids, though. I did try it a couple of times, in open raids, which were a thing for a while. Someone with more patience than a rock would spend an hour or two recruiting players in chat to come join a raid on some fairly accessible boss. Then they'd try to manage the ensuing chaos so that not everyone died.

At the time raiding generally required multiple clerics just to keep the Main Tank alive, a task they achieved only by means of something called a Complete Heal Chain, which was like playing Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at sombody else's head. A bunch of Clerics would all be given a number. They'd have the tank targeted and when the fight started they'd count off until it was their turn to cast Complete Heal. Then they carry on counting until their turn came around again and that was the raid as far as they were concerned.

At one point Complete Heal literally healed the target to full health, no matter how many hit points that took, but later it was given a fixed, very large total. Either way, it was the biggest heal available. And the slowest. 

Complete Heal takes ten full seconds to cast.  I got to be very good at timing its use in a group, where I was in full control of when to start. In a Complete Heal Chain, all autonomy is stripped away. You count the seconds between the first cast and your turn and god forbid you be the one who fucks up. No pressure, then...

It's one of those gaming experiences I'm happy to be able to say I did but which I did not enjoy at the time and never wanted to do again. Although I did do it a couple of times so it can't have been that traumatic.

I did know my limits, though, and raid healing was outside of them. So, as it turned out, was main-healing bleeding-edge, at-cap content in the infamous Gates of Discord expansion. One of the last things Shonki did before Mrs Bhagpuss and I decamped for EQII was to join a PUG going into one of the early GoD zones. 

This was a good while after the expansion had landed, by which time pretty much everyone I knew was already refusing to set foot in it again. I was still curious to see more, though, so I answered a LFM call for Clerics from someone wanting to do something or other in one of the instanced zones, one I'd never seen.

The group turned out to be just two people, a couple of high-end raiders who wanted a healbot. They told me what to cast and when to cast it and I did exactly as I was told. A bit of a change from my regular groups, where it was me calling all the shots as often as not and always me grunting "FFS!" angrily, whenever anything didn't go exactly the way I thought it should.

I still marvel at the fact we all didn't die on the first pull. In fact, the three of us managed to do whatever it was they went there to do and got out in one piece. It was one of the most stressful groups I ever had in any game and it pretty much decided me I was done healing in GoD for good.

Maybe Omens of War, the next expansion, woulfd have set things right. It ddid for some people. By then, though, I was ready for something new. Off to EQII I went, along with half the people I knew.

And that was more or less the last I saw of Shonki. When Mrs Bhagpuss and I returned to EQ, it was to play different characters on a different server. I did briefly try soloing Shonki with a mercenary when they were added to the game but that really was boring. I retired him after that and in retirement is where he remains.

I realise now I haven't explained why I called him Shonki in the first place. There's a reason for that. I didn't. Mrs Bhagpus did. He was her character, at least to begin with.

Shonki had a very odd start in life. Mrs Bhagpuss created him and named him that because she liked the sound of the word, which means something like "dodgy" or "shifty" in Yiddish. She then proceeded to play him in a way that entirely lived up to that name, especially when spelled with an "i", the way a stripper would spell it.

Okay, let's be honest. Shonki was once, as Mark Knopfler put it in the song he wrote and later gave to Tina Turner,  a privated dancer, a dancer for money. He did what you wanted him to do. And got well paid for it.

At that time in EQ, guard-killing was an established if controversial method of soloing. Later, the devs made many guards virtually unkillable but in 2003 most of them were still (un)fair game and there would usually be a couple of Dark Elves or an Ogre or two outside the gates of East Freeport, pulling the gate guards and slaughtering them as fast as they spawned.

As I mentioned when I was giving Timblewoot's backstory, there were some corrupt guards whose helmets you could hand in for a decent cash reward and some very good faction and xp. The bad guys killing guards at the gate didn't care about any of that. They just wanted the xp for killing them.

For a few weeks, Shonki, with Mrs Bhagpuss's help and encouragement, ran a small business servicing these reprobates. They couldn't go into Freeport for food and drink or whatever else they needed so she Shonki would go and get it for them. 

That wouldn't have been so bad but she'd also dressed him all in leather armor, which for some reason displayed on a Gnome like a shiny, wet-look gimp suit, which may be why she also had him dance for them, a sight some of the evil crew found highly amusing.

In return for Shonki's self-inflicted humiliation, they tipped him well and also let him loot the helmets, which he handed in to level himself up. That's how he got as far as Level 9. He certainly never healed anyone.

Eventually the appeal of this wore off for both sides and Mrs Bhagpuss was about to reward Shonki with the gift of eternal oblivion, when I stepped in to offer him both a home and moral redemption. I returned the little pervert to the one, true path, following his god...

...actually, I can't remember who his god was. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Church in Norrath back then. 

Probably just as well he retired.

#14 - Timblewoot - Born 20 November 2002 - 61 days 8 hours

November 2002 saw the beginning of a sea-change in the way I'd spend my time in Norrath. Until then, the overwhelming majority of my gameplay took place alone. Not for much longer.

I'd duoed a little with people I'd met along the way and Mrs Bhagpuss and I had made a few not very successful attempts to find characters we could play together, hampered by the fact that we rarely played on the same servers. I'd done as many pick-up groups as I could get with Rachel but those had mostly dried up with the coming of Velious.

Things were rolling along comfortably enough but I suspect now that, had Dark Age of Camelot not intervened, I would have drifted away from the game sooner rather than later, to return only occasionally over the years to come as a curious, if somewhat detached, tourist.

DAOC changed everything in that it introduced me to the dark, invasive, insidious and compelling power of playing with people you know instead of alone or with strangers. For a decade, from late 2001 to the first year or so of Guild Wars 2 in 2012, I spent at least as much time playing with friends and guildmates as I did alone. Quite probably more.

It was a mixed experience. The highs were intense but so was the drama. My god, the drama... I didn't mind it so much in the game itself but when it leached into offline life, as it regularly did, I found it draining. By the time the shift to the kind of alone-together play we take for granted today began, which for me was something I first experienced in Rift, I was more than ready for it.

That was still more than a decade away, when I made my first and so far only Ogre Shadowknight. I made him as a joke, in response to a character Mrs Bhagpuss was playing. At the time, I never imagined he'd become anything more than that.

That's the thing about these games. You make characters you never intend to play and then end up playing them for years. Four of my five most significant EverQuest characters fit that bill, the exception being Rachel and of the five, she made the least progress. 

EverQuest was very much in a growth phase when we left for DAOC. Just before we went, SOE added two servers based in Europe - Antonius Bayle and Kane Bayle. 

When we came back we began by picking up our existing characters on the various servers where we'd left them but for reasons I no longer remember (Maybe someone we knew had moved there? Maybe we were having connection issues with the US servers?) we chose to relocate to Ant Bayle, as everyone called it. 

I'd love to be more definitive but my memories of those times, while sometimes clear, are frequently fractured. I can remember many of the people we played with and a great deal about what we did together but as for the way we met them or why we made some of the choices we did, I can only guess.

I do know that not long after we moved to Ant Bayle, Mrs Bhagpuss made a character called Wimbletoot. She named him after a village in Ireland and he was a gnome. I can't remember his class. 

One afternoon, when I clearly had nothing better to do, it amused me to spoonerize Wimbletoot's name and blow him up to the largest size possible. I imagine I thought it would be funny to run around as an ogre/gnome duo with matching names. 

If that would ever have been funny, something I very much doubt, it certainly wouldn't have been funny for long. Luckily we never had to put it to the test because very soon after, Mrs Bhagpuss deleted Wimbletoot to make room for some other character she wanted to make.

I remember being a bit outraged by that. I almost never delete characters in any game. At the least level of affection I think of my characters as something akin to cuddly toys or household pets, not to be disposed of lightly, but if they gain any traction at all I think of them as people with rights. Virtual rights.

Wimble's demise left me with a joke with no punchline. I'd never intended to play another SK but since the record shows I didn't acquire any further characters (The significance of that verb will become clear in the next post.) until almost six months later, it would appear I must have been happy enough to take the challenge on. I'd like to say I remember my thinking there but I very much don't.

Rather than any organized plan, what I mostly remember are a number of significant incidents from Timblewoot's long and eventful career. He was a character I came to hold in considerable esteem and take quite seriously as I leveled him to the cap in something not far off real time. 

In those days, the level cap went up only infrequently. Reaching it involved some hard graft and felt like a big deal. The EverQuest Show has a handy timeline indicating the level cap only went up twice in the first five years, during which time there'd been no fewer than eight expansions, the link between expansions and level rises being far from established at that point.

Timble hit both 60 and 65 when each was as far as you could go. He did most of  the work in groups, which was how he came to be the character with whom I learned to tank. I was never a very good tank but I became good enough for most casual purposes. 

I was very lucky to be able to learn by example from some of the very best tanks on the server. Almost from the moment she started playing, Mrs Bhagpuss had become adept at both making friends and joining guilds, something that took me a lot longer to pick up, but by the time we came back from DAOC I was fair to middling at it too. 

Soon after our return, Mrs Bhagpuss quickly got invited to a middling-sized friends and family guild and I joined too. Then I somehow managed to make friends with a very skillful and even more sociable Enchanter and together we ended up starting a custom chat channel that somehow became the hangout of a number of raid guild players looking for somewhere fun and frivolous to hang out between raid nights.

Between the guild and the channel I suddenly had all the group offers I could handle. Thanks to the high-end company in the chat channel, I also got to spend a good deal of time with players who really knew how to play and I learned a lot. Eventually I even knew enough to be able to pass some of that on. It was an intense but often very fulfilling time to be playing EverQuest. I kind of miss it, sometimes, but I wouldn't have it back for the stress that sometimes came with it.

Most of that stress came from the aforementioned drama, which was never-ending, but I also found tanking pretty stressful in itself. Definitely a lot more stressful than healing, which turned out to be my metier. Nevertheless, I mustn't have been that bad at it - good enough to get asked to do it pretty often, anyway. 

Timble's class and race had something to do with that. At the time, Shadowknights were becoming a popular choice for Main Tank, having been very much also-rans to Warriors and Paladins for a while, and Ogre SKs were the most welcome of all since they enjoyed the considerable advantage of being immune to stuns while facing front. Even so, you still had to know how to play one and with some practice I became reasonably confident that I did.

The highlight of my tanking career came when a friend asked Timble to tank for him when he went to face the triggered version of the dragon Trakanon in Sebilis for his epic. I'd already tanked the Drolvarg Warlord earlier in the same extremely lengthy questline. I seem to remember that not going particularly well but it can't have been that bad or he wouldn't have asked me back for the much harder Trak fight. 

I also remember being there when he took on Phinagel Atropos in Kedge Keep for the same never-ending quest. It was an absolute nightmare of a zone and a horrible fight but at least I wasn't tanking for that one, thank Tunare.

Granted, triggered Trakanon isn't as tough as the full-fat version but at the time he was still a bona fide raid mob and we made a raid to kill him. I was flattered to be asked and excited to be there but I can't say I enjoyed it. Main tanking for a raid to get one of the final drops needed for someone's epic felt like a lot of responsibility at the time and if there's one thing I've never enjoyed it's responsibility.

In the event, everything went off about as well as could be expected. I still have flashes of the fight burned into my memory even now, like a series of still photographs glimpsed in a lightning storm. I never did anything like it again, nor wanted to. It was one of those things you're glad you've done for the experience but not until it's all safely behind you.

Everything was a learning experience back then, though. It was one of the best things about the game. Now, it takes a never-ending sequence of new games to provide that level of intellectual challenge but in the early years of the millennium just learning to play the one game adequately was more than enough challenge for me.

Playing Timble, I learned to do all the things a tank was supposed to do - taunt, hold aggro, peel, turn mobs - and I enjoyed all of that. One of the best things about combat in EverQuest in those days was how busy it felt. Unless you were playing a pure DPS class, of which there were very few, you had all kinds of things to do in a fight. It made combat feel much more tactical, more like a game of chess, sometimes, if you imagine trying to make your moves with someone beating you about the head and shoulders and yelling orders at the same time.

With Timble, when I wasn't tanking or off-tanking, a role I much preferred because of the diminished levels of responsibility, I was either leveling alone or working on his faction. Leveling speed was faster in groups but those were the days of hell levels and sometimes even grouping didn't make as much of a dent in the xp wall as you'd have liked so I spent much of my downtime from grouping fear-kiting solo to eke out a few more per cent.

As for faction, I'm still stupidly proud to remember how Timble was eventually able to stroll across North Freeport to do his banking. Not a lot of Ogres were welcome there but he was. He had to kill a lot of corrupt guards in the back alleys to gain the respect of the rest of the guards but it was a task both he and I were happy to take on. Getting to a safe spot in the city then locating, pulling and killing guards was one of the highlights of my time as an Ogre.

I carried on playing Timble all the way through until the next split in the timeline. That came a couple of years later, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I jumped ship once more, this time for EverQuest II. That proved to be a much more fundemental schism. A number of our friends made the transition but the only one who stayed for more than a few weeks after launch was the Bard I'd tanked Trak for. We played with him, on and off, for many years, all the way into GW2 until we finally lost track of him sometime in the twenty-teens. 

All the rest either went back to EQ or moved on to other games or stopped playing altogether. We never saw any of them again.

Looking back, I can see it had as much to do with with the infamous Gates of Discord expansion as it did with competition from new games like EQII or World of Warcraft. The infamously overtuned, unfinished and unforgiving GoD arrived in February 2004 and the damage it did, especially to morale, didn't begin to mend until the appearance of the following expansion, Omens of War, six months later, by which time it was too late for many who'd either already left or wished they could. 

For some of the latter, including Mrs Bhagpuss and myself, plus a few members of the guild we were in, the launch of OOW co-incided almost exactly with invitations to join the later stages of the EQII closed beta. The beta still had several months to run but once we got in and saw what was on offer I don't believe any of us came back to EQ, not even to say goodbye to those who remained.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I did return eventually but that's a story for another day. Suffice it to say that, when we did, we made yet another new start, leaving Timblewoot and all our old characters on both accounts beached on the sandrifts of the past. 

It seems fair. Timble had a great run. He's earned his peaceful retirement. He's probably just happy he doesn't have to tank any more. I know I am.

#13 - Morden - Born 8 October 2001 - 3 days 19 hours

Well, that didn't go how I thought it would. 

I should get that printed on a T-shirt, right below the EverQuest logo.

So, what I thought I was going to do this morning was log in Morden, my Level 14 Cleric on the Roleplaying server, Firiona Vie. take a couple of screenshots and then write something about the history of the server, or at least the opening day or two, which is pretty much all I remember. 

This being EverQuest, things turned out rather differently.

After a very minor delay, when I guessed wrongly which account he was on, I logged Morden in to the where he logged out whenever he was last played. That, as it is for almost all my characters, turned out to be Plane of Knowledge. 

It's usually there because from PoK you can get to just about anywhere you need to go by way of the many portals posted all around the place. It's also one hundred per cent safe for any class and race, which isn't something you can say about everywhere in Norrath, as we're about to find out.

If I don't find someone in PoK, odds are they'll be in the Guild Lobby, an adjacent instance with the added advantage of being the place where altruistic players unload their best buffs before logging out, meaning you can get yourself raid buffed if you hang about long enough. Since time stands still in both the Lobby and Plane of Knowledge, you get to keep those buffs, which can last for several hours, until you go somewhere else, so there's no incentive to leave unless you're going to go kill something.

It was night when I logged in. It's always night when I log in to any game to take screenshots. I realize this is perception bias but that doesn't mean it's not true. And night-time in Norrath is dark, or it is in Plane of Knowledge, anyway. Much too dark for a good picture.

It was while I was considering the light that I noticed Morden was holding a fishing rod. Don't ask me why. I guess he was fishing last time I played him but that was probably more than twenty years ago. Whatever the reason, it gave me an idea. 

I thought I'd get a shot of him "fishing" in the ornamental pool where the fishing vendor stands. There aren't any fish in the water there but who's to know? I got there and it was nice and bright with the street lights and the pale, blue tiles so I had him hop up on the low wall surrounding the pond and he fluffed it and fell in.

No problem. The water's only a couple of feet deep. Even a dwarf can't drown in two feet of water. He just can't get out.

Here's a thing that happens in EverQuest: if you fall into some water, especially water contained inside a walled structure like a pond or a fountain, sometimes you can't get out again. I've seen it happen lots of times. Someone jumps into a water feature, either by mistake or for fun or to practice swimming and then it comes time to get out and they find they're stuck. You can't jump in water and there's no climbing out without steps or a ladder like they have in the Cabilis canals.

What's supposed to happen, I think, is that whoever made the pond or the pool or the fountain is meant to include a spot where the physics changes and you just shoot out of the water onto land when you push against it. Only sometimes they forget.

They forgot when they made this one. Morden swam all around the pool, pressing against the wall, several times. He got about twenty skill-ups for his swimming skill but he couldn't find a way out of the water.

Fortunately, Morden is a Cleric and Clerics get the Gate spell. I figured he'd be bound in Plane of Knowledge - most of my characters are, for obvious reasons of convenience and practicality - so he'd just port out of the pool and appear on dry land somewhere nearby. 

Except that's not what happened. If I'd been given fifty guesses where he would have appeared I wouldn't even have come close.

For some reason long lost to the mists of time, when Morden last cast Bind Affinity to set his respawn point, he must have picked a spot right in the middle of Firiona Vie. That's the city, not the server or the Princess. Obviously.

Firiona Vie, as has been mentioned in previous posts, is a coastal port city on the continent of Kunark. It's where the boat comes in if you travel there by sea. It is also currently under the control of the Teir`Dal, Norrath's Dark Elven race. Dark Elves do not like Dwarves. Boy, do they not!

There was a big event some time around 2002-3, when the Teir'Dal wrested control of the city from the Feir'Dal, aka the Wood Elves. EverQuest used to go in for huge, game-changing events back then. People were much more tolerant of having the furniture re-arranged. Several cities changed hands and whole races turned refugee. It was a different time.

I can only imagine that when Morden bound himself in Firiona Vie, the Wood Elves (Good Elves.) were firmly in control. It still doesn't explain what he was doing there at Level 14, a good ten levels at least below where he'd need to be to do anythig in the zone, let alone why he'd have thought it was a good idea to bind there. Still, it would at least have been safe for him to do it.

It bloody well isn't now! Before I'd had time to take in my surroundings and figure out where the hell we were, some hyperactive Dark Elf Dragoon charged up and killed Morden in a couple of hits. He was dead on the boardwalk before I'd worked out what was happening.

This posed something of a dilemma but I can't say I haven't been there before. Quite a few times, actually. Getting suddenly and unexpectedly killed and having to figure out what to do about it is something of an occupational hazard in EQ.

I had a couple of ideas. The easiest solution would be to log out to character select and use the Return Home button that was added a few years into the life of the game to make things easier for customer service players by allowing people to log in to their starting towns instead of whatever dumb location they'd left their character in when they had to go answer the door or let the dog out.

By a bizarre co-incidence, however, when I'd logged in this morning, the first thing I'd seen was a message telling me it was Morden's birthday (It's tomorrow by my count but close enough.) and the second was a note telling me he was entitled to reset his home city to either Crescent's Reach, the newbie starting zone for The Serpent's Spine expansion or North Kaladim, the racial home of the Dwarves

To Return Home you have to have one, obviously, as I assume Morden must have, once but I was starting to doubt whether he had one any more. Not being interested in moving in with the Dragon-kin in Crescent's Reach, I tried to use the command to reset to Kaladim but apparently you can't do that when you're dead.

I couldn't bring him back to life to do it because his respawn spot was literally where his corpse was lying. He was in a classic death-bind loop, or he would be if I let him stand up. 

Never mind. There are ways. 

I tried to close EQ from the task bar and got the message "You can't camp while you're dead". So many things you can't do when you're no longer breathing. I tried Alt-F4 and Ctrl-F4 to no effect so I hit Alt-Ctrl-Del and closed the application from there. That worked.

I relogged and checked Return Home on Character Select. Greyed out. Looked like he didn't have a home after all. My next plan was to log him in and see if I could use the command to set one before he got killed again. 

Fortunately, this time, no-one attacked him right away. It seemed the guards were patrolling and didn't happen to be close enough to spot him immediately. I took the chance to scuttle down to the water's edge, well way from any patrol routes to re-assess the situation. Even at Level 14, I thought I had a fair chance of following the zone wall to the long tunnel through to Lake of Ill Omen. There's a Plane of Knowledge portal in a cave at the end of those tunnels or I seem to remember one there. 

It was a risky plan but it might have worked. Unfortunately, it failed before it really got started. 

First I had to swim across the river to what looked like some steps on the far side. Except they weren't steps, jut a line on the wall. Once again, I couldn't get out of the water, or not on the side I needed to be. And by then night had fallen because yes, that again, too.

I could barely see anything but I could see guards patrolling the walls. I seemed to recall there weren't any on the bridge, though. Even if there were, I could always jump off before I got to the end. As a plan it had even less to say in its favor than the last one but it might also have worked - if I could have seen where I was going. 

Sadly, it was far too dark. Before he even got to the bridge, Morden was smacked into oblivion by a twenty-foot tall Golem. Couldn't even see something that size - that's how dark it was.

At least I'd had the foresight to use that reset command to set his starting city to Kaladim before he went running off into the night. All I needed to do was hit Return Home... and it was still greyed out. 

A quick google told me there's a known bug with Return Home that frequently leaves it unusable for no particular reason. It's been like it at least all this year and no-one's done anything to fix it. Old game is old.

My back-up back-up plan of using a Level Boost at Character Select to bang Morden up to Level 85 or 100 failed when it turned out he didn't have any available. I know I have some on the account but they're probably still in Claim, waiting for me to collect them. Anyway, I didn't really want to waste one on him.

I logged back in yet again, once again avoiding the attentions of the local constabulary, and as I was thinking about my next move, the ship from Antonica (Or is it Feydwer?) sailed into view. After a moment's hesitation I had Morden leg it over to the dock to see if he could jump on board.

It was a very risky move in the darkened streets of a hostile city and I'd love to say my courage (Or recklessness.) paid off... but it neither did nor didn't. I got to the dock without mishap but not before the ship had sailed. I did at least manage to find what seems to be a safe spot to hunker down and wait and that's where Morden is now.

He may be there some time. There's no real urgency to move him, after all. It's not as though I'm going to play him. Do I really need to spend another hour trying to get him to safety just to park him for another twenty years? 

Even if I can get him on the boat, I'm not sure where it goes. If it's coming to an Evil port it most likely came from one, didn't it? I'm not sure ending up in the Evil Outpost in The Overthere would be much of an improvement.

What I'm probably going to do is leave Morden where he is for a bit and hope the Return Home button starts working. Supposedly the bug is intermittent. If that doesn't happen then he can just bide his time until I'm in the mood to do something about it. He's got his fishing rod and he's right next to the ocean. He's not going to starve.

All of which leaves me not much time to talk about the Firiona Vie server itself and how Morden came to be created there. It's an interesting and complicated tale but I'll keep it to the bare bones.

Firiona Vie was created about a year and a half after the launch of the game to provide something that had been a constant demand from day one, a server dedicated to roleplaying. There'd always been at least one unofficial RP server - it was Brell Serilis when I started Tarquinn there - but "the community" wanted more.

It didn't work, of course. Not even in the days when there were people employed to make sure the rules were kept. I forget now what the full ruleset was (There's a little more detail here.) but I remember there were plenty of clauses. All but two of them were withdrawn in a matter of months.

The two that stuck were Free Trade and no Common language. The first made sure the server prospered by attracting large numbers of players with no interest in roleplaying. The second proved how skin-deep any real interest in playing a role was even for the rest.

"Free Trade" meant almost no No Drop and Heirloom flags. If you had it you could sell it. That brought in a particular demographic, players mostly interested in becoming rich and powerful, arguably the antithesis of roleplaying unless you happened to be playing an oligarch or a railway baron. 

The language rule was more curious. There's a common tongue everyone speaks - called Common, naturally - but every race in EverQuest has its own language that any other race can learn. Prior to the arrival of a dedicated server catering to their needs, roleplayers traditionally spoke in the language proper to their chosen race, at least some of the time, so it seemed logical to remove the Common option and have them all learn each other's languages or not be able to communicate at all.

You can imagine how that went down in a group-oriented game with a culture of partying up with strangers. It didn't last the first day. In a matter of hours after the server came up someone decided there was going to be a common language after all and it was going be Elven. Thereafter, Elven was what everyone spoke but first they had to learn it. Which turned out to be no problem at all.

In Norrath you quickly pick up languages just by hearing them spoken. I remember sitting in a circle with a bunch of other people as one person gibbered away in Elven and the rest of us watched our skill tick up. Sometimes other races would chip in in their languages and those would go up too. I imagine now, after more than twenty years, Firiona Vie must be a server filled with polyglots, everyone fluent in every language. 

Or more likely they all speak Elven and no-one even thinks about it any more. So much for the great experiment.

Mrs Bhagpuss and made characters on Firiona Vie the day the server came up. The next day, we were gone. I don't at all remember it as being our grand farewell to the game  but from the timing I guess it must have been. I also have no clue how I came to play Morden for nearly four days, which amounts to over ninety hours in game. I suppose I must have but when it happened or what we did is lost to me now.

Firiona Vie launched on 8 October 2001. Dark Age of Camelot launched the following day. 

It would be over a year before I made my next character in EQ.

***Addendum***

After I posted this I went and made a cup of tea then came back and logged into EQ again, whereupon I found the Return Home button was working normally. I used it, ran Morden from North Kaladim to Plane of Knowledge and bound him there.

On the way through Kaladim I somehow once again managed to fall into some water, this time an underground stream, and once again I couldn't get out... until I thought to swap from third-person perspective to first, at which point getting out of the water became trivial. 

I now recall that that's how it always worked. EQ was designed as a first-person game with third being a buggy, awkward also-ran. I never even used third-person until I'd been playing for a couple of years and it didn't work reliably for a couple of years after that. Even when it did, I never used third in water. Always swap to first when you go swimming, that's the rule. Can't believe I forgot!