Read It In Books : EverQuest

Over the last few years I've managed to find reasonably cheap copies of most of the White Wolf gamebooks for the EverQuest Roleplaying Game. I think the only ones I don't have now are Al'Kabor's Arcana, Plane of Hate, Temple of Solusek Ro and Castle Mistmoore; of those four, the only one I really want is the last one.

It's just as well I decided to collect them when I did because as the supply dwindles the price increases. I don't think I'd ever have started buying them in the first place if the average cost then had been north of $50 per book, with some titles breaching the three figure barrier, like they are now.

As it is, at least I can rest easy, knowing that if (when) the final, official server goes dark, I'll be able to GM a tabletop EverQuest campaign with my pals in the old folks home. Or I guess I could just play P2002. Whatever.

When the affordable supply of White Wolf titles dried up, I did briefly consider scooping up the Prima Game Guides instead. There are still oodles of those up for grabs at exceedingly reasonable prices, many of them for no more than the cost of postage.

Pretty sure I knew a "Nugget" and a "Deena". I imagine everyone knew a "Lenore"

That's not surprising. In its day, EQ was a very successful game, with millions of players. Back then, I never felt the need (or desire) to buy a professionally produced hard copy of exactly the same kind of information I could get for free from Allakhazam or Caster's Realm. Clearly many did, though, because Prima pumped out guide after guide for years, eventually moving on to produce guides for EQ2 as well.

Out of curiosity I did put one of the Prima guides on my Christmas wishlist, just to see what they were like. I could have picked any of them but I plumped for the Ruins of Kunark. It duly arrived on Santa's sleigh and I've given it a good thumbing in idle moments since then.

It came well-thumbed already. "Pre-loved", as the marketeers like to say. Someone had obviously gotten a very great deal more use out of it than I ever will. I say that with confidence, not because it was battered or worn - on the contrary it was in excellent condition - but because it has been annotated throughout (very neatly,) in pencil.

Many of the spell lists have ticks or dots against them.  The previous owner seems to have been something of an altaholic, with a strong preference for casters and priests. Most of the notes are in the sections devoted to the Magician, Shaman, Wizard, Druid, and Enchanter classes. The Necromancer is a notable omission so I surmise the previous owner leaned towards the light.

As well as the pencil additions, which included a few extra notes about the Shadows of Luclin expansion (although nothing relating to Scars of Velious, which came before it), I found a few slips of paper tucked between the pages. One was a set of instructions printed from some unnamed website or forum detailing how to insert pauses in macros. Another, more poignantly, appears to be a list of the names of in-game friends or guild members - or possibly just some jotted ideas of names for characters.

As for the contents of the Guide itself, they're a curious mixture of the exceedingly obvious and the unutterably abstruse. There's a great deal here that's of historical (potentially academic) interest. For example, I found the lengthy diatribe by Gordon "Abashi" Wrinn on the notorious "Play Nice Policy" most instructive, especially  the paragraph that reads:

"For the first few months after EverQuest's release, we felt that a policy of non-interference in many of these matters was warranted. However, we continued to lose good players. This was not due to any deficiency or dissatisfaction in the game, but due to dissatisfaction with the treatment that they received from their fellow players, and the perceived inability of our Customer Service department to intervene."

A few pages later, under the heading of PvP Servers, we read that as far as Playing Nice is concerned "...we expect that the people on those servers will apply PvP combat in all situations where it is called for as a resolution to the problem. As such, the EverQuest Customer Service Staff will decline to intervene in cases where a PvP alternative exists..."

That certainly puts a different perspective on why Verant (later SOE) continued to place such an emphasis on PvP, despite the ever-dwindling interest among players, not to mention why Smed himself became such a fan of EVE Online.

Flicking through the pages, some arresting assertions leap out. Did you know that even by the time of the game's first expansion there were already 216 different types of player-made arrows? Or 63 different crafted bows? It also seems somewhat disengenous for an official guide to blandly confirm what all too many players already suspected - "Level 1 spells - Many casters find these spells worthless". True North, anyone?

Yes, I could have picked a less busy background.
And done something about the glare.
If only I was a photographer...

Reading the Prima Guide is a glimpse into a lost world. The sheer complexity of the game, even at this early stage of its as-then unimaginably lengthy life, is deeply intimidating. It's no wonder players felt they needed a helping hand. Not that Prima was having any truck with handholding. Item after item hammers home the unforgiving nature of the game and the world in which it's set.

The section on "Tactics" for Bards, for example, is succinct on playing solo: "Don't do it" . Bold type theirs, not mine.  The entry on experience is enough to bring on flashbacks : "After level 5, dying costs you experience. This XP loss gets bigger as you level up. Eventually you'll be losing about half a bubble of XP per death. In addition to that, it will look like you've lost less during a hell level (30, 35 etc.) but it actually hurts more." It's that casual "etc." that really twists the knife.

All in all, the Kunark Prima Guide was a worthwhile purchase (or would have been if I'd paid for it). It reminded me of a lot of things I'd forgotten and I may even have learned a few new ones. I'm not sure I'll be buying any more because I get the feeling there will be a great deal of repetition and a general sense of diminishing returns. On the other hand, at a penny a time plus postage it's not like I have a great deal to lose.

I'm rather glad, though, that I never bought one of these guides back in the day. Although whoever compiled the wealth of information it contains made a considerable effort to avoid pulling the curtain back too far, it still reveals more than I would have wanted to know when I was playing regularly.

One of EQ's - and the MMORPG genre's - biggest strengths for me was always its impenetrability. I loved not knowing exactly how things worked, having to try and deduce first principles by trial and error, preferably without getting myself killed in the process. I particularly loved the endless urban myths that surrounded the game's most arcane aspects - all those myriad theories on how to spawn the Ancient Cyclops or Quillmane, every one supported by anecdotal evidence from "a guildie" or "my brother".

As with the White Wolf books, it's very comforting to know that at least some sort of solid evidence of the fun we had will survive. Video games are slowly beginning to achieve historical and aesthetic recognition; an archival afterlife may yet exist for some. All the same, in my dotage I can't see myself toddling down to the gallery on my walker every time I feel in need of an EQ fix.

These books are the fragments I have shored against my ruin, as I suspect I may have said before. I might build the wall a little higher, yet.

A Trip To The Islands : EQ2

A few weeks ago, in the comments following his post on "EverQuest II Lore in a Minute", Wilhelm drew my attention to the existence of a White Wolf tabletop RPG featuring EQ2. I've been slowly picking up the various White Wolf books for the original Everquest but I had no idea there had ever been an attempt to expand the franchise offline to include the second iteration of Norrath.

The original series must have performed well enough, off the back of the success of what was generally reckoned at the time to be the most successful western MMORPG.  Fifteen titles were published in all. By the time White Wolf got around to EQ2, however, Blizzard had snatched SOE's crown and no-one was interested any more, assuming they ever were.

Given that all this happened little more than a decade ago it's harder than you might imagine to dig up exact details of what was published. White Wolf merged with CCP Games (yes, that CCP) in 2006 and all mention of Everquest has since vanished from the official record. A search at White Wolf's Digital Publishing and Print on Demand partners DriveThruRPG comes up similarly blank. Even the White Wolf Wiki can offer no more than a stub that baldly acknowledges the series' existence and no more. It's left to the Dungeons&Dragons wiki, of all places, to offer a complete and definitive list.

I was vaguely aware of these books when they were new but back then I believed I already had all the EQ I could ever use, right there on my 15" CRT monitor, so I didn't pay much attention. Over the years my complacency began to erode as various MMOs slipped into comas or shuffled willingly or otherwise towards the sunset. It began to occur to me that, while I might be willing to play Everquest on and off for the rest of my life, eventually that might not be an option and not just because I would no longer have the strength to click a mouse.

The path to purchase was crooked. I'd been writing about the desecration of Freeport in Everquest and speculating on the prospect of a similar revamp in EQ2. While researching that piece I was reminded of the time-locked Mac version of Everquest, with its one server, Al`Kabor, where it was forever Planes of Power and never Gates of Discord (like the White Witch in reverse).

It occurred to me that the Mac players must still have the old version of Freeport, which led me to check the price of second-hand Apple Macs (prohibitive) and the feasibility of PC/Mac emulators (too fiddly). By the time I'd found something that looked like it might be manageable SOE announced they were finally closing the door on 2004 and sunsetting EQMac.

It wasn't time wasted, however, because along the way I noticed the White Wolf Sourcebook for Freeport on Amazon. I bought that and it turned out to be very good indeed. I learned more about Freeport, the disparate and disturbing people who lived there and the tangled skein of alliances and enmities that fill their every thought than I had ever suspected existed in all my years actually playing the damn video game.

From there I went on to buy half a dozen more of the White Wolf game books, scenarios and sourcebooks, picking up the odd copies that appear at reasonable prices among the overoptimistic dealers on Amazon Marketplace. In time I hope to complete the set, although my enthusiasm for individual titles varies. An entire book dedicated to examining The Temple of Solusek Ro in nit-picking detail is not an enticing prospect and of all the choices they could have made, Dagnor's Cauldron strikes me as idisosyncratic to say the least. especially when you consider all the places they didn't do.

I don't imagine I'll ever use the books to for their intended purpose. Y'know, to play an actual game. Although, given the tools available for playing on a virtual tabletop online, the bloggers that are already using them, and the endless complaints of ex-EQ players that they'd love nothing better than to play Classic EQ like in the good old days, maybe a session or two sometime's not entirely out of the question. Just so long as I don't have to GM or set up the table.


For now I'm just reading. Its very interesting how effectively that fires up the nostalgia factor. More so than playing the games themselves, which, since I have played them near enough continuously, seem far more like current affairs than history. Now I have the Freeport book I can even face that abomination on the coast of Antonica with something approaching equanimity, knowing I can go to the real town with White Wolf's time machine whenever I fancy.

The EQ2 Player's Guide is, as you might expect, light on lore and heavy on rules on how to Sense Motive (P172) or use a Magnifying Glass (P212). Even so, there are sixty pages on the history and culture of The Shattered Lands, The New Lands and The Isles Of Refuge.

The last of those three chapters is of particular interest because the Isles of Refuge, set in what we now must learn to call The Shabby Sea, feature heavily in the upcoming Altar of Malice expansion. To confuse matters thoroughly, the bizarrely-named Shabby Sea breaks down into two sub-seas, Tranquil and Phantom. The Tranquil islands so far announced are the Isle of Refuge itself, Deathweave Isle, and the Pygmie-and-dinosaur-inhabited Island of Dichen, at least two of which don't sound all that tranquil to me. The sea-next-door, The Phantom Sea, offers Kithicor, the Far Seas Trading Company’s home base Highhold, and Grimshales, an island made from a shard of Luclin.

If we take the White Wolf source as canon then that's just the tip of the iceberg. (Bad analogy). The map at the top of this post shows around thirty islands with almost a dozen of them named. All the named isles are examined in detail in the book. Six of them get entries several pages in length.

I confess to having being largely unaware of the existence of almost of all of these islands. I can't recall if they were mentioned in game back in the first or second iteration of the tutorial, both of which I played through several times. I only remember the later, streamlined version with any great clarity. It's evident, nonetheless, that whether we as players were aware of it or not at the time, the waters and islands we are now so close to discovering and exploring for ourselves were there all along, both in the imaginations of the designers and in the design documents they were using.

I was already invested in the upcoming expansion. For years I've wanted to find out what the Far Seas Traders were up to. I've never trusted them. Now I'm doubly intrigued. When the expansion launches on November 11th for All Access members and November 28th for the masses, I'll be out there with my telescope, scanning the horizon for signs of islands yet unknown.