The best thing about Dorah’s tradeskill epic, is that it was done, start to finish, in a day.
She was already a level 80 jeweler, but didn’t have the faction to get the quest. Three easy quests later (kill a dozen cats, click on six weapon caches in the Swamp of No Hope, click on four prisoner cages near Sathir Span, and a last one I can’t remember but was also pretty easy killing twenty brutes), and that brought her to -19,999 with Bathezid — enough to get the quest.
First task, just to prove she could craft: twenty scout spells. That was easy.
So now Mister Forge Sarnak knew he and Dorah were crafter buddies, and he wanted to know all about the world outside Kunark. “Sunny,” I told him. He gave me a sideways look. “Oh?”
“MOSTLY sunny,” I corrected. He wasn’t going to let me get away with anything.
I started chatting about stuff, and being a halfling, of course the conversation turned eventually to pie. Well, once pie was mentioned, could Rivervale be far behind? Sure enough, the topic came up, and off I was sent to Rivervale to bring back news.
Well, I found the great-great-great granddaughter of Rebbecca Cabbageleaf, a jeweler who used to work in Fungus Grove on Luclin before it blowed up, but she was entirely unable to speak, being distracted by her pie-shaped hunger. If only she could have some fresh jumjum with which to make some jumjum pie, but, alas, the bixies had decided not to let their honey be harvested, and what sort of jumjum pe has no bixie honey in it? The bad kind people don’t like, that’s what.
She sent me off to Greater Faydark to talk with the Matron of the Nursery, herself a fae with long experience in dealing with bixies, and she mentioned something about a crazed old gnome (what other sort are there?) who might have a device that could stun them for a bit. So off to Gnomeland Security in Steamfont, where the gnome admitted he could build such a device, but unfortunately the parts he needed were scattered over Steamfont, and he needed a special shrub from Loping Plains to tie it all together. Sigh.
Hours of seeking oil cans, gears, power sources and water pumps LATER… I cart the stuff back to him (YOU try being three feet tall and having to climb a sheer rock face carrying packs full of machinery! Go ahead and try!), and try to get his mind off cogwozzles long enough to get him to make me a bixie stunner. And trust me, trying to get a gnome’s mind off cogwozzles is a job in itself.
He makes me the device, which smokes bixies to sleep, and sends me back to Neela Cabbageleaf, who offers to teleport me to their hive. She offered to shrink me as well, but I said no thanks… short enough.
The difference between this bixie hive and the normal one in the Drafling tower, is that these had the level 80 bixies. The ones that would instantly kill me. Well, there would be a time for Dorah-killing, but that time would not be now. I smoked the entire hive to sleep, grabbed the bixie honey, and squeezed the crystal that brought me back to Neela.
She swiftly baked the honey into her pie, and finally we could talk about that earring her ancestor had made.
Oh yes, that! Well, she’d lost the recipe, but heard it might be in Maj’Dul, maybe a scholar there would know.
Oh. Okay. One Call of Ro later….
Hi, Scholar in the Tower of the Moon! Oh, you say the shredded bits of the recipe are in the library of light? And that the library is filled with halfling-hating, super high level, djinni librarians! Count me in!
Off to the library, where I was occasionally able to stun the librarians for a short time by tossing books at them. (Important note: Hitting a librarian with a book twice in a row makes it aggro again). A dozen or so deaths later, I’d gathered the pages, found the recipe to bind them all together again, and used one of the crafting tables in the library to assemble it into the long-lost recipe for the Earring of the Solstice — the crafter epic.
It’s no surprise people don’t go to libraries so much anymore…
Back to Neela, who vows to make that earring for me, if she can only get nine items of great power made. She gave me the recipe for the Ruby-Encrusted Stein, but warned that I would need the services of masters of each of the other eight professions to make all the things required.
Befallen has a pretty active crafter community, and there’s been a number of crafter epic parties where crafters of various sorts gather together to make the epic items. One was forming in Nettleville just when I needed it, so I snuck into Qeynos and got three bits done nearly immediately, and offered my own services.
I got a druid sage to come away from harvesting in Tenebrous Tangle with the promise of 600 adamantine left over from Dina’s epic harvesting (that weekend of harvesting just keeps paying off). Iroced, a guildie, came by to do carpentry, and Dtfroak, another guildie. stopped in to do woodworking. I sent a tell to an 80 armorer I saw in Qeynos Harbor and he came by to do his stuff, and well, due to the kindness of the Befallen crafting community, all of us there in Nettleville walked away with everything we needed in about an hour.
BACK to Rivervale where Neela crafted up my earring. Upon hearing of this, my tradeskill society promoted me to the position and title of Master Jeweler. And the Sarnak that started this all off was so pleased at the news of the world that he gave me a beautiful cloak befitting a jeweler of skill.
Thanks to my guildies and the crafters of Befallen for helping make a jeweler’s dream come true 🙂
