I devoted eight years to EverQuest. Sometimes I think I could have made better use of that time, especially now, when I haven’t heard anything from the friends I made there for many years. But I was in a pretty bad place, post-divorce, two kids to raise… it helped to have people I could chat to and do things with that didn’t require getting dressed up and out of the house. And it did lead to meeting the love of my life in EverQuest II, so I guess it wasn’t wasted after all?
You couldn’t get the super-powerful, class-defining epic weapons in classic EverQuest alone; it wasn’t even vaguely possible. You needed a guild, and not only that, a guild that would in many cases need to mobilize instantly in order to grab a rare spawn. I’m looking at you, Ragefire.
An EverQuest guild was twenty or more people who would drop everything if you needed help, and you would do the same for them. I never had that experience in an MMO before or since. It was a different time.
So anyway, here’s a little bit about my life in EverQuest, as told by the epics I managed to obtain for five very different characters in five different guilds.
Druid – Nature Walker’s Scimitar – United Norrath Coalition
United Norrath Coalition — UNC — was my first guild, and Etha the Druid was my second character. Mehve, the Erudite Wizard, was camped forever in Rivervale once I stopped there on my way from Qeynos to Freeport. UNC was primarily a social guild, though we did do some light raiding with our sister guild, the Legion of Fate. UNC itself was the union of two other guilds, whose names I can’t remember, as this happened before I joined.
As a young druid, Etha grouped up with Noffin Stormfyre, a halfling rogue, and Lorika Stormfyre, a high elf wizard. The Stormfyres were an elite family that crossed guilds. When they joined UNC, they told me I should come along, and so I did. One of the first things I did with the guild was camp Najena in her lair. It was scary and spooky and so very much fun.
Valksis, Anavrin, Cilia, Jalanea, Taluil, so many other friends whose names I can’t remember now. I miss them so much. They got me this epic and I stayed there happily until the guild broke up. Etha moved into a European raiding guild, Divine Grace, and then I changed mains, which didn’t make anyone very happy. I wasn’t happy with how hard it was to find groups as a druid, or to be effective in raids as a druid. SOE later buffed druids up considerably, but it was too late for me.
Rogue – Ragebringer – A Twist of Fate
In the screenshot, Tipa is wielding both Ragebringer and the Burning Rapier, an iconic early rogue quest item. I had to go digging through the bank to find Ragebringer.
I’d mage a bunch of alts — a gnome mage, a halfling warrior — and had fun crafting gear for them. But I was inspired by my friend Anavrin’s rogue to try out the same, and found I loved it, so I’d play her occasionally, sometimes farm stuff for her. Total twink.
After I left Divine Grace, I fell in with A Twist of Fate because Noffin and (I just now remembered) Bridgecrusher had joined that after UNC fell apart. They were a raid guild led by a berserker warrior named Tormentcia, who had real issues in her real life. It made for an entertaining and sometimes alarming guild chat. Nonetheless, AToF were generally cool people and helped me with my rogue epic. AToF was slowly breaking down and I’d made friends in another guild, Crimson Eternity, and I asked them to help with the final fight.
Torm wasn’t happy about that. She accused me of just using the guild to get my epic and now I was going to jump ship. Which is what I did do, so she had a point. I still feel really bad about that.
Cleric – Water Sprinkler of Nem Ankh (1.0) and Aegis of Superior Divinity (2.0) – Lost Sock Patrol and Crimson Eternity
When the final original normal rules server, Stromm, opened, I made a cleric there just to check things out. Turns out that clerics get groups all the time, and level quickly, and everyone likes you and wants to help you. It was EverQuest on easy mode. Nobody tells you this.
I started spending all my non-raid time leveling Brita (as was her name then) on Stromm, and eventually joined a west coast guild, Lost Sock Patrol, which was really perfect, as Crimson Eternity was an east coast guild and generally went to bed three hours before I did.
LSP was eager for me to get the cleric epic, as its free rez was considered mandatory for a raid cleric. I had to sit in a lot of long camps, but they were there every step of the way. My time with Lost Sock Patrol came to end when we interrupted the uber guild real money spigot by waking the Sleeper in Sleeper’s Tomb, the last normal rules server where that could ever be done. I think one of the PvP servers followed after.
The political firestorm that resulted destroyed the guild, but I was happy. I got to do something very few EQ players have ever done, and I have the screenshots to prove it.
I asked CE if it would be okay if I transferred Brita to Erollisi Marr and changed mains to cleric. They were cool with it, so I did — had to change the name to Dera. I loved the rogue, but me arriving late to raids after work meant all the rogue slots were typically full, so I spent a lot of time listening to raids on guild chat. Clerics, though — always room for a cleric.
In the fullness of time, CE helped me get the Cleric 2.0 epic. I really had fun playing cleric.
Magician – Orb of Mastery – Various Guilds
You’ll remember from earlier that Stormfyre was a surname shared by many of my friends. I was pretty keen to keep to the surname Tanglewood for all my halfling characters, but I was interested in joining the Stormfyres with my gnome mage. I asked if that would be possible, and they said they would be glad to have me in the Stormfyre clan, and so I took on that name and wore it proudly.
Tsuki was another of my alts, someone to wear all the caster gear I’d come across — Oracle Robe and stuff like that. When CE started raiding the planes, sometimes I’d run her over to grab decaying loot. Every raider has alts to get that loot, and she was mine.
Every so often I’d work a little more on her epic; camping Quillmane was a long term project. I finally did get the epic when Nostalgia the Guild did our last raid, to the Plane of Sky.
Ranger – Swiftwind and Earthcaller – Nostalgia the Guild
Her name was Ramona Tanglewood on Luclin; when I moved her to EMarr, I had to change it again.
I don’t remember where the Nostalgia guild started. I know Stargrace and I just wanted to do EQ from scratch again, but I am not sure if we started this on EverQuest II or classic EverQuest. We started Nostalgia the Guild on Stargrace’s home server of Luclin, gathered some like-minded friends, and went through the new player experience at the time, which was the relatively new expansion of Serpent’s Spine. Unfortunately, the presence of Defiant Gear, commonly dropped gear that was better than raid gear in order to speed new characters through the lower levels, more or less ruined any hope we had of recreating the original EQ experience.
It was all good; we made stops along the way to see the old sights in Guk, Sebillis and so on. We did the dragons when we were high enough level (but not too high).
None of the rest of the guild thought of epics as a high priority, except me. Defiant gear put even epics to shame, but… I just wanted them. The name of the guild was Nostalgia, after all. I wanted those things.
The Nostalgians were kind enough to help, and I got my quest item in the Plane of Sky — getting Tsuki’s epic at the same time. (I just needed help handing it in; I didn’t make Nostalgia help an alt get her epic!) I finished the rest of the epic which was just largely turn-ins on my own.
I suspect this has come up in discussions here before but Mrs Bhagpuss and I played on Stromm from launch. I’ll get to that in my series of 25 characters for EQ’s 25th although how much I’ll be able to remember about it is another matter. I have the vaguest memory of Lost Sock patrol but it might be from your previous posts about waking the Sleeper. As a West Coast guild, they’d have had the minimal overlap with EU primetime.
Luclin was one of my other main servers, the third being the EU server Ant Bayle. Mrs Bhagpuss and I also did much of Serpent’s Spine around the time it was new although I’m not sure now what server that would have been on. That was entirely as a duo but we did quite a lot of grouping on Stromm, where we started a small guild that was quite active for a while.
I always had a hipster attitude to Epics in that I thought they were a bad addition to the game and wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Except of course I ended up being one of the people who went and hellped other people with theirs all the time so I did chunks of the Rogue one twice, the Cleric one, the Druid one (That little runty water dragon Feydedar.) and I tanked the version of Trakanon for the Bard epic as an SK, which was one of the scariest things I ever did in the game. The only one I ever did for myself was the Beastlord, which was famously the easiest. I did that one twice, once for all the group-required parts for a friend and much later the entire thing on my own for myself, by which time it was soloable, although only just.
I also have never heard from any of those people again since I stopped playing, with the exception of the Bard I tanked for, who popped up in EQ2 and played on and off with us for quite a few years until he finally vanished into the mists of time. I can’t say I miss my guild years – they were more drama than they were fun, by and large – but they certainly kept me busy.
I just did a search for Lost Sock Patrol and there are a couple other people out there talking about it besides me over the years, but mostly me.
I didn’t remember that you played on Stromm! It was so fun and new, since I had to legitimately play from scratch, no twinking. I’d been a healer with my druid, before she got to a level where druids couldn’t heal the groups clerics could, which ended my time of getting groups as a druid.
I raided in off hours with a different guild and helped them get some of their epics, and I’d bring some CE people if they were free to make these things work. It turned out that a couple of them were people I met later in Team Spode; I’d actually known them as different characters in EQ. And furthermore, when I was playing LotRO, they were again playing on the same server (Brandywine), and I knew them from there as well!
So in a weirdly indirect way, EQ has led to meeting some actual long time friends — I just wasn’t guilded with them in EQ. Also, my daughter met her husband in EQ, though now they play FFXIV.
Lots of interesting memories were awakened in me by this post. My EQ and EQ2 time has no overlap with yours, but some of the experiences definitely sound familiar.
I never had many alts, but my primary was a cleric and my guild did help me get the Water sprinkler aka “Rezzomatic”. I then became a regular raid ‘fixture’ along with a couple of other clerics in our guild with the epic, helping everyone else get *their* epics.
I have no desire to go back to that kind of guild/raid mentality, but I don’t really regret the time I did spend on those activities.
I also can’t spend the time raiding like I did. And with two young children to raise, I probably did spend more time on EQ than I should have. I can hardly spend an hour a week to meet Team Spode on GW2 now…
I stumbled across your post when I was thinking back to my early EQ days and the Legion of Fate Guild. My main was Hipocrates the Cleric (not to be confused with Hippocrates, also a Cleric in LoF :)). Lots of good memories from that time. I’m sure we crossed paths back in those days, but I don’t remember you specifically. Have you followed the development of the game Monsters and Memories? It’s essentially an indy remake of EQ and it’s looking really good. They are still in early testing but I’ve played a bit and it brings back a lot of good EQ memories.
I do remember Hippo! He had that snazzy purple armor! I don’t remember you specifically though maybe I would have gotten you mixed up with the other one, especially if you were both High Elves. Here’s a screenshot with how my character looked back in the old days –> https://photos.app.goo.gl/uWBFStSA2DhgU3WHA
I play Monsters & Memories whenever I can! If you search on this blog you’ll see some stuff about it. You’ll have to ping me next time there’s a test. I’d love to meet up with more UNC/LoF folks!