I’d heard wonderful things about Shards of Dalaya, a game built on EverQuest’s assets (and using the EverQuest client) but with a different plot, zone names, zone connections and so on. SOE knows about it and turns a blind eye to it for reasons of their own.
Nonetheless, even with the changes, Dalaya gives a fairly nostalgic look back to the simplicity and danger of old EverQuest, and though I realized I wasn’t as interested in the pure vanilla old school experience as I thought it was (half an hour to level 2? Madness!), the community is passionate and enthusiastic and active development on the game continues.
Ramon AKA Psyq123 started a couple of characters on Shards of Dalaya and writes about it on his new blog, Dalayan Diary. Even though SoD is not quite EverQuest classic, it really does bring me back to 1999 when I rolled my first character, an Erudite Wizard, and stepped into the Stygian darkness of Toxxulia Forest.
Great reading :)