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.