The Wayfarer’s Call

One of the things about my forays back into EverQuest over the last few years is that they tend to focus on one of two things: New or Nostalgia.

I either log in to see something new and shiny, like a new starter plan or in-game housing (or new hot bars), or I want to wallow in the old world of EverQuest and play in the Qeynos sewers or West Karana.  Part of the reason I keep saying that Ruins of Kunark is the only good EverQuest expansion is, of course, because that was the last EQ expansion in which I was really invested.  I have only really been a Norrathian dilettante since then, looking at the new and then going back to play the very old.

But those two points are just the first and last items on what is a very large and still expanding buffet of EverQuest content.  There are many more dishes in which to indulge. (I was torn on what metaphor to use there. I also considered the layers of a cake, the ends of a foot long hoagie, and something about pizza toppings. Clearly I did not get enough to eat for dinner.)

With this in mind, I decided to try and take advantage of one of the EverQuest expansions that I have never seen but which is available at lower levels, the Lost Dungeons of Norrath.

Yes, LDON is hardly new, but it does fall inside my knowledge gap, which is pretty much empty from the launch of the Planes of Power to The Serpent’s Spine.

LDON was tentatively on the list of things for Potshot and I to look into on the Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server.  Even after that effort was derailed by the PSN/SOE hacking last year, there was still a chance that we might go back once LDON was released, since you can start on it in full at level 20, or so I understand.

Then SOE announced that EverQuest would be going free to play, an event which occurred just a couple of days after LDON finally went live on Fippy Darkpaw.

And since playing of Fippy Darkpaw requires a Gold level subscription, it seemed like a better idea to just roll up characters on the new Vox server.

So there we were, rolling up new characters yet again.  And then subscribing and making too many alts and running around in old Norrath and all of the usual vices.

Eventually I managed to focus on one character long enough to get the call.

LDON is calling you...

I have actually gotten that message in the past, at other times on other servers.  I knew (though cannot tell you the source of this knowledge) that this message had to do with LDON, but have never attempted to answer the call.

This time though, I was going to.  As soon as I remembered where my home city was.  I started off towards Halas before I realized that everybody has to start in Crescent Reach now.  They even give you a recall skill to get you home, called Origin.  So, like the drunk who saw the “Drink Canada Dry” sign, I went.

Upon arriving in Crescent Reach, there was a mysterious voice update.

Okay, now find a guy...

From there, it was a matter of finding Vladnelg Galvern… a name Steve Martin could have made up.  Fortunately, the mysterious voice gave a geographical reference, and I was able to find him standing next to our old friend Disgruntled Boawb.

A somewhat antiseptic hive of scum and villainy

He told me… well… several chat screens worth of stuff, ending up by telling me to seek the camps of the Wayfarer’s Brotherhood, which were purported to be scattered about Norrath.

He did not, however, mention exactly where.  So I had to go look this up, since Norrath is a pretty big place.  This lead me to one of the problems with EverQuest, the fact that a lot of data on the web it really old and often link out to pages or sites that no longer exist.  Even Allakhazam’s EverQuest section, which has held together pretty well over the years, shows signs of age and neglect.  There are a lot of pages on the site where the most recent comment is more than five years old.

Still, I did find a site that told me where I might find the camps.  While the site was obviously old, the information was accurate.  The dispersalof the camps  in Norrath betrays the ongoing anti-Qeynos, “Freeport Über Alles” attitude of SOE.  They were listed as being in:

• East Commonlands (The Commonlands have been one zone for a while now)
• North Ro
• South Ro
• Butcherblock Mountains
• Everfrost

Bowing to the will of SOE, and looking for the camp closest to a Plane of Knowledge travel book, I went to the Commonlands.  Once there I had to search around a bit before some tidbit of lost data forced its way into concious thought and sent me headed to the tunnel to North Ro.  There it was that I found one of the NPCs which Vladnelg Galvern told me to seek, Barstre Songweaver.

This tunnel used to be full of players

I spoke with Barstre a bit, answering his questions.  I am sure they were part of the information that Vladnelg attempted to impart on me, but I just took the answers to his questions from the site I found, and used them to respond to each of his statements.  They were:

• Adventures
• Favor journal
• Morden Rasp
• Farstones
• Oldsmobile

After that he gave me the Adventurer’s Stone, which is an augmentation thing.  But augmentations are a bit of EQ lore that I missed (or forgot about… I have forgotten a lot) somewhere along the line, so I am not sure what to do with it.  More research ahead.

But I have some time.  In addition to having to get myself up to level 20 in order to get into my first LDON instance, you cannot go in alone.  So Potshot has to get there as well.  But we are, I hope, on our way to seeing something new to us in Norrath.