EverQuest Starting Points – Surefall Glade

Since my post last week I have I have chosen a path forward for the EverQuest 25th anniversary, which is to attempt to walk along my original 1999 route through the game zone by zone.  It will be easy for a few posts, then probably chaotically hard, but we’ll see how it goes.  I might change my mind.  But for now, this is the way.

Back on March 16, 1999 after having arrived home with the EverQuest box, fresh off the shelf at Fry’s, and installed it and managed to get logged in… easier for me over ISDN, but still not an easy trick that first night… I made my first character.

I made a half-elf ranger.

It is like I never learn.

It is as though the gaming community saw Aragorn and his rangers and thought, “that’s cool… we must thwart anybody who aspires to that!”  So I was abused for making a ranger back in the day, and as a class rangers have either generally sucked or become completely focused on bow and arrow ranged attacks such as to become Legolas rather than Aragorn.  It isn’t as though I dislike the bow, but I just want a warrior with some attunement to the magic of nature.

Anyway, that is a complaint for another day.  But part of why I made a ranger is that I was coordinating with some friends who were also starting out and they claimed druid first and to this day I regret not simply making a druid as well.  Few classes were as handy or beloved as the druid in early EverQuest, handing out buffs like candy and in demand by every group.

And so a ranger was born back in 1999, a half-elf which meant showing up in Surefall Glade, a little starter zone seperated from Qeynos and reserved for half-elves, because half-elves always get stuck in their own little ghetto, unloved by the elves and not trusted by the race of man.

Classic Norrath

Qeynos itself was on the unfashionable western end of Antonica, the largest continent of early Norrath.  The cool people started in Freeport or in one of the chic starting areas on Faydwer.  I will eventually get to traveling across Antonica to meet up with other friends who started as dwarves or elves, but on that first night we seemed to be a happy bunch of half-elves, as yet unaware of the cruel reality of our geographical situation.

Surefall Glade seems small when you first show up.  There is a modest pond… too small to be anything like a lake… on which the residents have built a solid guild hall under the soaring trees.  Or soaring trunks.  Back in the day when there was a mist to limit line of sight the trunks disappeared up into a fog that felt mysterious.  Now, however, with the mist long gone they seem seem more like textured columns that might be holding up a distant roof.

Wait, those aren’t trees! They are just giant pillars!

But the guild hall is still there.

Here, because we like to be on the water

Here was your first chance to fall in water and drown, because land was apparently at such a premium that they stuck the place on piers in the water.  When I say it is on the pond, it is not just fronting on the pond but literally in the pond.

Time to learn how to use a door!  This seems like a simple thing, yet this whole 3D world was strange and new and there was no World of Warcraft to set standards for interactions with the world… or maybe even suggest that doors were not strictly necessary.  How many doors do you see in Ironforge or Stormwind?  Even the Goldshire Inn lacks doors, and we all know what was going on in there.  When you tell somebody to “get a room” it implies a door to close to hide their shame.

One clicking on the door established how to open it up, inside there was one of the ranger guild masters and the fletching supplier.

Welcome to Surefall Glade

That was back when you had to go and train skills back at the guild every level or so.  And then there were spells, which were every five levels, modeled on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2.0 pattern that TorilMUD used.  The spells were available over at the counter from the triplets of Surefall.

There were not enough NPC models to waste any on half-elves

Meanwhile, hanging around outside were more rangers, some standing at an archery range pretending that archery was a useful skill to have in early EverQuest.

Here we are, practicing archery!

It was not.  Hager Sureshot?  More like Hager Pants on Fire!

I spent a long time with the fletching kit making a bow and some arrows and trying to shoot things and… and… I still wish I had just made a druid.  I mean, Spirit of the Wolf!  I think rangers got that at level 41 while druids picked it up at level 6.

My memories of the day involved me pretty quickly wanting to get out of Surefall and into the world, there not seeming to be all that much in the zone.  However, there is a whole hidden set of caves in the back of the zone… a lot more than I remember looking at the map that Project 1999 wiki has posted.

Surefall Glade Map – Circa 1999

That Project 1999 wiki is going to be very useful for these posts, and I am not going to be shy about swiping the maps since they themselves harvested them elsewhere.  I’ve posted a few of them here before from other sources.

My vague, 25 years in the past recollection is that there were some bears in the cave and a quest and a campfire or something.  But on day one I was on my way elsewhere, which meant going through the most awkwardly long tunnel in Norrath.  The map does not due justice to how long that tunnel to Qeynos hills feels… and how sudden that stop comes when you finally hit the zone line and thing the game has frozen, then how long you wait for the next zone to load.

And that next zone is Qeynos Hills.

Guarding Surefall Glade like anybody would want to get in there

We’ll get there shortly.  It is still loading.