EverQuest Starting Points – Qeynos Hills

On that first day in March of 1999 I ventured from Surefall Glade into Qeynos hills.  It was the first “real” zone I saw in EverQuest, the first place I slayed a mob, the first place there was danger, the first place I died.

A wolf passing by the Surefall Glade entrance

Danger and death were not hard to find.  They were literally in line of sight from the entrance cave to Surefall Glade, right over there at the haunted ruins.

The place is lousy with skeletons

You can see the cave there in the background.  And, should you emerge from the cave at night, you would absolutely see the unearthly glow of the ruins… and maybe even be drawn to it, thinking it friendly.  And, my low level friend, you would be in trouble should you venture too close.  The skeletons… sometimes roaming about, sometimes a seeming harmless pile of bones… would go straight for you if you got too close.  And mixed in with the low level skeletons that you might manage were a number of high level variants… high level for a newbie zone in a spot line of sight from their starting point into the world… that would kill you dead before you could make it back to the guards hoping they could be roused to defend you.

And that laugh they had.  That has to be one of the most distinctive sounds from the early game, one so well known that they carried it over to EverQuest II.

How crazy aggro were they?  Here I am trying to take a screen shot of Holly Windstalker, a notable NPC in the zone and where Holly Longdale got her “Windstalker” nickname, with a level 90 cleric and a freaking skeleton is coming for me.

Restless doesn’t even begin to describe it

Also, for some reason I turned on “shadows” in the settings and… frankly… they look awful and I promised to turn that off again for all future screen shots.

That is Holly’s updated NPC model.  She was a lot more stiff with far fewer polygons back in the day.  But so were we all.

She wasn’t even that special.  She didn’t have a quest or anything.  She would just beat the crap out of you if she caught you abusing the wildlife, which was kind of tough to deal with because the early useful quests in the zone let you trade in bear or wolf pelts for armor.  So you would be going after a wolf, struggling to come out on top, and then she would show and and pound you into mush.

Aside from Holly and the Millers, who had the hide quests, there was also the first of a number of like buildings in what I think of as the West Karana style.

Just out at the crossroads

There were vendors in there you could sell things to and buy crafting supplies from if you had the coin.  You probably couldn’t use any of it early on, but you could buy them.

As a zone Qeynos Hills doesn’t seem very big or complicated or surprising in retrospect.  Here is the map, once again swiped from the Project 1999 wiki.

Just a big rectangle really

But I have to admit that, while it feels small today wandering it with a level 90 character, its polygon hills and depressions, not pictured on the map, made it seem like a much bigger place at the time.  Back, exploring it as my first REAL zone, it seemed like there was a lot going on.  There was the big Gnoll head entrance to Blackburrow.

I’m glad they never revamped this, it should remain as ugly as it was on day one forever

There was a tower guarding a path that I would later learn headed to West Karana.  But the tower seemed a warning, and having died and struggled to recover my corpse from the freaking haunted ruins already I was heeding all warnings until I got my footing.

Meanwhile at the southern end of the zone, past the house and its crossroad, south of the tower, there was an open plain with a few trees.  The mobs there seemed to get higher in level. That was where the wisps were, a seeming high level mob for a mere newbie, but a mob that would drop a greater lightstone on occasion, a coveted light source in a game where the nights were menacingly dark… at least until I discovered the gamma slider in the settings… such that groups would get together to try and take them down.

And that plain of higher level mobs faded into the now missing mists such that I feared to tread very far down the road that led through it.  I mean, after the haunted ruins what else could be waiting for me.

So I lingered in the Qeynos Hills for a while.  With the distrotion of time it feels like I waited days, maybe even a week, before striking out down that southern road.  But it was probably more like a couple of hours.  But in that couple of hours I ran around exploring Qeynos Hills, trying to find its mysteries and hidden places.

One fond memory for me is always the small lake behind a ridge in the northwest of the zone.  On the shore there were a couple of boats.  And, on jumping into them the game told you how to control them and you could sail them around on the water.

Back on the lake, the boats are still there

This was kind of amazing for me.  That here, in this early zone, you could control a boat.  What else waited for us out in the world?  Surely this was just the start of amazing things!

Well, the boat, in the end, was something of an unfufilled promise, and idea never really expanded upon.  They were out in Ocean of Tears and Lake Rathetear, but were never much use and would not lead to other, more majestic options.

Out on Lake Rathtear during the Fippy Darkpaw Era

They were kind of thrown in there, an interesting little idea that was never expanded upon, so was left to itself.

Anyway, I eventually steeled myself up to head south to see what lay beyond the mists at the far end of that southern road.