I want to start this by saying that Blackburrow is the home to the Blackburrow gnoll clan, but I feel like gnolls are not, perhaps, the most notable or obvious mob in the range of fantasy creatures.
Do I need to explain gnolls? I mean, they don’t even have their own Wikipedia page, having to abide way down the page about Hybrid Creatures of Folklore, being humanoid creatures with a hyena-like head.
I mean sure, they are there in my 1979 copy of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, but there are a lot of things there that never made it to prime time in any campaigns I played. Thanks to Tolkien, we were a lot more interested in orcs.
These are still on the bookshelf behind me
Gnolls were apparently an invention of Dungeons & Dragons, and have been picked up here and there. The Monster Manual announced on its back cover that there were “Over 350 Monsters” within its covers, but you have to admit some of them felt like padding. How many pages of dinosaurs were in there between demons and the displacer beast? I mean sure, we were all into the details descriptions of the different dragons… but gnolls felt like they needed another humanoid race so it would ALL be orc all the time.
Some gnoll lore… I am sure WotC will be on my ass about this…
Gnolls were present in TorilMUD I am sure. There were some down past Baldur’s Gate around Jenna’s cottage I think. I am just not sure how they not only were folded into EverQuest in such a big way, but because the main opponent of Qeynos the way orcs were against Freeport. Again, I am always looking for ways that the devs slighted Qeynos, and giving us a second tier, practically unknown nemesis seems like another easy reach.
Fippy Darkpaw… and that section of false wall…
That said, Fippy Darkpaw is famous and the studio that keeps alive the EverQuest flame is named Darkpaw for him, while I couldn’t tell you the name of a single orc in The Commonlands. Qeynos prevails against the odds once again. Are there some famous NPC orcs? Freeporters represent if I am wrong.
Darkpaw Games… I rarely call them that, but that is the name of their studio
And then World of Warcraft picked up gnolls, making them a little less humanoid, but enshrining them in Azeroth with another well known name, Hogger. Yes, I also know some orc names in Azeroth, but they are also a playable race there.
All of which is quite the diversion from the topic, because tackling Blackburrow is a task I do not relish, yet feel I must do since it dominated some of my early play in the game.
As mentioned in my pass through the Qeynos Hills, you can access it through a crudely formed gnoll head passage on the eastern wall of the zone.
I’m glad they never revamped this, it should remain as ugly as it was on day one forever
You go into the mouth and through a passage that has at least two more twists than required and which is all the same horrible pattern so it is easy to zone, get yourself turned around, and zone back again into Qeynos Hills. But when you get through you are into an open upper area of the place, which is very low polygon the way much of Norrath was back then.
Behold, the top floor of Blackburrow
But Blackburrow delved down into Norrath, so to get a sense of it you need to try to look at it as a place of varied elevation I suppose, which means I should probably try to anchor this from a map.
Once again, stealing from the Project 1999 wiki, there are three Blackburrow maps just due to elevation issues. It is a zone that cannot be contained on a single map. Or even in three maps, really. But three maps is what I have. The main level of Blackburrow is thus represented.
The top level of Blackburrow
In the screen shot above the map I am standing about where it turns to go to “level 3” and am looking over “the pit” towards the far side. You can see the hollow tree, represented by the “1” on the map, which has a gnoll standing at the opening. That tree has a false bottom and if you step into it you will fall through down the lowest level of Blackburrow and, if you were not prepared, you would probably die and spend all night trying to find somebody to help you recover your corpse.
Where you land, with a level 13 gnoll tactician staring at you
Anyway, you aren’t really at the bottom, but at the middle of the map… but there are so many ramps and drops that the slice that represents the second level feels fairly arbitrary.
Level 2 of Blackburrow
The map legend from the wiki says:
- Snake Pit – sitting on the ramp to the east is the safest place to pull higher level gnolls from both the Elite Room(3) and the Commander Room(4).
- While waiting for respawns you can also pull the Snake Pit itself, the Snake Ledge(2).
- Snake Ledge – 3 high level snakes spawn here
- Elite Room – 5 high level gnolls spawn here
- Commander Room – 4 high level gnolls spawn here
- Fall to here from pit trap above
So that screenshot with the gnoll tactician I am in location 5 facing south.
A lot of the place is unremarkable wall patterns so that you are often unsure if you’ve been someplace before. Specific mobs and the few unique points, like the bridge, become landmarks as you try to navigate its chaotic sprawl.
It is like bachelors live here… nothing on the walls… except food…
Oh wait, I have found my way to the snake pit. The door ahead is locked.
Down in the snake pit
The snakes are level 7-8 mobs. I remember being in a small group at one point just hunting those. There are a few about.
There is a door off to the left, not visible above, and that leads down to level 3, putting me at the top of the map where it shows connecting to level 2.
Down at the bottom of Blackburrow
Standing by that point on the map.
Water down on level 3
Skirting along the edge of the water, which is not quite so comprehensive in its coverage as the map above might suggest, gets you to that around to the location marked as “1” which is the bridge.
The Bridge in sight
The bridge is probably your anchoring landmark as a low level player. It leads across to a ramp up to the first level, to the spot where I was standing in the first screen shot.
The bridge and its environs was the center of any number of groups ranging out, looking for gnolls that might grant xp or some decent drops. It was also the way out if somebody was running straight at your group yelling, “TRAIN!” That meant they had a pack of hostile mobs in tow and were going to drag them right over your position, where they would as like attack you as anything. You didn’t have to out run the train, you just had to be faster than the person behind you.
And if you ran all the way back up to the top and jumped into the big open pit in the middle of the top level, you would land in the water on level 3 just next to where I am standing two screen shots up.
Looking up to level one from my spot by the water
So the zone is pretty well tied together and, in its day, venturing into it was fun and chaotic. It was a toss up whether it was more accessible when crowded… which would get a lot of mobs out of your way if you wanted to explore… or when sparsely camped… which would allow you to setup some pretty good low level xp groups.
A menu of gnolls to choose from
The level range wasn’t that great, but leveling was also pretty slow in early EverQuest, so I feel like I spent a lot of time in there… but once we moved on to the Karanas there was no looking back.
It was also a zone you had to get through if you started as a barbarian character, which could be a bit of a chore. There were a few higher level gnolls hanging out in Everfrost outside the tunnel that you would have to run past to get to the zone line, and then some more you might have to dodge to get out the other side into Qeynos Hills and the road to the rest of the world.
As to the question in my title, I remain uncertain. It is obviously a zone, by simple definition of what a zone is within the scope of EverQuest. It is also arguably a city of gnolls… a hostile city, certainly, but their home. Fippy Darkpaw shouts his allegiance to Blackburrow during every assault on the Qeynos gates.
And it has a dungeon-like air to it, having levels and tunnels and an escalating level of difficulty the deeper in you go. But it also has no destination really, no boss, little treasure, and no quests. There is no “completing” it, no achievement for a boss slain, no dragon deep in its depths, no mystery to be solved within it.
It was, however, a simpler time. We were a good four years from instanced dungeons and all of that. In today’s context it seems like a kiddie park, a little leveling zone for noobs to get their feet wet in Norrath. But back then… it was kind of a big deal to the Qeynos crowd.
Now do I divert to Everfrost and the barbarians, or head to the Karanas next?
The story so far:
The Ancient Gaming Noob 