I bought EQ for my brother the Christmas after Velious came out, and I also got him the big Kunark strategy guide. We knew nothing of MMOs back then. Not even that you looted your own corpse to retrieve items still on it....! But man I loved that strat guide. It was cool! Tempted to look it up on eBay lol
Funny you mention this, I just found the Prima guide for Kunark the other day, along with the EQAtlas book for Planes of Power, which has super-inaccurate illustrated maps but contains a lot of cool lore. I still reference the Kunark guide when looking up racial attributes for certain classes, spell/ability levels, etc when I don't feel like tabbing over to a new Space and opening a Firefox window.
Very cool relics to have. I'm actually really wanting to find, steam wrinkles out and frame one of the old cloth EQ maps that used to come with all of them. I wish I had kept mine so bad. Seem to be pretty rare these days It's this one: http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTA1N1gxNDcz/z/BXYAAOSwI-BWL77R/$_35.JPG
i just found my kunark box a few weeks ago and it still had that cloth map in it. It's pretty cool because a lot of locations on the map you don't really hear much about.. like the river that seperates the karana's is called "the serpent", and apparently there's a big frozen lake between rivervale / everfrost / neriak called "winter's deep"
Yeah it's awesome. If any of you decide you'd be willing to part with your cloth version we should have some words. I was also talking to Polly the other day if any of you know her about another silly EQ relic idea that I have, which is to take all of EQATLAS maps and make like, a coffee table book out of it. Where on the left side is the map and the right side is the location identities, the cover would be their logo and there would be an index or table of contents type of thing in the beginning, and separate the continents with dividers so it would be easy to navigate. Just for fun more than a useful item, but I thought it would be cool. I figured it out, would cost about 98 bucks using alphagraphics printers in my locale in Salt Lake City . (totally looked into it) When I do this project you guys let me know if you're interested in a copy. When I do it I will definitely post some screens.
I'm deep into a couple of Jamison and ginger ales, but I'm incredibly fond of the old lore in EQ. Lore was so important in old EQ, that's why I loved the details that nobody cares about anymore that you mentioned Elroz. EQ was such a mystery then. When I was... I dunno 14? (I'm almost 32 now) I still remember people considering this game a role-playing game and I remember people sitting down in oasis to have a chat room situation, or teaching languages, goofy things like that.
My first week in EQ, I spent a good chunk of time trying to climb over the zone wall behind where Hadden spawns in Qeynos Hills. I thought maybe there was another big open zone to explore back there. I miss those days haha
One of my other good memories was when I hit level 18 and followed a full group of people from west karana to highpass. We wandered around until we ended up in the bar that goes out on a balcony over the lake. I spent all the money I had on brewing, and skilled it up while the group was spamming languages and drinking the alcohol for AT skillups. I think we maxed out almost all the languages, I did around 50 skill in brewing, and got to around 100 alcohol tolerance. They used the in-game message board in that bar to leave messages about meeting up for groups too. It was really cool, back when highpass / highkeep had around 30 people most hours of the day.
This. The fact that you have awesome memories at level 18 proves you were one of the people there at the time. And the fact that we had NO IDEA what alcohol tolerance did for us. Sure, we got some strength but the behind the scenes problems like "to hit" that we had no idea about. We just thought we were losing int and wis
Yup. All this stuff takes me back. I remember my older brother printed full color maps, put in sheet protectors, and categorized them in a binder. It may just be a game, but it taught that hard to acquire items, exp, etc made the reward so much more valuable! Some people get it, some don't. It's like a child *earning* an allowance vs just being given one. When I got my chanter epic at 54 or 55, I felt like I had won the game! No other game has been able to put the fear I had of strolling thru Rathe Mountains at a low level. Or the first time a griffon flew nearby.
I remember being somewhere around level 12 or 15 or so and trying to find an XP group on my cleric. Met a few other like-minded people who were trying to avoid the entire Kurns/Paludal/HK cycle and the six of us went on a trek to Lake Rathetear, because there was supposedly good hunting out there. Mind you, aside from PoK and a few newbie zones and Kurns, I still had yet to explore very much. So there we are, a barbarian warrior, dwarf cleric, dark elf shadowknight, wood elf bard, half elf pally and erudite wizard, going on what was (to me, at least), this mind-blowing trek across uncharted (to me, at least) territory, heading across Qeynos Hills into West Karana, then North Karana, then South Karana, and finally to Lake Rathetear. Once there, we set up a camp on one of the islands, and the SK and Bard go wandering around. All of a sudden, some NPCs in a tower aggro the SK and kill him and the bard (because he was playing a song at the time). I clearly remember suddenly feeling a sense of ominous dread and foreboding looking at the tower and being completely unsure of what dwelled inside that wanted to kill us. Being a newbie, I had either forgotten to purchase, or was not high enough level to scribe, a rez spell, and so I was stuck there on the dock with the remaining members of the party as the two recently deceased made their way back to their corpses. We had a blast just hanging out and fishing, working on a few language skills, until they arrived and we picked them up in the small canoe boat. The party had to disband soon after, and the entire trip amounted to maybe four blue bubbles of XP for us, but I will still always remember the trip for what it was: a chance to check out unexplored areas and actually interact with other people, instead of just following the beaten path through the well-worn XP zones and being stuck in mindless, wordless XP groups. We also made sure to take a screenshot of the entire group, and even though I don't remember their names, I'll never forget that adventure.
Awesome stuff! You mentioned passing thru SK....I spent so much time there. Some treant groups, but mainly gnolls at the spires. If too low, it took everything for a group to take a gnoll out...but then you hit that next spell level and you start getting a big chest lol. And back then when people sat waiting for group spots to open were awesome. I remember there were mule toons that people came to you to make change for you, after getting so encumbered with weapons and coin. They'd get a fee for the service. And quillmane sightings always added that extra bit of craziness
