EQ Chronicles: Epicced!
More than a year after beginning his quest, my Bard has finally acquired his fabled Epic weapon. I have waited a while before posting the story in the hope that I could get a picture up, but our FTP problems seem to be enduring. So instead, you will have to be satisfied with an image painted by words. In a way I guess that’s fitting. He is a Bard after all…
Update: Found a way around the problem. Here he is cheering like a dork.
Standing facing a wall at the zone-in to the forgotten undergound city of Old Sebilis is not the most epic of tasks. In fact, it’s downright tedious and quite below my Bard’s station. But for several weeks it was a necessary meniality.
Sebilis, or Seb as it is known, is the home of a particularly nasty dragon from the old world. Trakanon is a bitter and twisted wurm who takes up residence in a large cavern at the deep end of a long and dangerous path dug into the bare earth aeons ago. He is also Undead, which explains his rotten condition. I mean really rotten. His flesh is falling off him in chunks and no doubt he smells apalling. Aptly he also sports a potent area poison attack to add to his biting and clawing of any passers-by. His failing condition may be partly due to all the self administered notches in his fettid hide representing guilds he has vanquished, as he has disposed of many in his time. Perhaps in gloating he has whittled himself down into bitterness and decay. Whatever the reason, he is altogether an unsavoury character, and not to be trifled with. Yet there I was pushed face first into a corner at the zone line, barely two hours away from his lair, waiting.
It wasn’t hope of avoiding his odour that kept me skulking there nose to stone. I wasn’t actually interested in Trak at all, and was generally hoping he didn’t show. I was waiting for the Undead Bard.
The Undead Bard is an unfortunate musical soul captured and imprisoned by Trak for attempting to create the ultimate Lute. Trak may have taken exception because the strings for the instrument required the removal of his rotting guts. Either way, the Bard was caught, killed, and cursed to loiter in Trak’s lair until the dragon himself periodically returned, whereupon the bard was promptly killed over in vengeance, only to reappear at a set interval and endure the cycle again. An awful fate really, and one for which I could hardly stand, particularly since I needed to create the same Lute. You see an aged Maestro zones away in the Dreadlands wanted it desperately, and promised to exchange it for the ultimate Bardic weapon - a Singing Short Sword. Several dragon scales, countless smaller battles, and a more than a few deaths later, I had everything I needed except those strings.
I had to have a word with that Bard. So why was I wedged into a corner at the zone-in and not busying myself with constructive action? Well, as with most things to do with the Epic Quest, the explanation is a bit convoluted.
Getting to Trak’s lair is a major task in itself necessitating a gauntlet be run of undead frogloks, man-sized angry mushrooms (don’t ask), and massive lumbering earth golums that hit like pile hammers. Even if I made it there alive - which I would not on my own - there was no point unless the Bard was up. This only happened once every day, and even then he had to be reached before Trak spawned on top of him and commenced his devastating musical criticism. The trick was to know when the Bard appeared.
Luckily for me, Bards were awarded a very nice set of (rather ugly) green armor at the end of the Kunark expansion. The helmet to this set, called Singing Steel because every piece has a right click effect equivalent to a song (very, very useful), produces an Eye of Zomm when clicked. This Eye acts as a roving camera, and normally will appear as a large, bloodshot eyeball several feet in front of me. Tasteless, but cool. Seeing from it’s perspective, I can then move it around and check ahead, or see places I wouldn’t normally safely see. The only limitation is the eye disappears after a short period of time.
Usually the eye is just a cute toy and would not be of much use in Sebilis. However, in their dodgy programming wisdom Verant put in some bug catching code incase anything found its way outside the normal confines of a level. If something did - like (snigger) an Eye of Zomm for instance - the code would throw it to a random safe location within the zone. Thus, standing in a corner and clicking my helmet caused the Eye to spawn in front of me and outside the level, and then be thrown around the zone. If I did this enough times, it eventually spawned in Trak’s lair. Not an eloquent tactic, and not strictly speaking in the spirit of the game (that is if you can overlook the other hundreds of bugs which hinder fair play), but effective. Combined with a song that allowed me to “bind” my perspective to that of any entity within my view, I could target a mob in the lair while in Eye of Zomm mode, sing my perspective song and see through its eyes for as long as necessary. In this way I could safely watch the lair from the zone-in.
Sometimes being a Bard is not unlike being McGyver.
Of course, this wasn’t exactly a rivetting way to pass the time, but it had an important purpose. Once I showed the Undead Bard the pieces of the lute I had made, he would get angry and attack me (no, I don’t understand that either - perhaps when you’re dead and periodically re-killed by a vindictive dragon normal musical rivalry reaches murderous proportions). After he was dispatched, a special version of Trakanon would appear. He also had to be killed. This required the full support of my guild. Organising a full guild raid takes time. I had to know when he was up, so I could let my guild know to begin assembling for the fight.
The Bard spawned many times during the weeks I was there, but it seemed there was a glut of other Bards wanting to speak with him as well. Finding a time when he appeared, noone else wanted him, and enough of my guild was available for the battle was proving more difficult than I expected. We had previously completed the fight for another Bard in my guild, but he had yet to gain his sword due to mysteriously losing part of his lute and having to redo parts of the quest. Being the oldest Bard in my guild, I was keen to be epicced first (the inner workings of EQ guilds are bizarre and will be revealed in the next Chronicle), and was running out of time. More than once already I had watched another guild head for the lair because things hadn’t worked out.
So there I was on yet another slow night getting gravel rash on my nose, when low and behold, my skinny little friend popped in the Lair. Oh my god (OMG in EQ Vernacular)! This could be it! Where is everyone?! Our raid leader wasn’t yet on, but had promised to take the Bard if he appeared that evening. Three nervous hours later he and the rest of my guild arrived at the zone-in. Another two hours and many fights on the way down later still, we were assembled in the lair around the Bard. There is a little speel you can go through with the Bard for the sake of story and posterity, and it’s a tradition amongst bards that this is done. I started to, but in the moment became worried I’d do something wrong, and simply handed him my Lute mid-speel. Undaunted by my rudeness, he attacked. We killed him, the dragon appeared, we killed him. I had my guts!
It was a funny feeling going through the motions of the final hand-ins later. When I handed the Maestro the Lute and he gave me my sword, and I experienced the dancing blue note particles around me for the first time, my friends cheered and whistled (virtually of course), but I was subdued. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy, proud, and satisfied to have finally achieved my Epic. I was. It was that it was the end of a 12 month journey filled with adventure, discovery, difficulty, excitment, and longing, and left me a bit quiet for a while. They are not emotions you normally associate with a game, but there you are. MMORPGs touch on many things that aren’t normal gaming faire.
posted by monty · at 12:54 pm · filed under EQ Chronicles
Well done monty well done :)