Virtual World Stories: Gorge of King Xorbb
This is a story I had on an EverQuest private server called Project 1999. Project 1999 aims to faithfully recreate the Everquest experience in its early years before modern MMOs like WoW would cause the game to reinvent many of its systems.
If you played EverQuest back in 1999, you have every right to be a crotchety old person who claims to have hiked uphill both ways to reach max level. The game was hard and was not designed to be played alone. Past the first few hours, the fastest way to level was to find a group of friends to travel the world with and kill monsters that would easily one shot you alone. The dangerousness of the world made it feel huge because most players were too scared to explore it alone and had no idea where to go because the game did not originally have maps. However, the ones that did travel to all corners of Norrath could tell stories of dungeons with hidden traps and devilish monsters. These stories created an awesome world narrative with lots of mysteries to be discovered and shared among the players. Most of the stories were of horrible deaths though. This is one of those stories.
One day, my friends and I were killing skeletons in the Plains of Karana. The respawn timers were long and the grind was boring albeit decent in terms of experience. We agreed as a group that we should return to the goblin passage of Clan Runnyeye since there were some faster spawning goblins in the early floors of the dungeon. To reach Clan Runnyeye, the only way was through a mountain pass called the Gorge of King Xorbb.
The Gorge of King Xorbb was also known as the Beholder’s Maze. Without a map, the gorge was easy to get lost in due to its forking paths. Since we were all fairly low level, there were lots of dangerous creatures such as necromancers, eyeballs, and minotaurs lurking behind the walls of the maze, ready to kill us if we took a wrong turn. However, there was a single safe passage through the gorge and we could safely traverse the path since our wizard friend knew this route that would avoid most monsters but a few golems called muddites.
As we reached the pass, our wizard told us to follow his lead so that we could avoid as many enemies as possible. Given that this was our best chance of survival, we followed the wizard as closely as we could, mimicking his movements through the maze. We were surrounded on all sides by monsters but we took comfort in knowing that as long as we followed the lead of wizard, we would make it through the maze alive. The wizard evaded the sight of many enemies until he finally reached a wall. The wizard ran full speed into the wall and ceased to make forward momentum. We were perplexed at first and then the horror set in.
“Oh god, I’m blinded,” our wizard exclaimed over Ventrilo.
A muddite had cast blindness on our wizard and blind in EverQuest is serious business. In EverQuest, blindness turns your screen entirely black. Most people think that their game crashed the first time they are blinded.
With no guide, our group split in all directions. Most of the group got lost in the maze and murdered by minotaurs or muddites. Only the healers survived to tell the tale of the blind wizard who led adventurers to their deaths in the Gorge of King Xorbb.
