The Beginning

The Dragons of Norrath expansion was announced on January 11, 2005, and went live on February 15, 2005. The initial expansion announcement may be found here. The initial patch message may be found here.

Download < PEQ Patch Files v11 > HERE​

What's Going On

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• A series of events has transpired across the world of Norrath and the familiar faces of Firiona Vie and her nemesis Lanys T`Vyl return to find themselves at the forefront of these events. Unbeknownst to them, a dark influence has seeped into the world of Norrath causing new tensions to arise and conflicts to intensify as the dawn of a new age emerges. The Age of War is upon the people of Norrath and heroes return in this ultimate, unending battle between good and evil.
• A gnome mining expedition has managed to dig their way through the northern mountains in Lavastorm. They came upon the dragon nesting grounds, a previously unexplored part of northeastern Antonica which is full of Nest dragons, dragonkin and goblins; and thriving with wildlife.

What's New

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• The Guild Hall is your guild's own instanced zone, including guild bank, a portal to many druid/wizard destinations, and buff stoppage.
• The Guild Lobby (now available to everyone) is a place for guilds to recruit and for players to summon their corpses.
• New Models: Dragons, Stone Sentinels, Kirins, Drakes, Spiders, Pumas, Dervishes.
• New AAs retrieved through Dragons of Norrath progression.

Progression

• In order to progress through this expansion, you would be advised to pick a faction and stick with it. You have two to choose from: The good-aligned Norrath's Keepers or the evil-aligned Dark Reign. Neither faction has any effect on any other zones in EverQuest.
• Both factions have camps set up in the network of caves in Lavastorm's north. In addition to these two camps, there is a group of Wayfarers to the south-southeast of the caves who also offer tasks.
• Completing tasks (both groups and raids) yields X amount of Radiant Crystals or Ebon Crystals, which can be used to purchase items and augmentations from adventure merchants Tatsujiro the Serene (for the Norrath's Keepers) and Xeib Darkskies (for the Dark Reign).
• Faction is gained by completing tasks and turning in the token you receive after each task. These tokens are LORE, so you need to make the turn-in after each task completed for maximum faction gains.
  • Norrath's Keepers Tokens are turned in to Tatsujiro the Serene.
  • Dark Reign Tokens are turned in to Xeib Darkskies.

Zones

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A Breakdown of Static Zones

• Guild Lobby (all levels; entered through the Plane of Knowledge)
• Guild Hall (all levels; entered through the Guild Lobby; must be guilded)
• The Broodlands (40th-60th level; entered through the northern caves of Lavastorm)
• Lavaspinner's Lair (45th-60th level; entered through the Broodlands)
• Tirranun's Delve (45th-65th level; entered through Lavaspinner's Lair)
• Stillmoon Temple (55th-65th level; entered through the Broodlands)
• The Ascent (60th-70th level; entered through Stillmoon Temple)
• Thundercrest Isles (60th-70th level; entered through the Broodlands)
• The Accursed Nest (70th level; entered through the dropdown in the rocks centered in the Broodlands lake)

A Breakdown of Instanced Zones

• Lavaspinner's Lair (instanced) (missions available for 60th-70th level; multiple entrances through the Broodlands)
• Tirranun's Delve (instanced) (missions available for 60th-70th level; multiple entrances through the Broodlands)
• Stillmoon Temple (instanced) (missions available for 60th-70th level; multiple entrances through the Broodlands)
• The Ascent (instanced) (missions available for 60th-70th level; multiple entrances through the Broodlands)
• Thundercrest Isles (instanced) (missions available for 60th-70th level; multiple entrances through the Broodlands)
• The Accursed Nest (instanced) (missions available for 70th-75th level; multiple entrances through the Broodlands)

Travel to the Dragons of Norrath

• The Broodlands are entered through the cave system in Lavastorm's north.

Above source Allakhazam

Developers Diary on Dragons of Norrath



It's here! Finally! After roughly 5 too long years of development, blockers, struggles, we eventually and finally accomplished what felt so massive and impossible when we started. The major blocker being a massive new system that needed to be implemented, Shared Tasks (amongst many other blockers and challenges). At the time PEQ didn't even have Dynamic Zones or Expeditions and used not so great workarounds to implement both. Today, we have Shared Tasks which also use Dynamic Zones, Expeditions also use Dynamic zones and a tremendous amount of time in effort went into all of them. Combined, the effort(s) were well over 1-2 years worth of work alone to implement all of the above said systems.

Content Framing

We also had a major obstacle of collecting base content for the making of the zones. Years ago Drogerin started by hand placing NPC's in the Nest. Manually setting their appearance, size, texture, movement etc. While Drogerin's work ethic was unreal and I had no doubt he would literally do all of the zone by hand, we needed a better way to frame the zones in. Same could be said for Huffin who were both working hard at making Dragons of Norrath happen even though the challenges ahead were monumental.

Content Collection

Historically, we framed zones through packet collection tools where we would at least capture NPC spawns, appearances, doors, objects and all of their respective locations. While data collection tools are a massive help for framing a zone, we still needed to do a LOT of work grooming the content. For example, grids still need to be groomed, loot needs to be done entirely manually, factions, quests, merchants, scripts, updates, task data, task implementation, respawn times, quest interaction, sequencing, flagging. None of that is talking about the major systems we needed to implement to bolt on-top of it all and the massive investments in tooling to make developing it all simple.

Content Import

We worked with Maudigan from mqemulator.net to build a data collection tool using MQ2 cleverly called TakeADump which will dump doors, ground items, merchant lists, npcs, zone data, zone points to dumps which can then be translated using a tool we wrote called Monocle to import directly into our data models. You can see this video where I import dumps collected from both Drogerin and Huffin by going into every instance and task on live. This was already 4 years ago and this was our first major hurdle completed. The same tool was able to be used for other expansions and content as well.

After importing the roughly framed content, lots of work went into parsing by Drogerin and Huffin to tune major NPC encounters, loot, grids, framing the scripting for events independent of all of a major component, tasks. Shared Tasks were still the missing but giant elephant in the room that needed to be tackled. Years went on as various developers attempted to start an interpretation of the system, but got walled by its complexity and and enormity of the project and it sat, multiple times.

Shared Tasks

In 2021, I decided I was going to move a lot of my other projects to the background to start prioritizing getting Shared Tasks moving since it had lost all momentum multiple times by the several different folks who attempted it. I scoped out the project and started my plans for how I was going to tackle the behemoth. I put together a design doc which shaped the rough idea of how the project were to be executed and what was needed to be done. It also required heavy cleanup of the existing Task code to even consider how we were going to bolt on a wildly complex system on top of it and keep it simple and intuitive enough for other developers to maintain and content creators to consume.

After scoping out the project, it took some convincing but I was able to get @hg who was a massive help and co-contributor to making Shared Tasks possible. If you don't know HG he was a player on PEQ and one day decided to take a stab at Expeditions and Dynamic Zones and beautifully executed them. I really enjoyed working with someone so brilliant, easy to work with as we tackled the monstrosity that was Shared Tasks. We formulated our plans, iterated on them, learned from it, iterated our plans some more, went on code binges on each parts of our implementations and found ourselves burnt out many a time, only to pick ourselves back up to keep going. Hitting a project like this for as long as we did was a difficult, stale, lengthy process and having each other to keep synergy going was key.

ProjectEQ Expansions

There's been a lot of work behind the scenes over the years to enable the server technologically the capability of classifying content and data to be within an era. Classifying data is still an ongoing effort and whilst not perfect, we are and have been making massive strides in this area.

ProjectEQ is the foundational database that is used in every EverQuest Emulator server installation and is the open source "source of truth" for Live-like content. While being the defacto standard, that does not mean that it is perfect, in many ways is far from it. Many projects have forked from it and made significant improvements to various eras of the EverQuest experience. The emulator community as a whole continues to make lots of progress here, sometimes other projects have to take the foreground for a while until we can get back to certain workstreams.

Some servers have areas of content that is far true to era in ways and with the technology to more easily move a server between eras and content settings, it allows us to move between settings in a matter of small settings changes rather than huge one-way, non-reversible data changes which is how ProjectEQ and all servers have operated until recent years. We have strong members of the community who have been helping contribute back their changes into ProjectEQ content that is more true to era as we progress both forward in expansions and also backwards. We continue to improve our technology, tooling, processes here and we're finally starting to see the first major shift on the current PEQ Production server.

PEQ Server Era Changes

ProjectEQ has for the longest time been considered in no specific era or expansion. It is a mish-mash of current and past, with no sensible boundaries. We use an EverQuest client in the Rain of Fear era while most of the players are playing through Omens of War expansion. Some zones have items, spells, from an era far past Omens of War and even playable character races.

PEQ will be shifting from no expansion or (all expansions) into the current expansion context with the release of Dragons of Norrath. That means that while things won't be perfect, we can start to think of a lot of our data from the lens of the current era and make changes, tweaks from the perspective of the era. It also allows us to classify things in earlier expansions and later expansions which will make the ProjectEQ database more fluid for anyone who installs their own server to chose what experience they want to play on as we the project matures.

While we realize that making this change, it will inevitably take things away that players have been used to utilizing and benefiting from that is out of era. Taking things away is not fun from the player perspective and changes that do so should be attempted to be done as sensibly as we can. We are going to try our best to grandfather out of era features and things where it makes sense such as quality of life client features out of era and doesn't impact the experience tremendously.

Other servers that use PEQ can choose to be more strict about their era experiences while we will try to stay mostly true to form, we can certainly make small exclusions here and there where it does make sense. Some of that we will leave up to player feedback on the forums as to what should be done with things that may have been undecided on and we can make a call. It also doesn't mean that when PEQ has other variants of servers out for player use, some rule-sets can't be more stricter in some sense as well to be even truer to the era changes through progression.

In general, if players feel something should be changed. Please utilize the forums to report and make the case for what you feel should be changed.

Special Thanks

None of this would be possible if it wasn't for a ton of work by very few individuals.

• @huffin for his unrelenting dedication to PEQ. PEQ most certainly wouldn't be what it is today without his help. Massive contributor to content. He is always tweaking, tuning, fixing, correcting silently behind the scenes and does so without much thanks. I and the community are forever grateful for his selfless contributions and incredible hard work.
• @Drogerin for his huge contributions during the early phases of Dragons of Norrath. Drogerin was a huge help to the PEQ community helping out in all ways content. Huffin and Drogerin worked closely together on many things.
• @huffin and @Drogerin worked together closely during the early days of Dragons of Norrath, collecting zones, tuning encounters, building boss event scripts, parsing, scaling zones, applying pathing.
• @joligario for being a long-time champion of PEQ. Always helpful on the forums, being the sole maintainer of the PEQ editor enabling content developers to do more for the community, fixing broken scripts, helping players and so much more.
• @hg for being the silent hero who if it weren't for him, I wouldn't be writing this right now. He was instrumental in building Expeditions, Dynamic Zones, Shared Tasks, building out all of the Dragons of Norrath progression, sequencing, framing in all of the tasks and all of the missions for Dragons of Norrath.
• @robregen a long time PEQ veteran who went to build the The Al`kabor Project for years and is now coming back with all of his content learnings to help make PEQ better. Robregen is an amazing person who has selflessly helped so many people in the community.
• @Trust for continuing to take his learnings from running Wayfarers Haven (a variant of The Al`Kabor Project) and continuing to give back and also make PEQ better. Trust has been a valuable member of the emulator community and has done many things to improve PEQ from his work on Wayfarers. I'm sure he will certainly help Dragons of Norrath as well once his project is exposed to the expansion as well

Changelog Notes

Era-Related Changes

AA's

• Akkadius AA's are now era contextual. Only the AA's that were available during Dragons of Norrath will be loaded and available. There is no grandfathering here. Veteran AA's will remain as they were.

Spells

• Huffin Spells acquired for Dragons of Norrath through the Plane of Knowledge library prior to the expansion will no longer be scribed on characters and will need to be acquired through the means of the expansion content.

Character Select

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• Akkadius Drakkins are no longer able to be created during character select. If you had a Drakkin created prior to this change you are grandfathered in and still will be able to play said character.

Guild Hall / Guild Lobby

• Akkadius Consolidated Guild Hall versions to the current era. No longer will clients be bouncing between different versions. (Make sure you download patch files)
• Akkadius Consolidated doors between Guild Hall and Guild Lobby to be consistent and not different based on client versions

Plane of Knowledge

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• Robregen Added the pre-SoD era Guardians and set the appropriate min and max expansion flag.
• Robregen Added the pre-VoA era Spell Merchants and set the min and max expansion flag.
• Robregen Aligned the Bazaar and Guild Lobby to set more appropriate to live and set those doors to appropriate min and max expansion flag.
• Robregen Set the Crescent Portal to correct expansion.
• Robregen Fixed headings to Class Tome Merchant NPC.

Zones

• Akkadius No longer will players be able to zone to out of era zones. Zones that were not available during Dragons of Norrath will not be available to zone to regardless of the client you have. If there are challenges due to v1/v2 versions of zones that players run into, we will fix and come up with a remediation plan to address it. If you have spells that bring you to out of era zones, you will be prevented from zoning.
• Akkadius If you are camped in a zone that is out of era, you will be brought in era.
• Akkadius If you are bound in a zone that is out of era, you will be brought in era.

Feedback, Reporting Bugs

To provide feedback on Dragons of Norrath or anything content related. Feel free to use the forums, you also can use the new /bug functionality. We will be using /bug more to triage issues in-game.