Yup, I know that questline, but I've spent a lot of time in those catacombs. There are tons of quests down there, but most of them are started from drops, which is true for a lot of classic zones. If you didn't go around killing things for the sake of killing them, you ended up missing out on a lot of stuff.
There's a series of quests named after song titles. There are hidden quests at the tail end of some SL repeatables. The early devs, when they had time and money and more personnel, made a hugely rich game with many nuggets of fun thrown in. It wasn't until the dragon era came to a close that things got slimmed down drastically, with regard to story and to staff. My last note of real joy for this game still remains under my guild notes, and that was back in DoV - "Zombie othmir. This game rocks."
I don't mind the item-drop quests, in fact they're a lot of fun for XP grinds in dungeons, but some of the drop rates on them are completely ridiculous. There's this super rare one in Feerrott that has a less than 1% chance to drop off of only fish-type mobs, of which there are maybe 20 in the entire zone per spawn cycle. Thankfully in recent times they've added some of the old body-drop book quests to the sage NPC in cities, so at least you don't have to farm for those anymore.
With modern xp rates and mob difficulty, I'll outlevel the Sword of Thunder in Stormhold before I can get it to drop... and that's on TLE.
