The (Updated) History of Norrath

Holy cow. Ever hear of a carriage return? Lol, his edit hit the board about 30 seconds before my post. Very nice job.

I fixed it.. the new forums have an issue with pasting from notepad Arrex@Kithicor wrote:

This is a great post with lots of information but there was something I couldn't find and was hoping someone could enlighten me. About how long ago did the Quellithulian ritual happen? I am trying to come up with a history of my some of my characters and this is a key point (maybe).

It's difficult to say with accuracy. From what I understand, the ritual was part of an attempt to activate the Quellithulian spires, which means it happened after the invasion of the Nexus ~400-300 years ago. But, it had to have happened before the Rending, otherwise the Erudites wouldn't have had an opportunity to move to Freeport and Qeynos. So, I'd say 200-300 years ago. Somewhere in there, I think, but take that with a grain of salt

Very nice. It was written such as the bible is.. almost. lol. Which made it even cooler.


Bravo.

Cusashorn wrote:

Since the thread is sticky and since this is the Lore forum and hence, it will remain relevant until the end, I figured I'd jump in and correct this.
Having played EQ1 since day 1 and having had a ton of debates like this, I think we can infer that ALL life on Norrath was initially "created" by one god or another. I know that here on earth (being careful here) evolution is accepted as generally factual science in one form or another (trying not to offend anyone's real world belief), but this is a fantasy universe. We're talking pure creationism here. Imposing our laws of evolution is kind of silly where gods are a proven quantity, magic exists, and the laws of physics are very malleable.
That said, there is no ambiguity on humans. The first post of this thread (which is a recopy of the very first stuff put out by Verant on EQ1), spells out that Barbarians were created by Mith Marr. Barbarians were the first humans. They developed after their initial creation (theres how evolution can fit in!) into the civilized humans of the Combine and, later, Qeynos. It is also well known that Erudites were an evolutionary development beyond that (the history of Erud is well documented in the game).
Perhaps one can infer that on habitable worlds, basic lifeforms (bunnies, rhinos, lions, wolves) evolve from the seeds sown by the Nameless, but it is clear that all sentient life was molded by one god or another and then developed on their own from that point. Even goblins were created by Brell... Orcs by Zek... etc. Ogres were "high men" of sorts, created by Zek, but were punished by the Tribunal and reduced to brutes later regaining some of what they lost. Evolution and change are represented in that manner. I dont think it was the intent of the original authors (Brad et al, I guess) to imply that there was a normal, science based, universe with intelligent life evolving selectively on various worlds and then, in addition to that, there were higher order divinities meddling and also *creating* sentient species to coexist with them. If anything, it should probably be viewed that the Nameless kicks off the process of evolution by creating the basis of life and the gods tweak it by creating sentient beings from those building blocks.
Also, and this is a nit against the original lore, I think the creation of the Dark Elves legend would read much better if it were stated that Innoruk had a long standing hatred of *Tunare* and that his transgression against the elves stemmed directly from that old rivalry. The idea that he was angry and slighted for being excluded and picked out the elves to grind his axe again always struck me as awkward from a story device standpoint. A minor critique, to be sure, but for me, the little things can make a huge difference in lore (don't get me started on WoW lore! ugh)

Is there like a on line EQ lore encyclopedia?

Quite a few, and in different styles (from players perspective, purely data, as if reading from a book)

I've created a website where I try to compile all the lore from EQ and EQ2 so that players don't have to go around looking for bits and pieces here and there. I'm currently working on adding the in-game books to the site, but it may take a while (there is a lot, so it's a lot of work hehe).

Myrist

I've updated the OP. If anyone feels there's something big I should include please PM me or post about it.

Just wanted to say thanks to the OP for taking the time to put this all together. Very well done.

I am an old EQ alumni who played from the time SoV launched until just after LDoN. This was a great refresher and brought me back up to speed on some of the older lore which had been long forgotten.

I've only been playing this game for a few months now and I really enjoy the lore more than anything else. I sat in Qeynos the other day in one of the libraries for quite a while just reading the various books on how the lore has evolved from EQ to EQ2. The lore of Norrath runs so deep and after reading this I'm really looking forward to spending some time in the coming weeks reading up on various other aspects of the lore because this really doesn't even begin to scratch the surface.

One thing I noticed missing from the PoP expansion was theres no mention of the PoN (Plane of Nightmare). I honestly don't recall much of the lore behind it but I do know that it existed and until this day was one of the nastiest regular zones that I have experienced over the course of my gaming career.

Again, I would like to thank you for taking the time to put this together for us. Just reading it got me even more excited about the game then I've already been these past 2 months playing and reminded me of how deep the lore truly goes.

update to Sentinels Fate please

Yes, it would be nice to have an overview of SF's lore.

Do we know all of SF lore yet? We know about ultera and the great feedback and all that... but there's still quite a few missing pieces.

Sorry guys, I got laid off from my job and dumped from my guild for inactivity, so I took a weeeeee bit of time off EQ2. I'll try to get caught up on what's going on with the lore and update the thread.

troodon wrote:

Heh and here i was doing a write up for RoK...

Is you coming back? =( I'll buy you a game card!

In gu63 raid zones there are 4 mobs from temple of veeshan in EQ1 that our guild has run accross so far, Arraken Skyward(weak drake in tov eq1) Dozekar (dozekar the cursed eq1 halls of testing end boss) Ikatiar (ikatiar the venom in eq1 tov) and Dagarn (dagarn the destroyer in tov eq1) cool seeing those names again