EverQuest II: The Shadow Odyssey

Befallen is an area that was built by the Knights of the Order of Marr's Fist. It's a fortress, designed to fight off the orcs and bandits of the commonlands. However, if you call your fortress Befallen, you're begging for hot undead action. Sure enough, when Gynok of the Bone Bladed Claymore worked his way into their trust, the result was a betrayal, a curse, and everyone became a little bit posthumous. The Order of Marr's Fist still roam the area.

The Bonegrinder is our first impressively-named mob, and our host takes the opportunity to point out his "snap on" armour. This, she explains, is a system that gives the dev team more options with armour. I ask what snap-on means, and how this results in more options; I get this reply. 

"It's the way that they're making armour now, rather than revamping all the skeletal structures in game to allow for more and newer options for armour texture."

It's a response that leaves me baffled enough to understand that I'm asking the wrong person, so I refrain from tech questions. Besides, someone has just found a shiny, and started dancing with it.

Befallen, like Lower Guk, is heavy with undead themes. Mistmoore is another zone from the original Everquest game that you'll explore, and it's the first place we're taken to that isn't overrun with zombified types. Sure, there are vampires and ghosts, but this place had just been excavated; you'd hardly expect a Walkabout Sports Bar down here.

We're taken, first, to an area ceilinged by a rotating glyph, through which you can see... another glyph. It's worth squinting, though, because above that glyph, you can just about make out the underneath of a dragon, walking around. It's impossible to see a dragon's tummy without thinking of Bilbo Baggins accidentally finding Smaug's soft underbelly, and something seven years old in me wants to punch that dragon in the face. But, it's a long way away, and not in the direction we're going, for now.

The police force of Mistmoore are the Libant, and to progress far through the zones here, you're going to have to become a fully-qualified member of their rank. That means some faction grinding, but it will open up the next level of the dungeon, and get you closer to that dragon. For now, we're taken to somewhere a little more civilised.

Mistmyr Manor is the home of Mayong Mistmoore, and it's where he goes to forget the pressures of being a powerful vampire. It's populated by the ghosts of his serving staff. They're preoccupied with their living roles, and fuss over the dust on his open coffin. These people are the quest-givers here, as well as your combatants; many are keen to have you out of their workplace, but others will see uses for you. Maybe you'll get asked to dust his coffin - none of the quest-givers are here yet, so I can only guess. A dusting mission would be almost as good as killing that dragon.

We're teleported upwards, to Mistmoore's Ravenscale Repository. We're now standing on top of the first glyph, but still underneath the second. This means we can get a less obscured view of that dragon, who's pacing around like a polar bear in a zoo. It looks likes he wants a fight, I say. Can we kill him?

It seems not - we're taken instead to a huge chamber, populated with 60ft tall statues, very much of that classical "coming to life, stamp attack" genre. Mayong Mistmoore is here, talking to his head archivist about some artefact called the Ankh of Ydal.