I decided to pop into EQ2 last night, something I’ve been doing at random times recently. At this point I’m mostly still re-exploring Qeynos and doing the quests involved with that (which scale to your level). Anyway I found out something called the Heroes’ Festival is going on. I normally ignore events in EQ2 since the stuff that’s always there is overwhelming enough but after a little nudging from Angela I decided to poke around and see what was going on.

I found one quest that I really enjoyed. (Sorry, I’m telling this story from the Good side..not sure how it works if you’re evil). It’s called Thumore’s Absence and it starts with an NPC named Milupet Cogsory who is near the big Claymore Monument in what used to be North Qeynos. Milupet is looking for Thumore D’armer who is apparently something of a legend at the Festival; you’re sent to locate him.

Well it turns out that Thumore is, well, sleeping. But a bunch of mages are preventing anyone from waking him up. When you investigate you’re told that anyone who touches Thumore also falls asleep and doesn’t wake up, so the mages are keeping people away from Thumore’s sleeping body. Of course, you agree to help by entering Thumore’s dream in order to see what’s going on. If you want to do a good quest, just go do it, but otherwise read on for spoilers.

[SPOILERS BEGIN]
When you enter the dreamworld there’s not much for you to do other than speak to Thumore, who needs you to recover shards of memory in order to wake up. This takes the form of a linked series of quests. For each one you’ll go through a portal and into a ‘slice’ of some high level (well to me and other noobs, anyway) zone where you’ll have to defeat some even-level mobs in order to collect the memories. I thought this was really neat, since I got a taste of a bunch of places I’ve never been, and got to fight a bunch of monsters I’ve yet to encounter, all without spending too much time traveling.

Once you’ve recovered all the memory shards, Thumore thanks you but then implies that the memories you’ve retrieved are not his. Hmm. With no other choices open you leave the dream world to find…the mages are still there but Thumore is gone. If you talk to the mages they’re feeling groggy and out of sorts and they say they’ve never heard of anyone named Thumore. In fact no one has. Before the quest everyone was wondering where he was. After the quest no one has ever heard of him.

Eventually you find him in a ghostly form and he sends you off to help others trapped in their dreams, and that’s as far as I got. But I can’t wait to learn who or what Thumore is. It’s a mystery!

Now if you don’t read quest text then this whole series would be a lot less interesting but this time around I’m soaking up the EQ2 lore and quests like this series make me glad I am!