Lore text for paladin holy swords

[KyrosKrane]

One of the tasks I've set myself is assembling the lore text behind the paladin holy sword quests (SoulFire, the Fiery Avenger, and the Fiery Defender). When I first did the quests, they seemed really arbitrary and illogical. It turns out that most existing guides are either outdated or "get it done fast" guides that skip much of the optional material. Unfortunately, that misinformation from incorrect guides and skipped material from the correct ones serve to make the quests illogical.

So, I set out to gather all the lore text I could get for these quests. Here's what I have so far:

http://www.gamesnet.org/KyrosKrane/Paladin/

I know that many of the folks here at EQTraders are into quests, so I'm hoping some paladins here have run these quests with their logging on. I'm looking for any lore text I may be missing for these quests.

When viewed as a complete story, the three holy sword quests (the latter of which is in fact the paladin epic) suddenly make a lot more sense. I wonder how much more of this rich tapestry of background material we're missing because we just want to get the quests done as fast as possible?

[Dunthor Warsmith]

Oi, this will be an interesting project Got me poking around in some of my oldest logs - will definitely spend more time comparing them later.

I see you've excluded Ghoulbane - its not a flaming sword, but it is still generally considered one of our Holy Swords. Its quest text is entirely unrelated to the running theme of the other three though, so seems a reasonable exclusion.

Have you thought about including the faction hits in your writeup? Not strictly RP, but it can be one of the few markers about inter-faction relationships and who NPCs are actually loyal to.
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Looking through the start of the Soulfire, I have the red Guard Alayle text in my logs:

[Thu Oct 26 18:21:30 2000] You say, 'Truth is good'
[Thu Oct 26 18:21:30 2000] Guard Alayle says 'Ssshhh!! Pipe down. The others might hear you! You must have something for me. Kalatrina must have given you something if you serve the Hall of Truth. If you have nothing, please leave. You will blow my cover.

. I do not have two of your Krazen Loosh lines:
Krazen Loosh says 'The towering wall of stone is clearly unmovable at this point, being held in place by collection of magical energies.'
and
Krazen Loosh says 'As you try to open penetrate the stone wall it is clearly being held in place by a powerful force.'

I only have Krazen saying his Qeynos line - then misc guards charge with their standard aggro messages, and Alayle dying with the standard message (which you have). Krazen did not respond to hails after he finished his killing, btw.

Will be fun to look through more later. I've been trying to piece together the Soulfire storyline for quite a while. I only got bits and fragments while I was doing the quest myself - I couldn't figure out how to actually progress at many points, so I had to guides to complete it, thus losing much of the story's continuity (as you point out).

Goodluck with this project

[Malathos]

Don't forget the first sword which starts it all - Ghoulbane.

I've got logs from around lvl 5 onwards so I should be able to dig out all the text for that, but I haven't got much further i'm afraid.

{edit}
I've now got the whole Ghoulbane text - what do you want me to do with it ?

[KyrosKrane]

I chose to leave out Ghoulbane since it's not an obscure quest by any means; I believe the entire quest text is up on Allakhazam's. The lore for the flaming sword quests, though, is much harder to track down.

Malathos, if you like, you can PM me the text and I'll get it formatted and written up. You can also email me through the boards if you want to send it as a text file. I'll clean it up, format it, and post it with some comments.

Have you thought about including the faction hits in your writeup? Not strictly RP, but it can be one of the few markers about inter-faction relationships and who NPCs are actually loyal to.

I've been leaving out the faction hits since they're a pain to gather. I suppose it might help to figure out alliegances all around. I'll try to go through my logs when I have time and see what I can gather.

The other problem with factions is that many of the Web guides from which I got my source material don't list the relevant faction hits. I suppose I could revisit them and see if any list the hits.

Krazen Loosh says 'The towering wall of stone is clearly unmovable at this point, being held in place by collection of magical energies.'
and
Krazen Loosh says 'As you try to open penetrate the stone wall it is clearly being held in place by a powerful force.'

Krazen said the first line when I hailed him as he was approaching Alayle -- I was a total newbie at the time, so I was on my way out having considered my work done. I hailed him out of curiosity, then followed him due to his madcap response. When he started attacking Alayle, he said the second line -- I assume it's his aggro message, unusual though it may be. At the time, I was literally in mortal fear for my life. I hid in a corner and constantly kept conning Krazen to make sure he didn't suddenly decide he wanted to kill me. Eventually I convinced myself he wouldn't attack and I sidled my way out of the building.

[Heartsong_Steelsoul]

Very neat idea. My main is a warrior and I've always been curious about the entire path of the warrior epic, but some of it really isn't on any guides out there. =/

[Cubwynn]

Most of the guides out there are like, "Kill this mob, loot that, then go here and /say 'blah' to this NPC". Lore seems to be an afterthought for many people...

[Dunthor Warsmith]

For the Fiery Defender -> Pure Crystal, Jark has two "random" emotes (from my logs):

Jark strikes the wall with his pick. A dull clang sounds throughout the cave. 'Arrr. Nothin' here either.'

Jark strikes the wall with his pick. A clacking sound echoes through the cave. 'Har har. There's something all right.'

The latter is the source of the "something" keyword for the rest of the conversation.

Note that the second line has changed - older logs have it as (note the spelling of "all right"):

Jark strikes the wall with his pick. A clacking sound echoes through the cave. 'Har har. There's something alright.'

The change happened sometime between June 28, 2002 and July 17, 2003.

[KyrosKrane]

Super, thankee! That solves a mystery that's long plagued me. Despite camping Jark for about an hour, I never got his emote -- I'd say it's way too rare to be practical. He needs to fire off an emote at least once every 2-3 minutes to give people a chance to catch it.

[KyrosKrane]

OK, I've posted a ton of updates to the SoulFire and Fiery Defender write-ups. I've also posted a Ghoulbane write-up, and I've added my current working copy of the Fiery Avenger guide. The latter still needs lots of work, though.

[KyrosKrane]

For the curious, the SoulFire and Fiery Defender guides are now complete and submitted to Alla's. I'll keep poking at them periodically.

The Ghoulbane guide is almost complete; I just have to actually run around to all the NPC's and get names and screenshots of the items they give you or the stuff you have to collect.

The Fiery Avenger guide still needs work; I need to hunker down and just write up a lot of the info. Other bits need verification against in-game text, such as Inte Akera's text and the section in Neriak (for the Dal scribe) if you choose to go that route.

I've got a post on the EQLive boards here pointing out what appears to be some bugs and inconsistencies in the quests. If anyone has suggestions or wants to voice some support for the fixes, mosey on down that-a-way. =)