/wedgie

Last night, after another brief stint of harvesting, I went hunting for the Bristlebane Day quests.  I don’t know if there is more than one, but I only found one.

Some halfer was standing around outside of Qeynos in Antonica freaking out because the gods kept abducting him, stealing his items and memories, and then dumping him at random places in the world.  He had heard that there was a tin hat he could wear to keep it from happening again and wanted me to go get it for him.

So, I ran to Qeynos Harbor and sought out a blacksmith and asked him for the hat.  He giggled and said that it was all a practical joke he had been playing on the poor halfer.  He would be willing to give me the hat if I would go get him a trick deck of cards from a gnome.

I found the gnome upstairs in the bar in Qeynos Harbor.  She wanted to show me a magic trick.  After being “amazed” by her trick, I told her I wanted her trick deck.  She said she would be willing to give it to me if I could bring her some cute pink glasses some lady in South Qeynos had.

Off in South Qeynos, I found the lady in question walking around on a balcony upstairs in one of the buildings.  She was pissed because she had been jilted by some dude on Erollisi Day.  She was willing to give me the glasses, but only if I tracked down the object of her bitterness and reclaimed a high dollar bottle of booze that she had give him.

He was in the bar in South Qeynos.  He wanted to brag of his exploits to me.  When I told him that I wasn’t interested, he began cringing and begging me not to kill him.  I informed him that I wasn’t there to kill him and just wanted the hooch back.  He agreed to give it to me, but only if I went out to Antonica and killed a Ratonga who was after him.

I ran out to Antonica and got quickly ambushed near the griffon tower by the ratonga.  Right around the time I was attacked, I suddenly realized that it had been so long since I had taken my dirge into combat that I didn’t remember what everything did.

Right around the time my health was nearing 50% and I was debating evacing out, I started to recall the methods I used for fighting with my dirge.  Sheesh.  I couldn’t believe that I had already forgotten.

The rat died and I ran back to the coward in the South Qeynos bar.  He gave me the booze and I ran back to the jilted lady.  She gave me the glasses and it was back to the gnome.  She gave me the cards and I went back to the blacksmith.  He laughed at me for being willing to part with the card deck for a worthless hat, but made the switch.  I ran back to the halfling in Antonica and gave him the hat.

He promptly turned into an avatar of Bristlebane and started laughing at me for falling for his prank.  He informed me that all of the beings I had encountered along the way were actually him in disguise and he then proceeded to congratulate himself on a great prank.

In the end, I got a deck of cards to place in my house that, when placed, look like a deck of cards slightly fanned out.  If you right click them, you can enter into a LoN session.  Yay.  Yet another attempt to get me to actually care about LoN.  As if the constant system spam weren’t enough.

I placed the “hat” on the floor.  It looks like a brass kettle turned upside down.  You can right click that and there is an option to “turn on protection.”  When you select that, a light show starts jumping off of the thing like a mini fireworks display.

The quest was kind of fun.  It was definately easy.  It involved a bit of running around, but only through 3 zones and everything was relatively close together.

I am curious if there are other quests for Bristlebane Day or if this was the only one.  I have to admit that the holiday events in game are some of my favorite things to do.  I did the haunted house for Halloween with each of the toons on my main account (I hadn’t opened the second account yet).  I did parts of Frostfell with various toons.  All of the toons on my main account got all of the Frostfell daily gifts.  One toon got the wreath and Frostfell tree and they all did the Frostfell Carole instance.

For Erollisi Day, I was able to collect enough candies to buy a couple of the stuffed bears and a few other items and I got the cloak and keg for Brell Day on a couple of toons… although I never got around to doing the quest for the Avatar of Brell on anyone.  I meant to, but just ran out of time.

I have always thought that these holiday events are a nice touch to MMO’s.  They help to lend an air to the idea that these are persistant worlds that actually do change and see the passage of time.  Plus, they offer a nice break from the standard day of hunting.  For me, they definately bring out a different level of enjoyment to an already enjoyable experience.