Tinkerfest 2011
All around Norrath, gnomes, ratonga, goblins, kobolds, and all the rest of Brell’s creatures are celebrating Tinkerfest! This is the holiday dedicated to making clockwork contraptions steampunk style that more often than not, either fail or have creative side effects. Tinkerfest is one of my favorite game holidays (second only to Nights of the Dead) and the only one which does not correlate to an American or European holiday. Tinkering is one of the secondary tradeskills that any crafter can pursue, and their skill in tinkering is limited only by their skill in their primary tradeskill class. Unlike adorning, the other secondary tradeskill, tinkering only calls for common materials, making it more accessible to all players.
Happy Tinkerfest!
Tinkerfest is centered in Gnomeland Security Headquarters in Steamfont, of course, but carries you around to lots of different zones where gnomes and ratonga have a strong presence, like Baubleshire, the Dropship Landing Zone in the Moors of Ykesha, at the Dreadnever crashsite, and even in Solusek’s Eye, among other places. Tinkerfest is filled with many fun and interesting quests and activities (more every year) and you can collect Shiny Tinkerfest Coins that you can use to buy cool things to wear or for your home, and also use them as components in recipes for crafting. Special recipes and blueprints are also available only during this time, so there are many ways to enjoy yourself, including a clockwork pet fight.
Tinkerfest runs from 12:01am PDT on July 29th through 11:59pm PDT on August 8th.
I think the gaming devs have overlooked one big opportunity for questlines, since the creation of Tinkerfest and the release of Echoes of Faydwer. In all of EQ2, there has been one type of mob that wasn’t from the original EverQuest (that I can remember, at least) and is not from classic mythology or other traditional fantasy sources: gremlins. Gremlins popped up in Loping Plains in the middle of Faydwer, but they didn’t seem to fit in where I expected to find them. You see, gremlins are a recent addition to the world of mythology, probably derived from a German myth, and their first known written appearance only dates back to World War I. These were invisible impish tricksters who terrorized airplane mechanics, and were blamed for all sorts of unexplained machinery failures. The term “a gremlins in the works” meant that a machine was not operating properly for unknown reasons. According to wikipedia: “A gremlin is an imaginary creature commonly depicted as mischievous and mechanically oriented, with a specific interest in aircraft. Gremlins’ mischevious natures are simliar to those of English folkloric imps, while their inclination to damage or dismantle machinery is more modern.”
So, since gremlins were added to EQ2, their proper place should be to attack clockworks and other machines, and there should be an entire Tinkerfest questline involving gremlins, but so far, none has been made. I have written a couple of Tinkerfest stories, including one with gremlins, and should probably post them here as blog entries.
EverQuest 2 for the Casual Player 