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Everquest Fan Faire - Baltimore, February 2001
1/20/04 Note: I stopped playing Everquest in November of 2001, when I started to play Dark Age of Camelot. I then stopped playing that for the most part and played PlanetSide from July 2003 until recently. I play a little of all of these games here and there still, but I'm not sure what my online gaming future holds right now.
Fan Faire was a lot of fun! Over a thousand Everquest fans from all over the world came to the event. I came to this one since it was less than an hour to drive from where I live in Northern Virginia. I convinced Chris to go, since I had agreed to go to a U2 concert with her in June. For those of you that don't know, Everquest is a game in the genre of "Massively Multi-player Online Roleplaying Games", or MMORPGs. Verant, the creators of Everquest, has these gatherings every couple months it seems. This one had well over a thousand in attendance from all over the world, but mostly from the Mid-Atlantic region. The guild that I'm in on the Innoruuk server, called "The Renegades" had several people at this one as well. There were at least thirty or so from Innoruuk overall. There are dozens of servers, each an exact copy of "Norrath", the Everquest world. I've been playing since April 3rd, 1999. My three main characters are Zaun Ruslyan, level 53 Dark Elf Necromancer, and Vikan Tyuhele, level 24 Dwarven Cleric, and Derevo Listok, level 24 Halfling Druid. I also own the site innoruuk.com, which is the most popular site for the Innoruuk community. It currently gets a couple thousand hits a day! I took a lot of pictures at Fan Faire, but it seems that most of them were of random crowds milling around. I did have a few keepers though, fortunately.
This is a small crowd in the main conference room. It's a small fraction of the total, since many were in adjoining rooms during this time, attending talks by various teams of developers.
I wouldn't mess with him, even if most of his armor is only cloth!
Talmon (Scott) of Innoruuk, of the guild Silent Justice, on the left watches Krazick (Mark, a fellow Renegade of Innoruuk), work on his "trade skills". My wife is holding the newest creation off to the side, and some social misfits from the Tarew Marr server are staring at some cutie swimming in the indoor pool below. Mark is quite skilled in origami. I can only make paper balloons.
OK, here are the Innoruuk Renegades that were at Fan Faire. From left to right are: Helium (Kim, not a Renegade actually, Neverwinter Dragonlords), Tesla (Richard, Kim's husband), Wemdaan (Andrew, their son), Krazick (Mark, friend of theirs since college), Zaun (me), and Zaun's Wife (well, Erik's wife, but she did put "Zaun's Wife" on her nametag!)
At the end, everyone got together and had dinner, along with an awards ceremony. Nobody from Innoruuk won anything cool, but it was fun all the same!