How are respawning NPCs explained through lore?
 

Open question, I'm genuinely curious if it was ever explained how NPCs keep respawning in the EQ lore.

Does a benevolent god resurrect them every 30 minutes?

Spontaneous regeneration, where if there's even 1 cell left the NPC can regrow on a timer?

Is it a long family line, with one of the sons taking over the father's guard post on a timer?

Am I just knocking them out humanely, and little gremlins move them to a recovery chamber before they pop back out ready to rumble?

I don't think there is any lore for respawns,.. it's an mmorpg. The idea being that creatures exist in this world and they have a home/ natural environment.

There may be lore for magical being such as constructs.. for example elementals and how they come into being in the world.

It would be a far different game if creatures had to reproduce naturally because players are basically psychopathic murder hobos who kill everything they see for it's loots.

I always thought this was a problem from a roleplaying aspect... saying, "so and so killed my husband, get me revenge and I'll reward you". Ummm... why didn't you pay for a rez?

I prefer to think of it as Veeshan reincarnates folks, and we are pawns in her game.

That's a funny thing because from a D&D point of view getting rez'd in a low magic world could be insanely difficult requiring something like a perfect diamond that costs thousands of gold. But in a high magic/fantasy world where people flip their fingers and rez each other immortality can actually be fairly common. Just requiring stronger and stronger magic to keep the being alive, Unless they go lich. I'd say the elves king/queens in LOTR are liches.

long story short,. getting a rez in say erudin may be easier than getting a rez in freeport. In this hypothetical roleplay sense.

na hhh dude elf king/queens in LOTR are immortal because they are the First Born of Iluvatar. To be a lich you have to store your soul in a phylactery and they are fully undead beings. if ur Galadriel in LOTR you were getting laid under the Trees of Valinor whose blessed essence would destroy creatures of darkness such as liches, although it did not drive back Melkor when he turned finally to Corruption, nor did it stop Ungoliant from piercing the trees and killing them with her venomous fangs, and so possibly a greater lich such as Miragul would be able to stand under the Light of the Trees though it would bathe him in accursed agony, for it is well known that any evil being who holds a Silmaril, containing the light of the last fruits of the Twin Trees of Valinor, feels an excruciating burning sensation from the Most Holy Silmaril. Therefore, the allegation that Galadriel and Celeborn, or even Thandruil or Elrond Half-Elf could be liches is laughable, even more ridiculous than claiming that Feanor the Smith himself was a Lich. It is true that Feanor led his people to the first elvish Kinslaying at Alqualondë, which as we all know forced the Valar to banish the Noldor who followed Feanor and his Brothers from Valinor forever and this is the great meaning of Galadriel's speech when she says "I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the West..." That's right, Galadriel is the only elf who lived in Valinor who survived the exile and would return to Aman. This is why the elves in LOTR are not liches.

Not going to lie I read the whole thing and learned a lot. Felt like an episode of LOREMASTERS. :)
Thanks for setting me straight.

Thanks, was about to read Silmarillion again but you saved me the work - tell a story about Huan please :)

It's a game, if you haven't figured this out go outside and look at the sun for a minute.

+1. I’ve also long suspected that the designers didn’t actually expect players to camp spawns (“who in their right mind would sit in one place doing nothing for an hour just to kill one mob again? Maybe one crazy guy,..”). And if they DID purposely design the game for camping, I’d say that is the dumbest design direction in all of history. So players would be less likely to see mobs pop in front of them if they were crawling around as the designers intended. Now, we all know that intention failed terribly, thus later advances in EQ and WOW such as instanced dungeons and loot that can drop off any mob. WOW did many things overall to end the camp dynamic.

They didn’t intend for players to kill mobs over and over? Then they made killing mobs the only way to get exp, and made the amount of experience needed so large that you had to kill thousands (and thousands) of mobs to hit max level?

I agree, the devs of EQ didn’t expect a lot of he “emergent” behavior we came up with to work around problems. They patched a lot of the behavior that caused problems, but they never patched in the dreaded “anti-camp radius”.