It's all there in the header: free stuff! Come grab it. I'll get to what the free stuff is, exactly, in a bit. I have a bit of a problem with EverQuest II just at the moment. I'd like to slot it into my gaming rota (Hah! Like I have one!) which currently consists of Neverness To Everness, New World, Wuthering Waves (When I get a free couple of hours that aren't going to be interrupted by dogs. Or one specific dog, I should say. It's not like random dogs run in off the street and hassle me to come play with them. Although that would be cool if they did...) and Black Desert Online. Well, I've played BDO once. What all of the above have in common is that they're on GeForce Now. For the time being, I can only play games on GFN or more accurately I am only willing to play games using that platform. The reason is simple: if I play any game locally, as soon as I stop playing, my PC suffers a fatal error and crashes. It works perfectly the rest of the time. It works perfectly while I'm playing games locally,in fact. I can play anything just fine. It's only when I log out that there's a problem. And since when I carried on playing under those conditions earlier in the summer, it ended up corrupting my Windows install to the point I had to change the whole drive it was on, I don't think it would be a great idea to do it again. I've been working with ChatGPT to see if I can isolate the cause and fix it. (It's not RAM or the PSU or any hardware fault as far as I can tell. Might be the Bios or the drivers.) but honestly, I'm not sure I even want to figure out what it is. I might be happy enough to carry on only playing games on GFN and just use the PC for non-gaming stuff, for which it seems to have no issues at all. If I hadn't logged in to EQII to get the freebies, I wouldn't even have been thinking about it. But I did because... Free Stuff!. While I was there, I took some screenshots so let's take a look at what you can get. If you're a non-paying customer it's not a lot but it's all useful stuff and definitely worth having. It's all in the EverQuest II 2026 Splendid Celebration Crate. All your characters get one each. Inside you'll find: Five Portable Circles of Growth, (Handy teleport consumables that give you instant access anywhere to the Druid Portal Network.) Five Portable Translocation Devices (Ditto for the Wizard Spires.) A Shissar Armor Crate (Appearance armor.) A Mercenary Unlock Scroll (Free payment for a merc.) A Sorrowful Spud (Really ugly cosmetic pet - looks like a rancid potato.) And something called a Splendid Tender, which is an illusion item you can use to make yourself look like.... well, like this guy to the left. As I say, nothing to get excited about but certainly all well worth having. Except maybe the spud. If you're an All Access subscriber, though, you do a hell of a lot better than that. For a start, you get a free Level 135 Boost. 135 is the current cap and since this is an off-year, it'll still be the cap throughout the next expansion, so use this and you'll be good on levels for more than a year. As I can attest, having been through it - or, I should say, having started doing it and then stopped - leveling more than one character through the extra five levels that came with Rage of Cthurath is hard going. Leveling my first character was fine. All the content was new. The storyline was interesting enough. I enjoyed it. But it took a while. I found it a lot less enjoyable, trying to get through it a second time without the benefit of novelty. In previous expansions I haven't bothered with the free boosts because leveling at the high end used to be trivial. As I've said several times in previous posts, Daybreak changed that a couple or three years back and now leveling multiple characters in current content is back to how it used to be - slow, grindy and tedious. So a skip for those five levels is very welcome. Shame you only get one. I haven't yet decided who to use mine on. Emotion says it should be my ousted main, Conkers, the Berserker. Logic also favors him to a degree because in every respect other than level, he's my most-rounded, complete character, the one who knows all the languages, has all the best faction and owns every perk there is to own. Even with all his privileges, he's not the second-easiest to play after the Necromancer who replaced him, though. Once I got Mordita fully kitted out, I realised, belatedly, that I'd been playing on a kind of self-imposed hard mode for years by doing everything as a Berserker. I'd be better off using the boost on my Warlock or Wizard or even my Bruiser, all of whom would be in a better position to kick on in the next expansion than the 'Zerker. Luckily, I don't have to make my mind up yet. These boosts don't expire. As a subscriber, you also get a better class of crate. Inside your EverQuest II 2026 Splendid Subscriber Crate you'll find A Magnificent Nethernaught (Really impressive-looking flying mount as seen in the screenshot above.) A whole bunch of currencies and/or crafting mats, five kinds in total. (I have no clue what to do with any of them but I'm sure they're all very important.) A flag to say you're eligible for Raid Progression Rank 20 and Untold Heroic Progress IV (No Idea what the implications of that might be. Don't even know what "Untold Heroics" are.) Vox's Lair Deed of Ownership (A prestige house that's exactly what it says it is.) An EverQuest II Splendid Subscriber Gear Bag. A little more detail on that last one might be helpful. I examined it and was shocked to see a list of items so long it wouldn't fit on the screen. I was worried about opening it in case it completely filled my bags but as luck would have it, the last time I was on I spent a couple of hours clearing Mordita's inventory, so she had a couple of hundred free slots. I opened it and what popped out was a complete set of cloth armor, accessories and weapons suitable for a Necromancer, all Level 135 and 130 Resolve. It only gives you the right gear for your class, or at least your archetype (Cloth, Chain, Leather or Plate.) so be sure and open it on the character you want to use it. It's baseline starting gear for your boosted Level 135 character. It's an upgrade from the quest rewards from the last expansion and most of the drops you'd get in solo instances from Rage of Cthurath but Mordita already had some pieces that were as good or better from other content that's been added since. Still, she's wearing plenty of pieces that aren't quite as good, so when I get time I'll go through and swap them out as necessary. Or I might give it all to whoever gets the boost. It's a bit of a moot point anyway because a) I already have some 130 resolve gear in the bank to hand out to alts and b) I bet there'll be yet another set just as good on the Pandas, when that event comes round in a week or two. EQII is a real gear treadmill. I don't think I've played another MMORPG where gear feels so ephemeral. Even as a casual solo player it's rare for any item to last more than three months, if you play anything like regularly. There are gear resets at the annual expansion in December, at the two Game Updates in March and August and then there's the pandas and all the special events throughout the year and the new Overseer season... Don't get too attached to anything you're wearing. that's what I'm saying. All of this free stuff, as I probably should have said at the start, is in the Cash Shop at a cost of zero DBC. I started off looking in Claim but I should have know better. Just open the shop and click on the "New" tab. While I was in there, I happened to notice a new familiar. It was pretty cheap at 899DBC and the name, Rowen, intrigued me so I took a look. It's quite possibly the cutest familiar I've seen. It's a kitten with two sets of eyes, horns and blue fur. A demon kitten. But so cute! I haven't bought one yet but I will. As I'm always saying, I'm happy to find anything in that store I can spend my hoard of funny money on. It's not free stuff but it's the next best thing.