How EverQuest 2's 'Denmom' took on the "Unobtainable List."
When most people think of EverQuest 2, one of the world's longest running MMOs, they probably imagine battling dragons and grinding experience. But the game also hosts a group of dedicated builders who use EQ2's complex, sometimes neglected, crafting systems to construct and decorate gnomish tinkering workshops and whimsical cabins in snowglobes. For these players, a champion has emerged. Christy 'Denmom' Bell, an EverQuest fan turned designer, made it her mission to solve one of the game's great mysteries: The Unobtainable List.
Back in the late '90s, Bell and her husband got into the phase 4 beta test for what would become the world's biggest MMO, EverQuest. As a former 4-H club member and cooking enthusiast, she was excited to try out the game's crafting system. A self-described "pretty organized" person, Bell started taking notes and posting them to her AOL Hometown website, but there was a problem. You just couldn't make a sandwich.
"The recipe for sandwiches was bugged," she told me at Fippy Fest, a recent EverQuest 25th anniversary event that took place in San Diego. "It all started with a broken recipe book. The book in game had the recipe wrong, but after some expensive experimentation, I found out that the recipe worked if you put in some spices. That was how the recipe side of the website started—I was finding a couple things in the published recipe books in the game that weren't right."
The website is EQ Traders Corner, an incredible community resource that provides information on all the extensive and byzantine crafting systems in EverQuest and its sequel, EverQuest 2. Bell and her husband started the website at the very beginning, when information was scarce—this was long before MMO enthusiasts were scraping expacs and figuring out raid strats months before the content even released. Back then, we were largely in the dark.
One year after EverQuest's release, Bell was told by her doctor to "cut her stress or she'd be six feet under," she says. Around the same time, she found out her mother had a terminal cancer diagnosis. She quit her job at AOL, spent time with her family, and later threw herself into EverQuest and the traders website. It was a place she could be among friends, and a place of solace in her grief. "That was how I was coping, by giving back to the community."
She got to know other crafting enthusiasts—a diverse group of players who preferred tinkering with arrangements to battling monsters—through a gamewide chat channel called Homeshow, where they would share their creations and their lives, transcending their shared interest in EQ2's crafting to become a true community.
Bell's work put her on the radar of EverQuest 2's dev team. They approached her through her work at the website for feedback about new crafting ideas and content for expansions. She was active on the test servers, and her character Niami Denmother was a fixture of the community—always ready to help, but just as ready to bop you on the head with a rolling pin if you got feisty. They even approached her to join the team, but due to health concerns she couldn't make a traditional office job work out.
Then came the pandemic, and everything changed. With everyone locked down, Daybreak Studios changed their work from home policy. They posted a temporary position working on EverQuest 2, and Bell decided to apply, feeling like the position was made just for her. She got it.
Bell decided to tackle a problem that had long plagued her people: the Unobtainable List. Crafting in EverQuest 2 is a huge part of the game, with a separate XP track, crafting classes, and a rhythm based minigame (that if you failed, could mean your death! Hilariously, the forge was the most deadly foe in the early days of EQ2). One of the crafting classes, carpenter, largely dealt with furniture and other items for glowing up your digs. They had long been frustrated by a list of furniture items that technically existed within the game, but couldn't be acquired by players. Some had never been intended to be used, some were created and forgotten, others were half finished. All of them were in the game files flagged to be used as furniture, but they'd never found their way into the hands of the players.
Using her community connections, Bell reached out to the owner of EQ2furniture.com and put together the master list. "It was a massive housekeeping job to even find them all. We found this list of things that had been created and never put in the game, and I sat there with a guild hall and I summoned every single one of them."
Some of them were great, some were junk, and some were artifacts of artists new to the process who simply hadn't deleted their early drafts. The cream of the crop became the Forgotten Furniture series, placed onto the marketplace in-game and finally made available to EverQuest 2's crafting community. "I got it to the players and that was just a wonderful feeling, to be able to give them something that they'd been asking about for years but the team just didn't have the time to take care of."
Some highlights include:
As a full-fledged designer now, Bell continues to advocate for the community that gave her so much support in her time of need. So if you're ever wandering around in EverQuest 2, munching on some Niami's Trail Mix and listening to the Homeshow chat channel talk about their latest home decorating extravaganza, know that there's a friendly halfling with a rolling pin waiting in the wings, thinking of ways to continue making your time in Norrath just that little bit more cozy.
