Quests
Quests are the heart of the world and the fastest way to level. Here is how they work.
Finding and accepting
People with a marker over their head have work for you, and the mark tells you which kind. A gold exclamation mark means a quest you can take right now, and a gold question mark means a quest you have finished and can hand in. On a nameplate you will also see a gray question mark, which means you are on that quest but are not done yet. Repeatable work uses the same marks in blue: a bright blue exclamation mark is a job you have done before and can take again, and the same mark dimmed is one still inside its wait. Every mark but the gray one shows on nameplates, on the minimap, and on the world map, so you can spot work from across town. In Eastbrook, Marshal Redbrook is waiting with Wolves at the Door, one of the first quests you can take.
Why an NPC has nothing for you
Quests come in chains. Most are offered only once you have turned in the one before them, and many also ask for a minimum level, so an NPC with nothing for you today may have plenty after your next few levels or once you close the quest you are already carrying. A few have a condition of their own, such as the riding lessons, which open only after you have bought the riding skill. Group quests say so up front by listing how many players they suggest you bring. Some jobs are repeatable: you can take them again after a wait, and the marker over the giver tells you when one has come back around.
Objectives
Slay certain enemies, gather items, or interact with something in the world. The on-screen tracker counts your progress as you go. If you change your mind, you can drop a quest from your quest log and pick it up again from its giver later.
Turning in
Take a finished quest to its turn-in marker, the map shows you where, for experience, coin, and often a piece of gear chosen to suit your class. That is usually the one who gave it to you, though some quests send you on to someone else.
Questing in a group
Party members nearby share kill and objective credit, so questing together is faster, never slower. You can also share a quest with your group: post it to chat as a clickable link with the /share command, and any member who qualifies can pick up the same quest in one click.
The kinds of quest you will see
Most quests are one of a few familiar shapes. The on-screen tracker spells out exactly what each one wants, so you are never left guessing.
Slay
Thin out a pack of beasts or break a cult's hold by defeating a set number of a marked enemy. One of your first quests, clearing wolves off the Eastbrook road, is one of these. Now and then a quest wakes up its own targets: something that read as scenery on your last pass gains a nameplate and becomes something you can strike once you are carrying the quest that concerns it, so go back and look again.
Gather
Collect items from the world or from what enemies drop: herbs, ore, a cult's grim reagents. Some pieces only fall from a particular foe, so the hunt and the haul go together. Things on the ground that belong to a quest only give themselves up while you are actually on it, and they will tell you as much if you are not, or if you already have enough. Some quests also hand you a tool when you accept them: keep an eye on your bags and use it the way the quest text describes. If a quest needs a tool an earlier step gave you, taking the quest hands it back when you no longer have it, so a lost tool cannot dead-end the chain.
Interact
Use, cleanse, or read something fixed in the world: a defiled grave, a warning carved on a shore-rock, a sealed crypt door. Walk up to the marker and act on it. When a quest asks for several, it means several different ones: each object credits you once, so find the next one rather than using the same one twice. The object is not used up when you act on it, so everyone in your party can take their own credit from it.
Escort
Someone needs walking somewhere dangerous. Take the quest, find the person waiting at the start of the road, and speak to them to set off. They walk their own path while you keep pace, and the trouble that lives along it comes for them, not always for you. Stay close: enemies ambush the walk in waves, and the walk only resumes once a wave is down. You cannot attack the person you are escorting, but you can heal them, and if they fall the run simply resets so you can try again. Reach the far end with them alive and you beside them, and the quest credits.
Muster the defense
Some quests have you rally a town before a push north: thin the threat at the gates and gather what the defenders need. These are slay and gather objectives in service of the people whose story you are in, and they keep you moving with them.
Group finales
Each chapter of the main story ends at a dungeon door. The lead-in is soloable, but the final blow against a chapter's villain is meant for a party of five.
Not every NPC has a quest: the Card Master
One NPC in Eastbrook deals cards instead of errands. Talk to the Card Master, pick the Card Duel line out of his menu, and you join a queue that pairs you with the next player waiting. Any class can sit down, and nothing about your level or your gear comes into it. You each play from your own deck of twenty cards, values one to ten, holding four of them at a time and drawing a fresh one each round: the higher card takes the round, and two matching cards are a push that scores for neither of you. First to two rounds takes the match, so a duel is best of three. Rounds run on a clock, so leave your card unplayed for ninety seconds and the match goes to the other side, unless no round has been scored yet, in which case it is simply thrown out with no winner. The same is true if you walk away from a duel yourself. You have to be standing with the Card Master to join the queue, but once you are matched the board opens itself and you can play from anywhere. It takes two, so the offline world never offers it.
A thread runs through it all
From your first errands in Eastbrook, something is wrong with the dead. A cult is at work, and the trail leads north through every zone. Follow it to learn who stands behind it.
The main story is soloable right up to each chapter's finale, which is a five-player dungeon.
Follow the trail north
The main story is one long chase. A death-cult is at work on the realm's graves, and every chapter you close points one zone further up the road. You never fight the whole conspiracy at once; you pull one thread, and it leads to the next hand holding it.
The Vale: a name on a sigil
In Eastbrook the dead will not rest, and the mark behind it belongs to a sect long thought gone. Trace it to a Gravecaller working the chapel crypt, and his own papers point you toward the fen in the north.
The marsh: a tithe of souls
In Mirefen the drownings are no accident. Someone is filling the fen like a tithing box, raising obedient dead from every traveler the water takes. Chase the orders up the chain to a Fogbinder in the drowned bastion, whose last words name something older still, stirring beneath the peaks.
The peaks: what the tithe was for
On Thornpeak the whole scheme comes clear. Every soul stolen since the Vale was a tithe poured toward the cult's grim work in the mountain's heart. The trail that began in a chapel yard ends here, in a five-player descent to face the hand behind it all. We will let you find out who waits at the bottom.
Threads off the main road
Earning your name
Alongside the story, the marshals and wardens of the Vale and the fen hand out a standing bounty ladder. Work your way up it, foe by foe, the way every bounty hunter before you earned their place. It is honest leveling and a tour of each zone's worst troublemakers.
The drowned temple
A gate of pale light on a high tarn in the peaks opens onto a sunken shrine where a drowned cult still sings. Its short chain stands apart from the main story, a self-contained mystery for anyone who climbs to the shore, reads the warnings carved on the rocks, and goes down to see what they were for.
The forgotten king
High on the peaks runs a quieter mystery: old graves marked with a crown no record remembers. Read the dead, gather what they guarded, and unseal a tomb that was meant to stay shut. It is a detective's trail that opens the way to the realm's ten-player endgame raid.