Research

Along with various other ways players can spend their time, one of the most important and utilized are the tradeskills. For most casters, they are able to find pages that they can use in tomes to research new spells. Each spell has a recipe or specific set of pages that are required to combine for a CHANCE at successfully creating the spell.

Just as following an online recipe will not always provide the perfect chocolate chip cookie, merely combining ingredients together for any tradeskill in EverQuest will not produce a result - it requires experience (tradeskill level) to be successful. And materials are not easy to come by. Pages can drop from consistent mobs, but not consistently. The Wiki has eliminated much of the guesswork into what enemies need to be killed to get certain pages for specific spells, but back around the year 2000, being able to collect and sell pages had to be a lucrative endeavor.

"Research" is one of my favorite pieces I've ever done. While it didn't top the charts of the project 1999 subreddit - an amazing and extremely helpful community, albeit humble in size - it just holds my attention anytime I look at it. Maybe it's the depiction of someone pouring over paper, or endless words, trying to figure out the best placement for them, or how to arrange them into something that...just works. Regardless, I hope you enjoy this one as well.