************** SPOILER ALERT *******************

Stop reading if you don’t want to know.

Ok, so let’s get started. 🙂

Fiery Avenger:

When the Fiery Avenger Quest 1.0 (never completed) was put in, it wasn’t every fully functional. Pieces of the quest did go in however, and were discovered by the players. The sphinxes found in Rathe Mountains were originally part of this quest.

Quoting from Brad McQuaid in his post on the EQ forums on this topic recently:

“The first quest involved talking to several sphinx and figuring out their riddles. This was begun, but then devs were distracted with other priorities. So you couldn’t finish the quest (or even get far on it), but we announced it worked. When later we realized it didn’t work, we ended up throwing the whole initial quest idea out and put a quest in that actually worked.”

Mayong Mistmoore:

Mayong was not in the game initially. He was specifically left out to create a sense of mystery and hint at a larger story. Because he became a subject that players were curious about, he was a frequent topic of early GM quests and those done by the Quest Troop. The first few times they featured Mayong, they didn’t actually have a model for him and had to use a dark elf model. There were a number of GM quests that did involve Mayong, helping to lend some credence to the idea that he did spawn.

Brad mentioned this in the above mentioned thread as well, worth a read for you guys if you are interested. https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/12-years-i-feel-so-old.4319/

Kracken:

Unfortunately this one is complete urban legend. There was never a Kracken in the OOT. There was a giant shark planned for Lake Rathe, but he was probably removed at one point because water monsters are hard to implement.

Other Super Rare Spawns:

There are a ton of other super rare spawns in the original EQ zones. The most famous of these was bilge farfathom, who inspired the Bilge Hunter website. http://www.hyperhighway.com/bilgehunter/

These spawns are crazy rare, for example Prince Kyrmt Keroppi may not have spawned this year. Or last. It’s pretty unlikely unless people are actively killing in those zones all the time. There were a number of obscenely rare evil eyes as well, and they were the inspiration behind the Xorbb zone in the most recent expansion. I think spawns like these with incredibly low chances are what give rise to credibility for the above mentioned Kracken.

The King of Ak’Anon;

The King of Ak’anon is a clockwork stand in. The real king is in Dragonscale Hills I believe, and featured in some quests there. There is a very complicated Gnomish reason for all this, but it confuses me since I haven’t fully played through that quest line.

I think the other reason for many of these mysteries is that Devs are clever folks. Or at least they have a low animal cunning. When they build things they frequently add hooks where future content can be inserted, or areas where zones can be attached. While the early devs didn’t have any idea of the potential longevity for EQ, or the massive amount of people that would be attracted to Norrath, they still were gamers at heart. They did thing like write out long timelines, and note potential areas for future expansion.

Nowdays the devs are very cognizant of this, and frequently do these sorts of things in a much more knowing manner. They aren’t above planting fake clues buried deep in game files either to throw off those who try and find out what is not yet meant to be seen. Of course sometimes those clues grow in the retelling, and devs actually end up implementing what was originally intended to be something to throw players off the scent.

And never forget repurposing. In early Beta there was a system for evil characters to be able to travel around Norrath as there was significant concern that it would be too difficult for those individuals to go from one location to another. As the game developed it became clear that this wouldn’t be necessary, and so it was scrapped for the time being. But the firepot in Neriak’s third gate is still clickable. I wouldn’t put it past the Devs to use this sometime in the future.

Some of the Devs are more fond of the mysterious content than others. I know Dzarn who is on the team currently still adds in the occasional quest with no bracketed keywords immediately available. It’s always interesting to see how quickly the players pick up on those sorts of things and still solve the quests.

Hope that answers a few questions at least. 🙂

Reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/EQNext/comments/1ifni8/unsolved_mysteries_quests_and_other_bits_of/