Mum had a candy corn addiction, and when she indulged in her addiction, her antics while on a sugar high had become the stuff of legend.

This year that had become a problem for the pint-sized halfling.

Nobody wanted to accept her other Nights of the Dead treats in exchange for candy corn. Nobody. Not Grabby Gigglegibber, the candy exchange goblin, not any of her friends, not even any random strangers, no matter what sort of favorable exchange rate she offered.

Nobody wanted to be anywhere near her when she was under the influence of too much candy corn.

So, she tried using an illusion, only to find that Grabby Gigglegibber could see through any illusion that she could obtain. But if she stacked enough illusion spells over each other, maybe, just maybe ...

Armed with a plan, she decided it was time for a heart-to-heart talk with her god, Bristlebane. After all, a redheaded halfling wired on candy corn despite every city's attempts to deprive her of sufficient supply should be right up his alley, if she managed a convincing enough argument.

"No. Absolutely not. I won't give you a temporary race and gender change to layer under your stack of illsions. You frighten me when you're on a manic candy corn high." Bristlbane quickly amended his statement. "Erm. Well, you'd frighten me if I was capable of being frightened by a mere mortal worshipper."

Sensing weakness, Mum struck. "Ah, tallstuff, there's th' rub, eh? If ye gie me this temporary change, sae th' gobbies cannae sense through all th' illusions an' alsae through yuir change, then I'll be yuir menace. I can wreak mayhem wi' th' turncoat gobbie in proper Mischief format."

Momentarily sidetracked, Bristlebane paused. "Turncoat?"

"Aye, I heard him praying tae Bolgin Serilis when I approached him. Did he nae used tae worship ye instead?"

"Hmmm. He does deserve a double-helping of Mischief. But it is too risky. Frankly, Mum, you're a menace."

Like any true addict, Mum wasn't ready to give up yet. It was time to play her trump card, as it were. "Ah, but if ye help me wi' this, I promise tae consume th' candy while on Norrath. If ye don't help me wi' this, I'll consume what I hae up here. An' if ye kick me oot afore it wears off, then I'll bother th' avatars of th' other gods while on th' candy high, an' they'll be SURE tae blame ye frae my actions, since I'm known tae worship ye." She smiled winsomely up at Bristlebane, watching his face turn pale as he waded through her thick accent.

"You ... you wouldn't. Oh what am I saying, of course you would! Sometimes, woman, I think you're just a bit too much like me for comfort!" He flicked his fingers at her, changing her for the next 24 hours into an erudite male. "Begone with you now, and mind you, you are NOT welcome back here until the sugar high has worn off."

Quickly, Niami finished her other preparations. Her beloved Kruzz's Cooking Skillet was put away, and in it's place, she wielded a pitchfork. Her spirit companion, Ubuu, got changed into deathdragger orc illusion. Her Bristlebane robes were changed for something bland and stodgy, as befit her new bookish erudite look. Several silly illusions were then layered over her, ending with the 1-legged bounding orc skeleton illusion from the Nights of the Dead merchant. She even grabbed a couple raw lemons, and sucked on one before she spoke with Grabby. It wouldn't do to give the whole charade away by having the same speech patterns, and the lemon juice made her really choose her words with care.

Thankfully, Grabby wouldn't expect her/him to talk much. He was used to folks just shoving the candy at him and taking off after the exchange without much smalltalk.

She even slowed her movements down quite a bit. Mind you, it wasn't easy to scamper as a 1-legged orc anyway, but exaggeration never hurt where goblins were concerned.

Ponderously, she hopped up to Grabby carrying over two thousand mixed Nights of the Dead candies. He stared, and stared some more, as if peering through the illusions, but all he saw, in the end, was a stuffy-looking male erudite kicking up his heels (or single heel, as it were) during the holiday.

"Why so many illusions? You try to trick Grabby?"

One word was all he got in return, laden with much scorn (and lemon-puckering). "Dispels."

Grabby scratched his head, decided erudites gave him too many headaches from their talk whenever he asked them for explanations, and quickly started exchanging candies. He scratched his head a couple more times as the erudite-turned one-legged orc skeleton hopped off. "Airy-dites be rattled in the think-thinkers. Never going to understand them! Not smart like gobbies!"

~~~

The next day, when the local guardsmen were going door-to-door trying to find leads as to the source of numerous Nights of the Dead pranks from the night before, Mum answered the door looking like death warmed over. "Sorry, lads, I did nae hear a thing. I hae been feeling a bit under th' weather, an' slept soundly las' night frae sheer exhaustion." She coughed a few times for effect, watching them back up in fear of contagion.

After she closed the door, heaving a sigh of relief, she turned to find her apprentice, Agnor, eyeing her. The coldain's expression was deadpan, as usual, but he held a steaming mug out to her as he said. "Sugar hangover, I presume, Mum?"

Her answering attempt at an innocent look was more of a grimace, and she reached for the home remedy without another word.

Welcome to Nights of the Dead (NoTD) 2014! This annual EQ2 celebration of ghoulies, and ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night will run from October 9, 2014 through November 3, 2014.

New Craftables

These items require a nights of the dead candy (any type of NoTD candy) as well as tier 2 resources and tier 2 fuels. As with the NoTD recipes from past years, the recipe scroll requires a level 2 artisan to scribe. While the recipes can be created at that level, they are difficulty level 29.

Nights of the Dead candies of varying types can be found as body drops on undead and/or "creepy" monsters. To save on space, you can then convert your candies into candy corn at Grabby Gigglegibber who can be found at your home crafting society. Zam has a lovely list of mob types and what type of candy they drop that can be found here

A Mucous-Covered Egg	Black Velvet Curtain, Left	Black Velvet Curtain, Right
Bloodstained Meat Trough	Bones of Foreshadowing	Flowered Black Velvet Curtain, Left
Flowered Black Velvet Curtain, Right	Flowered Orange Velvet Curtain, Left	Flowered Orange Velvet Curtain, Right
Flowered Seafoam Velvet Curtain, Left	Flowered Seafoam Velvet Curtain, Right	Iron Maiden
Orc Bonepile	Rancid Bowls of Meat	Rusted Prison Door (opens & closes!)
Small Dangling Skull Collection	Urn of Endings

New Vendor Offerings

In addition to the new recipe book, Celebrations of the Dead VII, the following new items are available on the Nights of the Dead Merchant:

a Grave Ending (5 candy)	Bone Biter (appearance weap.) (5 candy)	Bonecraft Chandelier (achieve unlock) (1s 20c)
Cleaver of Bone (appearance weap.) (5 candy)	Dracolich (housepet) (150 candy) No-Trade!	Harrowing Gravestone (5 candy)
Hellhound (Berserker) (Dungeon Maker spawner) (5 candy)	Hellhound (Coercer) (Dungeon Maker spawner) (5 candy)	Hellhound (Templar) (Dungeon Maker spawner) (5 candy)
Hellhound (Warlock) (Dungeon Maker spawner) (5 candy)	Languid Crocodile Plushie (25 candy)	Ominous Scarecrow Mask (Appearance) (25 candy)
Nights of the Dead Bounding Orc Skeleton Costume (illusion) - 1s 20c	Nights of the Dead Bounding Shadowy Lich Costume (illusion) - 1s 20c	Petamorph Wand: Deathdragger Orc (5 candy)
Petamorph Wand: Vile Lich (5 candy)	Picnic With the Dead (5 candy)	Yellow Recluse (25 candy) No-Trade!
Zombie_Mystic_Doll (150 candy)	Scarecrow (Berserker) (Dungeon Maker spawner) (5 candy)	Scarecrow (Illusionist) (Dungeon Maker spawner) (5 candy)

Gruesome Glow Skimmer (5 candy)

In addition, the following items were past quest rewards, and are now available for purchase on the Nights of the Dead Merchant:

• a Bone Sculpture
• a Bone Trophy
• Dedicated Jack-o-Lantern (fluff pet)
• Sathirian Skull Candlestick
• Sealed Stone Sarcophagus
• Table of Torturous Instruments
• Vampiric Mirror
• Wispy Vampiric Mirror

New Quest Rewards

There is one new quest this year, "A Dream by Any Other Name". You can obtain this quest from Setri Lur'eth on the beach in Nektulos Forest after completing her "Survive the Night" (repeatable 1x per year) quest. Upon completion, you will be offered your choice of a Baleful Scarecrow Mask, the painting "Death's Doorstep", or 25 candy corn.

"Candy Crusher" - achievement for collecting 26 types of Nights of the Dead candies. Reward is a Bonecraft Chandelier. Once you have completed the achievement, you can buy extras of the chandelier from the NoTD vendor. It should be noted that you will need to "loot" the candies in order for them to count for the achievement. You do this by either looting the corpse drop from the appropriate creepy mobs or from your upgraded pack pony "looting" the items and dumping them in your bags after you have sent him out after holiday harvests. (It looks like you will not be able to complete the achievement with just the pack pony, since I've only seen 11 different candies from him, but I'd need many more pony runs to be sure.)

Baleful Scarecrow Mask

Death's Doorstep

Bonecraft Chandelier

Pumpkin Pulping!

This was a late addition to the testing of this event, and it took us a while to sort it out. There is a new set of Pumpkin Pulping achievements under the Nights of the Dead achievements. The following is my brain dump, and I seriously hope I caught all the major information.

1. Buy pumpkin bombs from the Nights of the Dead vendors in every home city crafting area. They cost 2 candy corn per. You will want several.
2. Grab a friend (or more) and have them buy some pumpkin bombs as well.
3. Head to an open, flat area in a city zone. (Walls, pillars, bumpy terrain can all eat some of your pumpkins on you.)
4. Target your friend and fire off your pumpkin bomb. 8 mysterious pumpkins will pop in a circle around them, which they have to grab ("pulp"). These pumpkins will give them either a collection item (common), a tree (rare), or the ultra-rare collection item that goes directly in the meta collection. You cannot target your merc, only another player, so really, grab a friend.
5. Have your friend return the favor and fire a pumpkin bomb around you, because you cannot pulp the pumpkins that you created from your bomb. However, be aware that anyone else can grab the pumpkins that you bombed your friend with (not just your friend), so you'll want to hit somewhere low traffic if you don't want strangers running through grabbing the pumpkins before you and your friend can grab them.

There are four collections of five items each. Handing those in gives you four of the five collection bits needed for the meta-collection. The final piece of the meta-collection, Jack's Lantern is directly from a pumpkin, and is extremely rare. In addition, there are two trees that you can randomly get from the pumpkins, "small autumnal blueleaf sapling" and "autumnal goldleaf sapling". (Yep, I know the blueleaf looks gold, and the goldleaf looks blue. We didn't find this out until the night before this stuff went in the live server patch, so I doubt they'll get the /bug reports in time to do much about it.)

So, what do you get from the meta collection? You choice of one of two tombstones. Oh, but not just any tombstones, but ones that can be customized with a name and some text. Yep, I foresee some really silly gravestones in people's graveyards...

Small Autumnal Bluleaf Sapling	Autumnal Goldleaf Sapling
Etched Centopath	Engraved Centopath