photo credit: BattleMage Brewing

BattleMage and Darkpaw Games embark on a new quest.

“We first collaborated with BattleMage for our 20th Anniversary back in 2019,” explains Jenn Chan, Head of Studio at Darkpaw Games. “Chris Barry and Ryan Sather, the owners of BattleMage, met and became friends playing EverQuest. We believe in supporting local businesses when we can. So, when we were thinking of our plans to celebrate the EverQuest franchise’s 25th anniversary, which we call Year of Darkpaw: An EverQuest Celebration, we reached out to Chris and Ryan again to highlight the great things we can do when we all band together as a community.”

The collaboration culminated in Corpse Run, a 6.3% dry-hopped ABV West Coast IPA brewed with Nectaron, Mosaic, and Motueka hops. The beer was released at an EverQuest and EverQuest II event at BattleMage — part of Darkpaw’s Fippy Fest, which according to Chan was “a two-day fan faire to celebrate the games’ anniversaries with their biggest fans, in-person and via live stream.”

Ryan Sather of BattleMage jumped at the opportunity to reunite with EverQuest. “This is the second collaboration we have done with Daybreak” — of which Darkpaw is part. “We did Brell’s Blessed Stout, which was an oatmeal stout we brewed 5 years ago for the EQ’s 20th anniversary. EverQuest is one of our favorite games, and it has had a huge influence both on Chris and myself. We were ecstatic to do another collab with one of our favorite studios.” Sather continues, “When Daybreak reached out, we shot out some beer styles, but we were excited about doing an IPA this time, since we did a stout last time, so we may have steered them in that direction. They helped come up with a list of names, then we put it to social media to vote and choose out of a short list we all liked. They had a solid team show up on brewday that were involved throughout the entire process. It is always a special brewday, because I get to hang out and teach a great group of people about our modern-day alchemy — a group of people who over the years have in turn been a huge inspiration to us, so it’s cool to share that experience with them.”

The name Corpse Run is a nod to a notoriously difficult aspect of EverQuest play. Sather enthuses, “In a sea of games that hand you everything, EverQuest makes you earn it. The gameplay, the raids, the networking, they are all integral to a very challenging game that makes your achievements feel that much more rewarding.  Traditionally, when you died in EverQuest, you had to retrieve your corpse so you could get your gear back, and, if you were lucky, obtain a resurrection from a cleric to get some lost experience. If you failed to do so, your corpse could eventually rot and you would lose all of your gear. If you were deep in a dungeon, getting back to that point where you died could be very challenging, and you might die several more times on that corpse run.”

Corpse Run is now on tap at BattleMage.