Tesserae

Difficulty:  Minimum to survive, 80+ to Solo
Level Restriction:  35+ 
Timer:  3 Weeks to Turn In Bells, No Timer on Tesserae Pickup
Can be Solo'd?  Yes
Rewards:  Various Tesserae - Tiles that can be redeemed for one point of skill

The Aun Tumeroks keep the Olthoi Queen at bay by drumming at 5 Menhir Rings on the Marescent Plateau.  When the 5 rings have been broken, the Queen comes to life and her forces begin to overrun the Marescent Plateau.  If you defeat the Queen's invasion force, you may find a Tessera on the corpse of her most dangerous minions - Olthoi Brood Nobles.  These tesserae may be redeemed for a full point of skill and are available in each skill (although they drop randomly).

Step 1:  Preparation.  Hunting for Tesserae is closely tied with killing the Olthoi Queen.  Refer to that walkthrough and follow the first 4 steps (Making the bells and then turning all 5 in).  You will need 5 level 35+ characters (NOT including yourself if you want to turn in your tesserae) to do the bell dropping.  It will take you an hour and 15 minutes from dropping the first bell until the swarm starts, so make sure you have a lot of time available.  It may take you 6 hours to totally wipe out the Olthoi Invasion, so bring some friends to speed things up.

Step 2:  The Swarms.  Spawning Brood Nobles will take you some time.  15 minutes after you drop the final bell, the swarms will begin.  There are a total of 5 sectors on the Marescent Plateau - have a look at my map!  The easiest sectors to spawn are the SW, NW, and East Central sections, so I recommend doing them first.  The SE sector is very large and the NE sector has a lot of high level monsters in it, so do those two last.   Spawning Brood Nobles is done by killing 3 special Olthoi - a Soldier, an Eviscerator, and a Noble.  The special Olthoi is indistinguishable from the other Olthoi in the section, so you will have to do a lot of killing.  You can tell that you are killing the correct type of Olthoi to spawn the next wave because all 3 special Olthoi types are different levels than the typical Olthoi.  Soldiers are level 79, Eviscerators are 85, and Nobles are 90.  The Nobles are also blue.  Since level 79 Soldiers only spawn after the Queen has spawned but disappear after the Brood Nobles have been defeated, you can easily check if a sector has been cleared yet.  When you kill the correct Soldier, you will receive a local message telling you the Olthoi in the region are beginning to swarm.  You will then see a large number of level 85 Eviscerators and more Soldiers.  After you kill the right Eviscerator, the Soldiers will disappear and will be replaced by Blue level 90 Nobles.  The right Noble will trigger the Brood Nobles.

Step 3:  Brood Nobles.  Before you start killing the Brood Nobles, run around the sector a bit.  If you are hunting with friends, spread out.  You want to spawn as many Broods as possible before you start fighting.  Once you are satisfied with the number of Broods you have spawned, start killing them.  Like all Olthoi, Brood Nobles are weak to Bludgeoning.  They have good armor, resistances, and defenses, so it will likely take you a while to take each Brood Noble down.  When you kill another unique but unmarked Brood Noble, the swarm will end.  You will receive this message:

[Player's name] hews the head from the Brood Noble! The chittering of the swarming Olthoi begins to subside... the danger in the [region] of Marae has been averted.

After you see that message, no more Broods will spawn.  That particular Brood Noble's corpse will drop a Tessera, so make sure you loot it immediately.  Now kill the remaining Brood Nobles in the sector.  You do have a chance of finding more than one Tessera per sector, so you may see the message more than once.  When you have killed all the Brood Nobles, head to another sector and start again.

Step 4:  The Tessera Trick.  Each tessera can be turned in to the Tah of Timaru (the Aun Chief who lives in the tent in Timaru) for a full point of skill.  Unfortunately, you can only turn in a total 5 tesserae per character.  The most effective way to use your tesserae is to wait until you are at least level 135 or so and can liberate about 3.8 billion experience from your specialized and trained skills.  Then start collecting untrain and specialization gems.  When you have enough  gems, untrain all your skills and specialize the skill for which you have a tessera.  Dump your XP in the specialized skill until it costs 350 Million XP to buy the next point (this is the last point you can earn).  Then head to Timaru and give your tessera to the Tah.  He will raise your skill a point, adding 350 Million XP to your total XP!  Now use an untrain gem on the skill you specialized and you will get 4.3 billion XP back into your available pool!  Repeat as many times as you have tesserae.  You can use a variation of this trick with the Scroll of Dark Rain too, except you will need to specialize Magic Defense and only train it up to 279 Million XP, since the Scroll is worth 3 points.  Since the Scroll is worth approximately 750 million XP, you can start the tessera trick at a lower level.  This trick works best between the ToD Launch and September 2005, since the specialization and untrain gems are on a 1 Minute timer instead of the usual 2 weeks.  Also bear in mind that you cannot reclaim XP you have dumped into your attributes, so you may want to refer to a utility like Treestats to make sure you have enough XP in your skills to perform the trick.

*Since you cannot specialize Tinkering skills in the same way you specialize normal skills, the Tessera Trick doesn't work as well with Tinkering Tesserae.  The maximum XP you can earn by doing the Tessera Trick with a trained skill is 306 Million XP per Tessera instead of 350 Million with a specialized skill.*