And that was only around level 6-8.
You should have kept exploring. After noob island is the Harbor which then gives access to the Market, which as the central hub for Eberron has access to all the other secondary areas and
of course advertises the pay areas. You're just supposed to run past them through.
In all there is quite a few free quests. Lv1 14, lv2 18, lv3 9, lv4 8, lv5 5, lv6 9, lv7 5, lv8 7, lv9 1, lv10 4, lv11 4, lv12 5, lv13 2, lv14 1, lv15 5, lv16 5, lv17 1, lv18 1, then four epics. Under the Difficulty system, every one of those can be reduced by one level (poor choice) or increased by two. So for example a lv9 character has 13 quests open to them which can be ran twice per day without any XP penalties, another 9 can be continued to run at a -10% rate, and you can try to run quests a level or two higher than you too but you'll probably need a bit of help. In other words, that "empty" range you spoke of easily has 22 quests to run off free content alone. Through obviously if you like running a quest once, and only once, you're pretty SoL given the genre is all about repetition.
Running all the quests, including the epics, gives 1,493 favor worth 350 Turbine Points (and another 500tp for first character on said server). At this point admit you can just admit that you spend a couple weeks playing a game you enjoy, and spend a Steam-level of ten bucks on Turbine Points giving you enough to pick up both the Vale & Gianthold. Overall they give you the most for your buck, great items, lots of quests, bunch of new raid content, they double down and give Epic quests, plus GH has a Saga reward. Once you complete every quest in the area at least once you can turn in for bonus +46,000xp, you can do this as many times as you like irregardless of your actual level so long as you complete each quest once.
Eventually, by the time you want to try out epics, you'll ether want to actually pay for the game or be so fed up you leave. But if you throw another fifty bucks at it you should access a huge chunk of Faerun's content. Either way, you probably spent far more time online playing this game than what could be considered a healthy amount
I made a dwarven cleric on Cannith, named Ulfdag Hammerskald. Got him to level 2 so far.
Cool. I'll try to patch up and email you in game.