Beastborne

by James T Callum

  The other group thought it was criminal to have any game in 2035 with only 4 playable races. There were hybrids of course. People usually forgot about that – Jacob included. A lot of Pyresouls was like that. Hidden paths, illusory walls, and objectives that were only possible if you went off the beaten path.

  From what Alec said, the game practically required you to constantly play “out of bounds” as if the map’s suggestions were an obstacle to overcome and not a typical marker on where to go next.

  Human, Elf, Fairy, and Karhu were the four races. Each of them had a base set of stats and there was no way to customize them.

  In Pyresouls Online there were 8 stats: Vitality (VIT), Agility (AGI), Endurance (END), Temper (TMP), Strength (STR), Dexterity (DEX), Intelligence (INT), and Faith (FTH).

  Most people could glean at least a little information from the basic stats of VIT, AGI, STR, and DEX. But few people understood precisely what TMP did, even less understood the interplay between INT and FTH.

  VIT was the easiest one that most people understood. It governed total Health, a large red HP bar in the top left quadrant of his vision. Simple.

  AGI increased one’s speed and physical swiftness while END governed total Stamina and increased Bleed Resist. END was one of the most important stats that few people understood early enough for them to take advantage of.

  Pyresouls was largely a game about resource management and Stamina was used to do just about everything. Sprinting, rolling, dodging, jumping, swinging or firing a weapon, everything took Stamina.

  Increasing Stamina meant you could go longer between needing to rest, where you were at your weakest and most likely to be killed.

  TMP, on the other hand, was unlike anything in any other game. The in-game description – cryptic as always – only said, “Allows you to withstand the burden of Guilt.”

  Not very informative.

  What it really did, was determine your speed and encumbrance. Guilt functioned similarly to weight in a lot of other games.

  Each piece of gear had a certain amount of Guilt associated with it. Mostly, this coincided with heavier armor but sometimes special armors, those that were uniquely powerful, had a high Guilt cost as well.

  Each point of Guilt slowed you down as its burden upon your soul increased. There were certain breakpoints that people had found out by comparing information.

  The general consensus was that each 25% of Guilt you carried incurred another penalty. From 0% to 25% then 25.1% to 50% and so on. Under 25% Guilt, you had full movement and no Stamina penalty. Each tier of Guilt above that slowed you down further and made your Stamina cost higher.

  For example, your basic Human started with 5 TMP. That meant they could only have a single point of Guilt before they were penalized. Luckily, most of the starting gear had 0 points of Guilt on it.

  Like the medieval gear they raided from collectors and museums, it would stand up to the monsters of Pyresouls, but it wasn’t particularly strong. It possessed enough Guilt to make it stronger than even the hardest nanowire weaves back home but not enough to encumber your movement.

  But very quickly you could get gear dropped off the various monsters, or find it in chests – if the traps didn’t kill you first – and sooner than later you were moving like a fat old man in a girdle instead of some badass knight.

  If you couldn’t move, you died.

  Which made increasing TMP one of the most important things you could do. Especially early game, when you didn’t have many stats to begin with. It was the stat Jacob intended to boost first.

  On his first attempt, he had found a piece of armor that even Alec didn’t know about. But it was so damn thick with Guilt that the first time he tried to wear the breastplate, he was killed trying to swing his sword at the half-armored Vacant he was fighting.

  It didn’t matter how good the armor was if he was left vulnerable to every attack. Pyresouls wasn’t like a typical MMO where you loaded up on HP and armor, tanking everything the game could throw at you.

  Even with an incredibly good set of armor and a proper shield, you had to play smart. The weakest enemies in the game could still kill you. They never stopped posing a lethal threat, even after the hundredth creature was slain.

  In that sense, it wasn’t too dissimilar from the reality he knew for the last decade. While most skilled fighters could take a Vacant or two in single combat, all it took was a single mistake to die.

  The only difference was, in Pyresouls Jacob would respawn at the last Pyre he touched. And for some reason on Earth, there were no Pyres.

  Nobody ever quite figured that one out.

  There was a theme of balance and picking stats wisely in Pyresouls. Having super high TMP was great to wear the best armor but if you couldn’t put down an enemy fast, you were at exponentially greater risk of death.

  STR boosted the Attack Rating (AR) of any non-finesse based physical weapons. It was also required to wear certain gear and to wield specific weapons.

  DEX boosted the AR of finesse weapons and increased spellcasting speed. Like STR, a lot of armor and weaponry required a specific amount of DEX to wear or use properly.

  You could equip the items even without the required stats but there were a host of negative effects that usually didn’t make it worth doing.

  INT and FTH were two sides of the same coin. They each increased a secondary stat like AR. INT increased Vile Intent while FTH increased Noble Intent.

  Both were magical stats but for entirely different schools of magic that did not mix. And that was the reason that Jacob had failed so miserably on his first attempt. He picked Fairy as his race thinking he would be a spellcaster and then began to raise FTH to offset the imbalance.

  Big mistake.

  The problem was, Vile Intent and Noble Intent were incompatible to the extreme. Raising INT increased Vile Intent just as the game said but what it didn’t mention was that raising INT also decreased Noble Intent.

  The inverse happened when you raised FTH.

  It didn’t completely invalidate the other stat but it severely hamstrung its efficacy. And with each stat point being so hard to get – you only get one per level up – it was a waste of both stats.

  You picked one based on the magic you wanted to use. INT for Sorcery and FTH for Clemency.

  Jacob took a closer look at the description for Humans.

  Human

  The most fundamental and proliferate of all the known races. Humans have spread far and wide across Lormar due in no small part to their capacity to take up any role in society and see it filled. As a result, humans are very well-rounded individuals with no inherent weaknesses nor strengths.

  VIT: 5 | AGI: 5

  END: 5 | TMP: 5

  STR: 5 | DEX: 5

  INT: 5 | FTH: 5

  Curse: Undeath

  Boon: Bleed Resistance, Physical Resistance.

  Bane: Reduced Speed, Fire Vulnerability.

  That was the other thing about Pyresouls that people didn’t fully understand. You not only had to pick a race – a difficult enough proposition for most MMO players even without the stakes of the competition – but also a curse. A negative effect that likely caused more deaths than the game’s monsters.

  Each race had its own curse. Human’s curse was turning into the undead. And as Earth was entirely populated by humans, it meant that any dead human would rise up again unless dispatched before they turned.

  It gave rise to the Day of the Dead shortly after the Collapse and the proliferation of the Vacant.

  In-game, the curse was different. You could influence it to a degree but it was painful and grueling. Most people opted to keep their curses at bay while a select few used them to frightening effect.

  Each curse came attached to a specific race, but you could choose any curse from any other race if you so chose. Jacob’s first run through, he kept the human’s curse of Undeath.

  Curses worked pretty simply on the surface, but like most things in Pyresouls there w
as a hidden complexity to using curses effectively.

  As with most MMOs, Humans were the middle-of-the-road race. No stat was larger than the other, making them a solid choice especially when nobody had any clue what each of the stats did.

  Despite that, any Human in Pyresouls was several times stronger than their counterparts on Earth. It was one of the primary reasons that players of Pyresouls who managed to survive the Collapse were so integral to the survival of those less fortunate bystanders around them.

  What little people could understand after the Collapse suggested that a single point in any stat was equal to an average human. Two points were considered twice as strong as the average human, and so on.

  Having 3 points in STR was the equivalent of a world-class bodybuilder. While 3 points in AGI made you as fast as some of the gold medalist sprinters.

  Starting at 5 in every stat gave even a first level of Pyresouls a ridiculous advantage.

  Alec had chosen human and regretted it. There was a lot of contradiction within Pyresouls and the world of Lormar. It suggested that balance was important but by doing so you were made ridiculously weak. It would take exponentially more Souls to level up and raise all your stats if you spread them out.

  At higher levels raising a single stat could easily cost upwards of 20,000 Souls. Most of the dangerous enemies – enemies that when taken head-on gave you a 50% chance of survival – only gave around 800 Souls. And any time spent grinding for more Souls was time another person was progressing deeper into the realm of Lormar.

  There simply wasn’t time to do more than one thing well and even then it often wasn’t enough.

  I’ll need to decide on what I want to be before I choose a race, he thought, going over all the races for a brief refresher. Based on his discussion with Alec, he already had a good idea for what he wanted.

  But he knew he had time and so he indulged himself. After all, he would only get to relive this once.

  Elf

  Rare and reclusive, elves are known for their superior swordsmanship and archery among the races. They are, however, less inclined to wield heavy bulky weapons and armor. They are also the likeliest of all to view the world through the lens of one who keeps to the old ways. They hold to their traditions well, allowing them unparalleled use of Harmony.

  VIT: 3 | AGI: 7

  END: 5 | TMP: 5

  STR: 4 | DEX: 7

  INT: 2 | FTH: 7

  Curse: Fractured Sight

  Boon: Peer into other realities and gain valuable insight into hidden paths.

  Bane: Potential realities have a habit of bleeding into one another, letting in unspeakable horrors.

  Fairy

  Keen-minded but slight, fairies are renowned for their cunning and trickery. It should come as no surprise then, that they specifically aligned to the turbulent art of Chaos magic and the underlying Vile Intent that empowers it. Their excellent use of magic comes at a cost. They are physically frail and must work harder than other races to bring physical prowess to bear.

  VIT: 2 | AGI: 8

  END: 2 | TMP: 9

  STR: 3 | DEX: 5

  INT: 9 | FTH: 2

  Curse: Soul Thief

  Boon: You gain valuable insight when collecting Souls.

  Bane: Memories can be overwhelming, blocking out threats around you.

  Karhu

  Powerful, nomadic people who keep to their tribalistic traditions. These large hulking bear-like people excel with a strength of arms but due to their past transgressions find it hard to bear the Guilt required of them. What they lack in magical strength they more than make up for in sheer physical prowess.

  VIT: 9 | AGI: 5

  END: 7 | TMP: 1

  STR: 8 | DEX: 8

  INT: 1 | FTH: 1

  Curse: Ursinthrope (Werebear)

  Boon: Increased physical prowess and defense.

  Bane: Uncontrollable bloodlust.

  Jacob was disappointed with being a fairy but that was because he misused it and could only find two spells during his entire time in Lormar.

  Of all the curses available, the two most appealing were Ursinthrope and Fractured Sight.

  Jacob had heard of enough people dying from Soul Thief while trapped in a memory that blocked out all senses. Most people didn’t even realize they died until the memory ended and they awoke next to the last Pyre they rested at.

  If each kill that granted Souls provided some glimpse into that person’s life, it would be all but impossible to concentrate in a fight with more than one enemy. An all-too-common occurrence.

  I’m good with a sword and shield, if I could use some magic to bolster both of those I might be in a good position. But that would require finding the spells.

  Unlike every other MMO out there, spells had to be taught or found. You couldn’t make your own, and you didn’t get a spell simply for being a caster-type. Something Jacob had found out the hard way.

  Every race had specific strengths and weaknesses. Karhu were powerhouses but you’d spend at least the first four level-ups boosting their TMP up so they could equip anything beyond the starter equipment. Which was also different per race and something that even Alec hadn’t known much about.

  As strong as the karhu were, they lacked any magical prowess and he wanted to try and bolster his physical attacks with magic. Several enemies in Pyresouls were highly resistant to one form of damage or another. That made it incredibly valuable to have multiple weapons and damage types.

  And finding a weapon that dealt magical damage was not only incredibly rare, but it also required an amount of INT or FTH (based on the magic of the weapon) to use.

  Fairy was already out of the running, he played them last time. Using them well came down to finding spells and Spell Gems. Both of which were difficult to attain. If time wasn’t an issue he would have been tempted.

  The few fairies Jacob saw at the Crossings often left him awe-inspired at their prowess.

  That left elves as his only choice for a full-blooded race. According to Alec, if he picked two races at once he would create a hybrid. It was a little known secret, one that Jacob didn’t ever remember seeing posted on any forum after he quit.

  While there was no way to customize your starting stats beyond choosing a race, by creating various hybrids you could influence the stats to your liking. Some combinations were simply bad.

  Fairy mixed with karhu for example, made something very similar to a human although inferior to what Jacob wanted. Using human as a base worked well to temper the more extreme stat swings.

  Human and karhu for example were physically robust and magically weak but not so much to the point of utter uselessness. Of course, their TMP was still quite low.

  After playing around with different hybrids, for a grand total of 10 actual race choices when you counted the 6 hybrids, Jacob finally made his choice.

  As tempting as being an elf was, he had no understanding of Clemency and its set of Harmony-based spells, which were based on FTH. Despite barely finding any spells as a fairy, he did learn a great amount of information about Sorcery and its set of Chaos-based spells.

  Most of his information came from neither his own experience in the game nor from Alec. It came from the various forums after he quit the game, trying to understand what he did wrong. His primary reason for turning his back on Clemency was its effect on other players.

  Compared to Sorcery, Clemency was less than half as potent at damaging other players. There wasn’t much information other than an overwhelming amount of anecdotes that pointed to Sorcery being designed to harm another person while Clemency was used to soothe those hurts.

  The few instances of Sorcery that Jacob was unfortunate to see up close Post-Collapse only confirmed those suspicions. The most dangerous humans he ever dealt with – largely running away from them – were all Sorcerers.

  He shuddered at the memories of the charred corpses of both monsters and innocent humans alike.

  Pushing the memories from his mind, h
e selected human and fairy. The resulting stat build was close to what he was hoping for. A capable fighter with good capacity to wield Sorcery.

  Unlike most games, you couldn’t change your physical appearance into something else entirely. Only changing race altered the way you looked.

  Increasing various stats improved your physique but you were still you. Anybody you knew would still recognize you, not that that mattered when nearly everybody wore equipment that hid their features.

  Still, it was neat to see the effects of being a human-fairy hybrid. Looking at himself in the mirror, Jacob’s green eyes turned bright. They gleamed with an inner-light when he tilted his head, much like a cat’s might flash in the dark but without the freaky slit.

  His facial features were lifted a little, cheekbones a little higher. He thought he looked a bit more handsome with better facial symmetry but it had been a while since he had seen this younger face before.

  Most intriguing of all were the emerald-green shimmering tattoos that curled across his brow and down each of his arms like emerald vines.

  A deep resounding gong filled the dark emptiness around him and a large ruby-red countdown clock appeared as large as a holoboard you’d see from the interstate. He had an hour left.

  I already spent thirty minutes doing this?

  Thankfully the curse selection was going to be a lot easier. You couldn’t create hybrids with them like you could the races, making his choice easier. Undeath was off the table and as much as he’d like to turn into a hulking bear and rip things apart, he knew it was a trap.

  Without control over your actions, you were no better than any other beast, and that meant you were easily killed by any enemy that could strategize.

  While he hadn’t met many enemies that could do that early on, right before he quit the creatures he faced began to use pack tactics and according to Alec that only increased in the later areas.

  That left Fractured Sight as the only contender. At least with what he knew of that curse, he could exert a modicum of control over it. Selecting the curse, he was greeted by a confirmation window for his choices.