First Login (The World Book 1)

by Jason Cheek

  Player chat system has been unblocked.

  Warning! This is the first key level. You are not immune to other players’ attacks anymore. Proceed with caution!

  I’d completely forgotten about the PVP aspect of the game. Typically in MMORPGs like this with open PVP built into the mechanics of the game, most players still refrained from just randomly attacking other players. There were also some prohibited areas within the game against PVP. Usually, this was within the limits of NPC cities, towns and training areas for low-level characters. Players caught attacking other players in those areas could be arrested by the local guards and even imprisoned for a short period of time in-game. Also, every time you attacked another player you were flagged for PVP with a big red diamond. The glowing sign stayed over your head for other players to see for up to eight hours unless you were defending yourself from attack.

  Even with those restrictions, PVP’ing was an important aspect of the overall game. Even though it hadn’t been tested in Alpha or Beta and was still considered under development, the World had been designed with a Real-Time Strategy component for battles between guilds for control over land and resources. Usually, the focus of most guild battles was more on destroying or taking over player-own towns and villages, which was supposed to disrupt the other guild’s income and overall strength.

  The rules for those battles were more stratified than regular PVP. Guilds declared war on one another, which didn’t flag players for PVP and there were set limits for how many times a player-own city could be attacked within a specific period of time. Any player own city that was attacked couldn’t be attacked again from the same or another guild until after seven game-days had passed. This was to stop guild alliances from teaming up against solo guilds while also giving the guild time to prepare and repair before the next attack. It was still possible to conduct surprise attacks, but guilds and players that chose to carry out surprise attacks on player-owned areas without a declaration of war ahead of time faced severe debuff penalties during the initial attack.

  I typically enjoyed PVP in MMORPGs and Real-Time Strategy games, so I was looking forward to this aspect of The World. The possibility of leading player and NPC armies in massive battles sounded pretty cool, and I wanted to see how it worked out in an MMORPG setting. Also, with the advent of more pro-gamers streaming their gameplay for money, this was a way to stand out from the rest of the pack and get more subscribers to your channel.

  Unfortunately, there were at times a darker side to PVP. Players and guilds who focused solely on killing other players. These players and guilds were referred to as PKers, aka Player Killers. These types of players were in every MMORPG game. They did this for the joy of griefing other players and the chance of getting a percentage of gold and items that might drop when the player was killed.

  For now, the players that died in PVP dropped 10% of their gold and had a 10% chance to drop any piece of gear they were currently wearing that could then be looted by the PKer. This might not sound like much, but it could add up quickly if you killed enough players. Usually, the other guilds within the game put these PKers on Kill Lists, which was the area I usually focused on for my PVP fun. While Kill Lists helped the overall problem, it didn’t stop certain types of players from griefing others any chance they got and was something to keep in mind when running across other players in the wilds.

  Anyway, PVP’ing aside, it was nice to see that the player chat system was now open for me to use. Quickly I typed in everyone’s name for my guild into my friend’s list, but when I tried to send a quick ‘hiya’ I received another system message stating that the player messaging was only available while in villages, towns or cities.

  Wow, now that sucked! I thought sourly. I’d have to send out emails once I log out tonight to check-in with everyone to see how they were doing. I’d also have to try to swing by the nearest town to get some messages off and hopefully get a few upgraded spells too, but only after I got the first part of this House of Kayden quest finished up.

  Two days wasn’t much time to get a base camp set up for forty-one NPCs. Thankfully, it only took around half an hour to trek back to the refugee camp. The camp was easy enough to find since the ashes from the fires were still smoldering. The zombie Goblins stood unmoving evenly spaced out around the perimeter of the camp. As soon as I dragged my travois past the make-shift blockade where the fighting had taken place, Chiara was there to greet me.

  “Welcome back, oh great hunter,” Chiara said happily seeing the load of meat on the travois behind me. Looking closer at the pile, she looked up at me in surprise. “Did you run afoul of a pack of Large Gray Wolves?”

  “Something like that. I just hope Large Gray Wolves are good eating.” I said with a wry grin as Chiara’s eyes’ bulged out as she realized the number of hides that were piled up behind me. “Do you think you could get some of our people going on cooking up the meat and curing the hides?”

  “Sure thing.” Chiara stuttered as she quickly began waving some of the less severely injured survivors over. “As long as you can collect some wood for the fires.”

  “I’ll get right on it.” No surprise with that request. Bringing up the HUD’s in-game clock, I saw that it was just past noon. Plenty of time to knock out the work I had planned. Dropping the travois, I headed back towards the woods. Chopping down trees ended up being much easier than in real life. My in-game strength made the work super easy and in only a few swings the tree was falling down. The spruce tree hadn’t looked particularly large when it was standing, but once it was on the ground, I realized it was humongous, easily a hundred feet long with a twenty-four-inch trunk.

  How the hell was I going to move something like that? I swore at the thought of how I was going to get the massive tree back to camp when I discovered my increased strength and that the game dynamics had made the process almost a moot point. Gripping the base of the trunk under one arm, I began dragging the whole tree back to camp.

  Although my endurance took a major hit from the weight, I was able to drag the tree relatively quickly back to the refugee’s camp, after which my endurance recovered quickly enough. Seeing how easy it was to chop down trees and move them around, I discarded my initial idea for making teepees and decided to just go ahead and cut down enough trees to make two communal longhouses instead. This would allow me to use the extra skins for blankets and clothing as needed. Also, the log houses would give additional protection in case there was another Goblin attack.

  Halfway across the meadow, I saw the surprised faces of the refugees coming out to watch me in shock as I drag the entire tree into their camp. Shaking away her surprise, Chiara quickly got the survivors that were strong enough to help out organized and working. Before I knew it, the branches were being stripped to make drying racks, and fires for the skins as a MILF named Taiah Indilwen asked me to make a couple fleshing beams for scraping the wolf hides. Taiah was one of the few surviving leather workers for the Clan. In short order, I created five beams to her specifications.

  Taiah saw me studying the zombies thoughtfully as I worked and was kind enough to give me some additional information on the whole zombie thing. Ilana was the only one that could command the zombies. Taiah said that Ilana must have mentally set the Zombie Goblins to guard the perimeter of the camp before she passed out, but until she woke no one could give the undead creatures additional commands.

  Although I appreciated the information, it really sucked that we couldn’t use the zombies for the next part of what I had planned. Either way, the work was moving along quickly enough, so I decided to go ahead and clear away the rest of the branches for firewood and whatever else the NPCs needed before heading back to the edge of the forest for more trees.

  Look up at the towering pine, spruce and fir trees, I realized that I needed to take a moment to decide exactly what I needed for my planned project. Most of the trees here were approximately the same height as the first tree I’d chopped down. Basically, that gave me a building ba
se of 100’ long and 24” round logs to work with, giving me an easy base to work with for my longhouses of 100’ x 50’.

  If I used five logs for the walls that would give me a ceiling height of ten feet, while not huge buildings, they should be more than enough for the current needs of the survivors. If the math worked out correctly, that meant I needed a minimum of 15 logs for the walls, 1 log for braces and 26 trees split down the middle for the roof and floor, bringing my total count to 84 trees for both longhouses. Throw in another 6 logs for firewood and a small defensive wall and that meant a grand total of 90 trees.

  For a second, I wondered if I was crazy for doing all of this work for a bunch of NPCs. Reading through the Nightmare quest again for House of Kayden, it was pretty clear I needed to keep the survivors safe and alive or the quest chain would fail. Thinking of Alanah, the little girl I’d saved and the other children, Rayne who had nearly died fighting the Goblin Raiders, Ilana, Chiara and the other NPCs I’d met, I felt my frustration somewhat fading away.

  Yea it was a lot of work, but at the same time it was what I’d asked for, and if I didn’t help, these people were all programmed to just die. In all honesty, I couldn’t complain about the levels I’d managed to gain or the gear I’d acquired in the short amount of time I’d been in the game. Also, this whole process was giving me a lot of information about the game’s crafting system in general and helping me level up my attributes and skills along the way. I wasn’t sure where this Nightmare quest was leading, but it seemed like it was all intertwined with helping these NPC and freeing House of Kayden from the invaders that had taken over their home. Besides, it was way better than being sent out to kill ten rats.

  Closing my eyes tightly, I rubbed them hard with my fingers as I took a deep breath thinking everything through. If it takes me two minutes per tree, that means ninety trees will take me three hours of non-stop chopping. I should be able to streamline the process somewhat as my skill levels up, but no matter what this would take me the rest of this evening and most of tomorrow to get the trees back to the camp and the longhouses built. And that was if I was lucky enough that nothing else happened. Either way, I’d make the deadline for completing the quest. It just meant a lot of hard work and time that I wouldn’t be leveling up. Still, not something I hadn’t done before in any other MMORPG I’d ever played. The only difference was that I usually knew what I was working towards.

  In MMORPG, players were crafters, or they were not. There wasn’t much of a middle ground between the two types of players. Crafting took a specific kind of mindset that not every player had. I’d met many crafters that had multiple alts solely so that they could have access to every skill needed to craft the items they wanted to make or even multiple accounts with multiple alts so they could easily craft and transfer items from one character to another.

  Take the last game I’d played, Chaos Online. The main technique for a high-level character to boost their stats was to handcraft bionic implants for every part of the body. Each bionic implant had three special inserts for enhancing stats. A crafter had to have a specialized character that could easily run and get the items from specific dungeons, another with maxed out strength to remove the unneeded pieces from the quest rewarded implant, another alt was needed with specialized mechanical skills that could combine the desired implants and another two that could give the additional buffs necessary to implant the hardware into the player’s character.

  Each character in the game needed seven implants and twenty-one inserts. This then had to be repeated for an entire guild and everyone’s alts. If you had a small guild with twenty players that was one-hundred and forty implants and four-hundred and twenty inserts. Easily a few months’ worth of work to deck out each member of your guild. Even more frustrating, implants needed to be redone around every twenty levels. Most regular players weren’t interested in leveling up four high-level alts to craft custom implants needed for their primary character, but to do any of the end-game raids everyone needed to have these extra bonuses.

  Game companies counted on this and designed their games specifically by restricting the allowable professions one character could have at a time, which in turn forced crafting oriented players to have multiple characters and accounts to have access to more crafting options. Having the extra character alone wasn’t enough, the character also had to be at the highest possible level before it would have access to the max crafting skills available.

  In many games, crafted items were the only way to get a large boost to spell power, extra protection from specific kinds of damage, bonuses to healing and such, which could make or break a guild’s ability to successfully complete the game’s high-end raids. Needless to say, crafting custom items for other players was a good side business and earned me a bit of in real life cash. To non-crafters this sounded more like work than fun but, as I explained earlier, you had to be a crafter to truly understand.

  With these thoughts in mind, I took a moment to decide exactly what I needed for what I planned to build. It helped to remind myself at times that this was all part of playing the game. The entire process of cutting down the tree had taken about twenty minutes. The longest being the part where I had to drag the tree back to camp. All of the branches I’d left on the first tree had slowed me down immensely, so for these next trees, I decided I’d de-branch them ahead of time to speed up the entire process. I also decided to focus my efforts around the outer edge of the meadow closest to the camp, which kept the distance I had to drag the trees down to about thirty yards.

  The next tree took me a little less than a minute to chop down and another to de-branch it, but as I worked my lumberjack level increased relatively quickly and within an hour and a half I’d doubled my speed at both processes and had sixty trees chopped down and ready to be dragged back to camp. During the time I was leveling up my Lumberjack skill, I ran across a small stream that meandered through the forest and across the meadow not too far away from the camp. I hadn’t noticed it earlier due to the deep cut of the bank and the frozen snow.

  I’d have to work access to the water into my design for the longhouses. The last thirty logs took me less than an hour to chop down. By then the time was a little after three in the afternoon as I brought up the in-game clock. Now all I had to do was get everything back to camp. A task that was easier said than done.

  Ninety trees is an awe-inspiring amount of wood. A quarter way around the meadow looked like a giant tornado had passed through and flattened one side of the forest. I’d learned in the past that you can’t look at the entire job that needs to be done when you’re working on a something this massive. It’s best to just focus on one part of the project at a time to be mentally overwhelmed.

  The next part of this project wasn’t any more fun than the first. If you couldn’t guess it ahead of time, dragging trees is incredibly boring. A round trip for a tree took a little longer than five minutes if I jogged back from the camp for the next tree. Debranching the trees ahead of time reduced the amount of carrying time from twenty minutes to just over five, but there was still an unbelievable amount of wood to move no matter how much I broke the project down into steps. If nothing interrupted my work, I’d be lucky to get all the trees back to camp by eleven-thirty this evening. Pushing away the frustrating thoughts of what was still left to do, I focused on the task at hand. I’d just dropped my twentieth tree off at the pile by the camp when I heard my name being called.

  “Startum! Startum! It’s time to eat.” Chiara’s shout out waving me over.

  “It’s okay, Chiara. I’ll eat once I’m finished with dragging the trees back to camp.” I yelled back, waving over my shoulder at the old woman to let her know that I’d heard her.

  “Stop right there!” I stopped and turned around in surprise at Chiara’s stern tone. “I don’t want to hear another word. You’re going to come eat and take a rest with the rest of us, and that’s final.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” I quickly replied holding my hands up in s
urrender. Seeing that Chiara wasn’t going to take no for an answer, I simply followed after her trying not to laugh at her low muttering.

  “You’ll be falling over half-dead in another hour.”

  Surprisingly enough, I was feeling somewhat beat. Looking at my endurance level, I was surprised to see my bar was nearly empty. Thinking over the oddity for a moment, I finally remembered what I’d read earlier on the forums about ultra-realism players needing to take time in-game to eat and drink or their virtual character’s health would suffer. Once a player’s character received the hunger debuff, it would remain as a permanent debuff to their stats that would lower their hit points and stop their ability to recover from injuries until the player took time in-game to eat, drink and even rest.

  This time when I entered the refugee camp, I had a lot of Elves greet me by name as Chiara led me to a young Elf woman who was watching the meat cook over a fire. The cute Elf girl’s name was Mariona. Shyly she gave me two skewers of grilled wolf steak and a flask of water as she thanked me profusely for everything I’d done to help. By the time I sat down next to Chiara by the fire, I’d been thanked again by another fifteen NPCs and was feeling slightly self-conscious. All around me wounded men, women and children sat on thick tree branches that had been set around the various camp fires as benches as they laughed and talked. Already, I could see most of them were looking much better. Still, I didn’t understand why there were no healers in the group.

  “Hey Chiara, why aren’t there any healers? Did they all stay behind during the invasion?”

  “I sometimes forget that you don’t know our full history,” Chiara said with an angry frown.

  “What history?”

  “The Light Elves and their Priests of Light refused to share their knowledge of healing with the House of Kayden.” Chiara spat sourly.

  “So House of Kayden has no healers?” I asked in shock.