by Eric Ugland
I sped through the welcome notices, mostly things about being in the World of Vuldranni and how the mountain that I was on was my respawn point. Then I saw the little tab marked equipment. I pushed on that, and saw that I had some equipment gifts.
You have found SWORD OF THE GODS
Sword of the Gods
Item Type: Legendary
Item Class: One-handed Melee, Two-handed Melee
Material: Celestial Admantium
Damage: 390-420 (Slashing)
Durability: 20000/20000
Weight: 4.8 lbs
Requirements: Str 8
Description: A straight-bladed sword having a cruciform hilt with a grip for one or two handed use. Made for and by the Gods for the purposes of smiting everything.
You have found SHIELD OF THE GODS
Shield of the Gods
Item Type: Legendary
Material: Celestial Admantium
Armor: +120, 100% immunity to Fire
Durability: 20000/20000
Weight: 18 lbs
Requirements: Str 18
Description: A massive shield designed to protect from everything.
The sword was your standard fantasy long sword, kinda big but well done. The pommel was solid gold, and had a nice glow about it, and the blade was balanced perfectly. I mean, I had very little experience with swords, so everything seemed fine to me, but what the fuck did I know? The shield was a giant gold saucer with a bevy of runes etched across the front, all of which had a light blue glow to them. It was heavy, but holdable.
I swung the sword around, doing this and that with the blade, totally thinking snicker-snack as I chopped off the heads of imaginary enemies. I maybe just recreated a few of my favorite movie fight sequences, and perhaps even let out a few lightsaber noises, even though those had absolutely nothing to do with real swords. Or fantasy swords. And it wasn’t a saber. I also announced I was Inigo Montoya.
I pulled up the inventory screen, thinking to see how much I could carry, and if there was some sweet gamification concept that allowed me to carry a ton of shit even though I didn’t really have a bag or anything.
Inventory
Worn: Furs
On Person: Sword of the Gods, Shield of the Gods, starting gear.
Starting gear?
I felt around myself, and maybe felt a bit of myself, which, you know, check, still there and, uh, proportional. That’s also when I discovered that I had pockets around the belly area of my stupid huge furs. And, from said pocket, I pulled out an orb. As I held it front of my face, a message popped up, pointing at the orb.
Do you wish to open your starting gear?
Yes/No
“Yes,” I said, and immediately wondered why I was talking out loud to myself when I could just think the yes.
The orb seemed to shiver out of sight, and a list of gear popped up, differing starting packages.
Please pick one.
The game was polite, a welcome change. Mister Paul had been pretty damn snarky, and I figured the game would continue in that vein.
There were five different sets to chose from, obviously geared to differing play styles. A dagger and a bow and some lock picks for the nefarious types. A sword, a shield, and a piece of leather armor for the fighter. And what I figured was for crafters, a hammer, a saw, and a carving knife. The final kit, that one was all mine. A fishing pole, a pick, and a hatchet.
Easy choice.
You have found the starting kit: Gathering
Fishing Pole.
Bronze Pick.
Bronze Hatchet.
Harvesting Skillbook.
Rations.
Rope.
Knapsack.
Bandage.
Money Pouch.
Lifeform Identification Spellbook.
Basic Object Identification Spellbook.
All of the stuff just dropped out of the sky, and half of it disappeared into the snow. And then I had a bunch of crap I had to put about my person. I had no, like, bag of holding or anything. The inventory system here could use some work, considering it was, more or less, just reality. I wrapped the rope around my torso, and got it tight enough that I could tuck the hatchet across my chest. The pick went in my belt opposite my sword. I put everything else into the knapsack. I then slid the sheath onto my belt, put the sword away, slung the shield over my back, and was ready to hike down the fucking mountain. I took a single step, and a little text bubble popped up.
You have an unaccepted quest. Do you wish to read the quest?
Well, sure. Sounded like a good idea.
You have been offered a quest by Mister Paul:
Descend from the Peak!
Get down from the peak of the mountain. Preferably with verve and excitement. And alive.
Failure: If you refuse to ever leave the peak and/or if you die too many times before making it down safely.
Reward for success: XP!
Penalty for failure (or refusal): none.
Yes/No
I accepted my first quest. I felt a bit of a thrill. For the first time, this game maybe seemed fun.
Then I got an idea. A terrible, amazing, fantastic idea.
Chapter 4
Spoiler alert: terrible idea.
Believe it or not, sledding down a mountain on a large round medieval magic shield turned out to be a bad idea.
At first, I made great time while having a great time, zooming down the mountain, the golden shield sending up sprays of snow behind me. And the snow was pretty close to perfect for sledding: deep, fresh untouched powder. But the thing with snow saucers is, there’s not exactly a ton of steering or stopping capability. You’re really just hoping you end up on a line down a hill with no bumps and a nice flat spot at the end to run out the speed. Oddly enough, that’s not what I found on the top of a mountain. I found mostly steep bits and rocks. So many rocks.
I was nearing take-off speed at the end of one particularly gruesome pitch, holding onto the shield straps as tightly as I could, when I hit the first big rock. I jolted skyward. It was exhilarating, the wind whipping against my face, the ground zipping under me. I landed with a hard thump. My vision flashed red, and I got a notification, but things were happening too fast for me to pay attention to it.
I tried to steer as best I could, pulling this way and that, doing a minimal amount yet avoiding major obstacles. Maybe if I’d been on something with real turning ability, I’d have missed the crevasse.
Nope.
Right off the edge, soaring across the gap. I almost made it to the other side. Instead, the shield, with me on top of it, clanged straight into a wall of ice.
I, naturally, continued forward until my face impacted against the same ice wall, and I had the distinct and memorable feeling of my nose breaking and my cheekbones shattering. Red flared in my vision, and a number floated up. Hit points. I thought about looking at my total HP, seeing how wounded I was, but then I had my very own Wile E. Coyote moment.
For the barest of moments, the shield stuck in the ice, and then, well, it didn’t. I went down.
Straight down.
I scrabbled at the ice and rock desperately, ripping out my fingernails, screaming in pain and desperation. My leg caught an outcropping of some sort, and I flipped end over end, twirling though the air like a coked-out cheerleader.
Blackness crept into my vision, and then washed over me as I lost consciousness.
Chapter 5
Plus side: I was not awake for the impact at the bottom of what turned out to be a massive ravine in the midst of some sort of cave system. Downside: I was awake for what happened next.
I came to in vague darkness. With a slight mental push, I activated dark vision, and could mostly see. Pretty much the definition of dark vision I suppose. It was a little brighter than comfortable, due to the line of light waaaaaaaay above, the opening I’d fallen through. Nothing of me worked, everything just sort of refused my brain’s commands.
There was a teen
sy-tiny little icon flashing in the lower right of my vision. A red circle with a slash across it over a running man.
Great, I thought, paralyzed. Thought instead of said, because I couldn’t quite get my face to work since it was smashed to fucking pieces.
I brought up my status page, and I was down to two hit points. Two. At this point, if I accidentally sneezed, I’d kill myself. I also had a prodigious list of broken bones, so many that I just dismissed the status page. I couldn’t be bothered reading names of bones I didn’t even know existed.
That would have been terrible except for regeneration. As long as I could stay out of combat and not get seriously wounded, I would heal. My flesh was already starting to knit back together and my bones were starting to inch back towards each other. Which, thanks to my paralysis debuff, I barely felt. I laid there patiently, waiting for the moment when I could move again. But then this thing came along.
A creature.
I counted eight legs coming off a long, straight body. It was somewhere between a lizard and a wolf. And, well, a nightmare. It sniffed me.
Despite my attempts at screaming, the creature didn’t seem to care in the slightest, and, instead, took a rather large bite out of me.
And then there were other bites taken out of me. Something I could only really feel because of the way my body was being pulled from one side to the other. Lots of chewing and hearing my own bones snap. I got a great view of its teeth at the end. They were big and sharp, and I managed to scream out a hearty “FUCK YOU” before I died. Didn’t seem to faze the creature.
Finally, thankfully, everything went black.
Chapter 6
A great banner popped up in front of me as I hung in nothingness.
Waaah-waaah. You have died.
Kicked the bucket. Shuffled off the ol’ mortal coil. You have been weighed and measured and found wanting. But, good news! You have at least one respawn left. Maybe you’ve got more. Who knows?
Would you like to respawn?
YES/NO
I took a moment to think. This new world was brutal. The pain was intense, and there were big weird creatures that ate humans. Still, what was the alternative?
Yes.
Chapter 7
I popped into existence in the same spot I had at the beginning, falling the few feet until I plopped into the snow. I jumped to my feet, my fur covered feet, and I did a little dance, feeling good, because all of me worked again. I willed my status page up.
Montana - lvl 1 nothing
Statistics
HP: 110
STAM: 320
MP: 172
Level 1 nothing? Well fuck you too, game.
It did make me wonder if there was some sort of class system I’d yet to discover.
I was back to where I started from. Sweet.
Slight disappointment in that my weapons were gone. My god-tier weapons, down in a cavern beneath a crevasse on the top of a fucking mountain likely inside a creature with lot of teeth and a hankering for human flesh. I did have my starting gear, so it was nice to know that if I died over and over again, I could slowly accumulate a massive assortment of picks, fishing poles, and hatchets. I could make my fortune starting the first REI outpost on Vuldranni.
The sun sat low on the horizon, meaning there’d been a time-lapse between death and rebirth. Good to know. But it was going to be dark soon, and I had a long climb down. A small, dark purple light blinked slowly in the corner of my vision, letting me know I had notifications to go through and decisions to make.
Still, I needed to book it or freeze to death in darkness.
I started walking, being safe this time. I hoped I’d given Mister Paul enough of a show, because I was going to be absurdly boring this time. I spent some time slipping down steep inclines, and doing some minimal climbing when I’d gotten to a point I couldn’t jump or crawl down. It wasn’t the most challenging of hikes, but there was an endless quality to it. The snow fields just seemed to go on forever. Had I been a skier, with skis, or one of those people who develop ski resorts, this would have been a hell of find.
With the sun down below the mountain ridge to the west, the temperature began to drop. The sky darkened into something I had never experienced. The stars were bizarre and, obviously, otherworldly. It was a joy to behold, as I could see things I had never before seen, whole galaxies up above. Great swaths of glittering lights right overhead. A moon rose shortly after the sun fell below the horizon. Then a second, and a third, and a fourth. Four different moons, four different colors, four different sizes. They forced a panoply of moonlight across the landscape, transforming the bare white snow in to a kaleidoscope of colors. On a steep slope, I stopped to just take in the beauty around me, calm and unreal as it may have been.
But the sharp cold got me moving again. I didn’t want to experience freezing to death. Sure, I’d respawn, but there were certain experiences I didn’t need to live through.
So I dipped into my Eagle Scout knowledge, and I made a snow cave as soon as I reached a flat spot. Then I hunkered down in the darkness, and fell asleep.
Chapter 8
I slept for a while. Not sure how long — in a land without clocks, time becomes more fluid. I dreamt of my life. Of the short good bit, the slice of paradise I’d found and fucked up somehow. I saw her, and we were together, and happy in our stupid little apartment surrounded by construction and mud. The empty fridge, the lack of furniture, and the bliss that comes from living with someone you truly love. A dream, because the bad stuff never kicked in.
I woke with a start, unsure of what caused me to wake. I looked around for the girl, and then I remembered everything that happened.
Snow cave. No flabdomen keeping me stuck to the bed. Despite the initial death, I appreciated what Mister Paul had done for me.
I got on my knees, and wiped the sweat from my brow.
Shit, I thought. Sweat.
Sweating is just a bit dangerous in super-cold locales, but I had no real options to combat it. I didn’t have layers to take off. I had layer. Singular. And that layer was fur. Worst case, well, I’d just die again, I suppose.
I snagged some of the ‘rations’ out my knapsack and gave them a look, hoping I had something approaching breakfast. They weren’t much to look at, and even less to eat. I had my choice of very tough, very dry mystery meat or very hard, very dry mystery biscuit-type thingies. I ate a bit of each, and they were gross.
Breakfast over, I pulled up my character sheet.
Montana - Lvl 1 Nothing
Traits
Race: Fallen
Height: 6’2”
Weight: 220 lbs
Eye Color: Hazel
Hair Color: Blonde
Renown: 0 - No one even knows you exist.
Statistics
HP: 110
STAM: 320
MP: 172
Armor: +3 vs Piercing
Active Effects:
Attributes
Strength: 20
Agility: 15
Dexterity: 15
Constitution: 20
Wisdom: 13
Intelligence: 13
Charisma: 13
Luck: 25
Unassigned points: 0
Skills
Riding - improvised (LVL 1): You can now ride improvised devices. +5% to handling.
Falling (LVL 1): You can flail through the air with the best of them. Watch for the sudden stop at the end.
Animal Handling (LVL 5): You can calm down a domesticated animal, keep a mount from getting spooked, intuit an animal’s intentions, or, if you’re really lucky, tame a wild best.
Abilities
None
Feats
None
Boons
Powerful Build (Mister Paul) - You are bigger than you look. For all strength roles, you are counted as one size category larger than you actually are.
Regeneration (Mister Paul) - Outside of combat, your body will repair rather quickly. Give
n enough time, it’s possible you will heal from nearly any wound.
Gift of Gab (Mister Paul) - Should you encounter a language you do not understand, as long as you hear at least three words of it, you will understand it, and speak it, perfectly.
Indicium
None
The Level One Nothing thing really bugged me. It just seemed overtly cruel. And, I mean, a rather apt reflection of my past life.
While chewing a piece of the mystery meat — it required a substantial investment in chewing — I pulled up the notifications from the previous day and began going through them.
Most were damage notifications. Hitpoints lost by bashing into a rock, hitting a branch, hitting the ground, fall damage, bite damage, that sort of thing. Then there was the paralysis and death. A lovely trip down memory lane.
I pushed through the snow cave and stepped out into something almost like morning. The sun was at the edge of the horizon, but there was enough wind to whip up the loose top snow, swirling it all around me, and making it difficult to see.
A small box wrapped with a red ribbon sat right outside my snow cave, precisely where I would see it upon exiting.