Spellcraft

by Andrew Beymer

  “Y’know that means the hottie hiding in the trees could very well be some overweight dude with more body hair than gorillas back before they went extinct in the wild,” I said.

  Kris turned and grinned at me.

  “This doesn’t mean I’m interested in this conversation,” I said.

  “But you’re thinking about it,” Kris said.

  I sighed. She was right. I was thinking about it.

  “Besides, does it matter what she is IRL if she looks like a sweet hottie in the game world?” Kris asked. “It’s like that dude said in the old Matrix movie. Y’know the one before that terrible remake? Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and I wouldn’t mind finding a little bliss in the game.”

  “You’re impossible,” I said. “Honestly. The whole thirsty gamer thing doesn’t suit you.”

  “Says you,” Kris sniffed.

  I looked at the forest around us to avoid Kris going on about gender roles in massive online games. It was my tried and true method for tuning Kris out. She knew to tap me to get my attention if there was something important going down. Otherwise she was happy as long as she had someone to talk at.

  I spotted more of those small yellow flowers I'd seen back in the clearing but hadn’t had time to inspect properly.

  I had the time now. So I leaned down for a closer look. I reached out and brushed my fingers against a petal. A notification popped up telling me five flower petals had been added to my inventory, accompanied by an animation of the flower petals flying into my bag.

  Huh. That was neat. It looked like the developers had decided to strike a balance between realism and convenience, which meant I didn’t have to actually pick the flowers and put them in that bag.

  I was starting to get excited. If the things were flying into my inventory then those petals had to be some sort of reagent. Items in games had purpose, otherwise developers and art departments wouldn’t waste time on them.

  The presence of reagents meant Lotus Online had crafting. I hadn’t found any crafting items while I was going through loot databases, but that was probably because I’d been looking through armor and weapons. I felt like an idiot now for not broadening my horizons.

  Crafting was always a fun legit way to break a game by messing with the mechanics, but something told me it was going to be a lot more difficult to mess with the crafting mechanics in this game than in the single player or multiplayer Horizon modules I'd played and broken with Kris.

  I grinned. That only meant the rewards were going to be that much more amazing when I figured out how to break the crafting system. Assuming, of course, that the same attention to detail had been paid to making an intricate crafting system as to the rest of the game design.

  The more intricate something was, the more rewarding it was when you figured out how to have your way with it. Complex systems yielded complex rewards and all that. I’d take advantage of a simple exploit if I found it, but something like this could very well be the magnum opus of my game breaking career.

  And if Horizon really was hanging around in this game then I had a pretty fucking good idea of who I’d be bending over and giving a good fucking if I figured out how to break this game.

  “Holy shit,” I said as a window popped up.

  “Oh come on,” Kris said. “Are you seriously going to be that old fashioned about this sort of thing when you’ve been gaming your whole life? Remember Treasa who used to heal for us a few years back? I heard her on voice chat, and that deep voice didn’t belong to anyone who…”

  “Shut up,” I said. “I think I found something important here.”

  “Important?” Kris asked, stopping and turning to look at me. “What’s up?”

  “Hold on,” I said as my eyes darted across the notification window that’d popped up.

  It let me know I'd unlocked the top level Gathering skill as well as the subskill of Herbs. Interesting. I also saw related subskills from other skill trees I hadn’t unlocked yet that were part of the overarching Gathering skill. It was like the game was encouraging me to unlock those new skill trees by giving me tantalizing glimpses of what else was possible.

  “Wait, are you picking flowers?” Kris asked. “What the fuck could possibly be important about picking fucking flowers?”

  “Maybe I am,” I said. “What’s it to you?”

  Kris rolled her eyes and let out a long suffering sigh. This wouldn’t be the first time she’d been brought along for the ride as I gathered reagents for crafting. It probably wouldn’t be the last time either if the suspicions about what I could do with the crafting system in this game were anywhere close to correct.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so obsessed with that crafting crap,” Kris said.

  I grinned as I looked down at the yellow flower petals in my inventory. I couldn’t quite describe what it was about gathering and crafting digital stuff that drew me in. I'd always loved crafting shit. There were times, before Diana’s accident, when I'd had more fun gathering and crafting things and playing the market on a game’s Auction House than I did actually going out and playing the damn game.

  The only problem with that was there were so many games where the developers seemed to think that crafting should be an afterthought, or only in service of lame things like raiding rather than being a pursuit innately worthy of investing time in because it was fun in and of itself. I'd always pined for a game where leveling crafting was just as rewarding as learning the intricacies of taking down raid bosses, with equivalent loot rewards, but I had yet to find a game with developers who felt the same way despite so much searching.

  I was hopeful now though. So far everything else about Lotus Online had been way more thought out and immersive than any other game. I could only hope the same would hold true for the crafting system.

  Still, I had to phrase this in a way that Kris would appreciate if I wanted her onboard. Or at the very least if I wanted her to be patient and stand by while I gathered shit.

  “You know how I feel about crafting,” I said. “It’s a good way to break a game, and breaking a game is what makes a game fun for me.”

  “You and your game breaking,” Kris said. “Did you ever stop to think that maybe you’d have more fun if you just played the damn game?”

  She whipped out her two-handed hammer and whirled it around her head a couple of times. Of course she wasn’t nearly as skilled with that thing in this game so she nearly took her head off with some self-inflicted blunt force trauma. Though, come to think of it, she had a habit of nearly taking her head off with whatever weapon she was flourishing in just about every game we’d played using the Lotus hardware.

  “Maybe it’d be more fun to play the game like the normies, but I seriously doubt it,” I said.

  “Those normies are playing the game the right way,” Kris said.

  “Hey, I’m not going to feel bad just because everyone else can’t figure out the intricacies of game systems that don’t involve bashing shit over the head. If it’s in the game then it’s worth exploring and exploiting, and stuff like this is a hell of a lot easier to exploit than smashing low level digital bunny rabbits with your hammer,” I said.

  “Behold the mighty warrior, slayer of flowers!” Kris said in a tone that I took to be just a tad mocking. She held her hammer over her head, looking for all the world like a sand person celebrating their most recent victory over a young Mark Hamill.

  “Don’t knock it,” I said, touching another flower and adding a few more petals to my inventory. There were little intricate veins in the thing that almost seemed to glow as I inspected it. “Crafting can be a path to fame and fortune in games like this.”

  “Fame and fortune?” Kris asked with a snort. “When did you ever get fame and fortune from crafting?”

  “Well, fortune at least,” I said. “There was one time when I took a level one character in NuWoW and used a few coppers I got from killing mobs in the starter area to completely corner the market on a couple of different or
es without ever leaving the capital city. That was fun.”

  “Yeah, I remember that,” Kris said. “I spent the whole night trying to get you to run NeoDeadmines with me, and you were so busy with your Auction House shenanigans that you wouldn’t come out to play.”

  “Whatever,” I said, tapping another flower and adding it to my inventory. When I inspected it in my inventory a tooltip came up.

  Nhewb’s Blessing is a flower that grows in moderately untamed forests around settlements that border the wilderness. It can be used as a reagent in several potions.

  That wasn’t much to go on, but it was a start. If I was a betting man I would’ve put money down on the moderately tame wildernesses Nhewb’s Blessing grew in being mostly the kind of areas where low level players got their start.

  “So I got Gathering: Herbs just by touching one of these flowers,” I muttered. “And it’s showing me skills I haven’t gotten already. Looks like the game doesn’t give you a skill until you do it.”

  “Duh,” Kris said. “How else would it work? You have to do something before you get the skill to start leveling it. That isn’t exactly revolutionary game design.”

  “No, that’s important,” I said. “If we’re going to have fun and break this game we’re going to have to figure out how the devs thought about putting it together.”

  Kris leaned in and tapped me on the forehead. “If you’re going to have fun in this game then you’re going to have to figure out what the devs were thinking when they put it together so you can try and break it. I’m perfectly happy smashing things with my warhammer. You’re only happy when you’re smashing the nice systems the game devs put in place so us normies can have a good time putting our brains on autopilot and doing fetch quests.”

  “Whatever,” I said, tapping more flowers that went into my inventory. Meanwhile my Gathering:Herbs skill was moving up with each tap. It was addicting. “I wonder what kind of perks I might get for leveling Gathering?”

  Kris shrugged. “You’re the one who unlocked the skill. Look at the skill tree and see if it shows you.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Good idea!”

  “You don’t have to sound surprised that I had a good idea,” Kris said with a sniff.

  “Maybe not, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m surprised,” I said, winking at her and earning a single finger salute for my trouble.

  I thought of the skill tree and sure enough, just like every other status window in this game, thinking of it was enough to make it appear.

  It was time to see what there was to see with this fun new skill I’d unlocked, and from there figure out how I could use that to pull off my ultimate exploit in the most complex video game ever created!

  15

  Gatherer

  I didn’t stop picking flowers as I had a look at the Gathering skill tree. It was easy enough to keep tapping the yellow flowers on autopilot in the background behind the translucent skill tree screen that I could see through easily enough.

  I’d unlocked Gathering:Herbs, but there was also a skill tree for Gathering:Mining. Which was a delightfully unoriginal way for the game to tell me that armor and weapon crafting were also available skills in the game that I couldn’t see yet because I hadn’t unlocked any of the skills by sitting down at a forge and figuring out how the hell that kind of crafting worked in this game.

  I imagined someone out there was going to start doing a brisk business at some point compiling all the different skill trees and telling players how to unlock them. It was very old school of Lotus to throw players to the metaphorical wolves and not hold their hands all the way to skill mastery, but I kind of liked it like that.

  It made me feel like I was in the Wild West days of the late 1990s and early 2000s when the Internet and MMOs had been new and anything went because nothing had been solidified into rules designed to help companies Hoover the greatest amount of money possible from their player base.

  “It’s not telling me much,” I said.

  “Sounds about right,” Kris said. “This game is old school. Now if you’re done picking flowers we might want to get a move on before those two assholes catch up to us?”

  The window showing me the skill tree for Gathering:Herbs disappeared with a wave and I was back in the forest staring at a path that didn’t have nearly as many Nhewb’s Blessing flowers as it had moments ago. Huh. I’d really gone to town grabbing those things on autopilot while I was reading up on skill trees.

  “Yeah, I guess I’m done picking flowers for now,” I said. “I don’t think there’s much more I can pick on this stretch of trail.”

  “Then let’s get going,” Kris said. “We already ran into a goblin and a couple of player killers and that hottie with the disembodied voice, and I’m not in the mood to run into anything else that could kill us.”

  “A hottie who you have no idea what she looks like, I might add,” I said with a smirk.

  “Whatever. She sounded hot,” Kris said. “Now come on. We need to get a move on.”

  I looked at the few remaining flowers. They had a faint glowing outline around them. Almost as though once I'd picked one flower the game was pointing them out to me.

  That’d be helpful. Or it could be my imagination.

  We picked a path through the forest in silence for a little while, but that silence didn’t last long. Kris kept glancing into the trees around us like she thought they were hiding more monsters. Or maybe more players who’d try to kill us.

  Which wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. This was a game, after all, and one of the hallmarks of MMOs was there was plenty of stuff to kill and plenty of stuff looking to kill players. Monsters and players alike.

  I didn’t figure that dynamic would be much different in the most advanced persistent online world ever created, though I did get the feeling that the methods for killing and being killed were going to be a hell of a lot more intense in Lotus than in previous games.

  For all that those assholes hadn’t actually attacked us. Sure we’d been rescued, but Gregor had hesitated with his bow and arrow for some reason. There was something to that if I could just reason it out, but there was a missing piece to that puzzle.

  “I really hope there aren’t any more griefer assholes lurking out there,” Kris said.

  I peered into the woods. The forest seemed like a pretty idyllic place. Like if we hadn’t been attacked by those player killers back in that clearing I would’ve thought we were going on a pleasant stroll through a wooded park in a richer part of the arcology where they could afford to waste money on things like putting together wooded parks and all the infrastructure that was required for maintaining a forest on a skyscraper that reached into the upper atmosphere.

  Basically this was the kind of thing I was never going to see in the real world. Not when I lived in one of the poorest levels on the arcology in a cramped shanty with my parents. For now. Until graduation at the end of this school year when they’d made it clear I was going to be out on my own, which was something I tried not to think about too much considering I didn’t have much hope of moving onto higher education.

  I’d wasted most of my study time playing games. Oops.

  I focused on the game to distract myself from thoughts of the unpleasantness the future held for me in just a few months if I didn’t figure out something to save my ass when my parents kicked me out.

  “I’m not that worried about griefers,” I said.

  There was plenty of existential dread to go around, and compared to that a couple of wannabe player killers barely registered.

  “You aren’t?” Kris asked.

  “Nah,” I said. “Maybe those guys came back, but this is a thick forest.”

  “And we’re walking along an obvious path leading from the starter area to the biggest town nearby,” Kris pointed out. “Doesn’t take a tracking genius to figure out the most likely path we’re taking.”

  “Yeah, but it just feels like if they were going to attack us they wou
ld’ve done it already,” I said.

  Again there was that feeling that there was something I was missing. Some game system or something that was keeping them from coming after us. I really should’ve spent more time reading up on the game’s mechanics and less time reading up on loot tables, but it was too late for that now.

  It’s not like I was going to log out of the game to try and figure out why those assholes might’ve given up the chase before it started.

  “Whatever. What we really have to worry about are creatures our level like that wolf,” I said, leaning down to tap a new group of Nhewb’s Blessing flowers and add them to my inventory. “I’m pretty sure those dudes and that goblin and your alleged hot chick were a fluke.”

  “Right, and the last thing we need to do if we’re worried about a low level wolf taking a bite out of our ass is bend over and present an easy target because we’re picking flowers,” Kris said.

  “Whatever,” I muttered.

  I couldn’t help myself. I was hooked, which made sense considering the whole point of a game like this was to get players addicted so they kept paying their monthly subscription.

  I was getting one hell of a shot of brain pleasure juices every time I tapped a yellow flower and got a notification that I'd added a new cluster of petals to my inventory. I'd even gained enough points in Gathering: Herbs to raise my overall gathering skill by a single point, which sent another shot straight to the pleasure centers in my brain.

  “This is going to take awhile, isn’t it?” Kris asked. “Like there’s no way I’m going to convince you not to stop and smell the flowers at this point, is there?”

  I grunted. Kris would understand the meaning behind that grunt. It was a grunt she’d heard often enough. The way she rolled her eyes when she heard that grunt was something I’d seen often enough, for that matter.