Spellcraft

by Andrew Beymer

  My voice was surprisingly hard there at the end. I guess I was learning all sorts of new things about myself.

  Finally one of the crafters stepped forward and moved to the forge. “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is something you’re not going to be able to understand even if I explain it to you,” I said. “But I can give you the recipe for daggers and we can go from there.”

  “But I literally just went and grabbed the recipe and gave it to you,” the goblin said, sounding more and more confused. “Why could I read it and know it but I couldn’t do it and you could?”

  I shook my head and chuckled. It really was going to be a problem in Lotus having gameplay mechanics butting up against thinking creatures, and I didn’t think a goblin being confused at his inability to carry out a craft recipe was even going to be the beginning.

  “Lets just call it a curse the gods put on you, and I can help you lift it,” I said, hoping that would be something the goblin could understand.

  I reached out and touched the goblin, unsure of exactly how this was supposed to go, and a menu came up asking me if I wanted to grant my ability to craft to this goblin. There was only the one recipe in there so far, but I figured I could very quickly flesh that out considering the vast library of schematics the goblins had hinted at when I asked for that dagger recipe. Especially if I had access to this forge room and all the materials we’d brought along with.

  “Try to craft a dagger now,” I said.

  The goblin looked unsure. Like I could totally understand where the little dude was coming from. He’d just tried crafting something and it hadn’t worked, so why would it suddenly magically start working now?

  But he reached out and grabbed the materials he needed. His figure went through the animation that went along with crafting things. A moment later he had a dull new dagger in his hands that he stared at in wonder.

  “How is that possible?” he asked, looking up at me and then back to the dagger in wonder.

  “I told you,” I said. “I have to be the one to grant you that ability, but now that we’re in business I think we can really do some dangerous stuff.”

  I looked out to the goblins standing all around us. “Whaddya say? Do you want to go into business with me and take out the assholes who’ve been slaughtering you wholesale, or do you want to keep hiding down here sending your people to their deaths like the Chief would have you do?”

  I glanced over to the Chief again. A few of the goblins also looked over at him, and it was clear they were weighing whether or not they wanted to wind up like him in addition to whether or not they wanted to keep being led to wholesale slaughter.

  It was going to take some work to make it clear to the goblins that I wasn’t going to kill them indiscriminately, and it’s not like it’d been a great start killing the Chief, but it had to be done. The asshole was going to kill us, after all.

  Then slowly but surely the goblins all started to get down on one knee. They looked up at me with something that was approaching awe and wonder. Even Rezzik got down on his knees in front of me, which made him barely come up to my knees.

  A system message popped up helpfully informing me that I’d unlocked a new skill.

  Congratulations! You’ve unlocked the Leadership skill path! Continue gaining reputation and building your faction to advance this skill!

  Congratulations! You are now the head of the Goblin Underground faction! Build out your faction and go forth and conquer in their name!

  Current territories controlled:

  Goblin Underground (Uncontested)

  I looked around at the gathered goblins getting down on their knees before me and doing their best impression of the end of Return of the King, and I couldn’t help but smile a goofy grin.

  “Huh. Looks like you made some friends,” Keia said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said, turning to the goblins and raising my voice. “Okay everybody, line up! We’re going to get out those stockpiles of crafting materials the Chief was talking about, and I’m going to teach you a little something called mass production!”

  69

  Recipes

  “Recipes,” I said, pacing back and forth through the forges.

  Things were going well, all things considered. In the past few days I’d set the goblins to creating weapons and armor with the lesser crafting supplies they had stockpiled after I’d imparted my crafting ability to them. I had another group of goblins adding spell infusions after I imparted some of my ability to them.

  We had goblins sneaking the materials into Nilbog and listing them on the Auction House, and we were making money hand over fist on the stuff even as the Horizon stuff was going unsold now that there were better alternatives.

  It still wasn’t enough. I needed more recipes, damn it. I needed the good stuff, and not just the typical medieval fantasy weapons most people thought of.

  “Recipes?” Rezzik asked.

  “Yup. Recipes. I need all the recipes and plans you have for building stuff. Like I need everything,” I said. “Especially any complex machinery you might have.”

  Airships existed in this game, which meant complex machinery existed in this game. If I could figure out a way to weaponize that it’d be amazing, but I’d been so busy setting up everything else and soaking up the massive skill gains that came from a goblin city setting up mass production in my name that I hadn’t had time to think about it.

  Until now.

  “But what do you need them for?” he asked, his ear twitching.

  I paused as I felt a pinging somewhere in the back of my mind. I pulled up the tactical display I’d discovered along with a host of other useful territory management tools after becoming head honcho around here, and sure enough there was another Horizon Dawn incursion moving into my territory.

  Getting used to those pings was a head trip and a half. Becoming the leader of a faction meant I got a notification every time one of them entered my faction’s territory, which had meant needing to turn off the notifications since there were so many Horizon Dawn people milling around at the Goblinsteel Mines.

  Those were my mines, not theirs, but no one had told them that yet. I intended to stake my claim clearly, but I had to do this nice and properly.

  Turning off notifications for people inside my territory still didn’t stop the pinging whenever someone came into my territory. Which was annoying since there was a steady stream of players moving between Nilbog and the mines.

  At least Nilbog wasn’t considered my territory yet. Which was a blessing in terms of notifications, but a bummer because I’d love nothing more than to turn the goblin population of that town against Horizon Dawn. For now Nilbog was listed as contested, along with the mines for that matter.

  I considered myself lucky that the pinging didn’t start until they were almost on top of the Goblinsteel Mines, at least. Otherwise I’d be getting those annoying notifications every time a Horizon Dawn patrol moved even slightly out of town, and they did that a lot.

  I swiped at the thing to move it away. I had to concentrate on the step in front of me, and not five steps out.

  “Another Horizon Dawn patrol?” Keia asked.

  “Yup,” I said. “I really need to figure out if there’s a way to mute those incursion notifications.”

  “Maybe they want you to be annoyed when your territory has been occupied,” Kris said. “Did you ever stop to think about that?”

  “Well it’s not like it’s my fault it’s occupied,” I said. “The place was occupied before I started the damn game!”

  “Yeah, but the game doesn’t know that,” Kris said. “Those dings are your punishment for not having a firm hold on your territory!”

  I ground my teeth together as I looked at her. I was tempted to tell some of the goblins to stab her, I was pretty sure Keia could raise her at this point so it’s not like she was in all that much danger. I didn’t ask them to kill her though.

  There we
re just some things that you didn’t do to your friends, and ordering a bunch of stabby little murder machines to go after your best friend was at the top of that list.

  “C’mon,” Kris said. “Just let me do my thing. Show off some of the skills I’ve been getting from sparring!”

  “We’re not sending out any patrols to take them out,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “But why not?” she asked, a hint of whining coming to her voice.

  I opened my mouth to explain to her, for like the eleventy billionth time, why we weren’t sending out goblin patrols to take out the Horizon Dawn people who were moving into territory that was now mine. Only Keia was way ahead of me to provide the explanation.

  “Because if anything out of the ordinary starts happening up there then it’s going to tip them off that something new is going on around here,” Keia said. “If they know something new is going on then they might be able to figure it out and counter us.”

  “Believe you me,” I said. “I have no desire to let them keep running things up there any longer than we have to, but we’re in a precarious position right now.”

  I pulled up the now familiar window that showed the defenses for the Underground, Keia was still giggling about that name a few days later, as well as all the weapons and soldiers that were available to us. It painted a picture of a city that was falling more on the game mechanics than art design side of things.

  “You’d think this place would have more soldiers,” Kris muttered. “I mean they’re all over the place, so why can’t we use them?”

  “That’s the problem,” I said. “Those guards are there for art design purposes and to make this place look like a fully populated city, but they don’t to jack shit when it comes to the actual military count for this place. They’re glorified raid mobs to be killed if an invading force makes it down here.”

  It was nice to know the game was handing me a ready made defense force should someone breach the city, but it was annoying that I couldn’t use them for offense considering I didn’t think a breach was likely anytime soon.

  The game had gone from being an MMO to a strategy game the moment I found a faction to call my very own. I’d always enjoyed strategy games, but in this case it was more than a little annoying that I was being hit with an old fashioned “gather lumber and gold and build up your army before you do anything” situation when this was clearly a massive goblin city with huge resources.

  Case in point. The only goblinsteel we had to make items was the goblinsteel I’d brought with me. Other than that a city built on goblinsteel was completely devoid of the material. We had the lesser stuff, but sending goblins to attack Horizon Dawn people in goblinsteel armor of their own would be a suicide mission for my people.

  Goblinsteel was the top shit around here. The best you could get in this region. The kind of stuff that could cut through other weapons and armor like butter. I might as well send the goblins into battle wearing nothing if I didn’t have goblinsteel of my own, and I didn’t have enough to supply the army I’d need to take out Horizon Dawn.

  Talk about frustrating.

  The message from the game designers who put together the faction PVP in this game was clear: if I was going to take out my enemies then I needed to build my army from scratch. Which meant I needed access to more of the good stuff.

  “About the only good thing I can think of is at least there aren’t any other factions around here I’m aware of that’ve had a chance to build up their troop concentration,” I muttered.

  “What was that?” Keia asked.

  “It’s just annoying that they’re making us build everything up from scratch when there’s clearly a whole damn city around us that’s on a war footing,” I said.

  “Yeah, that does suck.”

  “You said something about recipes and plans?” Rezzik asked.

  “Hm?” I asked, turning to the goblin who’d become my right hand dude since the Chief was taken out of commission. The goblin king hadn’t been exactly happy to discover that I’d fried his Chief, but he’d also been willing to bow to the realpolitik when it became clear the Chief had been doing his best to usurp the king’s power in his absence.

  “Yeah, any plans you have,” I said. “The more plans we have the more we can get goblins to working on those plans.”

  “How about these?” Rezzik asked.

  I turned to see that while I’d been preoccupied going over all the factional stuff and thinking about how I was going to deal with Horizon Dawn Rezzik had been busy. There was a massive wagon that was loaded down with scrolls of varying sizes.

  “Holy shit Rezzik,” I breathed. “This is the mother lode. How did you get all this?”

  “This isn’t even the beginning of it,” Rezzik said. “We have a crafting library here that can show you how to make anything you can think of.”

  My mind immediately went to the one thing that I’d been wanting to create ever since I first stepped into this game and looked up into the skies to see not a bird, not a plane, but a massive airship floating in the air in defiance of gravity and all known laws of physics.

  I mean I was well aware that violating laws of physics wasn’t really all that big a deal in a game where those laws could be turned off at the flip of a switch, but that didn’t change the fact that I had visions of massive airships dropping bombs like something straight out of the intro to a 16-bit Final Fantasy game, only with way more realistic graphics.

  I licked my lips as I looked through the giant pile of plans.

  “Do they have anything in there about airships?” I asked.

  Rezzik cocked his head to the side, and his ears did that weird goblin thing where one of them went slightly up while the other one stayed folded over. I knew that meant he was thinking about something, and I figured him thinking about whether or not they had airship plans could only be a good thing.

  “Well yeah,” he said. “Someone had to make those things in Nilbog, right?”

  I licked my lips again. I wasn’t going to bother explaining to him that those things had been put into the game as a convenient method of transportation that would allow players to get from point A to point B without traversing territory that was presumably full of nasty monsters that would want to eat them.

  No, much better to just go along with the in-game justifications for the goblins having airship plans. Especially when that meant I was getting what I wanted anyway.

  “D… Do you think you could show me those plans specifically?” I asked.

  Rezzik shrugged. It was a fatalistic shrug that seemed to say he didn’t care one way or another whether or not he was about to reveal something to me that was going to change the very balance of power in this game, but then again when you got down to it I figured a lot of these moments were like this in the real world too.

  I’m sure there were more than a few people working on, say, the Manhattan Project who’d been so exhausted by the time they got around to actually finishing their project that they were more relieved than they were excited at what they’d done.

  Then again I got the impression from reading some of the really interesting declassified histories that most of them were horrified by what they’d unleashed on the world. Sort of like someone being all proud of their pet Godzilla right up to the moment it goes on a rampage destroying Tokyo Tower and the Diet.

  The Diet being what they used to call their representatives in Japan, and not something that a person went on back when there was actually a problem with people having so much food that the poor people were fat instead of barely keeping enough food around to stay alive.

  The past was a funny place, is what I was getting at, and…

  “Here you are boss,” Rezzik said, handing some plans over to me.

  This scroll was a little more hefty than the others, but I knew it was all for show. I wouldn’t have to actually open this thing up and study it any more than I would’ve had to do that for any of the other plans that I’d been able to devour.r />
  That was one good thing about how the game handled learning new recipes. All I had to do was touch one and think about learning what was in it, and the ability to perform whatever the hell was included in that scroll was granted to me.

  Of course there was still the question of whether or not my skill level was high enough to allow me to pull something like that off on the first try, usually it wasn’t and I’d spent plenty of late nights in the Underground getting annoyed both at my inability to get some of these complicated recipes right the first time.

  The scroll glowed a few times, fitfully at first because the game didn’t want to give up the secrets of this particular recipe to me when I was clearly this low skilled, but I kept at the sumbitch.

  “Um, are you sure you’re doing that right?” Rezzik asked.

  “I’m pretty sure I’m doing it right,” I said, squinting at the thing and wondering if I was doing something wrong here. I mean most of the recipes I’d been learning so far had been simpler stuff like weapons and armor that I then passed on to the goblins who got to work making the shit, at least they’d been making shit and spell infusing it with my granted Spellcrafting powers until we ran out of the small amount of goblinsteel we brought along with us, and something told me an airship was going to be a hell of a lot more complicated than swords and armor.

  “I mean you hold the thing out and I get the knowledge,” I muttered.

  “Did you ever stop to think that maybe you need to read the thing?” Rezzik finally asked after a long pause that told me he was thinking about whether or not he wanted to bring it up.

  “I know you don’t understand this, but that’s not how this game works,” I said.

  “That’s how reading every other set of plans I’ve ever come across has worked,” Rezzik muttered under his breath, but loud enough that I was pretty sure I’d been meant to hear it.

  I didn’t have time to explain to him, again, that we were talking about a situation where everything had worked like that previously in his memory because the people who put this game together had implanted those memories in whatever subroutines made up his memories.