Cassandra would have grimaced, if she’d been able to. “System Processing” might as well have been “Please hold; the next available agent will be with you shortly”. It might as well have been an elevator with repetitive textures, or a T-posing character doll.

It was nothing but sloppiness, a mask over a failure of pacing and competent engineering.

Frustratingly, though, she didn’t yet have a body. It wasn’t the first time she’d passed through an ineffable void and reappeared in a chosen form rather than simply waking up in a new world in medias res, but it grated every time. At least when she was already embodied, she had senses other than the abstract representation of information devoid of any context.

RACIAL INFORMATION: TIEFLING

Tieflings share certain racial traits as a result of their infernal descent.

Ability Score Increase: Your Intelligence score increases by 1, and your Charisma score increases by 2.

ALIGNMENT AUTOMAGICALLY CHOSEN: Chaotic Good

Size: Tieflings are about the same size and build as humans. Your size is Medium.

Speed: Your base walking speed is 30 feet.

Darkvision: Thanks to your infernal heritage, you have superior vision in dark and dim conditions. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can’t discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.

Hellish Resistance: You have resistance to fire damage.

Infernal Legacy: You know the thaumaturgy cantrip. When you reach 3rd level, you can cast the hellish rebuke spell as a 2nd-level spell once with this trait and regain the ability to do so when you finish a long rest. When you reach 5th level, you can cast the darkness spell once with this trait and regain the ability to do so when you finish a long rest. Charisma is your spellcasting ability for these spells.

Languages: You can speak, read, and write Common and Infernal.

So it was with quite a substantial amount of genre-awareness and meta-knowledge that Cassandra Claire made her rapid choices, racing impatiently to the end of the tedious character generation chapter of her adventure.

The options were so familiar to her that she was sure she’d seen these exact words before, so familiar that it was as though she’d read the Reference Document for whatever System she was going to be dealing with this time around. She was dubious about that, though; she’d never been sent to another world that involved Intellectual Property law violations, for whatever reason, whether those were related to copyrights or trademarks.

Surely whatever edition of whichever game she’d studied in passing wouldn’t have been released in, say, the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license? Even if there was some sort of massive scandal due to toxic corporate overreach, that would be a bafflingly strange thing to do; it would allow any derivative, commercialized work to make use of the entire thing. Why, some random stranger on the internet could just copy-paste entire blocks of it!

Well, it didn’t matter, she was determined that if Infernal wound up being written right-to-left in an Abjad script, or for that matter if she ran into even one lich using a sealed box, whatever the material, filled with magical phrases transcribed onto any form of paper-like substance? Especially if it had straps that wrapped around the arm or head?

She’d damn well find a way to trigger a vacuum collapse in this reality on her way out.

It was the principle of the thing, really.

BACKGROUND AUTOMAGICALLY SELECTED: LEARNED PROFESSIONAL

You belong to an established society of study, learned in a particular discipline and having close connections with other scholars. You are a known figure in the research field, released from the grind and drudgery as well as any bonds of fealty. You studied under a succession of sages, within the bounds of your school, and became a scholar who needed to secure funding in order to study further. As a trained scholar, you know how to investigate, transcribe, encode, decode, copy, improve, and obfuscate information (as reflected in your proficiency with scholar’s tools), as well as how to study, take tests, ask for large sums of money with no shame whatsoever, and bullshit in a surprisingly compelling manner.

Skill Proficiencies: History, Persuasion, Investigation

Tool Proficiencies: Scholar’s Tools

Languages: Dwarvish

Equipment: Scholar’s Tools, Letter of Introduction (Dottore Leonardo), Traveling Scholar’s Clothing, 15gp

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Other (Thesis Snake Defeated): As a result of your training, you use the higher of INTELLIGENCE, WISDOM, or CHARISMA for Persuasion checks, Investigation checks, and Insight checks when you undertake them in an appropriate way.

Other (Scholar’s Network): While you are an established and respected scholar in civilized lands, there are alas no scholars anywhere short of a city—except, of course, for where there is research to do and funding to justify; there, they will at least recognize the name of the Senior Scholar you report to. You can also send letters, which are very unlikely to provide you with access to any resources, support, assistance, opportunities. The Scholar’s Network wields tremendous power, and will treat an attack on you as an attack on its own prestige unless it is more convenient to throw you to the wolves—which they will do without hesitation, so make sure you head any such thing off at the pass by credibly promising the greatest discovery in the history of the Material Plane if only they will intercede on your behalf.

Other (Student Loans): You must pay dues of 25% of Net Profits, as calculated by the hideously complex and frankly usurious secret formulas of the Scholar’s Network, to cover your loans. These are due every time you arrive somewhere with a Scholar’s Haven, so get your lies straight before you return to a city and you’ll be fine.

At least there were benefits to her starting situation. It didn’t seem at all right—the balance was wildly off and the consequences of what the System was giving her would be not only unpredictable but, inevitably, totally unreasonable. That said, if her initial hypothesis of where the information had come from was correct, it was plausible that there simply hadn’t been the right pieces of supplementary details to flesh matters out from within the System’s starting parameters.

From there, she was guessing, it had adapted and improvised.

Well, that was a hypothesis worth testing. But how to go about doing that? Were there going to be an endless series of barely-disguised references and blatant serial-numbers-filed-off copycat behavior by wherever she’d just been sent to? It wouldn’t have been the first time, so that hardly qualified as a proper test, though if that didn’t happen it would certainly falsify the hypothesis.

She put that on the list, along with a few other ideas—checking for sudden divergences in style, wild swerves that missed trademarked concepts and still-copyrighted material by the thinnest of margins, and so on.

BASE PHYSICAL ABILITY SCORES AUTOMAGICALLY SET BASED ON CHOICES.

STRENGTH: 8

DEXTERITY: 8

CONSTITUTION: 10

STRENGTH:

Strength measures bodily power, athletic training, and the extent to which you can exert raw physical force. A Strength check can model any attempt to lift, push, pull, or break something, to force your body through a space, or to otherwise apply brute force to a situation. The Athletics skill reflects aptitude in certain kinds of Strength checks. You add your Strength modifier to your attack roll and your damage roll when attacking with a melee weapon such as a mace, a battleaxe, or a javelin. You use melee weapons to make melee attacks in hand-to-hand combat, and some of them can be thrown to make a ranged attack. Your Strength score determines the amount of weight you can bear, push, drag, or lift.

DEXTERITY:

Dexterity measures agility, reflexes, and balance. A Dexterity check can model any attempt to move nimbly, quickly, or quietly, or to keep from falling on tricky footing. The Acrobatics, Sleight of Hand, and Stealth skills reflect aptitude in certain kinds of Dexterity checks. You add your Dexterity modifier to your attack roll and your damage roll when attacking with a ranged weapon, such as a sling or a longbow. You can also add your Dexterity modifier to your attack roll and your damage roll when attacking with a melee weapon that has the finesse property, such as a dagger or a rapier. Depending on the armor you wear, you might add some or all of your Dexterity modifier to your Armor Class. At the beginning of every combat, you roll initiative by making a Dexterity check. Initiative determines the order of creatures' actions in combat.

CONSTITUTION:

Constitution measures health, stamina, and vital force. Constitution checks are uncommon, and no skills apply to Constitution checks, because the endurance this ability represents is largely passive rather than involving a specific effort on the part of a character or monster. A Constitution check can model your attempt to push beyond normal limits, however. Your Constitution modifier contributes to your hit points.

FINAL/ADJUSTED ATTRIBUTES:

STR—8 (-1)

DEX—8 (-1)

CON—10 (0)

INT—15 (+2)

WIS—8 (-1)

CHA—20 (+5)

Rude, she would have said, if she’d had a body to say it with. A negative Wisdom modifier? Sure, the strength and dexterity made sense—Jason had a tendency to lurk within lunging reach in the kitchen, and he’d caught a knife in mid-air more than once—but a negative Wisdom modifier?

“Eight points in Wisdom, really? I’m great at people and great with people! Jason and I threw the best board game parties, assuming you liked either 10,000 piece puzzles or Spirit Island.” Claire was absolutely fuming. Hadn’t they raised a phenomenally excellent, superlative daughter together whose three-month rolling average number of “I hate you, Mom!” had recently fallen below three per week? Hadn’t that girl of theirs only ever been sent to the principal’s office for pointing out when teachers were wrong, or for reading in class and then having the temerity to have the answers to the teachers questions? And she’d picked Jason, hadn’t she?

“… I got a PhD in anthropology,” she muttered after a moment. She’d been trying to talk millionaires into funding history departments with it when a towering blonde man had found her, sitting outside an occupied women’s bathroom, sobbing. She hadn’t even considered that the men’s room was exactly as single-occupancy as the women’s—he’d just smiled when she’d admitted that, smiled like he’d done the same a dozen times.

Then he’d handed her a water bottle, a pack of tissues, and a pharmacy-sealed pack of ibuprofen.

When Jason had asked her if she needed a ride home or anything else, she’d said yes, a ride home and an engagement ring because she’d just fallen in love with him, and he’d grinned like the sun coming out from behind the clouds and suggested bashfully that maybe a date would be appropriate first, and—

“Oh God,” she said, opening her eyes suddenly. “I absolutely deserve that negative Wisdom modifier.”

It was only belatedly that she realized character creation was over, and she was standing in the room of an inn… and not alone.

“Hi, mom,” said Harriet Joan Claire. “Welcome to the Daggered Shores Archipelago.”