Ch.1

My head is killing me!

I groaned and opened my eyes, looking around to see nothing but darkness. Not the darkness of a void or something crazy like that, no. The sound from my few small movements had let me know that I was in some kind of a small, enclosed space.

Where the heck am I?

I remembered leaving work and heading home. Then everything got really vague and then I was here.

But where the heck is here?

That was when the rest of me decided to let me know that it wasn’t JUST my head that was hurting – pretty much everything was hurting. It was just that my head was hurting the worst!

Please generate a Character.

The words appeared both in front of my eyes and inside of my head. I was hearing them at the same time as I was seeing them, like a pleasant voice was reading the text to me.

What the Hell is going on?

I had no clue what to do, and frankly, I was torn between doubting my sanity and thinking I was dreaming. That doubt only increased when I realized I had no idea WHO I was! No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember my own name!

I could vividly remember the place I worked and the day of what my brain was telling me were my most recent memories. I could visualize the faces of the people working in the same office, but I had no idea of what their names were or what the name of the place I worked at was!

Please generate a Character.

The voice repeated its imperative to me once again, the voice almost asexual, but something – maybe it was just me, of course – told me that the voice was feminine. Definitely.

Ok, probably?

“How? How the heck do I generate a Character?” I asked out loud from pure frustration.

Begin by generating Stats.

Roll 4d6 7 times. Reroll 1s, then add the 3 highest dice to generate your starting Stats.

I was suddenly seated in a ring of dim, white light at a large, hardwood table – a large hardwood table that was incredibly familiar to me! Just like my name, the name of the place I worked at, and my co-worker's names, I KNEW that I had sat at that table more times than I could count!

There was simply no context connected to that feeling. I knew that I KNEW that table, and absolutely everything on it, but I didn’t know how I knew it, or where I knew it from!

This is some annoying bullshit! Why can’t I remember anything? What in the world is going on here? Is this some kind of crazy next-gen 3D sim game or something? If so, why can’t I remember my own name?!

It made me want to scream in frustration. It was like trying to remember a word that was on the tip of my tongue, but it just wouldn’t come to me... but a million times worse!

I KNEW that I knew all of those names, but it was like I just couldn’t connect to the parts of my brain that held that information.

Exactly like that, actually? This feels SOOO weird.

Not knowing what was going on was actually LESS frustrating, somehow. Even odder was the fact that I was merely annoyed and not freaking out.

I felt like I should have been going more than a little crazy. Instead, I was confused and annoyed, but overall, I felt comfortable about whatever was going on here. The worst part was actually the idea that I SHOULD be freaking out, and that I wasn’t for some reason!

Even that felt sort of unimportant, really; like something was suppressing those emotions past a certain point.

The table had a bag of dice; a green bag with Crown Royal stitched on it with yellow thread. MY dice bag, my brain told me. There was a notebook and a mechanical pencil sitting there, too – again, I knew that all of it was my personal gaming stuff.

I opened the Crown Royal bag and grabbed my four lucky dice, the ones I knew I always used for character generation. Then I began rolling.

The first roll got me a 15; a 6, a 5, a 4, and a 2. I of course discarded the 2 and was happy with my first roll!

The second roll was a 10; a 5, a 3, and two 2s. A smidge below average, but not terrible.

Then I rolled a 11. Not amazing, but still above average.

Then I got a 16! That was more like it.

Then, a 14, still way above average.

Then I got what I was looking for; an 18!

A moment later I rolled a danged 17!

This felt like making a character in The Game... but The Game didn’t have 7 stats. Well, I’d played with a guy who used a stat called Comeliness, but I didn’t think that was where this was going, as Comeliness was a stat created using a mathematical formula based off of 4 of the 6 other stats.

Why the heck can’t I remember the name of The Game, either? More than that, why can I remember these other odd details, but NOT the names?!

My inability to recall the actual name of anything, other than the name of a brand of alcohol, and only recalling it because I was reading it off the side of my danged dice bag was infuriating!

Nope! Let’s not wander down that rabbit hole. All of this is crazy enough already. I’m not sure if any of this is real, a dream, or some kind of drug or brain-injury induced delusion, but it FEELS real... whatever that means.

Annoying as not remembering names was, I could’t lie to myself, the session of dice rolling went about as well as it possibly could have! From a statistical point of view, those rolls crushed the average, even with using the House Rules version of character generation my friends and family always used...

Of course, that thought brought me right back to the fact that I could picture those people in my mind as well. Basic identifiers worked; mom, dad, best friend, next door neighbor, and so on.

But still no names, dammit!

Please arrange your Stats and choose your Race.

Strength: 17

Dexterity: 15

Constitution: 16

Intelligence: 14

Wisdom: 18

Charisma: 10

Luck: 11

I arranged and wrote down my stats in the way that I thought would keep me alive the longest. I was waiting for some kind of prompt to show me the races I had available; that's when I noticed a book. Strangely, I was sure it had been there the whole time, but I had just not noticed it somehow?

The Player's Handbook for The Game

That title also seemed to be trying to invoke a ton of memories. But only trying, not succeeding. Again, it felt like those memories were trapped behind a wall made out of pillows and memory foam; no matter how hard I beat my head against them, I made no progress... but it also didn’t really hurt.

It was a little frustrating, though.

Important notes about Stats in The Game. A 10 was considered the ‘base’ for humans. Every 2 points above 10 gave a +1 to whatever that Stat affected. For instance, a 14 Strength gave a +2 to hit and damage with melee attacks, to grappling checks, and to Strength-based skill rolls, plus a few other things like how much weight you could lift and carry.

Every 5-point increase was considered a doubling of that stat, too. Someone with a 15 Strength could lift twice as much and hit twice as hard as someone with a 10 Strength, for instance. All of that was obviously an abstraction in some ways, as the +2 to damage gained from an extra 5 points of Strength wouldn’t literally double how much damage you were doing in most cases.

A 12 Dexterity gave +1 to AC, ranged attack rolls, Reflex saves (which is basically getting out of the way of fireballs and lightning bolts; area of effect attacks of all types, really), Initiative (that’s who goes first in a fight), and Dex-based skills (like Acrobatics, Stealth, and Disable Device) and other Dex-based rolls.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Constitution gives a bonus to hit points and Fortitude saves as well as Con-based skills. (basically, a Fort saves lets you shake off things like poisons, diseases, and supernatural affects that target your body)

Hit points, commonly abbreviated as hp, were how tough you were. They were an agglomeration of how much damage it took to kill you. In some games, they were called Health or Life. In The Game, though, it was called hit points, though because of video games they’re often referred to interchangeably.

Intelligence mostly affected Arcane spell casting, specifically Wizardry. Fireballs, Lightning Bolts, Teleports, illusions, summoning extra planar creatures, and so on. Every 2 points of Int gives 1 extra skill point per level, 1 bonus language, and of course, affects all Int-based skills and rolls.

There were a LOT of Int-based skills, too. Every Crafting skill and every Knowledge/Lore skill worked off Intelligence. That added up to dozens of skills, without touching the skills like Spellcraft that used it independently of those two categories.

Wisdom represented willpower, perception, and the more mystical side of a person's mentality. It affected perception rolls and Will saves - which is shaking off stuff trying to mess with your mind or your spirit, as well as other Wis-based Skills and rolls.

For some classes, though, Wisdom does much more. The classes that I was interested in – the Monk and the Disciple of Pneuma – would both focus on a high Wisdom. Those classes used Wisdom to control supernatural energy, as well as directly increasing offensive and defensive abilities.

Charisma was about strength of personality, social skills, and good looks. Since it mostly added to social skills, gamers often considered it a dump Stat; a Stat that a character could afford to be lower than the rest. Though I personally hate the idea of doing so, the limited resources for raising stats makes it an uncomfortable reality. Bards, Clerics, Paladins, and Sorcerers all got a lot of power from having a high Charisma, and there's even a variation of Monk that used it! It was not one I was planning to go for, however.

Finally, Luck. I have no clue what Luck did. At all. It isn’t in The Game as a stat. Maybe it does nothing. Maybe it's super important. Because I had no clue, I decided to give myself a positive bonus to it, because who didn’t want to be at least a little lucky?

I certainly didn’t need any bad luck in my life, that’s for sure!

The book that I had noticed was titled The Player's Handbook for The Game which told me either a whole lot or absolutely nothing. Its cover was ALMOST identical to the scene that was on the cover of The Player's Handbook for The Game, but where that was a drawing, this was a photorealistic scene!

A statue of a giant, horned humanoid made of red stone was squatting dead center on the cover of the book. Its arms holding a huge brazier with a bonfire burning in it. Two men were balancing on top of the statue’s head, trying to pry the enormous gems that the statue had in place of its eyes out. In front of the statue was a pile of dead reptilian humanoids, and several other men and women wearing adventurer’s gear were going about other tasks.

Not only that, but the characters in the scene were actually moving around and interacting with each other while I watched, almost like I was watching a movie or TV show! I just sat and watched, amazed, until the scene reset itself back to how it was when I first looked at it.

It somehow relieved me that it was a type of recording, because for a moment I wasn’t sure whether it was happening live or not!

More than anything else so far, the book made a part of me certain this was all some kind of crazy, lucid dream – but I’d never had a dream like this before, and I’d never heard of anyone having a dream like this before, either. Everything was just too... sharp. Too finely detailed.

It was annoying, but I did the only thing I logically COULD do.

I opened the book.

It opened directly to the page titled Character Races.

Gee, that’s convenient. I was somehow sure that convenience had little to do with it, but by now I was way too freaked out to think of anything else.

Inside the book was a huge list of Races. Every intelligent humanoid race from The Game, many of the monstrous humanoid races, and even a few non-humanoids were listed in there – all of the classics, of course, too. Humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, half-orcs and all of their traditional variations were in there, alongside orcs, gnolls, hobgoblins, kobolds, thri-kreen, half-ogres, and baby dragons. The list ran into hundreds, maybe thousands of races!

The lists took up five pages!

Some of them were even crazy alien races, stuff from sci-fi, anime, and comic books, even! Sentient clouds of plasma, intelligent fungi, crab people, androids! You name it, there was a race for it!

The only one I could choose, though, was human. Plain, vanilla, and boring as heck. The rest of the names were greyed out and unselectable. The book wouldn’t let me leave the section on Races, either so I finally gave up hoping to find a way to Min/Max and just chose Human.

All my Stats immediately went up by one, and I had an additional one point to place anywhere I liked. I placed it in Constitution without hesitation, raising it to an 18 as well! After writing that down in my notebook, whatever was prompting me to do this seemed satisfied and gave me a new prompt.

Choose your Class.

The book flipped pages all by itself and opened to the Classes section. There were dozens of Classes available in there, and I couldn’t help but admit I was super excited to see all of the Classes I expected and many more, as well.

Some of them I knew were from third party books, and some of them were from entire other games, reworked for The Game's system – even Classes that I recognized from video games were included! The video game Classes had been modified down to the same power level as the other Classes, at a casual glance.

That was ok, I already knew what I was going to do!

A common alternate rules set for most versions of The Game let you make something called a 'Gestalt Character’. This let the player choose not one but TWO separate character Classes when making their pen and paper alter egos.

You get to take the best stuff from both Classes – but you only get the best of anything that overlaps. For instance, if one Class gave a d10 of hit points per level and the other Class gave a d8, you ONLY got the d10 of hit points, not BOTH. The same was true for saves and attack bonuses, plus a few other things.

Yes, it made for really powerful characters, and it was an alternate rule set that only decently experienced game masters should try to run a game using it because it not only made characters way stronger, but it also gave them a ton more utility. According to my dad, who I could remember was the normal GM for me and my friends even if I couldn't remember any of their names, the utility was more of a pain in the keister to a GM than the increased power levels!

Huh? I can remember the term GM? That’s weird.

More power seemed like a good idea. I was more than a bit of a power gamer, and I freely admitted it. There was simply no way I wasn’t going to at least try to make a Gestalt character!

Both Classes that I wanted were there, so under Race on my character sheet, I wrote Class. Immediately after that I wrote Gestalt 1st lvl. Monk/1st lvl. Disciple of Pneuma, and waited to see what would happen.

I was pretty sure that the worst thing that could happen is that I’d be admonished and told to change it but considering how many House Rules and third party things I was seeing, I was confident it would just let it go! I didn’t know why I thought that, but something told me it would ‘Just Work’, like the annoying CEO of that game franchise – the one where you woke up after being frozen in a nuclear bomb shelter for two centuries – liked to say!

He's the jerk who came up with ‘Horse Armor’ and kickstarted microtransactions in video games? Yeah, that guy!

Even as I told myself it would just work it began doing just that. I could feel my body changing, hardening, getting more solid. I could feel my senses sharpening as well, suddenly able to hear running water somewhere nearby, and smell the earth and stone around me. I could smell the water, too, as well as a scent that I thought had to be decomposition...

In my notebook, though, I noticed the line I had written had changed itself. It now said:

Primary: 1st lvl. Monk/1st lvl. Disciple of Pneuma

Ok. Not sure what that means, but I’ll take it! It was a bit weird in that it still looked just like my handwriting, too.

A moment later, a new prompt popped up.

Choose your Talents and Flaws.

Nice! I wasn’t sure if this was going to be an option. Talents and Flaws were all optional, and not part of the original game system, but once they were added, pretty much everyone I knew had started using them.

You got three Talent Points to begin with and could take up to three Flaws that could give you between three and six MORE Talent points! The reason that the number of Talents given was variable was because each Flaw was considered a MINUS one, two, or three Talent points... and you couldn’t take more than a single two- or three-point Flaw. They were just too nasty, and, for example, having all three of your Flaws being three-pointers would probably make your character unplayable.

You could take a second one- or two-point Flaw if you didn’t have a three-pointer, though.

For instance, being Blind was only a two-point Flaw!

There were ways to cheese it, though. For instance, even if you weren’t a magic user, you could still take a Flaw that would basically cripple your ability to use magic... which I didn’t care about because what I wanted to do wasn’t magic and I had no plans to ever use magic!

My roommate/high school buddy/best bro was the one who was a wanna-be spellslinger, after all.

The opportunity to unlock magic use during a campaign wasn’t uncommon, but I was going to focus entirely on Qi and Pneuma, and frankly taking magic classes would just get in the way.

I chose Magical Blockage, a two Talent point Flaw. It prevented me from naturally absorbing magical energy, though a magic user could still pour it into me if necessary for some reason.

I then took Shamanism, another two Talent point Flaw. If I did try to cast spells, I needed material components or a focus like a Totem, every time. Not even a Metamagic Feat could remove the requirement, and even spells that didn’t normally require components, now would.

I knew, it was cheesy but it was legit. There are even examples in the rules book discussing the two Flaws specifically, since they kept the character from developing the ability to use magic in the future.

Lastly, Heroic Flaw: Trouble Magnet, a one point flaw. The in-game description of that one was so hilarious, I had it memorized.

‘Heroic Flaw: Trouble Magnet – all heroes attract trouble. You, though, take it to the level of a virtual superpower! Not only does trouble automatically orient on you, but it affects your friends, family, co-workers, and even close enough acquaintances! Don’t worry though, you’ll ALWAYS find out just in time to do something about it, quite often when it’s least convenient! It's called a Heroic Flaw because only people who act Heroically can take it. Choosing not to act Heroically in response to Trouble will have Severe and Lasting consequences!’

When I was gaming, I sort of felt like Trouble Magnet was essentially free points. I mean, it virtually said it; I was going to attract trouble anyway. An extra Talent point for something that was going to happen anyway seemed like a no-brainer!

That gave me eight Talent points to work with. Three points base, plus five extra from my Flaws. First, I took Blood of the Great Beasts, a one point Talent. By itself, it didn’t do much, but down the line it meant I’d have chances to unlock innate supernatural powers that no one could get access to without taking that Talent!

Innate Armor was another one pointer. It gave me DR(or Damage Resistance) 2/-, which means all physical damage is reduced by two points against me. Every four levels, it grew by one more point and it stacked with all other types of DR, which most kinds of DR didn’t.

I took Regeneration (Basic), another Talent point. Characters in The Game normally heal their Constitution modifier in hit points every day. My 18 Con meant I’d normally heal 4 HP per day. Basic regeneration moved it down the Time Chart two steps, from where it started at per day, moved to per six hours, then to per hour... meaning I would heal four HP per hour, now, twenty four times faster!

It also gave +1 to Fortitude saves and hp healed per hour, +1/5 Class levels for both, which of course meant that I actually heal 5 hp per hour!

Five hp per hour was 120 hp per day... thirty times faster than I would heal without it! Totally worthwhile, as far as I’m concerned.

I could also eventually advance Regeneration to Intermediate or Advanced, and I likely would try to do so later, but as a Human I was limited to just basic Regen, at least for now. This was one of the reasons I took Blood of the Great Beasts as awakening most supernatural blood lines would mean I could advance Regen. I’d need to get to Regeneration (Advanced) before I could do comic book or anime level regen, but anything that helped to keep me alive and eliminated downtime was generally a good idea as far as I was concerned!

Come on, who didn’t want to be like that... uggh, so freaking annoying to not be able to remember names! The comic book character with the metal skeleton and claws that heals super-fast! One of the... Z-Guys, or something?

Martial Mastery (Brawler) gave me a +1 to hit, damage, and opposed rolls having to do with unarmed combat and grappling. It would increase by +1 every six levels. It also made learning skills related to unarmed combat easier and faster.

The plan was to be a freaking kung fu wizard! Well, an anime martial artist, really. I’d be using Qi powers and Combat Arts for supernatural powers instead of magic!

I used another point to raise my Wisdom by 1 with the Talent Advanced Wisdom, raising it to a 20, giving me a bunch of advantages immediately and in the future, as both the Monk’s Qi and Disciple’s Pneuma abilities were based off of the Wisdom stat!

There was an Advanced Talent for each Stat. It gave +1 to the stat and +1/5 levels as well. Eventually, I was probably gonna want them all, because Stats were power in The Game. It would take a while, though, since you could choose to either take a Talent point or raise a stat by 1 point every 4 levels... I’d always considered it silly not to take the Talent for each Stat, but there were legitimate reasons for focusing on a single Stat, too.

You could also only take one Advanced Stat Talent at character creation, though.

Scholar was my next Talent. It did three things, all pretty straightforward; it gave me a +2 to all Knowledge rolls, +1/5 levels; all Knowledge Skills were Class Skills; AND my rolls for all Knowledge skills (that I had at least one Rank in) were the same as the one for my HIGHEST Knowledge skill.

Knowledge and Lore skills are different names for the same thing, and are often used interchangeably.

Essentially, this meant I only had to put skill points into Lore Skills once – just that initial purchase, basically – and then I could choose a single Lore skill to raise from then on! In the game, knowledge could be power if you were smart enough to use it correctly. Many foes had major weaknesses that could be exploited, and even if they didn’t, simply knowing what your foes were capable of was priceless!

Next up was Qi Recovery (Basic). It worked just like Regeneration, except it was based off Wisdom and affected how fast you recovered spent or lost Qi points. In my case, it meant that instead of getting five points per day back, I’d get six points per hour...

It also raised my Will saves by +1 and added a +1 to my Qi recovered per hour, and it improved both by +1/5 levels.

Of course, Qi Recovery also had Intermediate and Advanced levels like Regeneration did, but I didn’t even have a Qi Pool, yet! Taking it now might have seemed like a waste, but I preferred to have it now than to find out later that I wouldn’t be allowed to buy it and be stuck without it! There were also skills and Feats to increase Qi recovery, so this was fine for now.

My last two Talents were ones that I felt were really important – Acute Senses and See Supernatural.

Acute Senses gave a +2 to any perception or sense-based roll, gaining a +1/5 Class levels and Sense Supernatural let me sense all kinds of supernatural energies, no matter what it was.

The only bad part was that Sense Supernatural was that it needed to be activated, and keeping it on all the time was not really supposed to be an option. It could lead to any number of issues, mostly having to do with psychological harm. It was almost like forcing the human mind to perceive things it isn’t meant to are bad for you or something! A high enough Wisdom score and Will save could mitigate that, eventually.

Lastly, I took my Trait, Footsteps of the North, because it gave me another Class skill I really wanted, Survival, as well as a free language, and a small bonus to saves versus cold environments.

It was amusing that I noticed right away the difference in how it made me feel in the cold air of the room I was in.