Wilfrid Pember - Historian- The Start of the Apocalypse

Written in past tense. Races are captalised.

C1 - When the Apocalypse began, we were all drafted into the tutorial. Many of us thought it was a joke at first, a prank being recorded for our friends and family to watch on the telly at home. It wasn’t.

C2 - Fools and hopefuls alike picked the hard and extreme tutorials. Suffice to say, they had also unknowingly picked the locations of their graves.

C3- Because of our origin from a mana-starved planet, the arcane was, and still is, a strange thing to us humans. Not to say that we don’t have talent with magic, as we absolutely do (some more so than others), but our lack of experience with it definitely put us as a disadvantage at first.

C5 - Although I am of the opinion only fools picked the extreme tutorial, there were, admittedly, select individuals who rose to the challenge. These men and women would go on to earn their places in my colleague’s, Stefan Sommer’s, book, Heroes and Villains of the First Age.

C12 - As long and draining as they were, the tutorials eventually came to their ends.

C15 - When we first arrived on Idroa, we were relieved that we could finally find our loved ones, and we collectively wiped our brow as we realised the planet wasn’t nearly as hostile as the tutorials had made it out to be. To put it simply, we were lulled into a false sense of security.

C16 - The lucky ones who passed the hardest tutorials came out with classes and combat ability well above the rest. They would be the ones to lead us for a period where we believed Idroa would soon succumb to human domination.

C17 - There was no doubt that the Ratkin were the greatest threat to us and the other races. They came to Idroa with domination in mind, and dare I say they would have succeeded within the first month had they not underestimated humanity.

C18 - There was a general struggle against the Ratkin from the people, but such a struggle wasn’t unique to humanity. What was was our weapons of mass destruction: our hydrogen bombs, nukes, anthrax, tanks, and missiles. By the time they managed to destroy and disable our weapons, we had already done irreparable damage to their faction and, by doing so, levelled the playing field.

C19 -The Ratkin had magic as strong as our weapons but lacked the will to use them. They wanted to enslave us and protect us from the hordes (which would grow progressively more dangerous); we were their assets, and they didn’t want to decrease our value. It was only after our decisive strikes that they retaliated in fear of extermination.

C22 - Despite the Ratkin, despite the hordes, despite the multitude of other races and monsters, it turned out our greatest enemies were the men and women beside us.

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C27 - Where there had once been politicians, there were now classers fighting tooth and nail. Some leaders turned out to be magnanimous, others tyrannical.

C28- Powerful, twisted people became a commonality following the Apocalypse. I’m not sure whether this was because the System rewarded their deviancy, or if power simply caused them to disregard morality. Either way, we all learnt first-hand how even the mildest of men could be monsters inside.

C30 - While many creatures from Caen and Xiivet were obscenely powerful, the most dangerous specimens undoubtedly belonged to the civilised races from their planets. Like us, a select few had been generously gifted with intelligence and set up complex societies. Unlike us, they had evolved to deal with creatures far more dangerous than lions and crocodiles. Unlike them, we had enough nukes to blow them up to the high heavens.

If the System hadn’t interfered and the Ratkin suddenly turned their full focus on us to stop our advance, it is my belief that humanity would have become the sole apex predators after a month or two.

C34 - Violence begets violence, and Idroa came to be in an explosion of violence. In such a world, it’s hard to find peace but small pockets of it did exist.

C39 - This is more than most can say, but I did make good friends on Idroa. Truly. While power and violence brought out the ugly in so many, not all of us had stained souls and some shined virtuously instead.

C40 - One’s companions could be more than just humans because of the increased number of sophisticated races and the System’s automatic translation.

C41 - Mayors moulded their settlements to their own tastes. Some had guards stationed at every street corner, ready to lash out for the least of offences, while others committed to free cities devoid of all rules and sensibilities. Either way, public privacy and human rights became things of the past.

C45 - Some of us didn’t strive for survival. Some of us simply wanted to watch the world burn.

C47 - Although we were reborn as new men and women on Idroa, our pasts eventually caught up with us. Some of us took it in our stride, others not so much.

C50 - On occasion, hard work pays off. Idroa is not always the cruel mistress we make her out to be.

C52-Many become drunk with power and forget there are repercussions to their actions. Who is to say whether that man you took for a fool will rise against you tomorrow?

C57 - Many of us survived by ourselves but we weren’t truly living. No, we began to live and thrive when the various settlements allied together to create unstoppable factions. With the safety and security came prosperity.

C58 - While Idroa certainly was a Wild West of sorts, that wasn’t to say it was all about the big, violent clashes or the grand adventuring. Rather, preparation was one of the most important things you could do, and almost all of the victors of the big, violent clashes and the survivors of the grand adventurers were, in fact, those who had prepared for it well ahead of time.

C64- Just as it is difficult to get over your first love, it is likewise difficult to get over your first teammates, especially those from the higher difficulties. These are people who you fought to the end with, people who you bled to the bone with, people who you trusted with your backs when there was no one else looking out for you.

C68 - Although violence is, without doubt, the vehicle that drives us along this apocalyptic road, not everyone is fond of violence, nor regularly subscribe to it. Of these, the powerful ones are those who choose non-combat classes that allow them unmatched influence over others, especially over those who, ironically, have a massive capacity for violence.