Recap: Part 1

The story begins as all classic games should(n't): with the main character waking up in a prison, with no memory of who they are are or why they're there. This time it's Silven (though he's a woman called Sylvia right now) and the guards are on their way to hang him (her). However, the escape is suspiciously easy, with big glowing bricks pointing to a secret tunnel, and the guards somehow unable to reach him in time or pursue him down the ladder he finds. A maddeningly cliche voice tells him that his destiny requires him to travel to somewhere called Three Toes Tavern.

Silven finds himself in a beetle-infested cavern and much repetitive fighting ensues. Silven survives by trapping the beetles on a path so they have to fight him one at a time. However, a seemingly invincible boss beetle almost ends the story right there (unfortunately not) until a group of mice save him with the miraculous healing power of a bite of apple.

The mice hint at many other adventurers before him, a past before the prison and some sort of levelling system before offering him a choice of three paths through life. All involving lots of blood of course. Sylvia chooses the sword and shield of a warrior before confirming her identity as a male Silven. He ascends a ladder out of the cavern where a strange jump in time occurs, and he finds himself in the outside world.

The surface is no more welcoming. Silven fights his way through packs of wolves before bumping into a merchant named Olgred on the forest path. He asks for directions to the tavern and the capital and is told that that's not how things work in the kingdom of Oldeburgh. He'll have to work his way round half the bloody landscape first before coming to anywhere vaguely useful to him. Silven learns about Olgred's fast travel map, which has to have been somewhere once before it can teleport its owner there. Silven begins to realise his mind somehow works differently to anyone he will meet. He points out Olgred could make ready-made fast travel maps by taking copies with him on a tour of the kingdom. He is promised half the profit from this venture before taking Olgred's own map and disappearing. It is the first encounter in what will become a firm friendship between the pair.

Silven briefly visits the capital, Solmond City, and sees he is bound by a system of quests which will restrict his movements. He goes instead to a pleasant northern village called Gigglewick, where he is introduced to the civil war which plagues the land by an old man named Folborn. Gigglewick appears to be a hub of good folk from which he can work.

Of course, that means it has to be destroyed. A group of horsemen called the Terrorknights of the Black Shadow descend on the village and ransack it. They are looking for a woman named Sylvia and do not recognise Silven in his current form. Guilt-ridden by the understanding he has caused Gigglewick to be destroyed, he charges at the attackers' leader before being saved by the old man. Folborn dies for his actions, and Silven saves himself as the old man wanted. Perhaps Folborn saw something in Silven that was worth scarificing himself for...

The next day, Silven is harassed by talking mice and the voice in the air. He is essentially told the destruction of the village was part of his development and he must level up and hasten to the Three Toes Tavern. He ignores these influences and returns to Gigglewick to attempt to pay the survivors back for what he has allowed to happen to their home.

Even after its ransacking, Gigglewick appears to still form some sort of quest hub for Silven. He is tasked with collecting turnips from a nearby farm and is angry to discover the workers there will do anything but actually harvest their crop. It's almost like everyone is just standing around waiting for an aimless adventurer to do all the work. After bringing home a feast of turnip (yum!) he is quickly sent to collect weapons from an abandoned outpost to help the survivors defend themselves.

In Snake Hill Outpost, Silven quickly discovers two limitations of his world. One is a benefit: he exploits the non-stacking nature of the poisons of two different types of spiders to survive their attacks and clear the area of enemies. The other is not quite so good. To his dismay, he finds that his fast travel map will not allow him to teleport all the weapons he finds back to Gigglewick. The overencumbered adventurer sets off on foot... slowly. The journey takes him a week.

Back at the slowly recovering village, he is horrified to find that the quests will keep coming from the quite frankly lazy residents. His next quest... to pass a mug of water to the butcher. He begins to fully appreciate that he will have to do everything here, and his guilt gives way to annoyance. He asks for somewhere where people actually do things and whisks away to the town of Desert Marsh to the south.

There's no such thing as simply walking into a town. There's drama everywhere in Oldeburgh. As he approaches Desert Marsh, a group of powerful cultists besieging the town attack him. He escapes and is thankful to find another limitation of this world: his enemies' detection skills... aren't exactly good. After slipping through the cultists as they search fruitlessly for him, he throws a rock into a nearby gorge and his foes plop off the edge one by one, like lemmings, to their deaths.

At first, the people of Desert Marsh welcome Silven as a hero. He has just saved the science-loving town from religious fanatics, after all. But they soon turn cold. Desert Marsh is its own faction, under the rules of a ridiculously long reputation system, and all newcomers are set to unfriendly.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Silven soon thinks he has found a way to win them over. Or rather, a way has found him. There has been a murder of a council member just outside the inn he is visiting. And, just like his escape from prison, the path to success is bafflingly obvious.

Silven follows a trail of bright red paint left by the murderer to Silicarco Academy, the town's centre of learning. He lockpicks a window to Professor Grennel's room, who all but admits he is indeed the murderer. He is intrigued to hear that Grennel's research is directed towards discovering ways the world works outside of the laws of normal science. It ties in with a lot of what Silven has suspected, and he tries to enter the room to hear the professor's side of the story. However, the open window is barred by a mysterious force that will only allow entry if Silven can provide some sort of new evidence to contribute to the project. His efforts, however, are in vain.

A group of guards conveniently show up, only to arrest Silven. Apparently lockpicking is a bit more serious than murder, and also guards can see through buildings. He is sentenced to a horrifying two days in prison. Silven surrenders.

Back at the inn after his imprisonment, Silven is visited by yet another of those pesky mice. The mouse pressures him into levelling up again, and he gains a powerful sword ability. The mouse mentions that someone called Ashleigh (obviously someone special like Silven) used this in Rockborough Cathedral just before her death. More on that later.

The ability is bad luck for Silven too. He tests it on a table and the town guards show up out of thin air again to kill him for destruction of property. This time, he's had enough of Desert Marsh, and he flees.

 What follows for Silven is a decision that will shape the rest of his life, and the whole world around him. He rejects the quest that the mice, Terrorknights and voice clearly want him to start at the Three Toes Tavern in favour of finding out something to help Professor Grennel's research. He is increasingly aware that things are not as they seem in this land, and he wants to get to the bottom of it. To progress, though, he needs to find evidence of something odd to unlock access to Grennel's room.

With no better direction to take, he sets out on some side-quests he finds in the village of Thornyhedge. He is growing more powerful in battle, and uses his perception of the environment to his advantage in order to trap his enemies, but all his quests have a rather dark ending. He is successful with nothing. The people he is supposed to find are dead before he can rescue them. Frustrated, he selects a simple apple-harvesting quest to take his mind off his failure and the world turns against him once more, to force him into another doomed rescue mission in an ancient temple somehow hidden below the orchard. He begins to question if, like his arrival in Gigglewick, he is causing death and destruction by his mere presence, and that dark night of the soul, he vows to never agree to help anyone again.

Silven is still determined to find something out for Grennel. He just has to do it without getting any innocents involved. Another opportunity comes when he finds a dead wizard with a  sealed box by the side of the road. The box can only be opened if pressed against the wood of a certain type of magic tree. Guided once more by a creature intent on making everything easier (a bat this time, not a mouse) he fights his way through an old library. He learns of a bandit leader, Steelhead Harry, connected to the unlocking of the box. Just outside, he finds out about a quarry where the bandits live via a couple of peasants who appear to be rather obviously reciting lines to guide him on. 

The quarry isn't where it is supposed to be (rather important later) but when he finds it, he is dismayed to find no magic tree. The bandits are there, though, and after a hard fight, Silven defeats Steelhead Harry by allowing him to exhaust himself with pointless area-of-effect showstoppers. In the quarry, Silven learns about a hermit he must rescue to discover where the tree lies. That takes him on a rather silly, convoluted tour of the northern parts of the kingdom, slaughtering whole hosts of zombies, fairies and orcs on his way to the rescue. The hermit reveals the location of the treee to be the very same quarry where he started. And lo and behold, this time, when he returns, the tree is there. So is Steelhead Harry and his bandits, who have mysteriously reset. Silven has no appetite for more death. He leaves the bandits to enjoy the contents of the box ( a pretty cool cloak dye) and sneaks back to Desert Marsh.

This time, Silven is sure that he has evidence for Grennel that will reveal the professsor's secrets to him. How can a tree just appear as soon as he is told to seek it in a certain place? Unfortunately, Grennel is not surprised. He explains this is an example of Elsenberg's purpose principle, where objectives will only appear once Silven is directed to them. In his explanation, he seems to reveal that Silven is a 'fulcrum', increasing Silven's suspicions that the world seems to be all a playground for his actions. 

Still he has no evidence to discover more. He stomps away from Grennel's room, only to be ushered in through a different window. Elsenberg appears to have been summoned at the mention of his name. He explicitly refers to himself as a quest-giver, implying he only exists to provide tasks for Silven. Silven is bitter about the prospect. He is tired of the doom and death he seems to take with him wherever he goes. 

When asked what he intends Silven to do, Elsenberg instructs him to put an end to the two groups of rebels terrorising the north: Warlord Wallace, the bandit who imprisoned 'Sylvia', and Zolar Ceneron, the witch who has captured the city of Greenholme. Elsenberg inexplicably also has passwords and secret entry points to the rebel strongholds, to aid Silven in his quest.

Silven, however, is not convinced. No more bloodshed, he decides. He will lay down his sword and become a scholar to discover a secret for Grennel and gain better understanding of the world and the powers that control it. He refuses the quest and begins his new life.

That life, however, would be rather boring, and I don't think it is a spoiler to inform you that that is not how things end...