1              Soul Bound

1.1            Finding her Feet

1.1.5          An Inscrutable Mastermind

1.1.5.20       Celleno

They departed Ruffiana’s house soon after that, heading west along the main road. Kafana, with Wellington and Bulgaria backing her, cast her skill buff followed by a speed buff, and they made good time.

Kafana: {Tell me about this ‘big quest’ you picked out. What is it, and why this one?}

Tomsk: {Lelio said he’d received a call for help from a nearby village, saying that monsters are causing problems when they take their goats over the river to the pastures. Lelio said he didn’t have enough men to spare to stake out a field on the off chance that a monster would eventually turn up. It is a variable reward quest, so we should get something even if all we do is return to Lelio with a definite report on what the monster is, and preferably how strong it is and where its lair is.}

Bulgaria: {But if we do enough, like scaring the monster off or finding an alternative place to feed the goats, we might be able to buy some goats there for the orphanage at a reduced price.}

Kafana: {That doesn’t sound all that big. Why were you reluctant to take it?}

Alderney: {The quest description lists it as being suitable for solo, small group, group and small raid. That’s up to 12 people. Which means that behind the monsters there’s probably some sort of boss monster. We’ll be fine as long as we don’t get too greedy, but we could be in trouble if it ambushes us.}

Wellington: {Statistically, solo bosses tend to be up to 10 levels higher than the base monsters in an area, while bosses designed for parties can be up to 20 levels higher. Beyond that there are bosses designed for full raids and world bosses, but we don’t need to worry about that.}

Bungo: {Kafana, with your buffs, I’m pretty confident I can evade a level 30 mob and keep its aggro as long as Tomsk moderates the rate at which he is dealing damage. But a level 40 mob? If it is a speed type, it will kick my butt, and if it does ranged area of effect, or keeps summoning spawns of adds, we’ll wipe the party.}

Kafana: {I think I might be able to come up with a buff that slows an enemy’s movements. Would that help?}

Wellington: {Yes, that would help. And we should all allocate the stats we received this morning. Put them into what will help most in a boss fight. Minimum 40 CON, and more for Bungo and Tomsk. If it works out, we’ll gain a few levels and be able to re-balance our ratios this evening.}

Alderney: {I can see the village ahead. I think there’s a group of players there now.}

Bulgaria: {Ok, let’s pause 2 minutes to allocate stats, and hope they’re friendly. Now we’re level 20, we can lose experience points if we die, and any items on our bodies that are not soul bound.}

Character CHA INT MAG STR DEX CON Bungo 1 5 20 20 207 160 Tomsk 1 1 1 100 32 60 Alderney 1 37 1 1 115 40 Kafana 1 64 64 1 25 40 Wellington 50 49 30 1 25 40 Bulgaria 31 31 31 31 31 40

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Bungo: {The good side of reaching level 20 is you can now talk on the local out-of-character chat channel.}

Alderney: {Just remember to ask System to filter out messages from anyone asking for money, bragging how big their sword is, trying to sell rat tails, and so on.}

Bungo: {No, hey, it’s useful! You can ask System to target just the people in your field of vision, and have a chat with them, without their first being on your contacts list. It helps you avoid getting reputation penalties from NPCs when you ask what’s going on and they warn you about a player killer or something. Mind you, some players won’t respond. Nevermere don’t use it. Ever.}

Kafana: {Bungo, can you listen into it for me, and just let me know if anything is said that I need to know? You can add to my heads up orglife overlay if you want to convey information about specific players around us.}

[Kafana, I have noted that you have granted Bungo this permission. Do you also want to grant annotate access to the other members of your party?]

{Yes. Thanks, Sys, good suggestion.}

[“Sys”?]

{Yes, short for “System”. It also sounds like “Sis” for “Sister”. Maybe I should nickname you my “Big Sys” ?}

Bungo: {Sure. If anything amusing turns up, but you’re busy, I may stick it in The Burrow. When are we opening it to the public?}

Bulgaria: {When we attract the right sort of publicity. The first few posters on there will set the tone. We need to pick a time when the people who come will be the sort who are there because they like and want to help us with something, rather than the sort who are just there to mock or spectate.}

Alderney: {In the meantime, I’m building up the narrative, editing our backlog of videos to tell the story of our playing Sacred Blood from the start, as seen by Kafana, with emphasis upon the character interactions and problem solving behind the ‘cool viral stuff’, rather than the short viral segments themselves. I’ve an expert system indexing and cross-linking things, so people can dip in and out from any starting point, and get drawn into the story.}

Wellington: {And I’m refining the reputation system, to curate how people interact with each other, making constructive interactions more visible than non-constructive ones. I’m giving people viewing our segments opportunities to interact with others who have expressed interest in similar aspects of the narrative, letting them get to know each other and build a sense of community. I’ve been looking ahead when designing the anonymity and connection protocols, to make the next stage easier when communities on our website decide to collaborate in arlife too.}

Tomsk: {Wellington’s also done this neat burrow-as-a-service thing, which sucks in all the fan data about the game his expert systems can find from other blogs and sites, cross-checks it and rates the reliability, then exposes an API that lets others use the burrow to do things like find nearby quest givers with suitable quests or use his custom expert systems to analyse uploaded combats using some of the stuff I was able to tell him about the way monsters fight.}

Bungo: {I just hope we can open soon. If we become the site of choice for people to go to for data and services, the network effect will ensure we get given data first and more of it, cementing in that advantage. If someone else, who already does similar things for other games and has an existing userbase, takes on that role, we’ve permanently lost the chance.}

Bulgaria: {Maybe. Our distinctive difference is that we insist people connect via tiara. The metaphor we’re going for is that someone’s cubbyhole in the burrow is their velife home. It is somewhere they can customise the look of and invite their friends to drop by. It is distributed, not traceable to any specific server, and not even we can snoop or enter a cubbyhole. On the surface it is just a game discussion board. The mechanics underneath ‘just happen’ to also be suitable for something far more radical.}

The village of Celleno, just to the North of the road, set in fields of green topped vegetables, was little more than a dozen square dry-stone huts covered in an ochre daub, with slightly domed conical roofs carefully constructed from wide stone slabs balanced upon each other.

Outside the largest hut there were five heavily armed women sharpening weapons, while the sixth talked to what was obviously the village headman. The women flowed to their feet, and there was a tense moment while the two parties faced each other.