Wowie zowie. Welcome to my new story, how ya doing?
What to expect
I still consider this a Slice-of-life story, even if it is combat-centric. Expect a lot of fighting. Solo and teams.
Lots of dungeon runs. Lots of loot. Lots of leveling.
Cute spirits. We start with a magic squirrel, and get a lizard eventually.
Mana regen build.
Subclasses.
No planned romance.
I intentionally write this with MINIMAL gore. I will never describe wounds in detail stronger than "there was blood".
MC is not overpowered in a traditional sense. He can win any fight, so long as he can outpace his consumption of mana, but is incredibly weak without his summons.
World/universe
I haven't decided if this is in the same universe as N&D. There's certainly a big difference in how the gods relate to the world. They have far less influence in this story, and the Great Spirits are the influencing factor.
System
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This is a modified system from The Newt and Demon. People start with a main core, which they cannot remove, and can use sub-cores to enhance that class. Sub-cores can be removed whenever the user wants (out of combat) and must be leveled.
Leveling is broken into levels and ranks. Hitting level 10 in a rank gives you a chance to rank up, which is done with a ritual.
People gain new abilities every 5 levels and 1 attribute point every level. Abilities are picked from a list.
Ethan needs to level his summons in combat, and they experience the same leveling scheme as main cores (ranks, levels, abilities every 5), except attributes.
Fiction Tags
So, I wanted to explain what the fiction tags are about here. I don't know if I need the traumatizing content tag, but it is there. I'll go through them one-by-one.
Cussin: We're looking at minimal curse words. I think the strongest we'll ever see is "damn".
Gore: I explained this earlier in this "chapter", but there is SOME gore. I don't plan on going into details about wounds. Specific impacts of wounding monsters won't appear. The exception might be large insect-monsters, who will spew ichor. An example would be if an orc NPC monster took a spear to the chest, they wouldn't gush with blood. The spear is lodged there in the text, we acknowledge that, and there might be the mention of blood.
I did this because I wanted this fiction to read like a safe adventure. Things get hairy, but there's always a way out.
Traumatizing Content: This tag might be removed from the fiction, I don't know. If it's gone, just read this if you're worried about the kind of content. I don't foresee any characters dying in this fiction. That being said, characters may enter a situation in their life where it changes for the worse. They may gain system-generated debuffs that set them back quite a ways.
The above said, Ethan has a very positive attitude toward the world. While he's not selfless, he wouldn't abandon someone he calls a friend. The Great Spirits are a powerful force, after all.