Hello, and welcome to Turen! I put the fanfiction tag on because I’m going to be using some mechanics and item ideas from some familiar systems of MMORPGs. This includes legendary gems, combination of like gems to form better gems, item abilities, followers, dungeons, races, and crafting. I’ll try to not straight rip it, but it’s a lot to manage so if you have unique suggestions about alterations, I’m listening!
I may also go back and change game mechanics on the fly. For example, I altered the death penalty to 25% experience of a level and the random dropping of a piece of equipped gear, with better gear having a greater chance of dropping. Of course, this does not affect Ian. He still only gets one life, since he has no mental “respawn point” like the pod that everyone else uses.
Anyways, enjoy.
----------------------------------------
As Ian was strolling down the street through a line of various carts of different wares, an ethereal system prompt appeared in his view.
[Since you have elected to start your journey without a class, please pick a starting set]
[Warrior]
[Spellcaster]
[Rogue]
[Shaman]
Ian stopped abruptly, eliciting a few curses from the players walking behind him as they moved to go around. His mouth dropped open. This is it?? These lazy bastards really only designed four starter sets?
The game was 95% generated by an immensely powerful adaptive AI. The other things though like starting sets, basic classes, and professions were implemented as a framework that the AI could use to build off of and grow. If the developers were as lazy with the classes and professions as they were for the starting sets...
Respect for the AI grew in his heart like a burgeoning tide.
Peeling his eyes away from the prompt, he swept his eyes over all the players in the vicinity and unfortunately found no newbies with which to compare. He’d only ever played a mage class, so he didn’t have any experience to go off of when it came to other classes’ starting circumstances. Plus, it was regarded as trash equipment. Why would anybody ever discuss gear that they were going to toss five quests from then?
Quickly choosing the spellcaster set, he noted their materialization in his Bags. Turen borrowed a lot of interface mechanics from previous mmorpgs. Ever since Turen’s parent company VRSoft came into power as the premiere virtual reality gaming developer, a lot of the former tycoons had fallen into bankruptcy or were bought out to consolidate market share. Thus, it was no surprise that the bags had appeared here and for the most part unaltered.
Every new character started out with a single 16-slot bag. Each player could have up to five bags on his person. The quality of the bag determined how many slots were available by equipping it.The idea that it was a “bag” was more symbolic in nature than reality, because no bag could ever be seen on the person of a character.
The objects were like digital pocket dimensions that perfectly stored and preserved anything you could put into them like reagents, herbs, ore, weapons, armor, etc. Every single type of item took up one slot, including large items. Crafting and profession materials below the legendary rank could be stacked on top of each other up, in the same slot, up until a predetermined amount.
For example, the gather professions - herb gathering, mining, skinning, logging, and fishing - could stack the materials they produced up to a stack of 100 for each slot in the bagspace. In the beta, they had tried to institute a 20 count limit, but the world of Turen proved to be way too vast. Having smaller limits meant that players would have to come back to town more often to either sell or craft with their materials, and that simply wasn’t an option when the players could range for several hundreds of miles away every time they stepped out the village or city gates.
Ian walked around a corner, equipped his beginner gear and then came back out. Trying to hide it was nearly impossible, but changing your rags into a starting set in the middle of the street practically begged people to notice you. In this veteran-filled area, he had already felt the probing glances of passing players.
Some of the sick bastards liked to target newbies merely because they found it amusing to crush a new player’s dreams. They’d follow a mark, usually with the help of a tracking skill from a hunter or rogue, wait for them to get a few levels on them or until they ran across a rare drop and kill them before they could pick it up. If they were real assholes, they would camp the city and repeatedly kill the target until they went back to level one and had no more gear.
Rounding a fountain, he sat down on a drier section that wasn’t partly frozen and opened his interface to get his bearings.
Name: Anarch
Race: High Elf
Level: 1
HP: 100 MP: 110
Strength: 10
Agility: 10
Vitality: 10
Intelligence: 10 + 1
Wisdom: 10
Spell Hit: 85.25% (against lvl 1 mobs)
Spell Power: 11
Crit Chance: 5.11%
Racial: Innervate
None
How utterly depressing. I fucking hate this game, he thought dourly. Why the ire? Well, to a player like him who’d spent almost a decade leveling a character in his other life, starting again from square one was enough to invoke what some gamers referred to as grind weariness, or grind burnout. It’s the idea that a player had spent so much time towards building a character and experiencing every little thing along the way that he or she would literally feel exhausting just thinking about doing all again, especially the work involved with grinding materials or experience from mobs repeatedly.
This was exasperated by the fact that he was still feeling ambivalent about being here. Sure, the game itself was fun, but how could he enjoy being here when the world was going to shit on the outside?
That 1 spell power is from… ah, wouldn’t you know it.
[Crude Staff]
4-6 blunt damage
+1 Intelligence
The rest of his starter stuff was just 2-3 armor per piece, resulting in a whopping 16 total armor. That would net him about 1% physical damage reduction. Joy.
Alright, this is killing my motivation, let’s go see Marcus.
Walking past an inn where a lively scene was playing out, as in two players fighting over a barmaid, Ian drew closer to the fifty foot high stone wall that encircled 3/4ths of the town, the other 1/4th being water. Every once in awhile, groups of two or three guards with thick beards and mean eyes would walk by, eyeing the new person to the town with vigilance until they saw his gear and then they’d always walk off laughing.
The people here were known as the Brinane and were roughly equivalent to a combination of early Vikings and a middle ages knight culture. They were a strange people. They enjoyed brawling, hunting, and - oddly enough - bear tickling. It was this sport where enterprising lads would sneak into a bear den and try to get the best reaction of a hibernating bear without it waking up. Hilarious to watch, terrifying to watch go wrong.
Thinking of that made Ian smile. While he loathed the game, at the same time he didn’t really. It was a strange clash between his ideals and the reality of experience. Seeing the culture and perfectly played out scene like a movie, he couldn’t help but feel an endearing sense of nostalgia. He was already trapped here. Did he really have to hate it every second of every day?
These were an honest people that brought warmth to heart when you got to know them. They were hardy and strong, and thrived in the cold climate of these northern lands that bordered the icy plains and mountains of Icehelm. Of course, to the players and residents of this world, they had no clue that there was even an empire sitting on their heads.
The Icehelm content wouldn’t be released for another year, so Ian was confident in having the run of the land for the meantime. After all, no one would willingly go to somewhere as desolate as the far north unless there was reward to be found there. As of now, there had been little success by exploration parties, so most players stuck to the dungeons and zones that offered a guaranteed benefit.
Shaking his head, Ian ignored the jeers of the most recent guard pair and headed in the direction from whence they came. Along the way, he got an eyeful of the populace. Stall owners and artisans mingled with the players in perfect harmony. Sometimes a player would get uppity with one of the locals but the high leveled guards would always show up and put a stop to it. Pushing around players or NPCs within the walls was a good way to get your ass handed to you.
The main method of travel was horses that could be bought or rented out. If the players were trying to be economical, then they would rent a horse and buggy. Generally speaking, however, players would really only rent mounts at this stage. The game had yet to institute summonable mounts. After all these years, Ian really believed that it was just because the game devs were massive, colossal dicks. He refused to to think that the game AI couldn't handle such a thing. There had to be a limiter in place.
Casting his eyes above, Ian watched as car-sized snow eagles came flying into town with players aboard. This served as the “quick travel” option for long distance traveling, but still it took a good while. The longest flights, assuming you’d been to grab the nodes before, were days worth of flying. Many would simply log off while the process continued. It was currently the golden age of mages, simply because players would offer several gold to be shuttled through portals with their group to save on time.
In a few minutes, the cold cobblestone gave way to dirt and he found himself at the edge of town, staring up at the coldiron portcullis that gaped menacingly like the jaws of a stone and steel giant. Snow would sometimes blow off the top, revealing a bundled up guard that was merely clearing the space between the parapets so that he could out of it. The banner of Jarl Icehammer flew beautifully from a pole on the center of the gatehouse, letting all who came near that this town was under his protection.
Nodding to the four guards that guarded the main entrance, Ian briskly walked out of the gate and was met with a blast of frigid wind. Shivering, he turned to the side and followed the wall a short distance to a camp that was erected like a lean-to against the town’s wall. There were well-made leather and cloth tents all around, the men and women occupying them corralled around a large bonfire for warmth that burned 24 hours a day.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Ian crunch up to them in the snow and asked brusquely, “Marcus Hale?”
None of them there paid any attention to him. Laughing to himself, Ian asked again loudly while secretly lamenting his neutral reputation with all factions and the lack of a basic identify skill, “I’m looking for Marcus Hale. Is he among you?”
A tiny, shifty looking man finally frowned and turned around, training his eyes on the newbie and then snorting at the sight. “Sod off ya noisy cunt,” he said, and then turned back to the fire while picking up a bottle.
Ian took a deep, cold breath to calm himself.
He ignored the little shit and turned to a freckled redhead woman that had to be named Helga. She was large and muscular, but the aura she emitted was noticeably less hostile. He tapped her shoulder and asked politely, “I’m sorry to bother, but could you point me to Marcus Hale?”
Her dull, green eyes, which made him think of a matriarch bear, regarded him coolly for a moment before jerking her thumb in a direction. Saying his thanks, Ian turned to see a haggard man sitting off to the side, snoozing with a bottle in hand. He reeked of piss and booze.
Is this really the high templar I’ve heard about? Ian regarded him with mute wonder.
Walking over, he roughly nudged the man, causing the arm that was propping up his snoozing head to fall forward.
“Thrice-damned orcs!” He started, blinking to see through the buzz and haze of sleep. Once he saw Ian, he snorted and added, “Fuck off,” before turning to settle into a comfortable position again. In a matter of moments, he started snoring.
Ian sighed and rubbed his forehead.
Followers were supposed to be a really cool addition to the game. You could literally recruit NPCs to go around and battle with you in PvE situations. This was a monstrous help to ranged classes like mages that constantly had to either party up or hit and run a mob, also known as kiting, to wear it down.
Followers came with unique, useful abilities that generally operated on cooldowns rather than mana and a cooldown like players. On top of that, they could wear gear like a player could while also having the ability to equip special follower items that were rewarded by quests or boss drops. As such, they were a guaranteed factor in strategizing for combat if they were available.
That was the catch, though. Followers weren’t a guaranteed for most players. In fact, they were a downright rarity. They were simply too expensive to hire, as they acted like mercenaries. Also, the better followers, like the templar in front of Ian, required special conditions to be hired. There was also the fact that Marcus Hale had seen better days.
Sending a swift kick into Marcus’ leg, Ian jumped back before a dagger came flashing by where his neck had used to be. The templar looked around confused and then settled on the player before him.
Ian ignored his brush with death and instead asked curiously, “How do you stay warm over here, Marcus?”
The gruff man with a beard and shaggy hair as black as night snorted and pulled his bearskin blanket closer. “My faith keeps me warm…” He scrutinized the youth before him and emphasized, “Boy.” Turning over, he added with a chuckle, “That and a bottle of 50 year old Elion bourbon.”
Ian smiled and then prodded, “Surely going on a grand journey would warm those old bones better than a bottle of liquor from the East. Why don’t you follow me and earn back your glory?”
“What would you know?” Marcus scoffed. “I’ve been on more so-called “grand journeys” than the hairs on your delicate chest.”
“So you’re burned out. That’s your story?”
The drunken man suddenly sobered up and sent a hard gaze at Ian. “You’re asking a lot of questions, kid. Tread carefully.”
The black-haired Ian gazed back for a few seconds before finally sighing. Scratching his cheek, he said, “Fine. I can see you’re the straightforward type. I’d like to hire you. I have a difficult road ahead of me and I need someone of your caliber at my side.”
Marcus’ eyes swept over his gear and then mockingly said, “You? Hire me? In your dreams, kid. In any case, I hung up that mantle. I have my own road to walk.”
“Would that road be the path to Clara?” Ian asked quietly.
In the next instant, he blinked and then found himself pinned against the icy stone wall, pain radiating from his back. Marcus’ crazed eyes took up his entire vision and he felt the cold bite of steel on his neck.
-85 hp
“What do you know?” the High Templar asked with an eerily calm tone of voice.
“I know a lot. Most of it from stories, but the sources are reliable,” Ian said somberly. He took no joy from knowing details beyond him right now. He could see the manic fervor in Marcus’ eyes, willing his mouth to open and divulge information. This was a soul-wrenching dilemma for the man.
His sad voice continued, “They tell of a noble who took a fancy on a high templar’s wife when he came to the city to visit the Emperor. He knew that he shouldn’t touch the woman of such an esteemed personage, but this caused him to want her even more, because she was both unfathomably beautiful and untouchable. Finally, on the last night of his visit, he snuck into their home, stealing her in the dead of night while her husband was guarding the Hallowed Halls of Elion.”
Tears streaked down from the high templar’s eyes, freezing on his cheekbones. There was a hunger in his tone as he asked, “What was the noble’s name? WHAT WAS HIS NAME?” He ended with a roar.
Ian saw the group of mercenaries hovering over Marcus’ shoulder in the background, casting a vigilant eye at the situation. Their hands inched over the scabbards at their waists in preparation to draw at a moment’s notice.
He turned his attention back to the bear of a man still holding him with an iron death-grip and said soothingly, “They didn’t say, Marcus, but they did know a bit about him. He has… twisted… morals. He did not force himself on her. Rather, he is waiting to break her by making her feel despair over the fact that you didn’t come for her.”
He stared into the man’s eyes and nodded comfortingly, saying reassuringly, “We both know that won’t happen, right?” Marcus steadily dropped Ian back down to the ground and took a deep, shaky breath.
Ian went on to say, “I’ve already asked those people to gather more information on the man like his name and where his keep is. However, you do realize that there is a price for this, yes? As much as it pains me, I must force your hand back into the slaughter for my own goals. This way, both of our aims will be achieved.”
The high templar sat down heavily on his heavily furred cot and cradled his head in his hands. Several tense minutes went by until his muffled voice finally rang out, “How long?”
“It’ll take three months for my path to stabilize with your help. Inside of four, I anticipate that we will have the information we need. As soon as that happens, I will assist you in storming his keep myself.”
This was, of course, complete horseshit. At least, the first two statements were. He could tell him right now where Clara was being held, but that would be an incredibly stupid move. Noble, but idiotic all the same. Right now, Ian was a classless “novice” with no spells, proficiencies, or skills to his name. Sure, his skills in the real world were awesome, but the game had an awful way of handicapping players who tried to do something in combat without the correct proficiency or skill. A level 1 snow wolf pup would give him an annoying fight, much less the larger fare or, God forbid, a level 2 creature. Having a veteran of combat, who was essentially a paladin, at his side would go a long way in keeping him alive through this next bit of his plan.
His hidden class awaits.
Marcus removed his hands and snorted with dry bemusement, “Virtuous words from a man wishing to exploit a High Templar into becoming a follower.” He gave another calming breath and then stood up, facing Ian with his broad shoulders, the furs layered under his armor making him seem all the more a giant than a man. “I agree to your proposition. I, Marcus Hale, the High Templar of Elion, will aid you in your endeavors so long as they are just and until the contract is completed.”
Unique Follower Quest generated!
The High Templar Marcus Hale has agreed to serve you for a period of four months, during which you will aid him in rescuing his captured wife. If completed successfully, the templar will be eternally in your debt. If failed, he will employ his vast and considerable influence to hunt you down to the ends of Turen.
Time Remaining: 118 days
Reward for completion:
+135,000 exp
+5 bonus skill points
+Marcus will become a permanent follower with no upkeep
+3,000 reputation with Elion
Penalty for failure:
-6,000 reputation with Elion
-12,000 reputation with Marcus Hale
-3,000 reputation with all other Sea of Emis factions
Ian about gagged at the quest notice. He’d never even heard of a quest that threatened to destroy a player’s reputation so thoroughly. Running from Marcus he could handle. He could even barely scrape by with not going to Elion for the near future, but that last reputation penalty was enough to ensure that he couldn’t get in the gate of any popular city or town within a 100 miles of the Sea of Emis. 3,000 reputation points in either direction was enough to land you in friendly/unfriendly. If a city was unfriendly towards you, you couldn't even approach without the guards chasing you off.
It’s not like he had planned on reneging or anything, but damn did the pressure mount quickly. The rewards though were more than worth the risk. Swallowing, Ian patted down his clothes and tried to still his beating heart.
Twice. Twice today he had come close to dying. All while at level one, no less, and just having barely stepped out the gates.
A shadow loomed and Marcus asked with his normal gruff tone, “I never did ask. What is my employer’s name?” He stuck out a hand.
Ian grabbed the proffered hand and gave a solid shake, feeling the crushing strength of his new follower. He said while looking into the bearded giant's resolute eyes, “You can call me Anarch.”
----------------------------------------
Workin' on a map!