Jake felt a sense of weightlessness as his surroundings changed. He had been standing next to a pond filled with red water while creating his character, but now he found himself in another location. He looked around. He was standing atop a hill, and he could see for miles in all directions, save one; a large mountain range loomed in the distance and dwarfed the hill he stood upon. That feels like west for some reason. The landscape around him was rocky, and there appeared to be a hastily made camp or village of small huts and tents spread out in the valley below.
The game designers had spared no expense; he had never seen graphics this good. The light breeze felt cool on his skin, and the heat from the sun warmed his back. This was truly amazing! He turned around and looked at the sun. Correction: suns. The animation of the twin suns was exactly as he remembered it from before he finished his character, but everything else around him looked different. He would need to find water but saw no source nearby. If only he could have bottled some of that red water; it was delicious. Alas, he hadn’t known that things would start as soon as they had. He couldn’t see any source of water, red or otherwise. Maybe whoever lived in the camp in the valley had water or could at least tell him where to find some.
Jake was famished but wondered why. He had waited in line for hours to be able to get his chance at the beta test of the new game, but he had eaten plenty and was full prior to creating his character. He had eaten the complimentary breakfast that the hotel had provided and had even grabbed a slice of pizza for lunch. The pizza had been his first taste of the vaunted New York style, and overall, it was good for a thin crust, albeit a bit sweet for his taste. He was unsure why he would be hungry already, but he felt an intense desire for a steak.
He felt a weight on his back, and he looked down to see a leather strap crossing his chest. It might be a backpack. He went to grab the strap but paused as he caught sight of his hand. It was gray and huge. He frowned and felt something poking into each of his cheeks. He touched his face. His teeth—or rather, his tusks—were the offending party. They jutted out of his mouth. He needed a mirror. He felt around the rest of his head. He was now completely bald, with no stubble whatsoever. His head might be freshly shorn, or this could be the natural state of it. He looked down at his body to find that he was naked except for a loincloth and a pair of cloth wraps that covered his feet. His body was truly impressive; he looked like a bodybuilder. His skin was the same charcoal gray as his hands.
He unslung the weight to reveal a very large axe. He gave the weapon a few practice swings and took up a fighting stance. How did I know how to do that? I’ve never wielded an axe before in my life. He performed a series of fighting forms before strapping the axe to his back. He started down the hill towards the village below.
Something chimed in Jake’s ears, and a screen appeared before his eyes. This was the same heads-up display that he had interacted with during the character creation process of the game. A message filled the entire screen. Welcome to Faltoral! Your adventure now begins. Your default language is Common, unless you do not speak Common; then it will be your racial language. When you learn another language, it will begin at rank 1, and if you wish to speak in another language, just will your speech filter to switch to the desired language. Note: You will be able to understand any known language at your current rank in that language, regardless of your chosen speech filter.
This is your current respawn point; to change your respawn point, simply access your bind point and activate it. Note: It takes five minutes to set your bind point. Enjoy your journey!
Jake let the display remain active and went back up the hill. When he could no longer see the camp, he sat and experimented with the interface. He thought about the character creation process, and what looked like a character sheet appeared before his eyes. He looked at the information at the top of the sheet. Name: Harbinger; Race: Dire Orc; Class: Blood Knight. When he had filled out the application to play the game, he had chosen his preferred character name that he had been using for years, but everyone had always called him “Harb” when he was in-game. His race explained the skin color, as Orcs were generally gray or green; the tusks were also standard. He pulled the axe away from the strap on his back and looked at his face in the reflection made by the metal. Except for the tusks and lack of hair, his features weren’t far off from his normal face, not hideous as he expected them to be. Orcs were nearly always depicted as malformed brutes, but he really just looked like a normal guy wearing a mouthpiece with fake tusks. Looking down, he amended that thought by adding “jacked” as a descriptor.
His class, Blood Knight, was interesting, as he didn’t remember seeing it among the class options during character creation. He had randomized his class but had specified melee fighter as his chosen class type. Blood Knight sounded sinister, and given that he was a Dire Orc, that was probably correct. Well, being an Orc of any type was an oddity, but he had wanted to run a tank. Orcs had high strength and HP and made great tanks in games.
He looked over his attributes. The creation process had allowed him to add thirty points among the seven different attributes, with a cap on twenty in any stat. Every attribute had started with ten points, and he had put ten points into both the Strength and Vitality attributes, hitting the cap in each before leaving the remaining ten points to be randomized. Of the randomized attributes, the one that had received the most points was Charisma, which was now at 14. All of the others were currently at 11 or 12 points. None of the other five attributes looked appealing, so Charisma was as good as anything to have received the most of the remaining points. He had 25 Vitality, so being a Dire Orc had provided him with the additional five points in the stat.
Skills were next. Harb had three languages: Orcish rank 10, Dark Speak rank 10, and Common rank 6. He had ten other skills; among these, axes and take it like a man were solely combat skills. The former was his ability to use axe weapons, and the latter reduced any physical damage that he received. The fortitude skill gave him added resistance to things like disease, poisons, and elemental damage, which would be useful both in and out of combat. Endurance lessened the energy costs for the actions that he took, which was useful in combat but also good for other things. The last skill that had combat implications was blood magic. He supposed that some spells would be good in combat while others would be more situational. The magic skill was a surprise, but he was pretty stoked to have an actual spell ability. He hadn’t been looking for a hybrid class, but the game had said that fighters could learn spells, so the skill might just be an amplification of his fighting style.
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His other skills looked to only be usable out of combat, and they were survival, direction sense, intimidate, command, and sense motive. He thought that all of these skills were self-explanatory, but he checked their descriptions just to be sure. All but the command skill were mostly what he had expected. Apparently, command allowed him to instruct others to make them better in battle. There was also an added perk to sense motive that he had not expected; he had assumed that it would give him some insight as to whether or not someone was lying to him. He was correct, but it also gave him insight into the person’s desires.
Having finished reviewing his skills, he looked at his three abilities. One was dark vision, which allowed him to see even in utter darkness. This would be very useful, but he would have to test out how his sight dealt with quick changes in lighting.
The next ability was called flicker. He certainly needed more information on that, so he focused on the ability and mentally requested knowledge on the subject. Reading its description, he tried to whistle, but his lower teeth and tusks stuck out too much. The flicker ability was a short-range teleportation that required his energy and mana to activate. This would be good for countless applications, and he counted himself lucky to have it.
Harb’s last ability was called robust. Robust: Your Strength and Vitality attributes are 100% more effective. He grinned at the obviously OP nature of that ability. Double Strength, Vitality, and HP—that’s awesome! He couldn’t have asked for a better ability for a tank.
He had two known spells; both were in blood magic, since that was the only magic skill that he possessed. The spell blood rage allowed him to increase his strength by 50% and gave him resistance to stun effects for a full minute at the cost of HP and energy. That, plus his robust ability, would greatly increase the damage he could do. The fact that it cost him HP and energy meant that he would have to use it either at the start of a fight or when he needed to kill something quickly.
His other spell was of the non-combat variety. It was called force of will, and it gave him a chance to control another creature by drinking its blood. This spell required that he ingest a small amount of blood from the target, or if that was not available, blood from something similar. Drinking the blood of another of the same species would work at a 25% rate, while blood from a blood relative had a 50–75% success rate that depended upon how close the relation was. Also, while other forms of blood would work to activate the spell, the further removed the blood was from the target, the less effective the spell was, and he was not allowed to use his own blood for this spell.
Drinking his own blood was a requirement for his blood rage spell, so he looked around for anything that he might have that would be able to draw a bit of blood from himself. He was startled as a slash appeared in the air before him, and his HUD shifted to an inventory screen. There was basic equipment on the list, like a bedroll, sack, and rope, but there was also dried meat, a waterskin, and a finger talon. He focused on the talon, and it appeared before him. It was a metal cap that fit over the tip of a finger and had a sharp point at the end. It reminded him of the movie Interview with the Vampire, where Lestat wore one on his thumb so he could cut people open without using his teeth. This one looked less intricate than the movie version, but it was certainly designed to break the skin.
Now that he was finished examining his inventory, he needed to determine what to do next. Well, I suppose I should go visit the village below. He expected that it would be filled with Dire Orcs like himself, but he decided to be cautious since he didn’t know what the designers of the game were capable of. The game instructions had indicated that this was a permadeath game: he’d have two respawns, which amounted to a total of three lives, before the game ended. There had also been a notice that after dying the third time in the game, he would actually be dead in the real world. He didn’t know if that was a real thing or simply flavor text to put him into the spirit of things, but he would try to take care. Virtually all of these types of games had a newbie area that had low-level content for beginning players, but he had certainly played some that didn’t work that way, and death was a regular part of the learning process in those.
He decided not to descend directly into the valley but instead to go down the other side of the hill that he was on and work his way around it. If this were not a safe starting point, then whatever killed him wouldn’t have a pinpoint on his spawn location. Camping someone’s spawn point was a devastating way to harass another player.
He reached the bottom of the hill. He worked his way around slowly, trying to be careful, but there wasn’t a lot of cover save for some boulders scattered about. When he was in sight of the camp, he was greeted—more like accosted, really—by two Orcs who came around one such boulder. One Orc was smaller than the other and wore what looked like a bandolier draped over a shoulder and across his chest. Do they have guns in this world? Harb thought. The other was larger but still well shorter than Harb himself, and he brandished a scimitar. He was pretty repulsive, sporting a jutting lower jaw and a wrinkled bald pate. The smaller one looked more like a normal person except for the tusks, and he even had short black hair. Harb also noted that their skin was a greenish-gray color, whereas his own skin was much darker.
“Who are you?” the larger one demanded. “You lack clan marking.”
Clan marking? Looking them over again, there was an ear painted on each of them in a blood-red color: the larger one had the mark on each of his epaulettes, while the smaller one had the mark on his leather armor just above his waist. “My name is Harbinger, and I’m from the north,” he said, trying to keep his answers vague until he could get some more information.
“Dire Bear or Storm Horde clan?” the large one asked.
Harb suppressed a chuckle. Well, that was easy. “Dire Bear,” he replied. “I had a disagreement with the clan chief and have come searching for another clan.” He felt that this story was plausible since Orcs were always written as bad-tempered bastards who did a lot of infighting. “Do you have any work that I would be good at?” he asked, trying to sweeten the deal.
His story must have worked, because the Orc sheathed his sword and said, “If you can use that axe, then you can come on the next raiding party.” He made a beckoning motion and began to walk towards the village. Harb followed, and the small Orc trailed behind at a distance. Well, raiding party duty doesn’t sound terrible; I’m an Orc, after all. I could get some easy experience if they attack small villages in the area.