“Quit yer spacing out and give me mah change!” Almost as soon as Drun appeared in the game, a stocky long-bearded dwarf was up in his face and shouting at him.
Startled, Drun blinked in confusion and muttered, “Cha… change?”
“Aye! Are ya damn daft man? Ya said the blade was four silver crown to fix. I gave ya a gold eagle. Ya owe me six crowns, and don’t think ya going to be able to cheat me out of it! I’ll report ya to the Crafters, that I will!” The dwarf was turning slightly red in the face and shaking his fist slightly to show he meant business.
“A moment. One moment. I’m sorry!” Almost instantly, Jason’s instincts to apologize kicked in, and he tried to diffuse the problem.
“Sorry?” The other dwarf blinked a few times, looked around stupidly, and then shook his head from side to side. “Forget about it. ‘T’ain’t a big deal anywho. Just take it off me next visit.” Looking confused and perhaps even a little bit embarrassed, the other dwarf turned and purposefully strode towards the door, leaving Drun alone in what appeared to be the front office of a workshop or smithy.
“What the heck was that all about?”, Drun whispered softly to himself as he began to look around, confused.
What type of game logged you into an immediate confrontation with an angry dwarf?! Where was the learning curve, with the starting quest giver standing nearby to tell a new player how to proceed and what to do?
Taking a moment to first pull up his stats, Jason was surprised to that there wasn’t any listing for “Class” anywhere that he could find. He was level one, had stats, titles, skills, and other such game related things that he could see, but nowhere in all those status reports could he find a listing for his class. He was simply a first level dwarf with what appeared to be some basic skills in fighting, smithing, and basic accounting, reading, and bartering. Truly, the character system wasn’t anything at all like he had been expecting it to be, and looking all around, nothing seemed to be what he had been expecting.
The shop around him was pristinely clean, with every surface polished, shined, and buffed to a luster. Various metal pots, pans, knives, swords, and suits of metal armor were laid for display on various shelves and a long counter with what appeared to be an abacus and a moneybox was off to the side of him. The level of detail was beyond anything he’d ever imagined or expected from a game; looking down, he could even make out the worn scuffmarks on the stone flooring from where countless metal boots had traipsed across it numerous times. The smell of steel, oil, and sweat mixed in the air and hung heavy over everything, giving it an odor that seemed somehow nostalgic to him.
“Is this my shop?” Looking all about, he couldn’t find any sign of another person or shopkeeper around, so Drun took his time to slowly walk the smithy and examine everything. He didn’t know anything about weapons in the real world, but when he picked up one of the well-polished axes, a blue screen appeared hovering in front of him that told him all about it.
Name
Damage
Durability
Notes
Mastercrafted Dwarven Axe
(Steel)10 - 2025 / 25An axe crafted by the Dwarf Mastersmith Drun Kindrawf, shaped and forged with the talent of a master of the art of metalworking, who puts his heart into each of his creations. Unnamed, this piece is fitting to be give a name by its first owner.
Current Market Value: 1,000 gold crowns
“A thousand crowns?” Drun blinked a few times and then sat the axe down and stared up and down the walls were dozens of weapons and suits of armor sat lined up in perfect order. The dwarf earlier was arguing over silver change from a single gold, so his mind was telling him that even fractions of a gold coin had enough value for people to fight and complain about. Silver wasn’t like pennies back in the real world, where you shrugged off and dropped into some ‘give a penny, get a penny’ jar at the cash register – it was valuable enough to argue over, and gold was ten times more valuable that that! And here, around him, were dozens of items that were worth hundreds and thousands of gold each!
“I’m fugging loaded!” Drun whispered to himself, half in awe. “What type of dang character starts out with such wealth? Or has mastercrafted goods at their disposal as a noob? Something’s wrong here, I think!”
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Fretting nervously, Drun paced back and forth, trying to compare what he was seeing to any other game he’d ever played. No matter how much he tried, he couldn’t remember ever starting out at level one with such high quality gear, items, and wealth before. The game claimed these were items he’d made, but he’d never crafted anything before in his life. As a sudden thought of what would happen if he couldn’t repeat the process and actually make master gear ran through his mind, he felt a cold shiver of fear trickle down his spine.
A shop like this had to cost an arm and a leg to own, rent, or maintain. Steel and other materials had to be expensive to buy and replace. He’d went to school with a lot of other students whose parents ran various businesses and shops, and he understood all about the pressure of supply and demand, shop reputation, quality vs quantity of goods, business overhead, taxes, and the effort required to balance the books. If he’d started with some sort of reputation as a master smith, selling items worth thousands of gold in his shop that he’d supposedly made before starting his character, and couldn’t make those items now…
Drun shivered again and rushed over to the door as fast as his stubby little feet would take him. Flipping the sign in the window to where it’d read ‘CLOSED’ on the outside, he quickly locked and fastened the multiple locks and chains on the door.
“Oh. Oh! Oh! CRAP!” Rushing into the back of the shop, Drun headed to the smithy area and began to look around. Various barrels of waters and oils lined the wall, several piles of ores were stacked neatly in one corner, several piles of various colored coal were stacked in a different corner, and all sorts of tools were hung up on the wall, ranging from hammers to tongs to screwdrivers to items he had no idea what their function was. A huge black anvil sat prominently in the center of the room, and a massive chimney rose up in front of a blackened stone alcove in the middle of the right wall.
“How the heck do I make a sword? I don’t know anything about this!” His dwarven heart pounding massively in his chest, adrenalin rushed throughout Drun’s body, making his massive iron muscles twitch expectantly. “First thing first. First thing first. First thing…
“FIRE,” Drun yelled, like a caveman, as he ran over and grabbed several shovels full of coal and dumped them into the alcove under the chimney. “Matches. Matches. Lighter? Fireball?” Dashing around, half laughing from the sheer rush he was feeling – this was great! In the real world, Jason had to watch and not get excited. Not raise his blood pressure. Not rush around. His parents had pampered him and sheltered him, and he wasn’t allowed to do anything to serious exert himself physically.
“Screw it!” Laughing, with the first beads of perspiration already starting to drop down his nose, Drun ran over to the wall and grabbed two massive metal hammers. Rushing as fast as his little dwarven legs could take him, he dashed over and grabbed one of the square metal bars from the corner and then sprinted to the alcove. Sitting one hammer down as a base, he placed the metal bar on it, and then began to bang it rapidly with the other hammer. Muscles rippling, adrenalin pumping, Drun was laughing and smiling broadly. He felt so strong! So energetic! So free!
A dozen wildly passionate strikes later, the sparks flying off the hammer striking ore finally ignited the coal, causing a small trail of smoke to trickle upwards and drift lazily through the chimney.
“HURRAH! FIRE!” Half dancing a crazy little jig, Drun cheered at his own success as he tried to grab up the ore and then flung it half across the smithy. “Hoy! Hot! Ho!” Shaking his hand, he blew on his fingers several times, and then laughed at the thick layer of callouses that covered his fingers and palms. His hands in the real world were baby smooth and had never had a blister in their entire life, but Drun’s hands were the calloused, scarred hands of a dwarf who had worked for years mastering his art.
Grinning broadly, Drun grabbed the handle of the hammer he’d laid down to use as a miniature anvil at its far base, and then he carried it over to the small worktable near where they hung. Taking time to rub both hammers with an oily rag nearby, he cleaned and shined them both back to looking like new before he hung them back up on the wall.
From what little he knew about smithing, all he needed now was to get the metal hot until it turned red or white, and then he just had to place it on the anvil and beat the heck out of it until he shaped it into something. Didn’t sound that hard at all.
Right?