The game didn’t begin with any sort of special fanfare, it just didn’t exist one second and the next it did. Without warning I was there, and not expecting it I just fell, knocking the breath out of me. I groaned then got up. I found it odd we didn’t get to choose our starting city at first, but figured it was probably to prevent any overcrowding in an particular place.

“Goddamnit, stupid start for this goddamn game. They could at least start us in a sitting or lying position but nooooo”

Looking around while grumbling, I got some vindictive pleasure out of the fact that a good majority of people were in the same situation as me, figuring plenty of people in the other spawn points were probably just as annoyed as I. Feeling slightly better, but still glaring at the few guys and girls who standing, I got my first good look around. We were in some sort of massive temple, with three exits. As we were slowly looking around, a wizened old man in a dark brown robe and holding what had to be a magic staff stepped forward on what seemed to be a stage and began an announcement.

“Welcome travelers, to our world. It has been foretold that you would come to us. The human race is in a perilous position, and you are foretold to save us from the other. We will help guide any willing, but we shall not support those who will not work in the great endeavor to save our race, nor will we hold your hands. Now everyone willing to learn to fight should head to the left exit, where you may gain instruction from our honored armsmaster, or you may head to the right if you would like to learn the time honored ability of magic. For those who believe themselves to be above learning, you may head out the middle for your adventure to begin, though you will not gain the aid the others shall. Lastly for those who wish to serve the great goddess Aleria, and channel her goodness to help the sick or injured, you may remain here”.

The surrounding players seemed a bit confused. You could learn magic? Healing? But there’s no skills? People milled about in confusion, but I and what looked like a good amount of others were starting to realize that the game devs weren’t truly going to leave us out to dry when it came to “skills”, but we were going to have to learn the hard way. People slowly started trickling out, and I decided to join them, heading to the right, as I wasn’t planning whatsoever to get into any sort of close combat without skills backing me up. As I stepped outside to what looked to be a large sandy circle, with target dummies opposite us, a large man, suspiciously so for someone who was supposed to teach us magic, patiently waited for everyone who was going to join us, then began an talking in a booming voice.

“Hello travelers, and welcome to Ederheim, my name is Olaf, and I will be your magic instructor for the day. First thing, I would like everyone to say or think the words status”.

With his announcement I shook my head. It should have been the first thing I did, but I quickly though ‘status’ and the most simplistic status screen I’ve ever seen popped up before me.

Name

Rayth

Level

1

str

1

Grimoire

agi

1

Recipes

wis

1

???

end

1

???

vit

1

???

Deciding to focus on the things I don’t recognize, my finger strays up and clicks on grimoire.

Grimoire

Stores all spell patterns you have learned

Quickly switching from that not so helpful blurb, I switch over to the recipes

Recipes

Alchemy

Metalcrafting

Tailoring

Woodworking

My attention was quickly brought back by the large man clapping his hands.

“Now that you’ve seen your basic stats, we’ll start with the lesson. To start with, I would like everyone to focus a little below their navel, you should feel a form of energy stored there, that is your mana”

Focusing where the man told me to, I am immediately wondering why I didn’t notice this earlier. It’s a very prominent and completely different feeling, in a way I could only describe as feeling full of lightning.

The big man waited patiently for a few minutes to let us process the feeling and get used to it before continuing. “Spells in our land work through patterns. To make any spell at all, you’ll need to draw the mana through your body, and use it to make a spell pattern in front of you. Once you release the pattern the spell will fire. For example.” Olaf quickly starts writing a glowing pattern in front of him with his finger, a simple cross pattern with a line diagonally through the top left lines. He then steps back, and we watch as the pattern seems to fold inwardly on itself and becomes a mostly translucent bolt of energy that screams down the field and demolishes one of the targets. I’m left breathless, totally excited to be able to do that. Soon.

“Now that I’ve shown you the basics, I’ll have everyone line up and start trying to do it on their own. If anyone is having trouble, you can come to me. Make sure to keep some space between each other for when the patterns are made incorrectly, they can have somewhat explosive results.”

I didn’t miss the “when” in that statement, and made sure to pick an area with very few people. I then focused on the energy, and tried to draw it to my hand, and failed horribly. Not one to give up, I continued over and over, and on my 32nd attempt I was able to do it! Feeling the energy in my hand, I opened my Grimoire

Grimoire

Stores all spell patterns you have learned

Spell Name

Mana cost

Force Bolt

2

Luckily for me, selecting it made a handy little guide float in the air in front of me, so I simply followed that, and promptly exploded. I slowly got back up, dusting myself off from the couple of meters I had rolled, and decided that the best option would be to try again. This time at least, it was barely any trouble for me to drag the energy out of my hand, and opened the spell guide again. This time I was very, very careful drawing out the pattern. (It may have taken me well over a minute for three lines) Then I simply stopped holding the mana in place, and down the field my… puny little force bolt…. went, not even close to the screaming terror that the instructor had made. It even had the audacity to whiff right between two targets, making me realize I hadn’t bothered aiming it in the first place.

I promptly tried again, this time completing the rune in less than a minute... probably. This time, before letting go of the spell pattern, I tried to figure out how to aim it. After a few minutes of trying to puzzle it out to no avail, I walked up to the instructor, doing my best to dodge the errant explosion from those trying to make the spell pattern too quickly.

“Um Olaf sir? I was wondering how to aim the spell?”

My innocent question was responded to with an ear shattering response “Oh, seems I was remiss in my education. Everyone! To aim the spell bolt, or any spell in general, just put a small dot of mana in the direction you’d like the pattern to go, the spell will collapse toward the excess mana.”

Quickly thanking him, I retreated back to my corner of the field and realized that the spell bolt I had put there was gone, even though I’d not released it. Shrugging at my lack of knowledge, I drew up another pattern and put a small dot of mana in the direction of my target. I released the spell, and the bolt collapsed inward towards the dot, and still missed, flying around 5 feet to the right. Not dissuaded, I decided to do what every gamer knows to do, grind. 5 spells in, I realized a problem, I was out of mana, and had only hit the target once. I decided to sit down and rest for a bit. I quickly looked at my stats page and thought wisdom at it, it popped up my mana regen, at .1 mana/second.

Wisdom: +10% spell damage, 0.1 mana/second regen (Out of combat), 0.05 mana/second Regen (In combat)

Quickly deciding to look at all the other stats, they were all very similar, strength adding 10% melee damage, endurance adding .1 stamina regen/s and 10 stamina/level, getting boosted to .5 stamina/sec when out of combat, and agility adding 2% speed, whatever that meant. One thing was clear though, gear was going to be VERY important. One point of damage increase with a stat at 100 would be an 11 point difference, and I doubted the gear would increase by such small increments.

After going through the stats I noticed my mana was back at full, and cast another 5 bolts slightly quicker than last time. For a few hours I simply repeated the actions. After 50 or so I managed to hit the target reliably, and around 100 I started to not use the guide from my grimoire, and only blew myself up a handful of times! Once I finally felt comfortable with my only spell, I looked around at the empty training ground, and decided to start the game. With the time dilation factor of 4 hours inside the game to an hour outside, I still had plenty of time to game before heading off to sleep.

On my way out of the field, the instructor was standing there, his booming voice not quite so loud for once as he called out to me.

“Wait there for a moment young one, don’t forget your staff and pack. They’re nothing fancy, but we give them out to every person who would fight against the enemy. And some advice, learn to properly loot your kills, none of that goddess stuff if you want to make good money out there.”

Quickly thanking him, but wondering what he was talking about with the goddess stuff, I left the training field and started to wander the town, quickly noting the massive walls that seemed to be visible from everywhere in the town. Deciding that I needed to gather some information before my grind session, I pulled up the forums in game and started looking through them. It seems that the best bet is to go to the adventurers guild and sign up. After a short search, I also managed to find out what the instructor had been talking about. It seems that while players can simply open a loot box from an enemy and grab some random loot, you can also cancel the loot box and manually harvest anything of use from the corpse, from skin to bones. Feeling a bit hungry and thirsty, something I hadn’t really noticed while I was practicing my new spell, I opened up my brand new pack, and was promptly surprised by what looked like marble sized pieces of bread. Taking one out, as soon as it left the confinement of the bag, it quickly grew to the size of a normal loaf of bread, and putting it back in would shrink it down to marble sized again.

After playing around with the bag for a bit, I noticed that everything, no matter the size, would shrink to a similar size in the bag, not that I could test larger items, but a pebble wouldn’t shrink to any smaller while a fist sized rock would go down to marble sized. Quickly deciding that my best course of action would to be just finish the bread, I did, thinking that at the earliest time possible I would need to find someplace good to eat. I then pulled out a marble sized water skin, which quickly became full sized, I took a deep drink and put it back, noting that I only had 9 of my teeny tiny breads left.

After another five minutes or so of wandering, I managed to find the adventurers guild, just as described in the wiki. It was a medium sized building, with a large open area where people seemed to be selling off the materials they’d gotten. Walking through the group of people, all of whom had a weapon of some sort, and only a couple having the same newbie gear that I was sporting, I looked around at the tables, many of them covered in blood from the monster parts being traded, some old and faded, others the bright red of fresh kills. I figured it made sense to do all the material trading out here so as to not have the mess on the inside of the guild.

After walking into the guild the atmosphere changed immediately. I was expecting some rowdy, tavern like atmosphere, and I couldn’t have been further from the truth. There are boards hanging along, each with a label over them, rating them one to 7 stars, and people waiting in chairs for their number to be called. It honestly felt like an old fashioned DMV. I go up, grab a number, then go off to look at the boards. There were request on them ranging from finding herbs, hunting monsters, all the usual fantasy stuff, with a smattering of simple fetch quests and escort missions as well. After gawking at the request to hunt one legendary monster or another on the seven star board, I go sit down to wait.

After waiting for what seems to be forever I notice something that I had no reason to expect. I had to go to the bathroom... Luckily, after looking around I found some signs and quickly took care of business, grumbling the entire time about unnecessary realism. Not long after I got back, my number was called and I go up. The woman at the counter was petite, with short brown hair and amber eyes, cute, but wearing that bored businesswoman smile you get from having to deal with people all day. A nametag on her shirt read Sable, so I quickly addressed her.

“Hello, Sable, I just wanted to sign up for the guild real quick and maybe get some tips on how to start out.”

She looked back at me for a second, her eyes filled with disinterest before replying. “Here’s a form, fill it out. As for tips, you should probably hire a mentor, you can probably get someone with experience for as little as one gold, they’ll show you the ropes far better than I can”

The tip would’ve been far more helpful if I’d started with a gold, or even any money at all, but I thanked her regardless then got to filling out the form. It was surprisingly simple, requiring only name, aliases and role. Seeing as how I was hoping and praying to sit in the backline throwing spells, I filled it out as rayth and mage before handing it back to her. I was still wondering what the point of filling out such a lackluster form was when she wrapped it around a small silver tag with a chain attached, looking very reminiscent of a dog tag from my world. A light shined for a second, then dimmed.

“I’m afraid I’ll need some of your blood next. It binds the tag to you and will allow the guild to upgrade your rank as needed. For every rank you need to complete at least 10 missions and take a combat test, excluding the first rank.”

She then took out a small needle, and I winced as she pricked my finger, even though it didn’t hurt much, as it’s always worse when you know it’s coming. She smeared the drop of blood on the tag, and it shined again before fading. She passed it to before giving some more information.

“You can look at the one star board, and feel free to take any of the hunting missions, just bring back the materials to one of the counters outside and they’ll sort you out”

After thanking her again, I decided to look at the first star board. There were a few targets for the hunting, orbs, wargs, and treants. I shrugged, I didn’t know what anything was, so I’ll just go out to hunt then bring back what I get. Heading out the door, I asked directions from an unmemorable stranger and headed off. It was time to hunt.

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