It felt like everything just went dark for a moment. I closed my eyes and there was a moment of quiet, of emptiness. Then I opened them again and it was morning. 8 hours gone in literally a blink of an eye. It didn’t feel like any time had passed, but I felt good. I sat up and felt well rested and energized, ready for a new day. I noticed a new icon hovering underneath my status plate in my HUD, and focusing on it showed I had the “Rested” buff, giving me +1 END for the next 8 hours. This was nice as it brought my HP up to 300 for a while, giving me a bit more of a cushion.

Aibee was laying face down on Raiders back, snoring softly. The tiger was awake, but just lay there patiently with his head on his paws as if he was afraid of waking the tiny AI. I smiled, and coughed loudly, causing Aibee to suddenly wake with a start. It was totally adorable, and I had to suppress a laugh as she sat up rubbing her eyes while looking around sleepily.

“Lets go grab some breakfast guys, shall we?” I equipped my armor and headed downstairs to the main dining area of the bar. It was early morning, so the place was mostly empty. It was an MMO, so there was always a few players active at all hours, but early mornings were frequently the slowest time, and I could only see a couple players eating breakfast and talking with the Werths.

“Some breakfast?” Geira came up and asked me what I wanted. I ordered up some waffles, surprised they were on the menu, and ordered an extra-large side of sausage for Raider. Despite being a fantasy-themed game, there were a lot of mundane, modern day things in the food and such. Made sense, considering both the fantasy-modern-future of the background and that a heavy inspiration was Warcraft which wasn’t afraid to color very widely outside the convention fantasy lines.

After breakfast I headed out to the quest board to grab my daily quests. I pulled off three flyers at random, and noticed that I couldn’t really read the flyers until I had them in hand. Until then, the letters and words were unintelligible, and any pictures on the flyer were vague shapes. Once I had the third quest, the rest of the quests came into focus, but were all duplicates of the ones I was holding. I was fascinated, but a little disoriented as well. Game mechanics were a strange thing when they became a reality.

Of the three quests I had pulled, the first was another [Deliver Supplies] quest like I had done yesterday. The second was a combat quest, [Hunt Sand Wolves] which was nice. The reward wasn’t quite as good, but I’d be getting XP and drops from the mobs so that would compensate. Some Sand Wolves, one of the local monsters, were getting bold and approaching the wall of the city, so I had to kill ten of them to thin their numbers.

As a side note, mob was an old online video game term that was short for “mobile” that dates back to the early pre-graphics, text-only Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs. It generally referred to hostile enemies capable of moving around the game map and attacking on their own, but got quickly adopted to mean almost any type of non-player monster that wasn’t a boss enemy of some type. It wasn’t used quite as much these days, but I was an old-school gamer so the terminology stuck with me.

The final quest was very interesting. [Locate Lost Grandparent] wanted me to track down and locate an elderly man who sometimes got confused. The quest text indicated there might be combat and the reward were quite nice, awarding a decent chunk of gold and, more importantly, a really nice Rare Silver weapon. Quests like this were usually tailored to the person who took them, so it must have chosen the weapon based on my Ranged Weapon skill, as it offered a [Wicked Desert Ash Longbow] that would be a significant upgrade to the starter shortbow I was using now. It was better all around: damage, durability, range, and even had a pair of +1 Attributes, END and FOC. I decided I had to knock out that quest first thing.

Right now the game didn’t have a minimap, though I suspected that would be remedied eventually if the translation from my version held. I was pretty sure I knew where the quest item was that would unlock that and a few other functions was, and wanted to hit that with Torrie and the gang later on. But for now I was stuck without that or any sort of quest markers. So I had to do this old school, and talk to some NPCs and then try and extrapolate a location from there.

The quest wanted me to return the old man to his grandson Billy at the [Old Johnson Farm], so I headed out there first. There I found Billy playing in the dirt outside a run down farmhouse. The fields were overgrown and looked like they hadn’t been tended to in at least a couple years. I approached him casually and said “Heya. What you doing?”

The young boy was maybe five or six years old, with a mop of unruly brown hair. He looked up from his toys, what looked to be some little wooden toy soldiers that he was making fight a wooden dragon. “Just playing while I wait for Grandpa to come back. He was supposed to be back last night, but he never came home. I’m kinda hungry.”

“Where are your parents?” I asked, concerned.

“They died a couple winters ago. Got the cough. I don’t really remember them much, but Grandpa said they’re in a better place now, so I don’t miss them too much.”

“You said your grandfather hasn’t come home yet? Maybe I could go looking for him. Do you know where he was going?”

“He wanted to go picking flowers for Nana Johnson. She died before I was born so I don’t remember her, but today is their ananversity, whatever that is.” He kept his head down and just kept moving his soldieries around as he talked, though I could tell by his voice he was scared and worried.

“Where does he get flowers for her from?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. He said he wanted to find something special, so was going to check outside the walls. He said there was probably some flowers out there that we didn’t have in here. Said he was going to check south of the city, I think.”

After breakfast this morning, I’d bought a few extra servings of sausage for to keep on hand for Raider. Food placed in your Inventory was placed into a kind of suspended animation, so not only would it not spoil, it would even stay warm or cold. I pulled out a plate of Sausages and set it down in front of Billy.

“Here you go. Have some breakfast. It’s all I have on me right now, sorry. But I’ll go out and see if I can’t find your grandpa, ok?”

The little boy looked up at me and nodded bravely. Then he slowly reached for one of the sausages, looking up again at me to make sure it was alright. When I nodded, he started wolfing them down. The AI in this is game was brutal. And whoever designed these quests is kind of sadistic. A starving boy who lost his parents and now his grandpa is missing? That’s just sad and mean. I did some randomization charts for these quests that could come up with something similar, but I never attached any real back story to it since it was stuff that was designed to be done between game sessions, in the background.

As I was heading toward the main gate, I saw a couple of players staring down at each other, one yelling at the other about “kill stealing”. I paused and listen to the argument, the gist of which was that the two players had been hunting in the same area, and one of the players kept stealing all the enemies. In Apoch’s Twilight, mobs were “tagged” by whoever did damage to them first, so no one but that person or members of his party could get XP or loot from the mob until it was dead or it lost aggro. The accuser was a melee warrior with a warhammer and a shield, while the accused was a ranger like me though he looked like he hadn’t taken the Animal Companion Trait. Being ranged, it was easy to see how he could easily snipe and tag the enemies before the warrior could get in close.

The shouting increased, and finally the warrior pushed the ranger to the ground and pulled out his warhammer. The ranger scrambled to his feet and pulled his shortbow out. Suddenly there was a clarion call of loud trumpets and from out of nowhere a pair of fully armored guards appeared. They wore silver plate armor from head to tow, carried large silver kite shields in one hand, and held a wicked looking longsword in the other. They had a black tabard draped over their armor with a silver raven crest on it.

These were the Ravensport Guard and they acted to protect the town and the players in it, providing a safe zone for the playerbase. There were a handful of these NPCs stationed around town and at the front gates, they were largely non-interactive and wouldn’t respond to players unless players attempted to touch or attack them. In the case of players attempting to PvP or attacking the town NPCs, however, the stationary guards would spring into action, and more guards would instantly spawn if there were no stationary guards nearby.

The two spawned guards immediately moved toward the ranger and warrior, weapons held in a threatening pose. “Cease and desist immediately, or you will be restrained.”

The two players glared at each other, then looked over at the guards who exuded a menacing aura. It was obvious these guards were far more powerful than any player on the server, and further they would continuously summon more as needed, making trying to fight them futile. The warrior spat, then turned and stormed off. The ranger looked shaken, but also had a smug look on his face. I disliked players like that intensely.

If the players had attacked, the guards would have killed them, and rather than respawning at the chapel they would have spawned inside the gaol, the local jail, and would be held there for a minimum of one game day, with the jail sentences increasing in length for every repeated offence. While players could log in, there was no way out of the gaol, so it effectively locked their account during that period. That didn’t prevent potential PvP outside of town though, and in town players could use a PvP Duel function to challenge each other and the guards wouldn’t interfere.

Once the commotion died down, I headed out of town. The ranger was going further into the city, so I breathed a sigh of relief. I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with someone sniping my kills and making things more difficult, or worse possibly deciding to try and Player Kill me. I’d never liked PKing or PvP much.

As I left the gates, my eyes were dazzled for a moment. Inside Ravensport was mostly fields with some small patches of forest. It was lovely and very pastoral. But immediately outside, the land was just… green. But not green grass, green sand. A brilliant, almost blinding crystalline emerald green. There were a couple minor quests and objects that could be found that would reveal some of the back story about the emerald sand from Lacio, Ravensport’s Historian, but I already knew the reason for it.

When the dome initially went up, it was rushed and thus was incomplete. It was powered by a large Magicite crystal, a physical embodiment of mana that could be sometimes found naturally. This crystal was the source of the dome original 20-year lifespan, but what the mages who created the dome failed to take into account was that Magicite Crystals could absorb mana to replenish themselves over time. The unique combination of the dome and the Magicite crystal slowly drained the mana from the surrounding countryside, empowering the crystal far past its intended purpose, but destroying the local environment and staining everything this green color.

While I didn’t have a minipmap to track my immediate surroundings, there was a world map I could open up. It didn’t show my surroundings in great detail, and from the start the only revealed area on the map was Ravensport itself, everything else was black. The map would slowly fill in as I explored, but I knew from designing this that the emerald sand extended out for two miles away from the dome, at least in the direction that wasn’t blocked by mountains and cliffs.

“Hrmm. If there’s nothing but green sand and nothing grows out here, how am I gonna find Grandpa Johnson?” I asked myself, unconsciously speaking out loud.

“You need to go this way.” Aibee pointed to the south. “There should be a small patch of flowers that have sprung up for this quest.”

I looked at Aibee and blinked. “Umm, I thought you were just my Help and FAQ bot? Shouldn’t you only answer questions about game mechanics and the interface and stuff?

“Doesn’t helping with quests and answering questions about them qualify as ‘Help and FAQ’?” She hovered in front of me, wings buzzing.

“I guess I can’t argue with that. And this helps a lot. So, thank you, Aibee.”

She smiled and flew over to sit primly on my shoulder. I began heading in the direction she had pointed to. After about 10 minutes as we moved further from the walls, the sand began to form dunes. As we approached one of those, Raider suddenly stopped and gave a low snarl. I bent low and we moved up to the top of a small dune. N the distance we could see a rock outcropping, maybe 15 feet high. An old man was huddled on top of it, and several dun-colored wolves paced back and forth underneath of him. Focusing on the wolves, I could see that they were indeed [Sand Wolves] and a small indicator under their status indicated that they were a quest objective. Nice, I’d be able to get double credit here.

There were three wolves, so I had to be careful. I crept forward, trying to stay outside of their aggro range. I hoped that the VRMMO worked on the same principle that most MMOs did, in that mobs didn’t operate purely on line of sight or on sound, but also on being within a certain range. There wasn’t any cover, so I was nervous they’d see me before I was in range to fire. I knocked an arrow anyway, just in case.

Once I was 40 feet away, the maximum range for my shortbow, I targeted one and told Raider to charge. I then used my Rapid Shot to fire at the remaining two. My arrows whizzed by the charging tiger and struck both wolves, causing them to yelp and immediately turn toward me as a pair numbers floated up over their heads reading “65”, murderous intent in their eyes. Apparently they had 10 points of Damage Reduction. The wolves were well muscled, but their fur was ragged and mangy, given them a nasty, feral look. Raider pounced on the remaining tiger, his claws digging deep into its flank.

The wolf Raider attacked bit back, and I winced as I heard my tiger let out a screen of pain as the wolf’s fangs dug deep into his side. Meanwhile, the two wolves I’d shot moved about halfway, and then leaned back on their haunches, readying a leap attack of some kind. Most enemies had at least one special attack they could do outside of their basic attack that let it do something special, like attacking from range or doing extra damage, and the wolves could perform a leaping attack, adding damage to their claws.

Fortunately I was out of their initial range, though just barely it seemed, and I was able to let off another arrow attack. The arrow flew true and dug deep into the neck of the wolf dealing 65 more damage to him, and it collapsed with a whine. The remaining wolf then leapt at me, its front claws raking me across the chest and knocking me back a few steps. Pain rippled through me, causing me to inhale sharply, and I could see I’d taken 85 points of damage, leaving me almost halfway down.

I grimaced as my vision swam. Holy crap, this hurt. There’s supposed to be a large amount of pain reduction, otherwise no one would play these games, but maybe since I was reborn into the game or something it didn’t apply. I groaned, but forced myself to focus. Rapid Shot was off cooldown, so I fired it off again, once at the wolf next to me and once at the wolf attacking Raider. One arrow struck the far off wolf, dealing 65 damage, killing it. The wolf near me, however, dodged away and the arrow dug into the sand in front of it.

Raider began charging toward me, but the wolf was able to lung at me first, its teeth digging into my leg deep. I grimaced as a large “75” flashed up. Looks like I’d taken a crit from the wolf, but my armor saved me. However, I was down to 30 HP, and the pain was nearly unbearable. My vision swam and somehow I got off another arrow and the wolf fell to the ground and vanished into blue sparkles. I collapsed to my knees, panting in pain.

“Query, Bull.” Aibee the Pixie help-bot asked as she flew over near me, peering at my wounds. “You seem to be in a great amount of pain. Why have you not adjusted your pain threshold settings?”

I swore under my breath and collapsed face first into the sand. If I didn’t hurt so bad, I would have reached up and strangled her.

“Hey! Are you still alive, young man?” An elderly voice called out to me as I lay there.

“Meh.” I mumbled into the sand. I just lay there, feeling the warmth from the sand and not wanting to move. “Nope. I’m dead.”

I groaned again as I rolled over and sat up, wincing at the pain. “Hey old dude, is it clear? Anymore wolves around?”

The old man looked around from atop the rock. “Nope, looks clear.”

“Good, give me a minute to recover then.” I leaned forward and laced my hands behind my head and closed my eyes. Raider padded over and licked at my face, his large tiger tongue scratchy like a house cats. “I’ll be fine, boy. Just need to chill for a few.”

When I was creating Apoch’s Twilight, one thing I wanted to avoid was excessive downtime due to players using their abilities in combat. I couldn’t even count the number of D&D games I played in where our party would camp for the night to rest and recover health and spells, only for the first encounter of the next day to be especially rough due to some nasty enemies or bad dice rolling and we would end up using up most of our spells and be low on health again. Rather than risking any further exploration, we’d hunker down and camp for another 8 hours to recover. It was silly and could really bog down a game. So I decided to eliminate that aspect of the game because it simply wasn’t fun.

Once out of combat, if you rested for a few minutes, you could regain all your health and mana. This further helped the MMO emulation of the game, since it was something a lot of those games did as well, because no one wants to waste a bunch of time recovering after a fight. It also let you go into each fight at full strength.

Of course, there were exceptions to this in Apoch’s Twilight, namely Dungeons. Most dungeons were flagged as “No Rest” areas, and you could only rest and recover in certain areas. This provided a nice mix of tactical ability use while still being able to find places to recover at, usually right before boss fights.

While I was waiting, I opened up my status screen and found my options menu. It was tucked out of the way so I hadn’t really noticed it before, and since I was reincarnated here I had assumed I wouldn’t be able to modify any of it. There were a lot of options, but pain was one of them, as was smell and surprisingly taste. I left the latter two alone for a while, but moved “Pain” down to about 30%. Pain is a useful tactile sensation, so I felt that turning it too low would actually be detrimental. I remembered a biology teacher I’d had in junior high school who had lost the sense of touch in one of his legs, and he told us how he’d once stepped on a nail and was bleeding pretty badly and didn’t realize it until he noticed himself leaving bloody footprints around his house. That always creeped me out.

While I rested, I opened up the loot windows that had popped up for the wolves. There were a dozen [Scraps of Wolf Fur] which were a grey-named trash item worth 1 silver each, a white common [Copper Chain Pants] that I couldn’t equip, and best of all 8 pieces of [Sand Wolf Shank], a cooking ingredient that would only drop if at least one member of the party had the Novice Butcher skill. I couldn’t use the meat yet, but it wouldn’t spoil while in my Inventory, so I could store it until I picked up the Cooking skill. I could also feed it to Raider since he would happily eat raw meat. The loot window also reported I‘d earned 150 XP which was a nice bonus.

After a couple minutes, my health began to rapidly regenerate. My wounds likewise began to fade, the holes and rips in my armor vanishing as they did so. I stretched and stood up, feeling great once again. It was amazing how resilient this body was, though dropping that low on health really scared me. I needed to raise my Endurance and HP and invest in some better armor as soon as possible.

“Hey, you up there!” I called out to the old man on the rock outcropping. “You’re Billy Johnson’s grandfather, yeah? He asked me to come find you.”

“Yeah, that’s me. Hold on a minute, I’ll be right down.” The old man slowly clambered down from the rocks and wobbled his way over to me. “Thank you, young man. You really saved my hide there.”

“Glad I could help. The town gate isn’t too far back this way, I’ll escort you back.” I pointed back the way we’d initially come.

“No, no. I can manage on my own, but thank you.” Old Farmer Johnson said, and he began slowly walking back toward town. “You must be busy. But come find me when you have some free time, and I’ll see to it you’re properly rewarded.”

I guessed that this wasn’t really an escort quest, and the old man vanished over a hill as I called out to him to be careful. My Quest Log updated itself at that point, noting that I had successfully rescued Billy’s Grandfather and that I should now return to the [Old Johnson Farm] to finish up the quest and get my reward.

I decided to explore a little further, moving cautiously. Fortunately quest mobs could overlap, so the three Sand Wolves had counted toward the [Hunt Sand Wolves] quest, leaving me only 5 more to kill to complete the quest. They seemed to spawn in small groups of two to three, so I was able to hunt them without too many problems by avoiding the packs with three wolves. I still had to take a short break between fights to recover, and had a close call during the second fight when two more wolves wandered awfully close to us, but I managed to kite the wolves we were already fighting away before the new group could aggro on us. Because we were pulling groups of two I ended up taking down one more wolf than needed, but that wasn’t a bad thing since it was some extra loot and XP.

Kiting, by the way, is a term in gaming when you move and lead an enemy around from a distance, like leading a kite on a string. It’s useful to separate groups of enemies away from each other, or as I did this time to lead one group of enemies away from a second group to prevent pulling too many enemies at once. I just barely survived three wolves before so I was pretty certain I couldn’t handle four at once.

I picked up some more [Sand Wolf Shanks], more [Fur Scraps] to sell, and a couple more pieces of common white armor. One was a pair of [Linen Gloves] that weren’t worth equipping since my leather gloves were better, but there was also a [Light Hide Belt] that let me equip something on my waist inventory slot. I immediately put that on, since it added 4 more Damage Reduction.

While I was looking over my armor, I noticed that my breastplate and my shortbow were both getting a bit worn. Gear had a durability score, and would take a little bit of durability loss during every combat. The more you got hit, the more durability would be lost. The [Starter] gear had pretty crappy durability, each piece only having a Durability of 10. By contrast, the belt I’d just found had a Durability of 16, and it was still a low level, common item. Better quality and higher level items would have higher Durability values.

Repairing gear was pretty simple. You could get it repaired in town by any vendor, with the cost varying depending on both the amount of durability needed to be repaired as well as the value of the item. More powerful and thus more expensive items would cost a lot more to repair than crappier, common items. So repairs could become something of a money sink. Besides vendors, any player crafter could do it with minimum of the base material used to craft the item and some tools. This was one way that I’d wanted to encourage players of Apoch’s Twilight to take the crafting and gathering skills.

[Starter] gear had no price, so it was simply 1 Copper per point of durability to repair, so was negligible. But as I mentioned it had a really low base durability, so you had to repair it frequently. For now though, I could make do.

I headed back to town and did the [Deliver Supplies] quest, then turned the quests all in one at a time.

QUEST REWARD: Deliver Supplies Experience Reward 100 Gold Reward 200 Item Reward [Small Healing Potion] QUEST REWARD: Hunt Sand Wolves Experience Reward 100 Gold Reward 300 QUEST REWARD: Locate Lost Grandparent Experience Reward 100 Gold Reward 300 Item Reward [Wicked Ash Longbow] - Dmg 90, Req 7 AGI, +1 AGI, +1 END, Dura 20, Value: 200G

I smiled as I repaired my armor and equipped the new bow, which was a nice recurve bow made of polished, pale wood. Equipping it made me tingle a bit as I could feel the power from the enchantment making me lighter on my feet and more durable. It was an interesting sensation, and was a bit of a rush. I could easily see that feeling being addictive, leading one to wanting more and more power.

Finishing up the quests also pushed my total gained XP up enough that I leveled up! That gave me a new Trait point to spend, plus enough XP to consider a new Talent or raising an Attribute or two. I decided to head back to the Golden Horizon for some lunch to think it over.