You received:

[Brown Pony] Mount

[Selection of Weapons and Armor]

[Timer]

[5,000 Gold Pieces]

Well it was nice to have a mount in the beginning of the game, I wouldn’t be hoofing it everywhere. I “used” the pony, and instead of actually spawning a horse, it popped into a menu that pulled up in front of me where I could pull it up and summon it from there. Right now the “Collections” menu was pretty empty besides my pony, but I’m sure that will change eventually. I minimized the menu back down to its little icon in the bottom right hand corner.

I was more concerned with the Selection of Weapons item and the Timer. Why was a simple timer epic rarity? The timer just looked like a normal egg timer in my hand but it went up to 10 seconds, that was it.

“Well, that was certainly more than expected for my - “ the NPC behind me I had completely forgotten about had begun talking, but I turned the timer to ten seconds, and then right before my eyes it reset like I had never turned it.

“Well that was certainly more than expected for my day,” the NPC said, finishing its statement. I looked at the timer in amazement.

It… it turns back time! Oh good god, why is an item this overpowered in the game at all?! I feel like I should not have this. Why would he give this to me though? Was it just RNG loot from the chest? That’s what most chests have is RNG loot…

My thoughts raced through my head a mile a minute as I struggled to make sense of having this item. Then, I had an idea.I turned back the dial ten seconds. Then another ten seconds. Then another ten seconds. GD Fenrir appeared in front of me. Then another ten seconds. Then another ten seconds.Then another chest of items appeared in my inventory. I waited ten seconds, then turned back time again. And got another chest.

I was sure either this was localized time travel within maybe a mile or less, or everyone in the game was having “lag” at this point. I didn’t really care when I could potentially get a full set of awesome armor for little to nothing along with awesome weapons and it could be blamed on server issues. My dwarven-esque beard split into a toothy grin.

I repeated this overpowered item’s move until I had a full inventory of chests (roughly 200 chests) and then put the [Timer] back in my inventory. I then walked away from the NPC talking behind me, and sat down next to a tree on the outskirts of the clearing and then sat down and began to take out another one of the chests from my inventory.

The next chest was a physical item in front of me, same as the last one, but bigger, maybe a foot by a foot by a foot in size. The first one just was palm-sized, for some reason. I’m not questioning it.

I opened up the chest and out popped of the chest in a cartoonish fashion, some items that landed on the ground. In this chest happened to apparently be a polearm, a helmet and some other equippable trinket for the [Trinket] slot in my UI. I picked up the Polearm and inspected it:

[Dwarven Crafted Masterwork Polearm]

Damage 213-316

Str +10

Con +20

Lck+1

I shrugged. It’d probably get a good price on the street or the auction house, if this game had one. A lot of games were tending toward not adding auction houses or places where you could give an item to someone to sell, but I’m sure someone probably put one in place if the game devs didn’t. The other chests were obviously worth a fortune if they had items of this quality in them, but I feel like the Timer item was a special one for me, since the chests were different icons in my inventory at the time versus the ones I now had a whole smack-load of. I picked up the helmet and inspected it.

[Tiger’s Helmet of Speed]

+200 Movement Speed

+10 Str

+5 Agi

+2 Con

Just a rare item, nothing new for a veteran of MMORPGs, but a good starting item for me. I equipped the item and immediately felt a surge of strength and speed. Unfortunately for me, I had roughly two hundred chests in my inventory that I really did not want to look through. Fortunately, I had an idea for that, but first wanted to check out this tiny trinket, maybe it was useful for me. I had already stowed the polearm in my inventory, so I picked up the trinket on the ground.

[Unidentified Trinket]

+ ?? Agi

+?? Con

The trinket was unfortunately unidentified, but unidentified items rolled random values from 1-500 for their stat values on the items, so it could be a hit or a miss. These values were also determined at the time of identification, and also how strong the identification spell used on them was. Unfortunately I’d probably have to find someone who has a powerful enough identification spell to ID this beauty. The trinket was actually a gem, which means it could be slotted into a weapon or armor to add these stats to that piece of armor or weapon, obviously.

I gathered up everything and put it in my inventory. I looked at what my starter bag was, in fact.

[Pack of the Traveler]

-50% pack weight on user

+10% Movement Speed

250 inventory slots

This was honestly a pretty nifty bag, if a little overkill on the slots. To be quite honest, I was expecting to run into a “You have no more bag space” error while getting those chests, but it looks like I’ll be fine for a little while. But first I’m going to have to level up before getting out of this starter area maybe? I walked over to the starting NPC and began talking to him:

“Hey, you have anything that needs to be done around here?” I asked him.

“Nope.” The NPC replied. He was just sweeping the road of rocks and various other debris, despite it just being a dirt road.

“Uh, really? Cause… you’re the starting tutorial person right?”

“Yes. And no. Typically people just start running away into the world by themselves, so I stopped offering my services to them as a quest-giver long ago. I just upkeep this small monastery now, along with a few of my cleric brothers and some of the Cleric classes that stop by every now and again, knights and adventurers, and the like.”

“What comes with being a Cleric?” I asked, looking for information on the class. Since in SwordGate, you don’t choose a class, you visit a class trainer and “trial” the class for ten levels, and after that you can decide to make it your permanent class or not. There were some VRMMOs of a much lesser quality that let you level up multiple classes, but SwordGate was not one of them, that was for sure. As far as I knew, anyway.

“The basic healing spell in the beginning, as well as a starter kit of a mace and shield. We actually have all kinds of weapons to give out, but people just choose the stereotypical mace and start bashing things.” He shrugged. “It’s just how it goes, I guess.”

“Hm. Say I was interested in becoming a Cleric, do you anything a little more… powerful as gear and weapons go?” My CHA was rolling its way into town like a badass cowboy on a nightmare steed. I figured Cleric wouldn’t be bad to get levels in. Plus every class did stay at ten levels after you leveled it up to that at least, so it would be worth it just in case I wanted to switch back to that class in the future. My Luck probably played a part here as well.

“We… do not release those relics to the public,” he said, pausing, looking like he was thinking. “Lightly.” He paused to think some more, stroking his brown beard. “Come with me.” I stepped toward the NPC, a smile splitting my dwarven-esque features as he started off at a brisk walk, taking his broom with him. I followed him, immensely curious as to what I might get, and if this was connected in any way to my race programming. Probably not since persuasion usually depended on CHA, which slightly determined how you looked to other people in-game, so. But, it could be!