You pretty much always appear in a dark forest or something. The other major option is a newbie town. I'm in the woods. Getting out of the woods is obviously my first goal. M60 wanted to replicate the feeling of old school RPGs, awesome for me, terrible for their profits, so there's no radar map or anything. The game will reveal a static map as I explore but its just like a real map, not your map app. It doesn't tell you where you are or anything like that. We'll not till you get enchantments I guess? But those are expensive and I ended up learning my area long before I got them, even as a super mage blessed by world builders. Well I guess I wasn't super yet, I could only cast like 8 spells before I was out of mana. The game was lazy on the math so they started health and mana with 0s at the end to make common division easier. You can take those of if you feel like they make me seem overpowered at level 0.

So I was in a classic portal fantasy situation basically. There were secret backgrounds that involved being like the secret child of a prince living with an old woodcutter, a kindly and grampa-ish one of course, but I wasn't one of those. I think I was supposed to be an amnesiac like in Worlds of Exile and Illusion or Planescape but from offworld. The beta didn't get that far. In fact I doubt the dev team did either. Its a beta and I was gifted my Template as a shortcut for testing purposes. Maybe I actually was secret royalty.

Now if you spawn in a town you see rats and if you spawn in the woods you see wolves. So I saw wolves. Specifically 3 dire wolves. Turns out they dumped me in a mid level zone to make up for my super powers. Lame. Woulda been nice to get a little curbstomping in early on as I learned the rules. Faster leveling though and we only had 8 months. Obviously it has been a while and while emotionally significant moments do survive the vagaries of time better, I'm just a slightly above average person. If they did that fancy evaluation crap they do these days my Memory score would have been more like 14. Still awesome, my memory was always strong, but not godly. So the wolves kinda looked like this:

Dire Wolf LV 4 40 EXP

Hp 80

STR 8 DEX 8 CON 8 MOV 4/s

Skills: Dash 2x speed | Slash: 25 damage | Bite: 40 damage

I'll only indicate non-PHY stats for creature that use magic or special effects. So here we go. I'm a squishy mage and each of these guys has the same HP as me. Kinda wish I took that time field now right? I can take 3 Slash hits or a Slash and a Bite. We're 120ft out and my spells go about 20ft. Luckily wolves, even nasty ones, only have melee skills. They are 4 seconds away with their 30ft/s speed. Lucky I had decent INT and WIS so I saw them in time and reacted.

I'm going to run through this fight in a sort of turn based manner. Hopefully people won't get too bored. It'll be kinda long because I was really not equipped to fight these guys. Its time to see if my math heavy spell strategy is going to work. I can't target them yet so I have to go the spell buff route.

But then I look at my skills and it won't work. I went through all my options very fast since I have great MEM and INT. Noneof my time spells can actually help with the mana I have and Tarnishing spells are useless because I don't have time once they get in range. Metamagic will fall just short on a Fireball/Boost combo using my Highmage Metamagic boost. In the end I go with a Fireball + Tricast Ability combo.

Tricast is free because the penalty is silencing you for the duration of the average casting time, and its unmodified casting time so I can't really abuse it. I didn't take Thoughtcaster so I don't have an out. And Template abilities are one chance. I can't go back later. If I wasn't going for the NPC interaction I could have dropped Charismatic for Thoughtcaster but no go.

I technically only cast 2 spells but the average is of cast spells, not potential spells, so I get a full 12 seconds for Fireball where I'm helpless, luckily I got the damage I needed. Time to see what the exp and loot stuff looks like. On the upside, since I'm way under level I get 40*3*1.4 exp. turns out you get 10% per level you are below the target. I know you guys are used to getting cool titles and permabuffs for cool accomplishments but that doesn't come into vogue for a while. M60 actually falls out of favor for games that do that but it doesn't happen for a while. Still 240exp is a level and 70% of another level. Not bad.

+240exp (240/100) (140/200) Lvl Up!!!

You have gained 8HP, 21MP, and 2 stat points!

You have gained 2 skill points + 1 magic point!

Since I am pretty scared about dying, and the penalty is pretty harsh, I drop 2 points into CON to gain 20 health. I also gain inventory space and 10% damage resistance. STR and CON increase carrying capacity. Every 10 CON is 10% multiplicative damage resistance + 10% base for your first time. This seems like it would start spiking fast but physical damage penetration exists and you'd hit a mere 26% by 100 con so its not a big deal. Nice for me as a mage fighting forest creatures though. I've got 97 EHP vs 80 EHP. Not super amazing since 3 Bite attacks is 120 EHP but not bad. You also gain HP equal to CON so I'll gain more next time. Bit of a trade off though. Spell damage is buffed by 1% per INT and Spell Pen is 1% for each point of difference between INT and enemy WIS. However that didn't impact my last battle. Soon, though. Math!

Obviously my main boost is my skill points. I can get 3 more spells or increase a Talent phase or save them for something. Skill points can also level existing spells, even though you can raise them through use. I only cast a dual fireball so that fight didn't help much. Maybe I should subject you guys to 3000 words of me training on rats later. Thoughts?

I ended up grabbing some new spells, though:

Warper Phase 1 Spell List:

Worldstep: Blink | Self | 80ft | Cast 1s | 20 mana

Stretch: Expand | field 40ft | ranged 10ft | Cast 1s | 40 mana

Rip: Move | single target | ranged 40ft | Cast 1s | 40 mana

Bosonist Phase 1 Spell List:

Lockdown: Root 4s | sphere 8ft | ranged 40ft | Cast 2s | 40 mana

Yank: Move 40ft | sphere 8ft | ranged 40ft | Cast 1s | 40 mana

Crush: 50 damage | single target | ranged 40ft | 50 mana

Miasma Phase 1 Spell List:

Smoke: Blind/LOS 4s | sphere 20ft | ranged 40ft | Cast 2s | 40 mana

Splash: 25 damage + 5 DoT/3s + Con -1 | sphere 8ft | ranged 20ft | Cast 2s | 25 mana

Infect: DEX/STR -10% + 4 DoT/10s | single target | ranged 20 feet | Cast 1s | 25 mana

Fester: 4 DoT/10s | Infect+ 3 targets | ranged 20ft | Cast 1s | 25 mana

Envenom: 8 DoT/10s | single target | ranged 20ft | Cast 2s | 25 mana

I didn't look at Illusion at this point but that tree will be coming up soon. I ended up taking Worldstep, Lockdown, and Envenom. I really wanted some Utility and Safety spells. I'd regret this later because I didn't end up using lockdown for a while. Worldstep and Envenom were a nice combo, though. The Miasma skills really relied on combinations I felt but they do become good eventually. I am not differentiating between damage types right now but when it becomes relevant to my story I will. Miasma provides some decent variety there which makes it seem more useful eventually. The damage types are sort of linked but there are enemies who are only immune to one or two so it still works.

I do end up clearing some weaker wolves during this trip but it isn't till I get to the bear that things pick up. 4 wolves puts me at (180/200EXP) but sadly there is nothing to farm for level 3. I got lucky here. Not only was it a Stone Bear, which meant it couldn't reach normal bear movement speeds, which are roughly similar to wolves, but its physical damage resistance obviously means nothing to me. Its not literal stone so Miasma and Pyromancy are both viable. I didn't take the gravity damage spell this early but it didn't end up hurting me.

Stone Bear Level 4 80EXP

HP 160

STR 16 DEX 8 CON 16

Skills: Slash 40 | Bite 40 | Charge 80

This guy is twice as tough and 1.7x or so as damaging as a Dire Wolf but luckily his trade off of speed for toughness is to my benefit. He starts off about 80 feet away which is closer than the wolves but I have the element of surprise and he is slow, plus I can focus on single target spells. Suddenly my Chronomancy becomes a lot more useful. I am still limited by mana though, I don't regen faster than I drop spell buffs.

So I have 88 HP but I got up to 235 mana which is nice. I decide to try out my new spells since this guy is slower and there's only one. It turns out a lot of my spells are better against humans. Animals move pretty fast which negates spell ranges and teleports and so forth.

I get into a good range and cast Boost. Then I caste Quicken to apply self haste. the bear won't see me till I bring myself to his attention so my main limitation is spell duration. Spellsage boosts those which is cool. Boost also buffs the primary spell effect. Haste has an 8 second base, plus 1.6s from my 20% duration boost, then Boost increase the duration by 50% * 1.5x from Highmage for 1.75%. I've got 16.8s of haste which does a few different things. It takes 1s off of casting times, though spells have a minimum casting time of 1s. This minimum was later modified a bit because it was difficult to deal with for fast enemies but not in the beta. Haste also improves other body movement stats but as a hard mage with teleport who had to stand still to cast I was not typically impacted. Later on I got a movement casting buff which synergized well with Haste for kiting.

It cost me 70 mana to use Boosted Quicken. Highmage really improved the efficiency there for me. At my level it was taking roughly 1 mana to deal 1 damage so I was pretty close to my buff budget. I got into range and threw down Envenom. It would eventually deal 140 damage, which made it mana efficient at 43.75 mana, but now I needed to survive 10 seconds with only 120 mana. The bear was 1 second away at Envenom range.

Tarnishing was turning out to be mostly useless, at least against forest creatures. The speed penalty from DEX damage was no good really, at 15%. The spell lasted 10s as did the STR damage spell but these fights were decided quick and I had a tight manage budget when looking at spells that didn't actually kill. Boost had worn off at its 2 spell limit which was fine, I didn't wanna pay that 75% mana penalty anyways.

Envenom at ~44 mana would break even 3 seconds compared to other spells. Thank the developers that Boost targeted the damage and not the duration of the spell. I didn't think of that until it was too late. That would have hurt badly. Envenom would deal 88/160 or roughly half the Stone Bear's hp at 6 seconds. Therefore my obvious goal was to try and deal 72 damage in 6 seconds. I felt like I was pretty safe with Worldstep. I could move 80ft which mean I would have a second to cast each time. The developers set movement to resolve before combat. The bear would charge once while I cast a combat spell with a cooldown of 1s, if I could, then I'd blip away just as it reached me. But that was mana intensive.

I could cast Timestop to get me 4 seconds of freedom but Stasis prevented all interaction and I again had mana related limitations. Luckily DoT duration also paused in Stasis, well at least directly applied it did. AOE environment effects didn't pause. I eventually settled on Firebolt, Worldstep, Firebolt, Worldstep, Fireblast. I didn't end up having to tank a hit. If that bear hit me with Charge I was in real trouble. I only needed 5 seconds of Envenom and 5 seconds of casting. Perfect min-maxing on time syncing.

I looted some basic vendor trash like claws and teeth and pelts from the Dire Wolves, Wolves, and Bear, then look at my notifications.

+104exp (244/200) (44/400) Lvl Up!!!

You have gained 10HP, 21MP, and 2 stat points!

You have gained 2 skill points + 1 magic point!

I was up to level 2 and 98HP with 252 mana. I didn't invest in dexterity because it was mostly good for running at this point and skills I didn't have yet. Strength was mostly pointless for me as well. I would later do a lot of catchup on dexterity but I'd always lag behind most players on strength. I went with 1 to CHA and 1 to WIS. MEM caps your allowed abilities, although not your point expenditure. At some point even if I *could* access new skills I couldn't pick them, unless I spent some points on Phases or boosting existing skills.

Most characters could theoretically use all their skill points on new skills every level but I got an extra point so my stats couldn't keep up. Of course it would be stupid anyways but I am always on the lookout for a cool exploit. Sadly without 21 INT like my character I whiff a lot. I was hoping to meet sentients soon so I wanted to get to 14 or so CHA. Wisdom was a secondary stat on both CHA and INT skills, as well as the reverse, although I wasn't expecting to max WIS. Crafting used WIS a bit though so I wanted to be decent.

INT was the core stat for mages, with WIS as a bonus for combat and CHA for spells of the mind and social spells. However I started pretty damn high so I wanted to balance things a little. Maxing INT would eventually matter but first I needed to not die, hence the CON, and join a Guild or something, hence CHA. This was changed in the live version but in the beta you had a stat point modifier based on your starting stats. You could increase your stats for one point up to 2x your initial value and for 2 up to 4x. However the base stat was modified by Template stats and special rewards, though not retroactively. Some people, even bigger perfectionists than me(I know right? How?), would avoid raising their low stats till they got their first multi-template boost so as to never spend more than 1 point on a stat gain if they could possibly avoid it. Overachievers.

In any case I know most of you want skill ups. I still haven't taken Illusion, sorry. I went back to Miasma for Infect, Fester, and Splash. I plan to take Smoke once I get Illusion because of a specific synergy. Splash gives me a nice cheap AOE with a low mana cost at the cost of course of it being a DoT spell. But 3s isn't too bad for 15 damage. Infect is a Mark spell. You need a Mark from the right damage class to cast Fester. Disease, Poison, and Rot all work. Acid doesn't. Envenom actually deals acid damage. I guess they didn't want to have both Venom and Poison as damage types. The Mark mechanic is kinda weak now but once we get more spells it is a lot of fun. Miasma, and later Tarnish, have some nice spells that do damage, DoTs, and debuffs together. Corruption does as well but I don't get that for a while.

I get in a few more fights in the woods but EXP costs are rising now so nothing fun happens before I hit the town. I've been running around basically naked for a while. Its possible I missed some bandits or a kindly forester or something but who wants bandit clothes? Not this massive germophobe. Sure its a game but still, gross.