#(crunch) AHAHAHAHAHAH

[othernaut]

Character Creation Challenge, Day 15: EverQuest Role-Playing Game

Appearance is reality.

The placid picture of a Koada'Dal enchantress sits by a marble-veined window in one of the spiraling towers of Felwithe, sipping clear tea and taking measured notes. The curling fern in the window sways its long leaves whenever another scholar passes by, dappling the study table with a manicured representation of the Greater Faydark in totality. A stiff-backed librarian passes by and takes in the scene, the open books and organized notes - the teacup conspicuously placed far away from any uncaring elbow or flailing pen. Nods, whispers a pleasantry. Smiles, and moves on.

One of the open books is a Freeport merchant's guide, outrageously unethical, detailing just how much a person can fleece their suppliers before they need to begin bribing the authorities. One is a dwarven judiciary book, little more than court transcripts, thought so worthless it had to be rescued from a midden. Two are explicitly and enthusiastically pornographic. The fifth, a delirious religious tract praising all-consuming, all-destroying Solusek Ro, was discovered in a cult compound, copied in secret, and is powerfully heretical to the nature-worshipping elite of the High Elves.

The notes, then, are about influence. The levers of influence, the mechanics of want and refusal. In sixteen pages of looping shorthand, the enchantress has detailed the skeleton of a philosophy, one built from its bones to influence people, to change their opinions, to manipulate their favor, to cause them to do and believe advantageous things. To a detailed reader, it would appear psychopathic. To a passerby, it appears as schoolwork. To her, it is the only means she has discovered to interact with other people.

Appearance is reality.

Two months earlier, the enchantress was breathing hard under the all-concealing canopy of the Faydark forest, sweaty and dirt-stained, standing over a corpse. The orc was a young one, she could tell. She was young herself; like recognizes like. The heavily-muscled creature carried a chipped sword and a belt full of beaten knives, but no trophies - no teeth, no ears, no locks of hair. A pawn, she remembered. Not yet an adult, to the orcs; it would have needed to kill before being trusted with that status. That would be why it attacked so fiercely, why it had sprinted towards her the second it saw her. She, actually - the enchantress only noticed these differences once the violence was done. The orc was attempting to earn her place. The enchantress was attempting to save her life.

Battle was quick, a matter of seconds. A spell cast reflexively, learned and memorized but never tested. The enchantress manifested a braided loop of magic around the orc pawn's throat, seized it in place while the spell choked the life out of it. Only now, in the frayed peace of the aftermath, did she realize she had other choices. She could have become a flower, a fallen log; she knew the illusions, she had the capability. And now a corpse was cooling at her feet and no one would know the orc had died, not if she didn't speak of it.

There came a rotation of perspective, under the shadow of the leaves. If she modified the illusion, took on the appearance of the orc, then she could prise a tooth from her victim's head and take her place in the clan. She would be inducted as a member of the Crushbone clan, in whatever means the orcs sought to do this, and live as a tested equal among a people she had only known as enemies. How different would it be from her own life? Would she crumple under brutal reality? Would there be something there, something alien but not altogether unpleasant to the Koada'Dal and her life of genteel isolation?

Appearance is reality.

Five years earlier, the apprentice enchantress was stopped in her tracks by a spell trap. She had only just begun her studies; she had never seen this kind of magic before, never felt it. All muscles in her body seized and any thought bent towards motion or speech died unmanifested. It would have been terrifying enough, had she not been miles below the Academy spires, exploring hidden passageways that she was distinctly not permitted to see.

But what else was there to do? When classes ended, everyone either paired off or gathered in clumps. She was left alone at her worktable to pack up her things in silence. She tried, she really did. She introduced herself, made jokes, did everything she knew how to do, but the best she could hope for was a polite goodbye. She didn't know whether everyone had already found exactly the companionship they needed or whether it was something to do with her. She bathed, she had a decent personality (according to relatives), her clothing was decent and her hairstyle recent. As she learned the illusions, she applied them to sharpen a cheekbone or conceal a blemish. And still she sat there, day after day, packing her things and listening to a camaraderie that she would never be a part of.

So she wandered. She wandered in the steepness of the hills, stayed out late, watched the stars. When she did the illusion right, she took the appearance of burning candles and stayed in the temple to watch the secret lives of acolytes and priests. She wandered by the gate, sat by the burning braziers to watch the Faydark, green and glorious. Alone, always alone - and now alone here, in the dark where the familiar had become a threat, unable to move a muscle.

Someone came and got her, of course. She got a lecture about which places were appropriate for a student and which were not. Because she was known to her teachers as a quiet and studious elf, she would be forgiven her transgressions - so long as she never spoke of it. Never mentioned that she had seen the pale marble of Felwithe shift to an older stone, a darker foundation, deep in the bones of the city. Never mention the ever-burning purple flames she found flickering at the end of that tunnel - that she had fixed her eyes on and wondered, while her body failed to move. Let it sift into obscurity and it will be as if nothing had happened, as if there was nothing at all to discover.

Appearance is reality.

Ten years earlier, she watched a shipment of raw stones delivered to her parents' jewelry shop. Night after night, her parents worked to cut and polish those rough bands of color into glittering gems. They went out in bulk, too, to Ak'Anon. Something to do with gnomish experimentation. They would never adorn a finger or enliven the curve of an ear.

Fifteen years earlier, they cleared the furniture from her brother's room. The stonework items, they would be broken into slag and dumped as gravel on the Caravan Road; all the wooden ones would be burned. Her mother filled the space with potted plants. The light, she said, was ideal, as if it were made for this. They never spoke his name again. She didn't have a brother. But that's when her father began the habit of spitting whenever the name Crushbone was said in his presence. The houseplants flourished and her mother spent hours in that room every day, alone.

Twenty years earlier, she had been playing by a lone tree in the gardens when a pixie twirled down out of the leaves and sprinkled her with dust. With a laugh and a word of magic, the pixie turned all her hair a vibrant pink. She laughed, too, which seemed to surprise the pixie - so it changed its hair to match. Giggling, it fled into the trees, leaving the girl alone with her alterations. The color change was permanent. She had to cut it all out for it to grow back the same basic blonde she was used to. Her parents fretted, made her cover her head. They hadn't heard the laughter, they only saw the consequences.

In the undefined future, the enchantress might do incredible things. Who could say? It was a world of adventure and excitement. People broke the barriers between planes, met their gods in the flesh, and slew them. People died unremarked in a nameless stretch of forest and that was all there would ever be of them. What mattered was the narrative, and that was a universal province. If the world saw her as beautiful, as powerful, as well-traveled, capricious, as everything she would ever want to be, would there be a difference?

Would anyone care?

Appearance is reality. Anything was fair.

*****

Solstyce Wintersun High Elf Enchanter 3 Training points: 0 Alignment: DG (perceived NG)

Str: 8 (-1), Dex: 14 (+2), Con: 11 (0), Int: 20 (+5), Wis: 12 (+1), Cha: 19 (+4) Speed: 30, Size: Medium, Languages: Elven 4, Common 4 Senses: Infravision Hit Points: 11 Armor Class: 13 Equipment: Quarterstaff, adventurer's clothes, spellbook, 4 daggers, 10 tiny daggers, backpack, bedroll, candle, flint and steel, ink (1-ounce vial), inkpen, small steel mirror, belt pouch, 6 days rations, 50 feet of hempen rope, sewing needle, 1 pound soap, waterskin, 11 gold pieces

Base Attack Bonus: +1 Melee: 0, Ranged: +3 Fort Save: +2, Reflex Save +3, Will Save +5 Proficiencies: Simple weapons, one-handed blunt, two-handed blunt, piercing, throwing. Class features: Spellcasting, bonus mystic feat feat. Feats: Combat Casting, Extend Spell, Dodge Skills: Appraise 6 (Int, +11), Bluff 6 (Cha, +10) Channelling 6 (Con, +6), Meditation 6 (Int, +11), Spellcraft 6 (Int, +11), Knowledge 6 (mysticism, Int, +11), Diplomacy 6 (Cha, +10), Animal Empathy 5 (Cha, +9), Sense Motive 6 (Wis, +7), Trade Skill 5 (jewelcrafting, Int, +10)

Available Spell Level: 2 Mana: 30 Spells Known: 1 - Lull, Minor Illusion, Shallow Breath, Pendril's Animation, Minor Shielding, Weaken. 2 - Gate, Color Flux. Prepared Spells: 1 - Minor Illusion, Shallow Breath, Pendril's Animation, Minor Shielding, Weaken, Gate, Color Flux, Lull.

*****

As I continue this challenge, as I write these bits of (hopefully) good fiction for bad games, I come again and again to this idea of exorcism. Of a personal closure, of pulling things out of myself and, by making it explicit and giving it stats, transforming it into a thing that can no longer trouble me. A thing that may be a part of my past, yes, but nothing I need to be ashamed of anymore. Look at it, it's got 30 mana and a +11 to Meditation. I know exactly what it is now.

EverQuest was the first game that ate me. I never had a chance. I had already been hooked by the seductive imagination of the fantasy genre and, like our protagonist above, spent most of my life achingly alone. To find a place where I could engage with others about my sparkly magical interests, and I could do it exactly as and how I wanted to be perceived? I never had a chance. They baited the trap with belonging and knew exactly what they'd catch.

It's been literal decades since I've touched anything related to EverQuest, but this silly little fantasy world is still an indelible part of me. I met friends that I've known, now, for years - I've had a 25-year-long conversation with a dude I first knew as a bucketheaded human paladin, what the fuck is this life. My tastes in fantasy have grown beyond the out-of-sequence Dragonlance and clearly-unredacted Greek myths that fascinated me as a lonely kid, but every weird obsession has to start with the simple things. And even now, decades later, here I am, making my old EverQuest character exactly as she would have been walking out of her starting city, having already done all the bat and spiderling killing she'd need to begin a long career of bullying sand giants and turning into trees in front of the bank doors so no one could get out.

As for the game itself? It's 3e D&D. If you know what that is, you know what the EverQuest Role-Playing Game is. But it's also good 3e D&D, to a point. The mechanical changes that White Wolf (jesus christ, yeah, it's White Wolf who made this) put in place to make the tabletop feel more like the MMO serve to improve the base game of D&D without adding too much complexity. A lot of the modules and additional adventure packs are, like, dungeons the game very much intends for you to grind for loot, and while I found this hilariously incongruous to what I come to tabletop for upon first blush... yeah, yeah, this is basically exactly what someone wanting to play tabletop EverQuest would want in 2002. I built my old High Elf Enchanter and immediately felt the urge to go troll Crushbone. It's in me, now. The hook that caught me once knows exactly where to slide in.

Next up: I deserve a good RPG for once, as a treat.

[roll-da-credits]

DENKI SUPREMACYYYYYY 🛐🛐🛐

the “by the sea” trend where its just kissing characters all over the face but DENKI

starts sparking like pikachu 🥺

denki is the crackhead boyfriend we all deserve

Right I'm not even going to lie, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TREND YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT AHAHAHAHAHAH

I legit searched it up on TikTok and saw NOTHING LMFAO.

But if it's anything like you described it 👀👀👀, I stan kissing Denki everywhere on his face and just seeing his nose crunch up at the feeling. Only to blush furiously afterwards whilst you giggle at his playfulness.

Rip