Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 70

First two chapters of SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION!

Here are the first two chapters of my LitRPG book, SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION. You can read them here and decided if the book will be to your liking. If all goes well, CREATION should be out next week!

Chapter 1: Welcome to Sevenfold Sword Online

One year after he got fired, and ten months and two weeks after his divorce was finalized, Noah Carver was finally ready to play the game he had helped build.

He locked the door to his bedroom and set a box on the floor.

Even after everything that had happened, the bedroom remained neat and orderly. The habits of growing up on a farm and joining the military at eighteen had not deserted him, even during times of long-term stress. His computer desk with its reclining chair took up most of the space, the twin monitors and the hologram projector on standby. Carver had a few pictures on the wall in cheap plastic frames – his family on the farm, the ship he had served on during the height of the war, and a departmental group picture aboard the Stalwart, all of them wearing their uniforms and looking solemnly at the camera.

Of the forty-four people in that picture, only Carver and three others were still alive.

His double bed, made with a precision that would have pleased his sergeant back in basic training, had been shoved to the corner opposite his desk. Given that it seemed unlikely he would have anyone else in the bed with him anytime soon, Carver had thought about replacing it with a single bed instead to free up the floor space, but buying a new bed would have been a waste of money he simply didn’t have.

A significant portion of his available funds had gone toward the box on the floor.

He sat in his computer chair and gazed at the box, thinking. The box itself looked expensive – glossy black cardboard with the bright logo of Neural Technologies on the side, accompanied by artwork of two fantasy warriors (the man’s armor covered more than the woman’s, which could have served as swimwear or maybe exotic lingerie) fighting creatures that looked like orcs or trolls. A smaller notice on the side of the box also listened off the productivity and educational applications of the device, though no artwork accompanied those much less popular uses.

Once Carver opened that box, he was committed.

No turning back.

But he had been committed for a long time already, hadn’t he? Ever since he had made the discovery that had gotten him fired from Maskell Entertainment.

With no hesitation, he produced his multitool and cut through the seal and the packing tape.

A thought occurred to him, and he smiled at his own hesitation. Unpacking the contents of the box would have been well and good, but he still had to run firmware updates and patches. If he dramatically unpacked the headset while contemplating the meaning of the moment, he would end up waiting for a half hour while all the latest patches downloaded.

“Tammy,” he said.

The AI interface on his desktop computer chimed to life. “Yes, Noah?” The voice was calm and feminine.

He had named the interface Tammy after the woman who had run the hardware store near his father’s farm. Tammy Yaroslav had been calm, cool, collected, hyper-competent, and had known how to fix anything. Carver’s father had brought his automated tractors to her for maintenance and replacement fuel cells. The first time Carver had used an AI voice interface, not long after he had joined the military, he had named it Tammy in her memory.

Carver wondered what the real Tammy would have thought of that.

Probably she would have made several suggestions for improvement and offered to find him parts cheaper.

“Download and install the Sevenfold Sword Online client to secure partition five,” said Carver. “Full encryption, with access only from my fingerprint, voice scan, and password. Link it to my masked account. Also download and install any patches and updates for the client.”

“Working,” said Tammy. “Estimated time to completion, seventeen minutes and forty-five seconds.” A progress bar appeared on one of the monitors. “Would you like me to notify you when installation and updating are complete?”

“Please,” said Carver.

With his computer busy installing the game client, Carver turned his attention to unpacking the box.

There was a lot of packing material, and he drew it out. First came the power supply, a heavy brick of plastic, and Carver crawled under his desk and plugged it in. Then came the data cable, which would connect to his computer, a cable considerably thicker than the power cord. Carver located a suitable port on the back of the system and inserted the cable.

Finally, he unwrapped the last of the packing material and drew out the device.

It was a Diadem.

Specifically, a Neural Technologies MX-7 Diadem, the latest and greatest in Neural Interfaced Virtual Reality headsets. The Diadem was a band of metal about half an inch thick and an inch tall, adjustable on the sides to accommodate a range of different head sizes. Carver turned it over in his hands, surprised at the weight. Or the lack thereof, rather – the heaviest part of the headset was the ports where the power and the data cables plugged into the back. The first NIVR headset he had used had easily been three times thicker and heavy enough that spending more than an hour with it caused nasty headaches and neck cramps.

The technology had come a long way. It was even lighter than the ones he had used in the military.

Carver connected the power cable to the port on the back of the Diadem. A green LED flashed, and he plugged in the data cable. A new notification appeared on his screen, informing him that the system was downloading and installing the latest drivers from Neural Technologies.

With seven minutes remaining on the game client download, Carver took a moment to tidy up, putting the packing material into the trash and breaking down the box to carry out to the trash. For a second, he almost walked out to the recycler but then stopped himself, unwilling to leave his computer unlocked and unattended while it installed the client and the drivers for the Diadem. It wasn’t terribly likely that anyone would choose that moment to break into his uncle’s apartment and steal Carver’s computer, but he didn’t want anyone to know what he intended to do with Sevenfold Sword Online.

Much like the habits of tidiness, the data security training he had acquired in the military was still with him.

His computer chimed. The Sevenfold Sword Online client was still downloading, but the drivers for the Diadem had been installed, and the device was ready. Carver seated himself in his computer chair, picked up the Diadem, and settled it upon his head, making sure the contact points rested against his temples and forehead. The metal felt cool against his skin, and it took a moment of fiddling to find a decent angle to drape the power and data cables. People had been talking about creating wireless NIVR headsets ever since the technology had first come on the market, but given the power and data throughput requirements of a NIVR environment, let alone a game, Carver doubted that would ever come to pass.

He tapped some commands into his keyboard and brought up the control software for the Diadem. While the bells and whistles had improved, the basic layout had not changed since the first time he had used a crude NIVR headset as a teenager and he hit the Calibrate button. A cold, shivering feeling went through the inside of his head, and a new status bar appeared on one of the monitors. The shivering feeling intensified as the Diadem calibrated itself to his neural patterns.

“Calibration complete,” announced Tammy forty-three seconds later.

Despite the many things that weighed upon his mind, Carver smiled. Neural interfaced virtual reality technology had indeed improved quite a bit in the last fifteen years. The first time he had used an early NIVR headset, it had taken the better part of two and a half hours to calibrate to his neural profile, and it had given him a nasty headache, one only equaled a few years later when he had gotten his first hangover during shore leave.

The technology had grown far more refined in that fifteen years.

Even, he reflected, in the year since he had been fired.

As if to prove his point, the computer chimed again, and a notification appeared on one of the screens.

“Installation complete,” announced Tammy. “The Sevenfold Sword Online client has been installed to secure partition five, linked to your masked account, and protected with full encryption, password, fingerprint, and voice authentication.”

“Thank you,” said Carver, turning his chair to face his keyboard and mouse. He clicked on the icon that represented secure partition five, and a password prompt appeared. Carver entered his password, swiped his fingerprint over the reader, and then read aloud from the text box that appeared on the screen. He had chosen the most secure voice analysis setting, so he had to read four lengthy sentences before the system decided that it was his voice and not a high-end AI clone.

Given what Carver had discovered about the game, he couldn’t be too careful.

The partition unlocked, the icon for the Sevenfold Sword Online client appearing on his screen.

Carver took a moment to adjust his chair. After much experience and trial and error, he found that he was most comfortable during an extended NIVR session in a reclining position. The newest headset models, including the Diadem, included low-level muscle stimulation during sessions to counteract the bad effects of too much sitting, but Carver remained dubious about that.

“Tammy,” said Carver, glancing at the time display in the corner of his monitor. It was just after two in the afternoon, and Uncle Royce would arrive home shortly after six. The human brain could process NIVR inputs much faster than normal stimuli, which meant that time within Sevenfold Sword Online ran at a 5x multiplier – for every five hours that passed in the game, only one passed in the real world. “Set an alarm for 5:45 PM, to notify me inside the game.”

“Acknowledged,” said Tammy. “Would you like me to launch the Sevenfold Sword Online client?”

Carver took a deep breath.

A year since he had been fired, a year since he had been inside the game.

A year since he had seen something that forced him to act.

“Yes,” said Carver. “Launch it now, please.”

“Launching,” said Tammy.

A faint hum came from the Diadem headset as it powered up.

And then…

…the world went white as the game loaded.

Chapter 2: Character Creation

A dozen different memories blazed simultaneously through Carver’s mind.

The official term for the experience was “memory foam,” and it usually happened the first few times using a new NIVR headset. The primitive initial iterations of virtual reality had only engaged the visual senses, usually through a crude set of goggles strapped to the user’s face. Neural interfaced virtual reality engaged all the user’s senses simultaneously by directly accessing the nervous system through the headset. The inventors of the technology had expected it to be used for education and a variety of industrial applications, and it was, but it had found a profitable use in the gaming sector.

But NIVR technology had some occasional odd and mostly benign side effects. Memory foam often occurred with the first use of a new headset, followed by intense dreams in the first subsequent REM cycle, and even the MX-7 Diadem had memory foam.

Which meant for a few seconds Carver experienced a dozen memories as vividly as he had when living them for the first time.

Running through the fields of his parents’ farm.

The first time he had successfully programmed one of the automated tractors.

Driving into town with his mother.

His first kiss with Mary Crane behind Tammy Yaroslav’s store, the way she had bit her lip and smiled after.

The cold look on Kat’s face when she heard what he had discovered on Maskell Entertainment’s servers.

The day the war had started, blasts of fire plunging from the sky and ripping apart his parents’ house and barns.

Running through the frozen forest with the other surviving crewers of the Stalwart, the metallic buzzing of the xianzhar behind them.

Always the xianzhar…

The memory foam lasted only a few seconds, but it stretched for an eternity.

Then it ended, and the game client loaded.

Carver found himself standing in a round chamber built of rough-hewn stone blocks. Torches burned in sconces along the walls, throwing a flickering light over everything. Niches in the walls held statues of armored knights, gauntleted hands resting upon the pommels of stone longswords.

A flourish of music came to Carver’s ears, a mixture of trumpets and warlike drums.

He turned and saw the words floating in the center of the room.

SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE, the words fashioned from burnished iron and arranged in the game’s now-iconic logo.

Below the title floated smaller words proclaiming that the game had been developed by Maskell Entertainment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Maskell Industries, Inc.

Below that was still smaller text informing the reader that Sevenfold Sword Online was based on the original novels by Jonathan Moeller. Next to it was an even smaller link that, if touched, would take the reader to a very long and very expensive legal document explaining the intricacies of salvage law and the legal basis of Maskell Entertainment’s claim to the gaming rights from Moeller’s books.

If Carver remembered the metrics correctly, something like one in every twenty-six thousand users ever opened the document.

He walked forward, glancing down at himself as he did. His avatar was male and at the moment, wore generic in-game clothes – ragged trousers, a torn tunic, simple leather shoes. The Sevenfold Sword Online logo disappeared as he walked through it.

A new prompt appeared in the air before him.

DO YOU NEED A TUTORIAL ON VIRTUAL REALITY? YES/NO.

“No, thank you,” said Carver. Despite the rapid growth of NIVR technology, many people were still unfamiliar with it, which led to the spectacle of new players constantly walking into walls or unable to figure out how to turn door handles. Roundup videos of “noob players” getting stuck on walls or doorways were frequently popular on the various streaming channels.

Another notification appeared before him in the form of a giant text box, along with a prompt informing him that he had to accept the game’s Terms and Conditions of Service before he could continue. Carver scrolled to the bottom of the box, the text blurring past, and tapped the Accept button. Many of the developers he had worked with on the game had made frequent jokes about lawyers.

Carver, not so much.

The xianzhar didn’t have lawyers.

The text box disappeared, and ahead of him, Carver saw a stone corridor leading into a courtyard.

“Come forward, adventurer,” came a woman’s voice, musical yet commanding. “Let us see what destiny awaits you.”

Carver strode down the corridor. Like the first chamber, it had been built of rusticated stone blocks, the ceiling rising to an arch overhead. Torches blazed in wall-mounted iron sconces every so often. The scent of their smoke came to his nostrils. Carver noted with amusement that the smoke from each torch smelled exactly the same – a minor cost-cutting measure in the game’s development.

The corridor ended in a castle courtyard. Towers rose overhead, outlined against the night sky. Three moons glowed above him – one of them blue, two a sullen red. The game world had thirteen moons, and their position enhanced or dampened the various kinds of magic. Four bonfires blazed in the courtyard, set within braziers of stone and metal, casting dancing shadows over everything.

A woman waited for him in the center of the courtyard. A giant golden exclamation point hovered above her head, a not-so-subtle indicator that Carver should talk to her. She looked about forty and wore an elaborate green gown with drooping sleeves and golden scrollwork upon the hems and bodice. A black leather belt cinched her waist, and a sheathed dagger rested upon her hip. In her right hand, she held a worn-looking wooden staff. A bronze diadem held back her blond hair, and her sharp blue eyes considered Carver as he approached.

“Welcome, adventurer,” said the woman. “Do you know who I am?”

Given that Carver had sat in on several dozen meetings refining and tweaking the game’s character creation sequence, he did. “You are Calliande Arban, the Keeper of Andomhaim, and you’re here to start me on my quest.”

Calliande raised an eyebrow. She really was quite attractive. This had proven a difficulty in some of the earlier versions of the game since a few players had taken it upon themselves to grope or otherwise molest her. Since Calliande Arban was one of the highest-leveled non-player characters in the game and promptly annihilated any attackers, this was a problem. The solution had come in the form of a max-leveled Shock Shield spell, which was permanently active around Calliande during the character creation sequence. Carver’s team had also adjusted the ragdoll physics for avatars during the character creation sequence, so anyone who touched Calliande was thrown across the courtyard, limbs windmilling. The unintentional comedy was highlighted when clips from players stupid enough to attack Calliande were uploaded to the game’s official streaming channel.

The genre of “noob Calliande attack” quickly became popular and was often recut with comical music.

“I see you are familiar with the realm of Andomhaim, adventurer,” said Calliande. “Do you still wish my counsel?”

That was the game’s way of letting experienced players skip the character creation walkthrough.

“I do,” said Carver. “I have not returned to Andomhaim in some time, and things may have changed since then.” He had kept up to date with the patches, but still best to be prepared.

“As you wish, then,” said Calliande. “Andomhaim needs heroes, but there are many paths those heroes can take. First, shall you be male or female?”

“Male,” said Carver. Given the immersion capabilities of NIVR technology, he had always been a little baffled at the number of players who opted to create characters of the opposite sex. He supposed that playing as a female character would help obscure his identity if he ever came to the attention of Maskell Entertainment, but he would find the experience too strange.

Calliande nodded. “Andomhaim is home to many different races. Which one shall you be?”

She gestured, and statues appeared in the courtyard. Each one stood on a plinth and had been carved from gray stone. Carver recognized them as the playable races within the game – humans, high elves, gray elves, orcs, halflings, dwarves, dark elves, umbral elves, manetaurs, tygrai, and others. Each race also had the option for a variety of different origins – you could play as a noble-born human from the city of Tarlion or a commoner from Cintarra or an orc from the kingdom of Rhaluusk. Each race had its own strengths and disadvantages, with bonus skills provided by the origin.

“Human,” said Carver. “The Cintarran commoner origin, please.”

The other statues disappeared, leaving only a statue of a human wearing simple clothes. Text scrolled across Carver’s vision, informing him that the Human: Cintarran Commoner race and background granted him +5 bonuses to Strength and Endurance and a +10 skill boost to both Small Blades and Lockpicking.

The Lockpicking bonus was going to come in handy.

“Then you shall be a human of Cintarra,” said Calliande. “Now another choice lies before you.” She gestured, and the shadows shifted. “Behold.”

Three pedestals of stone appeared in the courtyard, each one supporting a statute carved out of the same gray rock. The first statue showed an armored warrior carrying a sword and a shield. The second depicted a figure in robes holding a staff in his right hand, left hand outthrust to cast a spell. The final statue showed a crouching man with the hood of his cloak drawn over his face, daggers gripped in either hand.

“There are three paths you can choose to walk,” said Calliande. She pointed her staff at each of the statues in turn. “The way of the warrior. The way of magic. Or the way of the rogue.”

“Yes,” said Carver. “You’re talking about which basic character class I should choose. Fighter, Mage, or Rogue. Then once I get to level ten, I can specialize.” He realized that he was talking about game mechanics to an NPC, but that was the nature of a NIVR game – it started to feel real.

“That is correct, adventurer,” said Calliande. “I see you are more familiar with the lore of Andomhaim than I thought. Have you much experience of our realm?”

“I do,” said Carver. He had helped build it. “But I haven’t been back for a year. I imagine things have changed since then.”

She smiled. “As I tell my students in the Tower of the Magistri, the one constant in all things is change itself. A paradox that defies understanding, like so much of the world. But perhaps I can offer counsel. What path do you wish to choose?”

“I will start as the Rogue class,” said Carver.

Calliande nodded. “May I ask why?”

“Because once I get to level ten, I need to specialize as the Nightblade class,” said Carver. “Nightblades can use magic, and I need the Invisibility spell for…” He almost said for what he needed to do but caught himself at the last minute. “For the particular kind of playstyle I have in mind.”

Calliande gestured with her staff, and another statue appeared. It showed a man wearing sleek leather armor, his face and head hidden beneath a cowl and a mask. Daggers rested in either hand, serrated and far more ornate than those held by the Rogue statue. If Carver remembered right, those weapons were dvargir-forged assassin daggers, which had a minimum level of fifty-five to use.

“The Nightblades walk the path of both stealth and magic,” said Calliande. “They strike from the shadows, using their magic to conceal themselves, and can work spells of confusion and misdirection among their foes. Often they serve the forces of evil, but heroic Nightblades can perform great deeds in service to noble goals.”

“I choose the Rogue class,” said Carver. “And once I reach level ten, I intend to specialize in the Nightblade class.”

Calliande considered him for a second. She was silent for so long Carver started to wonder if there was a problem with the game or if his new Diadem headset was glitching. It had better not – he had spent a significant part of his limited funds on the damned thing. Then again, given the server load on Sevenfold Sword Online, it was entirely possible that the game was lagging, and Carver had simply picked a bad time to create his new character.

“It seems to me, adventurer,” said Calliande, “that you are a man who is clear in his goals.”

Carver met her eyes. He knew that she wasn’t real, that none of this was real, that it was a calculation running on a server somewhere. But for a second, her blue eyes seemed to have a weight and presence that he couldn’t remember feeling before in a NIVR game or training simulation.

Maybe the technology really had advanced in the last year.

“Yes,” he said.

She waved a hand, and the statues disappeared. In their place, a mirror rose out of the ground. Carver saw Calliande’s reflection in it, standing next to his own. At the moment, his avatar looked like himself – wiry build, black hair in need of a trim, gray eyes – though sort of like a higher-resolution version of his actual appearance.

“You may choose your avatar’s appearance here,” said Calliande. “Some adventurers choose to look the way they look in your world. Others prefer to alter their appearance.” She raised an eyebrow, a dry note entering her voice. “I have noticed that some adventurers tend to…augment their attributes to a considerable degree.”

“Yeah,” said Carver, stepping to the mirror. The appearance of players’ in-game avatars had been a topic of frequent discussion – and occasional hilarity – when he had still worked at Maskell Entertainment. As he approached the mirror, a control panel appeared next to it, with sliders to adjust his avatar’s facial features, hair color, skin tone, and overall build. There was a RANDOMIZE button, and Carver tapped it three times until he settled on a completely generic male appearance – brown hair, brown eyes, skin a few shades darker than Carver’s own. He didn’t look all that different from most of the NPCs in the Cintarra area, which was the point.

The less chance of anyone realizing that Noah Carver was playing Sevenfold Sword Online, the better.

“Now you must assign your attribute and skill points,” said Calliande. She waved her staff again, and the face and body adjustment controls disappeared.

In its place, Carver saw the character sheet for a level 1 Rogue.

Sevenfold Sword Online used classic role-playing game-style character sheets. Each character had six basic attributes – Strength, Endurance, Dexterity, Intelligence, Willpower, and Charisma, and a wide variety of skills related to combat, magic, stealth, crafting, and others. Every character started with exactly ten points in each of the basic attributes, and each skill started at a rank of five. With his character’s Human: Cintarran Commoner background, Carver received a bonus of five points to Strength and Endurance. Carver had ten bonus points to spend, and he put six points into Dexterity, and divided the remaining four between Endurance and Willpower.

All skills started at a base rank of five, and since he had chosen Rogue as his character class, Carver received an additional ten points in Small Blades, Light Armor, Stealth, and Lockpicking. He had fifteen skill points to assign, and after a moment’s consideration, he divided them equally between Small Blades, Light Armor, and Stealth. The early stages of the game included a lot of fighting, and the faster Carver could work his way up to level 10, the better.

“All right,” said Carver. “I’m ready.”

“You are certain?” said Calliande. “Once we finish this conversation, your choices will be final. You can still go back and change anything, adventurer.”

“No,” said Carver. “I’m certain.”

“Very well,” said Calliande. “There is one final choice. What name shall you choose, adventurer? Sometimes those entering Andomhaim adventure under their real names. Or they choose a name appropriate to their origins or another alias entirely. What shall your name be?”

She waited expectantly. In front of Carver, a text field appeared, complete with a floating translucent keyboard. He could speak his character’s name or type it out if it was too complicated to say.

For all the planning Carver had done, all the preparation, he hadn’t yet considered what he would name his character. Obviously, he couldn’t walk around Sevenfold Sword Online under the name of “Noah Carver.” That would quickly draw the attention of the people he wished to investigate, which would defeat the entire purpose. He thought about choosing a random name or some sort of in-joke gamer tag, like FastKey9875 or RipRoar443, but that didn’t seem right.

His thoughts turned to the first time he had played a NIVR game back on his parents’ farm, how crude it had been compared to Sevenfold Sword Online. And as always when he thought of his parents’ farm, he remembered the day the war had started, when he had looked up in the sky and seen the blasts of fire hurtling down…

“What’s the Latin word for sky?” said Carver.

“Caelum,” answered Calliande.

“Okay,” said Carver. “That will be my character’s name. Caelum.”

“Then in the realm of Andomhaim, you shall be known as Caelum,” said Calliande. A notification appeared in Carver’s vision, informing him that he would actually be Caelum589. Apparently, a few other people had chosen the same name. She gestured, and a glowing character sheet appeared where the appearance slider had been, showing his character’s statistics. “This is who you shall be within the realm of Andomhaim, Caelum589. Now is your last chance to make any changes before your adventure begins.”

Carver took a quick look over the sheet. Caelum589 would start as a Human with the Cintarran Commoner background. His character class would be a level 1 Rogue, with the extra skill points put into Short Blades, Stealth, and Light Armor. His starting inventory would have a basic set of clothing, leather armor, two daggers, six throwing knives, and one hundred gold pieces.

His character sheet looked like this:

Name: Caelum589

Race: Human (Cintarra Commoner)

Class: Rogue

Level: 1

ATTRIBUTES

Strength: 15

Endurance: 17

Dexterity: 16

Intelligence: 10

Willpower: 12

Charisma: 10

SKILLS

Small Blades: 30

Light Armor: 20

Stealth: 20

Lockpicking: 15

(All other skills at rank 5.)

“Yes, I am ready to continue,” said Carver.

“Good,” said Calliande, and the character sheet vanished.

And to his surprise, she reached up and touched his face, turning his gaze to look at her.

She wasn’t supposed to touch him. Carver’s first worry was that her Shock Shield spell was about to blast him right out of the game, but the spell would only react if he took hostile action against her. Was the game glitching? Or had the developers added something new to the character creation sequence in the year since he had been fired?

Her eyes seemed to cut through him, almost as if she was reading his mind.

“You may well have a great destiny before you, Caelum589,” said Calliande. “Be wary. Things are not always what they seem. But I think you may know that already. And you may find allies where you least expect them.”

“What do you mean?” said Carver, but she stepped back.

“Your journey is about to begin,” said Calliande. “Great perils and mighty foes await you in the realm of Andomhaim.” She lifted her staff, ready to strike the end against the ground.

“Do I still have to sit through the opening cutscene?” said Carver.

To his surprise, Calliande grinned. “I’m afraid so. The developers put a lot of work into it, you know.”

Carver just had time to wonder if that joke had been scripted or not, and Calliande struck the end of her staff against the ground.

White light filled the world.

When it cleared, Carver felt like he was flying.

His vision swooped over a coastline. Waves splashed against the beach, and here and there among the waters, he saw small fishing boats. A flight of fire drakes flew overhead, their bronze-like scales glinting in the sun. The camera turned inland to where the towers of a mighty city rose along the coast. Its white walls gleamed in the sun, and from the city’s heart stood a mighty castle crowning a rocky crag.

Despite his annoyance at un-skippable cutscenes in general, Carver had to admit the view was impressive.

“For a thousand years,” said the narrator’s deep voice, “the realm of Andomhaim has stood against its enemies.”

The camera view changed to a typical rural village, one that had been designed as a respawn point and a quest location for players adventuring away from the major cities. As always, the level of detail was impressive. The village was a row of wooden houses along a dirt road, mountains rising in the distance. A few chickens moved through the street while villagers went about their tasks. The smells of woodsmoke and grass came to Carver’s nose.

Despite the impressive level of detail, the part of his mind that had grown up on a farm pointed out all the facts the developers had gotten wrong about pre-industrial farming.

“In that time,” continued the narrator, “the realm has grown strong.”

The view shifted to show the city of Cintarra, which would be Carver’s starting game zone. It spread on either side of a wide river, the city’s eastern and western halves connected by seven bridges, high walls of red stone protecting the city from the wilderness. A large castle and a towering cathedral dominated the city’s eastern half, and the streets bustled with traffic. Mostly humans, but quite a few orcs, dwarves, and halflings were among them.

“But our enemies have likewise grown strong,” continued the narrator, his voice growing more solemn.

The camera view shifted to display a burning village, similar to the first one that the cutscene had shown. Flames engulfed the houses, and screaming people fled from them. Savage-looking orcs in spiked armor rushed after the fleeing villagers, accompanied by misshapen wolf-like creatures. The scenes began changing faster and faster – legions of orcs with skin the color of blood, marching at the command of inhuman priestesses robed in black. Strange creatures prowled through underground caverns, emerging to hunt for prey. A half-ruined citadel of white stone, an archmage of the dark elves presiding over legions of mutated orcs and twisted creatures.

“The hour of battle has come,” intoned the narrator. The scene changed again, this time showing armored knights on horseback charging across a grassy field. Behind them, wizards in white robes cast protective spells, while armored battle mages called fire and lightning. Orcs in spiked armor rush to face them, brandishing enormous axes and swords. Dark elves and umbral elves cast spells of shadow and necromancy, raising the undead to fight as their minions.

“Andomhaim needs mighty heroes for this hour of battle,” said the narrator. “Will you be one of those heroes?”

Everything went black, and glowing letters appeared before Carver’s vision.

LOADING. PLEASE WAIT…

-JM

SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION Table of Contents!

I am now far enough along that I can share the Table of Contents for SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION, which you can see below.

Be sure to check back tomorrow – I will post the first two chapters of CREATION, and you can decide if it is your kind of book or not.

-JM

fun & games

Lately I’ve been playing four games.

Chess.com

When I was a kid, I was really into chess for a while, but the difficulty was finding people with which to play. Not many kids my age were interested in chess, and I almost always lost playing against adults. When computer chess came along, for a while I had one of those chess computers with the LEDs that light up to show you where to move the pieces, but I almost always lost to that, too. Eventually, tablets and the Internet arrived, but I never really enjoyed playing chess on a screen. There’s just something about a wooden board with well-carved, attractive chess pieces that a screen can’t match.

However, I recently realized that you can combine the screen and the wooden board. I discovered Chess.com, which allows for human vs. human games. However, more interestingly to me, it also allows for matches against various bots of increasing skill levels. I’ve been playing against the bots, arranging the pieces on my wooden board, and I’ve slowly been working my way up the skill level of the bots. I suspect that I’ll max out my ability somewhere on the lower third of Intermediate.

Of course, people sometimes focus on flashy tactics and moves in chess, especially with opening sequences. But a more prosaic approach is the best – arrange your pawns carefully, advance whenever possible to choke off your opponent’s field of movement, and try to force exchanges where you lose one of your pieces but claim one of your opponent’s more powerful pieces. Lose a knight to take a bishop, lose a bishop to take a rook, lose a rook to take a queen, and so forth. Though chess is also a game about mistakes – whoever makes the biggest mistake first generally loses.

Magic The Gathering: Arena

In a way, Magic The Gathering is a far more realistic game than chess.

I realize that sounds crazy, but hear me out.

Chess is basically a stylized medieval battle between foot soldiers and horsemen. There are no elements of random chance in the game whatsoever. A skilled player will nearly always beat a player of lesser skill, and in a match between two equivalent players, whoever makes a mistake first will probably lose.

But real life isn’t like that at all. Random chance often overrides all other considerations. It’s even in the Bible: “The race is not always to the swift, not the battle to the strong, but time and chance overtake them all.” We’ve all seen situations where a smarter, better-prepared opponent (in whatever field) was defeated by a less-skilled adversary due to luck, mischance, or simpler blundering.

Our brains find it hard to accept that the world works that way, but it does. This is why violence and the use of force are dangerously seductive because they offer a (seemingly) foolproof solution to a problem. Yet it overlooks the fact that your opponent will fight back, your opponent might be smarter than you are, there will likely be unforeseen consequences that you can’t possibly predict and that could be worse than your original problem, and sometimes luck is simply not on your side. (Of course, there are situations where force is indeed the appropriate answer, but having the moral high ground is no protection against blunders or bad luck.)  Magic The Gathering manages to capture that chaos in game form.

Wow, that got philosophical for a card game about dueling Space Wizards, didn’t it?

Anyway, the deck shuffling in Magic The Gathering adds that significant element of random chance we see in real life. Like, a Magic player could have all manner of intricate strategies prepared in his or her deck, only for it all to fall apart because of the random deck shuffling. I did play Magic for a while in the 90s and the early 2000s, but lack of time and lack of funds (those cards get expensive) meant I eventually forgot about it.

However, I recently came across Magic The Gathering: Arena, which is free-to-play with a LOT of microtransactions added in. But! Recall that in 2022 I beat ELDER SCROLLS: BLADES, another free-to-play game with many microtransactions, without paying a single penny for any of those microtransactions. For the casual Magic player, Arena is pretty good – you can pop in, play a match (one of the advantages of Magic is that the games are often over very quickly), and then you’re done. The app also automatically calculates all the various intricacies of the rules, which in Magic can get really complex.

The app itself is pleasingly frictionless, albeit with occasion connection issues. But since I discovered it in January, I’ve probably played more Magic The Gathering than I did in the 1990s and the 2000s combined. It essentially automates the most annoying part of playing Magic The Gathering – finding other players, and then dealing with those other players.

I imagine hardcore players can make use of all the tournaments and rounds and so forth, but the app is pretty good if you just want to play a quick match against a bot or some random person also using the app.

Arcane Quest

I mentioned before that I read Jon Peterson’s GAME WIZARDS last year, which describes the legal battles around the early years of Dungeons & Dragons. (D&D’s entire history seems to revolve around dice, lawsuits, and bad business decisions, up to and including recent events.) But during the early years of D&D, other companies tried to get into the fantasy wargaming space. One of them was Milton Bradley, which came out with HEROQUEST. I’d never heard of the game before, but it sounded like a lot of fun. But I don’t have the time (and the table space) to devote to an intricate long-running board game.

But! It’s a long established principle in US law, dating back to the 19th century, that you can’t copyright game rules, only the creative expression of the rules. This, for example, is why Zynga was able to make Words With Friends (which is basically Scrabble Lite) without getting sued into oblivion by Hasbro, which owns the copyright to Scrabble. (In fact, Zynga and Hasbro played ball, and Hasbro released a board game version of Words With Friends a while back.)

So someone made a video game called Arcane Quest that basically follows the rules of HEROQUEST with some modifications and changes. It’s free with ads on the iPad, and I really quite enjoyed it – I suspect it closely recreated the experience of what actually playing a board game of HEROQUEST would have been like.

Scrabble

I am very bad at Scrabble. That’s all I have to say on that topic.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 146: One Final Dungeons & Dragons Business Lesson For Indie Authors

In this week’s episode, we take a final look at the OGL and Creative Commons situation with Dungeons & Dragons, and consider what it means for indie authors.

Coupon of the Week!

The audiobook of GHOST IN THE MASK (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now available on my Payhip store! You can get it for 50% off with this coupon code:

FEBMASK

The coupon code is valid until February 27th, 2023.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

Coupon Of The Week -2/6/2023

Once again it’s time for Coupon of the Week!

The audiobook of GHOST IN THE MASK (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now available on my Payhip store! You can get it for 50% off with this coupon code:

FEBMASK

The coupon code is valid until February 27th, 2023.

-JM

Still Another Business Lesson From Dungeons & Dragons: Give Away Free Stuff

I think part of the reason I am a writer is because I am trying to understand human nature, which as we all know, is an unending puzzle that often defies explanation. As humans, we are both simultaneously rational thinking creatures and irrational to the point of self-destructive madness. People can both stun you with their generosity and amaze you with their perfidy, and sometimes this inexplicably happens in the same person.

And a recurring theme in human history is how often a group of smart people put together a plan that somehow backfires and has exactly the opposite result of what they intended.

I’ve written before about the latest legal controversy engulfing Dungeons & Dragons. (Though, to be a honest, based on what I’ve read you could put together a history solely of the many, many lawsuits and legal maneuvers around Dungeons & Dragons and arrive at a very nearly complete history of the game.) I should mention that I haven’t actually played a table-top RPG since like 1999 or so, but as a self-published fantasy writer I’m sort of living on the next street over, so to speak, so I watched the controversy with interest.

Anyway, to sum up – for the last twenty years D&D has had an Open Game License, which lets people create compatible content (settings, adventures, and the like) for D&D without paying royalties to Hasbro, which owns the rights to the game. Recently, a draft of an updated OGL leaked (probably by a Hasbro employee who recognized what a bad idea the updated license was) imposing far more restrictive terms and including the right for Hasbro to take any D&D compatible material without payment. Predictably, a massive, snowballing uproar ensued, with a variety of interesting consequences. Paizo, which makes the 2nd biggest TTRPG after D&D, sold through eight months’ worth of inventory in a few weeks. Many other RPG publishers announced high sales. D&D Beyond, Hasbro’s virtual tabletop site, lost a ton of subscribers. And Paizo and a bunch of smaller RPG publishers announced plans to make their own version of the OGL, the Open RPG Creative License, which will have the clever acronym of ORC.

So what Hasbro wanted to do was to increase D&D revenue and drum up publicity before the new D&D movie this year. Instead, the actual results of the plan were 1.) reputational damage, 2.) loss of monthly subscription revenue, 3.) increased sales for competitors, and 4.) the possible creation of a new long-term rival in ORC.

I doubt it would be any comfort to Hasbro, but this kind of thing happens again and again in human history, though often with far more serious results. Unintended consequences can be nasty. When King Richard II of England seized the estates of Henry of Bolingbroke, he didn’t think to himself “this plan will end with me starving to death in a prison cell.” Richard just wanted to rid himself of a potential rival. But what actually happened was that Henry gathered an army from other nobles whom Richard had angered, seized the crown for himself, and Richard was deposed and died of starvation in captivity. Or when the conspiracy of Brutus and Cassius stabbed Julius Caesar to death. The plan was to rid Rome of a dangerous tyrant and restore the rule of the Senate. Instead, within a few years, all the conspirators were dead, and Caesar’s nephew Octavian would rule Rome as a far more competent and ruthless tyrant for decades. (A common joke among historians is that Caesar was a merciful man who forgave his enemies, and so he was stabbed to death, while Octavian was a ruthless man who killed his enemies without mercy, and so died in bed of old age.)

No doubt we can all think of examples in our own lives or from our own employers where what was supposed to be a good plan blew up in everyone’s faces. And, without naming any examples, I’m sure we can all think of recent political and economic plans that have produced somewhat less than desirable outcomes.

However, it seems that cooler & more farsighted minds have prevailed at Hasbro. A few days ago the company announced that it was releasing the core rules of D&D to Creative Commons. Of course, the “core rules” are a massive 400 page PDF document that’s actually quite well written – it’s basically a condensed version of the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide without the excellent illustrations and artwork.

This was actually a clever move on Hasbro’s part. It defangs a lot of the criticisms, since anyone can use Creative Commons stuff so long as they attribute it. Of course, one of the things I learned reading about this is that you can’t actually copyright game mechanics thanks to a Supreme Court decision dating back to the 19th century. (This is why if you go on the Google Play Store or the App Store, you can see a lot of free games with names like “BusinessTown” that basically use a lightly modified version of the Monopoly rules but none of the trademarked terms, images, or iconography associated with Monopoly.) So if Hasbro tried to sue over it, the odds were not in the company’s favor. And if anyone makes their own RPG stuff using the core rules in Creative Commons, the Creative Commons license means that Hasbro can’t sue about it.

It also means that people will continue making RPG stuff compatible with the core D&D rules, so that’s a win for Hasbro. One of the reasons that TSR went under in the 90s was that they kept making campaign settings with beautiful illustrations and maps, but the books were so expensive to print that TSR frequently lost money on each copy sold. With the Creative Commons release, people will make compatible RPG campaign settings, which will encourage sales of Hasbro’s Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. And if Hasbro wants to go to a more restrictive license with a future version of Dungeons & Dragons or the virtual table top software, they have a clear avenue to do so. If people complain, Hasbro can always say “well, the core rules for 5th edition are in Creative Commons, go use those, but enjoy premium features in our new version of the game.” The welcoming invitation is usually a better tactic than the coercive hard sell. “Freemium” is a successful business model for a reason.

It might even remove ORC has a potential long-term threat. The table-top RPG world is a notably quarrelsome one, and getting a lot of RPG publishers to agree on anything would be difficult. It’s too soon to predict what will happen, but it’s easy to see the project devolving into infighting. To use a lightly exaggerated example, it’s hard to see a military veteran-owned RPG publisher that specializes in wargames about the Global War On Terror agreeing with an RPG publisher that specializes in romantic furrykin adventures and prominently has the phrase “we recognize that words are violence” on the publisher’s social media profiles. However! Stranger things have happened, and nothing unites people quite like a common enemy…though to return to our starting observation about human nature, nothing inspires bickering and infighting quite like a common enemy.

So, after that lengthy introduction, how does this relate to indie authors?

It shows the value and the goodwill generated by giving away things for free. I don’t mean the copyrights or anything like that, I mean the value of giving away free ebooks for people to read.

Right now, as of this writing, FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT, FROSTBORN: THE FIRST QUEST, SEVENFOLD SWORD: CHAMPION, CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, CLOAK GAMES: THIEF TRAP, SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND, and THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS are all free on the various ebook stores, and I will probably make AVENGING FIRE free as well when it comes out of Kindle Unlimited later in February. (In fact, when I was typing this, I forgot that I made GHOST IN THE RING free as well a while back.) That comes to over 800,000 words of fiction that I give away for free almost every day across multiple platforms. At my absolute top writing speed, at peak health and with nothing going wrong in Real Life, I can write about 100,000 words a month, though I’ve slowed down in the last few years.

That means, every single day, I give away like eight months of work for free. Eight months!

Taken on its own, that sounds like utter insanity.

But! In January 2023 I sold 3 times as many ebooks as I gave away for free. The free ebooks are an excellent way to draw in new readers and get them to try the paid books in the rest of my various series. And anecdotally I have heard from many, many readers who say they got started reading one of my free books and kept on reading.

I also wrote about 50,000 words of short stories or so that I gave away for free to my newsletter subscribers in 2022. Again, that’s several weeks of work. But it encourages people to sign up to my newsletter, which is my best tool for selling books. It also has the salutary effect of increasing my newsletter engagement since people click on the links to get the free story, which means fewer of my newsletters end up in spam folders.

So I think the lesson for indie authors here is clear – don’t be afraid to give away ebooks for free. I don’t think I would have found nearly as many readers if I had not.

-JM

SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION rough draft done!

I am very pleased to report that the rough draft of my LitRPG book is done!

Now it is finally time to reveal the book description, title, and cover.

It’s called SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION, and you can read the book description below. The cover image is also attached to this post.

Once get they’re ready, I’ll post the first two chapters here, and you can decide if it will be the kind of book you would enjoy or not, since I’ve never written in LitRPG before.

Next up is GRIEFER, a short story my newsletter subscribers will get for free when the book comes out. GRIEFER will describe how the protagonist of CREATION met someone significant to him.

If all goes well, the book should be out before the end of February!

###

The greatest epic fantasy MMORPG in history has a ticking time bomb at its heart.

Noah Carver used to work for Maskell Entertainment, developing the smash hit virtual reality game Sevenfold Sword Online (loosely based on the fantasy novels of Jonathan Moeller).

Then Carver got fired.

Not for incompetence, or for laziness.

But because he discovered the truth.

The game’s runaway success was built on the deadly technology of humanity’s ancient enemy, and Maskell Entertainment doesn’t want anyone to find out.

And unless Carver finds proof, a lot of innocent people are going to die…

-JM

ad results January 2023

New month coming up, which means it’s time to look at ad results for January 2023!

One thing slightly different this month – I worked out how to include ACX audiobooks in with the ad results. They should contribute to the totals, since the best way to advertise an audiobook really is to advertise the ebook connected to it. I should note that means I get better results advertising THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE instead of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, because THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE comes with a massive 39 hour audiobook that you can get for one credit.

First up, Facebook ads. Here’s what I got for every $1 I spent on Facebook ads:

FROSTBORN: $6.07

THE GHOSTS: $3.58

SILENT ORDER: $2.12

For February I’ll probably stop advertising SILENT ORDER on Facebook until I publish THUNDER HAND and go back to advertising CLOAK GAMES for the month, or maybe spend that budget on a lead generation ad for my newsletter. But I’ll probably start trying SILENT ORDER OMNIBUS ONE on Amazon ads, since if they don’t work it doesn’t cost much money.

Here’s how my Amazon ads did. Remember that for an Amazon ad to work, it must get 1 sale for every 6 to 8 clicks, and I’ll also include what I got back for every $1 spent:

DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE: $8.02, 0.78 clicks per sale.

CLOAK OF DRAGONS: $1.52, 3.84 clicks per sale.

SWORD OF THE SQUIRE did a lot better than CLOAK OF DRAGONS because DRAGONSKULL: TALONS OF THE SORCERER came out. Amazon ads sometimes have this annoying chicken-and-egg problem where they work well once you have external traffic coming in, but the whole point of Amazon ads is to generate that traffic! So releasing a new book in the series when you’re advertising the first book helps circumvent that problem.

Finally, I continued the combined Facebook/Amazon ad campaigns on DEMONSOULED OMNIBUS ONE. Here’s how it did for January:

DEMONSOULED OMNIBUS ONE, 1.32 clicks per sale, and for the entire series, $1.74 for every $1 spent.

The sales-per-click was a lot better than in December, but the return was $0.04 less per $1 spent.

So all the ads were profitable, which was good.

Thanks for reading, everyone! Hopefully I will have a new book out in February.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 145: Third Person vs First Person

In this week’s episode, we take a look at third person narration versus first person narration, and consider the pros and cons of each when writing fiction.

Once again it’s time for Coupon of the Week!

The audiobook of GHOST IN THE ASHES (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now available on my Payhip store! You can get it for 50% off with this coupon code:

JANASHES

The coupon code is valid until February 15th, 2023.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

Coupon of the Week – 1/30/2023

Once again it’s time for Coupon of the Week!

The audiobook of GHOST IN THE ASHES (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now available on my Payhip store! You can get it for 50% off with this coupon code:

JANASHES

The coupon code is valid until February 15th, 2023.

-JM