Chapter One
“I’m telling you, Dirk, we should kill them while we have the chance.”
I look up at Nogg from the corpse of the lesser tribesman I’ve been searching. Well, looting. But don’t be too quick to judge. We all have our stations in life. And me being expelled from school because of my best friend Nogg—well, Brian in real life—has left me rifling through dead NPCs just to make enough cash to afford food and rent. And maybe car insurance someday.
My looting turns up a copper coin and three human teeth. I have about sixty teeth right now and I’m debating whether to keep these and maybe do some potion grinding to sell at the River Market, or just leave them with the rest of the crap. The raid team who cleared this dungeon really cleaned it out.
“Dude! Dirk, c’mon. They’re AFK. Probably watching Netflix or something. We can kill them and get something of value for a change. Look at this big guy’s sword.”
I shake my head and move to the next lesser tribesman. “The moment you attack they’ll get a ping on their phone and then that’s it. We haven’t even chosen classes yet, and it’s not like we or anyone else have a backup character.”
“You think they have the app?”
“Everybody that gets past level twenty has the app. It’s required.”
“You… you think they’re over level twenty?” Nogg sounds a little scared now.
“Twenty-two at a minimum. Or, at least the Wizard-girl is. She has a Staff of Divine Justice. You can’t use that until you’re level twenty-two.”
Nogg walks around the big plate-mailed Fighter he’d been standing in front of and over to the Mage. I can see Brian’s character, a dirty-faced elvish male wearing rags and muddy boots, strafing from side to side, then crouching and jumping, as if trying to get the Wizard’s attention. He then circles around and repeats the process.
“Oh, yeah,” he says, acting like he’s going to run into the busty Wizard and then abruptly stopping. “I guess I got distracted by her, uh, outfit. Didn’t notice the staff.”
I hadn’t paid any of the trio of adventurers much mind. At least not after the initial shock of being a pair of level ones running unawares into a clan of players. But that wore off once I realized we weren’t in danger of being killed.
That’s a real struggle in King’s League. It’s hell to level up, like an Everquest throwback on the juice. And if you die, it’s back to level one. The highest I’d made it was level thirty, but that was when I was living at home and could focus on advancing instead of looting just to earn some cash. It was also fresh after the beta had ended and I still had a pretty good advantage over the players who didn’t play that beta obsessively. Once that level thirty character was killed, well, not a lot of glory was to be had.
Anyway, because the game is such a grind, and because high-level characters are generally evil dicks, if they catch a low-level PC outside of the game’s safe zones like the Woods of Adventure, they’ll kill you in a heartbeat for the easy 1,000 XP.
You can stay in the Woods until you reach level eight, just so you have a chance at defending yourself in the rest of the game. Only trouble with that is… there’s nothing worth selling there unless you have some insane luck and a legendary item drops from a giant forest rat or something. But if you’re banking on that to get ahead, then you may as well buy some lotto tickets while you’re at it.
I managed to climb back up to level five recently, just from random monster encounters while looting and a good deal of luck. In between running for my life. But that ended last night—again, thanks to Nogg.
And maybe that’s what makes me lose my temper with him. “Nogg, would you quit screwing around? This may not be important to you, but I’ve gotta earn another eight hundred bucks at the River Market. Rent is due next week.”
“Dude. Relax. I won’t touch them. Not saying I don’t want to touch her, though. Where have you been all my life QUEEN_KATTY77?”
“Why don’t you DM her?” I ask, passing by on a chance to pocket more teeth and a broken stone spearhead. “Tell her you’re a freshman third-string quarterback on scholarship who probably won’t be able to play because of GPA.”
“Hey,” Nogg says, sounding annoyed. “Second string. And that’s only until Rogers graduates and then it’s my show. And, also, I’ll nail the finals and make up for it. You know this, man.”
“If I were you, I’d be studying instead of wasting my time looting lesser tribesmen.”
“Just wanna hang out, buddy. Figure I owe you that much.”
You owe me a lot more than that, Brian.
I inspect another tribesman and find an Orb of Looking. Five bucks. Easy. All right. Now we’re getting somewhere. Maybe this outing won’t be a total loss.
“Well, do me a favor then. Forum says that the drops of enchanted spiritual weapons are supposed to be increased. Like an unofficial event.” I move toward a fork in the cave, hoping that maybe there’s an untouched NPC waiting to be looted. “I watched one of Salvatore’s streams earlier and he got like three +4 stone hatchets from raiding against Neolithic mobs. That’s equivalent to a level thirty weapon but it can be used at level two, so an easy fifty bucks resale on the market.”
I take a few more steps into the darkness, debating whether I want to burn a torch or not. I only have two left in my inventory.
“Brian? Hey, you even listening?”
I hear the telltale fwoosh of a fireball being cast, and then see my shadow lengthen down the cave I’m traveling as the cavern fills with light. Nogg can’t use fireball, which means…
NOGG HAS BEEN CRISPIFIED, says the game’s ticker.
“Brian, what the hell?” I shout.
“Sorry!”
I’m trying to get deep into the shadows, not wanting to lose what I’ve gathered so far. “What happened?”
“I, uh, I may have tried to touch QUEEN_KATTY77’s boob. Guess the game interpreted it as a melee attack.”
“Of course it did, you idiot! There’s no ‘sexual caress’ button.”
“Well excuse me for thinking this was more like a BioWare game then!”
“We’ve been playing this game for years, Brian!”
“Things get patched!”
I move further into the shadowy recesses of the cave. All three adventurers are back at their VR sets and moving through the dungeon. I can hear their footsteps, albeit with a distant echo.
“You’re sure you saw another one?” booms one of the player characters. A deep-voiced guy that made me think of the Fighter. They’re using the general game chat, something higher level players do instead of private chat like me and Brian. Sort of a flex. They roleplay and they’re not worried about getting killed because of how far they’ve progressed.
“Yes,” replies a more feminine voice. “Out of the corner of my eye when the little newb tried punching me to death.”
“Dude,” Brian says, “did you hear that? They’re using general chat instead of private or Guild. Are we sure they’re not scrubs?”
King’s League is an interesting game in that it has three chat options. The default is game chat, which anyone can hear provided that their character is close enough to hear what’s being said. Then there’s private chat. That is, obviously, private, but this has limitations. It’s voice only, just a party hotline, really. And then there’s guild chat, which works like a mix of both. If you talk to other members of your guild, they hear our voice fine, but to anyone else in the area of effect, they hear someone speaking a guild cant. Just a bunch of gibberish. That disadvantage is that people will know that a guild is speaking somewhere around them, the advantage is that while operating in guild chat you get a lot of additional perks. You can highlight a monster, player, object, map point… whatever, and it’ll show up on the rest of your Guild’s HUDs. It’s the best way to coordinate big campaign movements but it comes at the expense of complete silence. It sounds weird if you’ve never experienced it, but it goes a long way in improving the atmosphere. There’s always conversation of some sort.