Where the hell did Z3ke run off to? It’s been three days and he hasn’t posted. Doesn’t he know that he’s contractually obligated to be perpetually online for our entertainment?
Chop chop isekai protagonist. Chop chop.
10161066
Agree. Null got him to get a Tech Slate for the specific purpose of dropping travel logs from the road. So far all we’ve got is one description of a small fight against a Jackal Runner, him telling us he got into another fight, and then that tragic backstory bomb from Corva.
HandswithoutArms
Dude is fine. Y’all need to chill. He “disappears” every few days, saying that he’s out of contact, and then comes back with a novella for us to read. Give him another day to check for spelling errors and shit and I’m sure he’ll be back posting.
BTW, I don’t know how to feel about all that Corva stuff. I mean, it’s cool that he’s giving backstory for the most notable NPC in the fic…but it was sooooo depressing. I prefer the Corva that lives in my head: the weird, smug, occasionally drunk mystery-man.
VeneratedWitchHunter
I’m right there with you on the backstory.
One of the reasons that Corva is so appealing to everyone is that he’s this mysterious figure who pops up randomly in all the games. How are you gonna take away all that mystery and replace it with sadness?
I get that Z3ke is trying to capitalize on Corva’s fame to draw more eyeballs to his fic, but he’s making him into this tragic figure. People are gonna be replaying the games and Corva pops up and they’re going to be like “oh buddy…you need therapy.”
Totally ruins the immersion for me.
Chick8da_swarm
I’m actually into it. That backstory that Z3ke made up makes Corva more likable and real. Instead of him being some one-dimensional mentor character who shows up from time to time, Zeke is trying to give him layers.
I replayed Null Protocol recently and Corva shows up drunk in that one and suddenly it’s like, oh that makes complete sense with everything that you’ve been through.
Z3ke (Original Poster)
You rang?
To everyone who is complaining that I haven’t updated, I’ve got a very good reason for that. Brace yourselves. Here it is.
There is absolutely nothing to update.
I can only write “we walked through the Deadlands and I lost half my body weight in sweat and Pell killed something” so many times before it gets boring. I know that a bunch of you (*cough cough* Venerated) would complain that I’m padding my adventure if I posted that again.
The past few days have been walking, more walking, a shit ton of sweating, Pell scouting up ahead, Wren being silent, Cole giving history lectures, and the group shoving low-risk monsters in my direction so I can learn to fight better.
Oh, and Corva is trying to teach me a bunch of skills but that’s…not going so great. He’s patient, but I’m beginning to think he’s wondering where his life went so wrong that he’s failing to teach some guy out in the back-end of nowhere.
MushroomCleric
If you don’t have any more adventures to tell us, how about updating us on your skills? Is there anything new on that front? (If you’re having trouble brainstorming a bunch of adventures, you can always update us with a character sheet. That could bump up your posting numbers.)
Also, it’s a little surprising to hear that Corva isn’t a great teacher. He’s basically the mentor in every Fracture-verse game.
InnerMarrow
| He’s basically the mentor in every Fracture-verse game. |
This isn’t completely true. If you look at all the games he shows up in, he only ever gives advice, not lessons. He offers quests and points the PC in the right direction to guide the narrative along, but he doesn’t ever teach a skill. He’s more a narrative guide than anything.
So it tracks that Corva wouldn’t be a great teacher for Zeke. He’s providing guidance and security and explaining what Zeke should work on, but he’s not unlocking any skills. If Zeke wants a teacher, he’s gonna have to go back to The MIZ and pay one of the Grand Masters in teaching to help him out. And that’s gonna be ruinously expensive for him at this point and time.
Z3ke (Original Poster)
The only new skill that I picked up is Athletics. The description it gives off is vague as hell. It’s literally “the ability to move your body in an athletic fashion.” I mean…what the hell is that?
Corva did try and teach me how to cook one night, but Pell immediately vetoed that. Direct quote: “I refuse to eat whatever abomination a novice produces while we’re hundreds of miles from the nearest doctor.”
Then Wren chimed in and painted a vivid nightmare of all of us dying from dehydration due to culinary-related bowel disasters and I stepped back and agreed not to try and cook for anyone.
AnywayHeresWonderwall
Any update on where you’re headed? You’ve been out in the Deadlands for a while now. I know Null suggested that you were headed out to the Soundtrap. Have you asked Cole about that? Has he told you what you’re gonna be looking for?
Z3ke (Original Poster)
Oh, man. Yea I made the mistake of asking Cole where we’re headed and if we’re really going to the Soundtrap. That made him furious. He wasn’t angry that I knew where we were going. He was angry that I called it the Soundtrap.
According to him, the name Soundtrap is a “lazy bastardization and mistranslation of ancient Venic.”
He said all that in the tone of a scholar discovering that someone replaced a priceless manuscript with a crayon drawing of a dragon going “RAWR.” I mean just…disgust mixed with anger. He went off on this long ass tangent and I remember thinking that he wasn’t even this worked up when we were fighting for our lives against those jackal things.
Apparently Venic is the language of the original settlers to this region, but it’s a dead tongue now that is only spoken by a handful of monks who are hiding out in some remote region of the world called the Carenfel. What’s interesting about that little nugget of information is that the Carenfel has absolutely zero historical interaction with the Deadlands. It’s actually on the complete opposite end of the world. Supposedly, it’s a big mystery in academic circles about how all these monks can be fluent in a dead language that existed half a world away.
That little factoid could have been interesting, but Cole delivered it in the middle of a six hour lecture while we were hiking along.
Cole told me that the actual name of the place that we’re heading to is something like se Froun Traf. That was the name that was uncovered by some shoddy historian writing a history of the late-era Vash Dynasty. From the way that Cole talked about the man, I’m guessing that he’s a particularly sore spot for Cole. He went off about the guy for hours despite the fact that the historian had died about seventy years ago.
After Cole corrected me about the name for a good five minutes, he then launched into a sprawling six-hour lecture that touched on such topics as colonial loan words, phonetic drift, proto-Venic migration patterns, the tragedy of casual nomenclature, the political ramifications of historiography, and the dangers of geographical determinism. I have no clue what any of those words mean.
Suffice it to say, no fun was had by anyone during that lecture. Wren kept shooting me angry glares like “you did this to us.” That’s an entirely unfair accusation because Cole had answered my original question within the first five minutes. The rest of the lecture was just Cole being Cole.
Pell bailed from the group the moment the word etymology came pouring out of Cole’s mouth. And Corva decided to be a dick about the whole thing because whenever Cole looked like he was winding down in his lecture, he’d ask little follow-up questions that would get Cole revved back up. I know he was doing it on purpose to prolong our torture because, after asking his question, Corva would just look at me with an evil grin on his face.
I absorbed maybe 5% of the lecture (which was still too much) because I was too focused on not slipping and dying during our hike.
Anyway, lesson learned. Don’t ask Cole about geography, history, linguistics, or anything else that would fall under any sort of academic discipline.
10161066
| and the dangers of geographical determinism |
Cole is now my favorite character in this fanfic because of the lecture he gave Zeke.
For anyone who is interested, geographical determinism is basically the idea that geography alone shapes the fate, culture, and success of civilizations. Yes, geography does have some influence in a civilization. Mountains affect travel, rivers help trade, oceans act as a natural defensive barrier. But claiming that geography is the sole determination for the rise and fall of civilizations is bad history.
The most well-known geographical determinist is Jared Diamond. You might know him from his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. So many historians are pissed at the man because of that book.
People ADORE that book. Professors assign it. Amateur internet historians quote it. It’s always displayed prominently in the history section of bookstores. But most serious historians rip into it, and have for years. There are several reasons why it’s viewed as bad history and why geographical determinism is a poor theory.
- It oversimplifies everything.
Diamond says that environmental factors shaped societies in a clearly defined and neatly organized way. A begets B begets C begets D. There is a clear path from the start to the end of a civilization, and that path is fated to be that way because of the local geography. In actuality, real history is a messy and chaotic thing. It is messy because it is made up of human decision-making, chance, politics, culture, religion, and sometimes pure luck. Diamond doesn’t look at any of that when he’s making his conclusions.
- It erases agency.
People are not puppets of their geography. Diamond says that each civilization was fated to rise or fall simply because it had mountains and rivers and valleys nearby. That is not true at all. Civilizations and societies and cultures make choices. Those choices can be good or bad or brilliant or catastrophic. But Diamond is saying that these civilizations were dragged along their path solely due to the shape of their continent.
- It treats cultures as interchangeable units.
His book lumps wildly different cultures, civilizations, and peoples together based solely on continental location and ignoring internal diversity, social dynamics, and the fact that technology adoption depends on so many more factors than what crops grow nearby. His book is basically doing to history what the British did to the Middle East and Africa when they just decided to draw random lines on a map and call them borders, disregarding the fact that they lumped together a whole host of people who had historic feuds with one another, and called them a country.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
- It's an outdated anthropological theory.
Geographical determinism had its day. Decades ago. Centuries ago. Millenia ago. The Greek philosopher Hippocrates (you might know from the Hippocratic Oath) was a geographical determinist. He argued that, because of mild weather, the Asian people were less warlike than others. Yes. The continent that gave us Attila, Genghis Khan, and Pol Pot was less warlike because of mild weather. Most geographers and historians nowadays will look at Diamond’s work and say “yea…it’s all a little more complicated than that.
- It’s convenient for lazy explanations.
His book is pop history (which I have no problem with.) It gives simple answers to complicated history. I’m all for people reading more history books, but don’t treat Diamond’s work as the end of the subject. Think of it as a primer. Realize that there is soooo much more to history and the rise and fall of civilizations than simple geography. Realize that history is messy and chaotic and confusing and that the simplest answers are almost always wrong.
Z3ke (Original Poster)
Jesus. I just read that post and…you okay man?
If anyone wants an update on what I’ve been doing for the past few days…take Hastings’ post right there, record it and then play it back on a loop for six hours. That’s what I’ve been dealing with.
You sound almost exactly like Cole there. He has this intense, vitriolic hatred for certain historians that I’ve never heard about. He claimed that there was a group of academics who tried to weaponize history and spread propaganda to make it so that it was easier to conquer outside groups. Or something like that. Again, I was mostly not listening and instead trying to focus on marching through the Deadlands.
UnhelpfullyHelpful
You’re in the wrong place if you’re trying to threaten us with a lecture on esoteric subjects. This is a forum devoted to a game that hasn’t seen a new release in ages. A lecture about the history of the Deadlands and the Vash Dynasty would be incredibly interesting.
The Vash Dynasty shows up in a few item descriptions and bits of lore in a few of the Deadland quests, but we don’t know too much about it. I would love to hear what you come up with in terms of lore, and how that meshes with what we all know from both Frontiers and Syndicate.
I was never a big fan of history in school. It was too much about old dudes doing stuff to other old dudes. But having a historian NPC deliver a lecture about game lore could be interesting and I think you’d be surprised by how many people on the forum would tune in to something like that.
MushroomCleric
Seconded.
Zeke, try to get Cole to tell you about the Soundtrap and the history behind it.
TwoGirlsOneCuphead
No. Ask him about the Vash Dynasty. We don’t really know much about it from the games, only a few throwaway lines.
InnerMarrow
Por que no los dos?
Z3ke (Original Poster)
…
I hate so much what you all choose to be.
I’ll try. I’m not gonna promise that I’ll remain conscious through his entire lecture…but I’ll try.
Also, since you all insist that I let myself be babbled to about topics I have no understanding about, the least you can do is answer a few questions that have been bubbling up.
You all gave me that spiel about classes and skills and the Human peak being 7 in skills, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of skills. I especially don’t understand them in relation to how they work in a video game world.
I never really played a bunch of RPGs, but from the few that I did play, they all had a level cap on them. You could only get so many skills and levels and then you’d stop. But you all are saying that Corva, as a Drifter, can pick up skills faster than other classes. Not that he can pick up more skills, but that he learns them faster. So…how does that work? Are there limits to the number of skills that a character could have in these games? Do they just keep stacking up forever? And how do they work in relation to combat or jobs or things like that?
I unlocked the melee skill, but what does that mean? I’m pretty sure a bouncer back at my old job could still be able to beat my ass if we got into a fight and I have a melee skill and he doesn’t. So what do the skills actually do?
StoryLeech
I can answer that, but before I write out a massive wall of text for you, I’m much more interested in how the skills feel for you as a character.
You’re gonna say something along the lines of “not a fic,” and we get it. This is really happening to you. But in most fanfics and LitRPGs and isekai manga, the author never really talks about the experience of getting a skill. Usually it’s just a checkbox. Skill unlocked! Numbers go up!
What I mean by that is that authors treat skills as a reward for narrative moments in the story. They don’t go into detail about how that isekai’d protagonist feels when he earns a skill. So…how are you feeling now that you have a bunch of skills that you didn’t previously?
Z3ke (Original Poster)
Sigh.
Yea, that’s right. I typed out sigh. This doesn’t really feel like a fair exchange. I’ve given so much in terms of entertainment value, and all you guys have given is a bit of advice and information.
But whatever.
You wanna know what it feels like to have a skill. The best way to describe it is that…it’s odd. I know that’s not all that descriptive, but it really does fit.
I’ve only managed to unlock three skills so far: athletics, puzzle intuition, and my melee skill. Puzzle Intuition hasn’t got much use since I unlocked it because I haven’t stumbled across any glowy shrines or abandoned archaeological dig sites protected by ancient traps. Athletics is there in the back of my mind, but the whole thing kinda feels faint and I don’t think I’ve really gotten much out of it.
The melee skill is probably the easiest thing to describe. The best way I can talk about it is that it feels almost like I downloaded a whole bunch of muscle memory into my body. You know the Matrix where Keanu Reeves is like “I know kung fu,”? It’s kinda like that. Nothing dramatic or anything. I can’t suddenly outfight an MMA bro. At least…I don’t think I can. Instead, it’s just a moment where my brain tells me “no, no, no, we do it this way from now on.”
I kinda liken it to bartending, one of the few skills that I was actually good at in my past life.
Every bartender has a pour. Most mixed drinks follow the same formula which is 1.5 ounces of liquor plus a mixture. A screwdriver is 1.5 vodka and the rest is orange juice. A whiskey sour is 1.5 whiskey and the rest is sour mix. That means that every bartender needs to be able to measure out 1.5 ounces of liquor without needing to stare at a jigger all day.
The woman who first taught me how to bartend gave me a little mantra that she used to pour by: I like money, I like money. Say it while pouring the liquid and then, boom, 1.5 ounces.
I didn’t stick with her mantra. My pour was much simpler. 1-2-3-4-5-6. Each count was the equivalent of a quarter of an ounce. Right index finger braced on the spout so the bottle doesn’t slip, steady wrist, smooth pour. If a drink had a different recipe, I could easily pour it with my count. A sidecar is 1.5 cognac, .75 cointreau, and .75 lemon juice. A six count of cognac. A three count of cointreau and a three count of lemon juice.
It got to the point that I was so good with the pour that I didn’t even need to count anymore. I could just freehand it. If a drink needed an ounce or two or three of liquor, my hand just knew when to stop.
That’s what the melee skill feels like. Back at The MIZ, when I went to that weapon school and started swinging around a sword, it felt like I was a danger to myself and everyone around me. I tripped and fell all over myself, which should have been physically impossible but I’m pretty talented like that.
When I unlocked my melee skill, I wasn’t tripping anymore. Holding a weapon felt…familiar. My body corrected itself. I shifted my grip and widened my stance and knew how to fight. It was like instinct. Muscle memory.
I can’t tell you how it’s going to work with Puzzle Intuition, and I don’t know if Athletics is making me any faster or if I’m just more graceful when I fall on my ass. So far it feels like the skills just dump a bunch of talent on me and my body sorts it all out.
StoryLeech
I’ve thought a lot about how it would feel if I got isekai’d into the Fracture-verse, and you just described how I imagined getting a skill would be like.
Of course, it does bring up the question about skills where you wouldn’t have any sort of muscle memory to fall back on. Skills like magic or the kind that you can get above peak Human. Once that happens, I wonder how it would feel and if you can describe it.
As payment, let me tell you a little bit more about skills.
The first thing you need to know is that Fracture isn’t a game series that sticks to a single genre. If you buy a Pokemon game, you know what you’re getting. It’s mostly a turn based old school RPG with four moves and six pokemon. If you get Zelda, you know you’re gonna be playing an adventure game. Call of Duty is an FPS. Fallout is an action-RPG. GTA is an open world sandbox. But the Fracture-verse is soooo many different genres.
Everyone puts it in the RPG genre because that’s what it has mostly leaned into, but the different games have all focused on different genres. Think of the series as a shared ruleset that is split between a bunch of different game types.
The very first game, Fracture: the Fall was similar to Fallout in that it was an old school RPG where you go out and try to collect things and survive. Frontiers was more like a survival game. You had a thirst meter and a hunger bar and your character could catch diseases and be dehydrated. Null Protocol was more action heavy, kinda like Mass Effect or Cyberpunk. Emberveil was like a traditional RPG with spells and rituals. Tech Reign was more FPS with John Woo choreography. Then you had Syndicate’s Wake which was an MMO with a true mishmash of genres. There were rogue-lite dungeon raids, survival horror, squad-based shooter sections, survival mechanics, and a host of other things.
But ALL the games shared the same skill base. If you unlocked a shooting skill and leveled it up, it would lessen the spread in Tech Reign, allow you to curve bullets in Null Protocol or snipe from half a map away in Syndicate’s. All these genres still had the same ruleset.
I bring this up to answer your earlier question about skill caps. The main selling point of the Fracture-verse games was that it felt more like a real world than any other game on the market. You could play any of the Fracture-verse games with any kind of build you could imagine.
In most RPGs, developers limit the amount of skills you can get. That’s all for the sake of balance in gameplay, not realism. When a dev makes a game, they need to limit the player character so they don’t just trivialize the missions in the game. They put limits on everything: levels, cooldowns, skills, talent trees that force you to decide between different power sets. All of it is an artificial friction meant to stop players from becoming too OP and dogwalking every boss in the game.
But Fracture never cared about all that. Any skill can be unlocked by any character. A mage could be amazing at melee. A cook could throw fireballs. An archer could be godly at healing allies. The only limit to your skills was how much time you wanted to invest in them, AND which skills you could push above the Human peak based on your class.
So, no, there aren’t any caps on the amount of skills you can have. If you want your character to go out there and be the best in the world at every single skill, you can do that. The problem is that unlocking a skill isn’t all that easy. It’s not like you just go out there and kill X amount of monsters and suddenly gain a skill. Instead, the patterns of your actions turn into a skill.
The actions you take - whether it’s swinging an axe, cleaning a rifle, or racing across the desert - will slowly build a pattern. When that pattern stabilizes, the world acknowledges it. That’s the moment when the game says: Skill Unlocked. You don’t really unlock anything. It’s just a way to show what your body already learned. At least, that’s the description that the devs gave us in one of their few interviews with the fandom.
When you say that your melee skills feels like you downloaded a bunch of muscle memory, that’s pretty much what happened. Your body isn’t suddenly magical. Nothing magic happened. It’s just that you’re doing what you’ve trained to do. The world is just showing that with a skill unlock.
Think of when you unlocked the Athletics skill. You said that it doesn’t feel like it’s doing too much. That’s because you’re thinking about it in terms of a sudden influx of magic. That’s not what is happening to you. That’s not how most of us imagine the Fracture-verse to work. You don’t level up and suddenly get better at running. Instead, it’s like you’ve been running and marching and scrambling over rocks and your body figures out what “efficient” feels like, your mind learns the rhythm, and then the world says “this is now a skill.”
Binary_Arcana
Wow Story. I know we all joke that Z3ke is never breaking character, but you wrote all that as if he actually has been isekai’d. “This is why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling.”
TwoGirlsOneCuphead
I’m for it. If Zeke wants to write like he’s actually in the game, let’s treat it like he’s actually in the game.
Z3ke (Original Poster)
Not gonna touch the above two posts. What I get from Story is that I got sucked into a magic world that has no magic when it comes to skills. That’s a bummer.
What about gear and weapons? How come none of you have told me where to find epic or legendary weapons? I know that Pell and Wren have guns. Is there a way to tell what is special about them? The axe that Corva let me use when I was fighting didn’t seem all that magical. Is there a way for me to get an axe that’ll make my melee skill better?
StoryLeech
| I got sucked into a magic world that has no magic when it comes to skills |
I didn’t say that. There are some magic skills out there, you just haven’t unlocked them yet. Mages and warlocks and priests and whatnot have magic skills that will do cools shit even before they hit level 7 in them.
As for your question, there aren’t really magical weapons in the Fracture-verse*
Fracture isn’t like most games where you can find a sword that does 3d6 fire damage. That’s now how the setting works. The Fracture-verse leans a lot more towards realism. At least, as realistic as a world can get and yet still have magic.
You said that you played a bunch of survival games before. Think of yourself as being in one of those games. When you build a spear in Green Hell, you don’t get a +1 spear. All you did was build a spear. You can stab things with it or throw it at animals and that’s it. It’s not magical. It’s the same with other weapons in the Fracture-verse.
A sword is just a piece of sharpened metal. A spear is a piece of sharpened metal attached to a stick. A gun projects small bits of metal very very fast in whatever direction it’s pointed in. None of it is magic.
The asterisk from above is there because there are some magical weapons. You might come across a sword that people would call a +1 in the fandom. It doesn’t let you do any extra damage and it doesn’t glow and it’s not easier to hit things with it.
A +1 is a blade that has been enchanted. That +1 adds a level to your swordsmanship skill (which you don’t have) but it doesn’t do extra damage. If you’re untrained (which you are) then the +1 is just a hunk of steel in your hands. But if you’ve got a swordsmanship skill, that +1 feels better in your hands and makes you a better fighter.
It’s the same thing with guns. They don’t have a damage range like you might see in other video games. That’s an absurd concept. You’re not going to suddenly find a chest with a gun that deals twice the damage as the one you’ve already got.
Instead, they act kinda like guns in FPS games. A gun has muzzle velocity and an effective range and a recoil pattern. They all do the same damage, it just depends on how effective you are at using them. If you’ve got a pistol and try to snipe someone from a mile away, that bullet is never gonna get there. If you don’t clean it or it gets banged up, it’ll jam.
In short, you’re not gonna find a Glock that does 7-12 DPS. It’s just a gun. The axe that Corva let you borrow is just an axe. Pell just has a revolver. None of it is magical. If you do find a magical weapon, it’s probably just a focus which means that it’ll let you push magic through it as long as you have a skill. If you can shoot fire from your hands, maybe you can find a sword that will allow you to focus your magic and will let you shoot the fire out of the blade. But the sword itself won’t do extra damage or help you hit things.
Also…don’t ask about how damage scales in the game. You complained about Cole giving you a history lecture. Well, this forum is filled with people who have devoted significant time to working out how skills and weapons and talents all fit with damage scaling.
If you get them started, they will throw mathematical equations your way. And I’m talking about the math with letters and weird Greek signs in it.
Z3ke (Original Poster)
Well…that’s kinda depressing. I was hoping for a more magical setting for when I get isekai’d into a magical setting.
Anyway, we’re talking about making camp for the night. While Corva is cooking and Pell is out doing his scouting rounds, I’ll chat with Cole and ask him for a brief history of where we’re headed. Hopefully Wren will be more interested with that topic of discussion instead of the massive lecture that Cole gave us earlier.
I’ll update you all when I’ve got the chance.