Subject: Curiosity!
Author:
Posted on: 2020-04-24 00:53:12 UTC
So I’m curious about what sorts of quirky people Sophie ACTUALLY ends up adventuring with, if indeed she ends up in a permanent group.
Subject: Curiosity!
Author:
Posted on: 2020-04-24 00:53:12 UTC
So I’m curious about what sorts of quirky people Sophie ACTUALLY ends up adventuring with, if indeed she ends up in a permanent group.
The year is Twenty-Mumblemumble. The game everyone's talking about - at least, everyone in the MMOJRPG scene - is Masterclass Online, a sprawling high-fantasy RPG with vast player customization options, enough lore to sink a battleship, excellent PVP and PVE opportunities, and Easter eggs that reference everything from classic anime series to Blackadder to the songs of Neil Young. The vast player base is supported by the fine folks at Super Happy Fun Time Games Incorporated. MaCO is a gigantic cash cow for the company, and they have a huge development team for whom terms like "scope management issues" and "feature creep" are key parts of the design document. Between them and the servers capable of supporting such a gargantuan endeavour, it is widely assumed among the player base (who are being entirely serious, honest) that SHaFT's developers are either robots from space, touched by the awakened madness of an elder god, or both. The main gimmick is that there are over eighty playable classes, but you don't just pick one when making a character - you pick two. This means that there are more than three thousand individual dual-class characters, or "crosses" as they're known in-game, for you to pick from. This is one of those games where you can easily spend a hundred hours in the character generation screens alone.
Our initial focus is on a young British player, or "shark" as they are known (since the game's common abbreviation sounds like "mako"), as she builds a new character. This is Sophie Richards, member of a high-ranking PVP and PVE group based in Japan. While conversationally fluent in both Japanese and Weeaboo, she doesn't have quite the same laser focus on PVP meta chasing as her other guildies. We see her briefly chatting to three of them as she works on the idea: Sugimoto Hayate, a shy mid-twenties otaku shut-in who plays DPS; Owari Eita, a headstrong but perpetually horny tank player; and Kobayashi Akemi, a demure and polite healer with a heart of gold. The four chat amiably, and it's clear they've been friends for a very long time. Sophie finishes making the character but has to go to bed; it's three in the morning and she's got work at the local Definitely Not Maccy D's in the morning. The others bid her farewell, gently ribbing her about her idea and telling her to be ready for the big raid next weekend.
The cross she's built uses the two least popular classes and least well-thought of in the entire game. From this, and the scattered design notes around her minuscule flat, it's clear that she loves doing this kind of thing. She finds joy in building quirky, edge-case, off-meta characters just as much as she does running herd in PVE raids and strategizing in grand guild-on-guild PVP battles. She goes to sleep, in her tiny bed in a rundown part of London, and dreams of being somewhere and someone else.
Next morning, just as Hayate, Eita, and Akemi are flattened by a speeding truck while waiting for a bus, Sophie is flattened by a speeding double-decker bus while looking for her co-worker's truck.
But, as any animé dork will tell you, this is not the end. The four are reunited - well, technically just plain united, since Sophie's on a different continent - in a limbo realm, wherein they are told by some manner of strange deity that they are to be reincarnated in a magical fantasy land of wondrous adventure... that just so happens to work almost exactly the way that Masterclass Online does. Yep, this is an isekai, and the four guildmates jump at the chance to travel to this incredible fantasy kingdom full of haughty elves, gruff dwarves, amiable halflings, and people running around dressed as Definitely Not Lelouch From Code Geass getting confused by the concept of turnips.
There's something of a catch, though. The four of them appear in the new world as the crosses they'd last logged into the game as. This means that while the other three were reincarnated as their max-level, hyper-competitive, fully-geared, meta-chasing, PVP-dominating characters, Sophie... doesn't. Sophie gets her janky, quirky, level-one character made from the two worst classes in the game. Sophie gets the cross so unused, so universally derided, that the SHaFT devs didn't even bother to give it a name. Her guildies look at her, with her basic gear and garbage stats and totally off-meta cross, and...
Leave.
They leave her alone, to fend for herself.
And Sophie's rightly furious about it. She resolves instantly to beat her so-called "friends" in single combat, grinding and strategizing and making the most out of every single advantage she can get, no matter how tiny, to make them lose. She's got a long journey ahead of her, though, so she'd best get started.
This is the opening of Nameless Cross, a fantasy isekai-style story I've been pondering for some time and am finally getting around to doing something with. It's intended to be a takedown of the sweaty, creepy, misogynistic power fantasy that isekai anime often devolves into, with the three villains of the piece being the kind of people who would be the protagonists of a more conventional entry in the genre. I wanted to share it with the PPC and indeed I did, initially on the Discord, where the absence of such minor things as "a plot" didn't get in the way of the premise capturing people's imaginations. Now that we've collectively ironed out more of the world of Mako, I feel like I can share what we've been doing with the Board.
This (WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE THROUGHOUT) is Nameless Cross's design document and worldbuilding bible, available in convenient spreadsheet form. There are, at present, sixty-seven named primary classes, and there are over a thousand named crosses. Each class plays differently and has an in-universe explanation of what they do. There are listings for Signatures, powerful endgame skills that the three antagonists have and Sophie obviously does not. There's a brief glossary of in-universe slang and player terminology. And there's more to be added. Much more.
I turn to the PPC, my peers, my colleagues, my dearest friends, to help me with this. I'm trying to build a fantasy world of endless possibilities, and I'd love it if you came along for the ride. And who knows?
Maybe I'll finish a light novel version of it, get it translated into Japanese, and have it turned into an anime one day.
Thank you all for reading, and for being my friends.
=]
The design document is presented for everyone to work from... and Scape is permitting us to create characters for Mako! They’re not going to be a part of Nameless Cross’ actual story, but we can still have fun making characters just to fill out the word a bit.
Aaaaand... boop. I made this doc for y’all to have some fun in.
So I’m curious about what sorts of quirky people Sophie ACTUALLY ends up adventuring with, if indeed she ends up in a permanent group.
Or are any characters beyond the four players just a murky concept at present?
I do know that there's a couple of people in her initial party:-
Vi Stonebuckle is a Barbarian/Grappler cross, but more importantly she's the proprietress of the Barbarian Charter... which reminds me, I should probably talk about Charters. These are the organizations that the crosses learn their skills and powers from, and they have status in the world of Mako dependent upon how many players they have in the game. In this world, the Charters are funded by donations and acquire prestige from their powerful members. The Cleric Charter's home base is a glittering cathedral complex that is almost as vast as the imperial palace in the capital city. The Barbarian Charter's base, by contrast, is a scabby-looking dive bar with boarded-up windows in the worst part of town, all mismatched furniture and sawdust on the floor and a vague but pervasive smell of stale beer. Vi runs it because... well, even she couldn't tell you why these days. Almost every cross possible has access to a higher-status Charter building, and the few times people come in are almost universally there to point and laugh at how the other half lives. She's a good person but she's been beaten down by years of fruitlessly trying to improve the status of Barbarians in the face of total indifference from the world at large. She's also the first person to be kind to Sophie in this new city that's so achingly familiar.
Meanwhile, across the street from the Barbarian Charter, there's the Mystic Charter. If you've ever been to a second-hand bookshop that looks like it hasn't sold anything since about 1946 and whose owner might actually be the skinny ginger cat glaring at you from behind a stack of mouldering tax demands, you've been in the Mystic Charter. The only difference is that there's more books on psychic studies and a whole lot more tatterdemalion vaguely-occult garbage everywhere. I really do mean everywhere, too; they cling like dying ivy to the piles of hardbacks throughout the Charter, some of which might actually be load-bearing. It's marginally less welcoming than a Siberian gulag and that's just how the Charter's head likes it. Heather Lake is a diffident person with her nose in a book almost twenty-four hours a day, because does it look like she can afford candles? Spoilers: she can't. While she's a Mystic/Occultist cross herself, she was subtly ostracized from the Occultist Charter over a period of many years. She's naturally diffident and standoffish, so it wasn't too hard for the Occultists to persuade her that she was happiest on her own, especially with the help of little telepathic nudges here and there. Tall and rail-thin and sporting the very thickest of spectacles, she's a huge nerd and is very knowledgeable about the theory of psychic abilities, which is extremely helpful to Sophie as she tries to get the hang of her extremely weird cross.
Finally, there is Lady Elodie Brightmantle, who doesn't join the party right away but instead at the end of the first arc. See, in the world of Mako, to become a royally-sanctioned adventurer you must first beat an adventurer of the royal guard in single combat in a kind of mock duel. In theory, this is so that you can prove your worth to the crown and the land. In practice, it's a means of keeping the riff-raff out more than anything else. Powerful crosses get rubber-stamped, janktacular weirdos like Sophie get laughed at by an audience of hundred of nobles before being made to fight for their lives. This doesn't sit well at all with Elodie, a newly-invested member of the royal guard. She believes in the spirit of the guard to protect the nation and the common people, rather than what it's become these days - a political entity that exists to prop up the existing, manifestly unjust power structure. She's especially dubious of Hayate, Eita, and Akemi, since they rocked up like they own the place. She's made to fight Sophie in her Honour Duel, and she's put under Akemi's influence to go absolutely ham on the comparatively green girl being tested. After that fight - in which both parties are left barely alive - Elodie volunteers to mentor Sophie, taking her on the first steps into the wider world and to help her grow in strength. She loathes what Akemi made her do, and she spends quite some time apologizing to Sophie, reluctant to accept that it wasn't her fault because that'd mean accepting that she could be so easily dominated. She's a Paladin/Fury cross, tall and muscular with a cascade of dark auburn hair, and she habitually wears plate armour and a flowing cape that covers her wings. She's stubborn and compassionate to a fault, and she doesn't like the idea of those things being manipulated. Especially not by someone from another plane of existence who did so as a borderline assassination attempt.
So yeah, those are the first three members of Sophie's new guild. These are not top-tier crosses, though they're certainly viable; there will be more that Sophie recruits by just being a decent human being, something rather alien to the terrible trio currently squatting in the imperial palace living out their by-the-numbers pandering isekai power fantasies. I don't have much more than that as yet, but there's gonna be a lot of this.
Oh hell, now I'm gonna have to actually start writing, aren't I... =]
Sophie's three "friends" sound like those obnoxious, snobby MMO players who care more about gear and stats and whatever than about having fun or helping out other players. I'm sure you know the type.
Which two classes did Sophie pick for her character?
Whoops.
Anyway, Sophie is a Barbarian/Mystic cross. It doesn't have a name yet; indeed, it's sort of a meme. The weird part is that as a cross, it's not actually that bad. Mystics can increase the power of their buffs and debuffs by sacrificing HP, while Barbarians have a huge HP pool and a passive ability that ticks up your stats based on how much damage you've taken and how many debuffs you have active on you. It's effective! Just really difficult to use, since you have much lower HP than you'd like and you're very much on a timer. There's other stuff as well - this is a game with the kind of feature creep that makes WoW's dev team look on with horrified expressions and unmentionably soiled undercrackers, so it's far from an exhaustive list, but that's the basic combo that makes Sophie's cross work. =]