Pale Lady Territory
Pale ladies camp out in the long dead reactor of the facility, which operated not on nuclear or hydroelectric energy but on some mysterious energy beam that is now completely non-functional. Instead, the pale ladies have turned it into a spook workshop, using some spook addicts brought in from Brandt’s Landing as essentially slaves to produce the spook and then serve as smugglers out to the Grey River.
You might think that the last post is going to precipitate either a total abandonment of Succubus or else some in-depth rantviewing. If so, you may wish to prepare to be disappointed, because we are now entering detached summary mode. Succubus is not recovering from chapter 11, but the thing is, there isn’t much room left to go down. Sure, there’s some, and I even have confidence that Succubus will at some point pull it off – but mostly I expect it to continue making the dumb mistakes it already has. As a rabid completionist, I’m going to see the book through, but I’m only going to go into details if Succubus shows signs of either getting better or somehow getting worse.
All that being said, Succubus does manage to fuck up in a novel way almost immediately:
Stig and I raced past the livestock pens over to the simple stone house with its timber roof. Three bandits were out in front, holding their hands over the mouths of three small, wriggling children.
Crap – I didn’t know if my powers would hurt the kids if I attacked the bandits.
So I opted for some real-world strategy instead.
“Kids – bite their hands!” I yelled. The children must’ve followed my orders, because every single bandit screamed and let go of them.
“Go to town and get help!” I yelled, and the children took off for the woods. Of course, that meant three bandits were coming right at me.
This is apparently how you solve a hostage situation. Have the hostages bite their lethally armed captors. That’ll go well.
If I’ve done my job right, there will be an actual, working video here once this post live.
As usual, I recommend the written form of the guide over the video form (even if the video is working properly) because I’m good at writing and formatting words but bad at voice acting and editing video, but I’m offering the video version for people who strongly prefer to listen/watch instead of read. I hope it’s not too rubbish in this medium.
There is also more Iron Fang Invasion:
Chapter 11
So now Ian’s chipping away at his bandit quest. He has a new power that allows him to temporarily summon a four-imp hit squad to help him out on a two-minute refresh, so he just hangs around waiting for the timer to recharge between kills. This isn’t necessarily bad game design – Ian might just be pushing up against quests he’s a little underleveled for, and using what’s intended as a bosses-only panic button for clearing regular mooks. On the other hand, we’ve yet to see any sign of any stats besides health, mana, stamina, and intelligence, so giving this book the benefit of the doubt on game design decisions is probably unwise. Look at this, for example:
The bandit’s corpse yielded another 80 coppers, plus something else: a silver necklace with some sort of religious symbol made up of overlapping circles. When I inspected it, I found out it was the sign of Bartok, patron god of thieves, and added +3 to intelligence.
Why would a symbol of a thief god add intelligence and not agility or dexterity or some other stat associated with stealth? Well, because this game has two stats, which is insufficient to even cover the distinction between warrior, rogue, and mage, so the rogues have to timeshare with the mage stat, and it’s not clear if the stamina stat does anything except determine how much health you have – at which point why not just have a health total by itself?
When Ian’s stat sheet was so sparse early on, I kind of assumed it was because the author was introducing stats piecemeal rather than all at once. He felt the need to explain what Health and Mana were, after all, so maybe he was only going to have other stats added to the sheet as they became relevant, but for that to still be true it means that a god of thieves is handing out INT bonuses, which seems unlikely. If AJ Markam (our author) really was introducing stats piecemeal, now would be a spectacular time to tell everyone how DEX works, but it’s not happening.
But, wait, there’s something just a page later that makes this sloppy game design seem like peanuts. Remember how earlier I said that the best thing Succubus had managed to do so far is not fuck up, failing to manifest any strengths and instead just avoiding any serious failures? Well keep your arms and legs inside the ride, because we’re about to nosedive hard enough to make Zuula seem like sledding in a field.
It’s Litha (or at least, this post is scheduled for Litha), but instead of doing one of those goal-oriented updates I usually do I’m just gonna drop the Vestitas stuff I’ve been working on. I can no longer think of any goal oriented things to post, so clearly that was never going to be a long running tradition.
This is for the Enclave, one of three unfinished areas left in the Vestitas hex crawl. Just like the hex encounters, it has no specific stats, just vaguely defined monster roles the details of which I’ll fill in later. This isn’t really the content that the audience this blog stumbled into cares about, but it’s a part of my ongoing quest to complete all my unfinished projects, so I’m tossing it up anyway. It’s not gonna slow down the Succubus review in any case, since I’m only posting these on the Tuesday/Friday non-review article slots.
You may have noticed Longes, the only confirmed real human being reading this blog, posting in the comments about Way of the Shaman. We’ve also talked about it in Discord some. Since he is also the only one who voted on my last poll, and since I could really use a mostly-positive LitRPG review before I end up cementing myself as disliking the entire genre, I’ve decided to dispense with a poll and just go with his recommendation, which means that I’ll be reviewing Survival Quest, book one in the Way of the Shaman series, after Succubus finishes up about a week and a half from now.
Chapter 8
Ian finds another farmer and picks up your bog standard “kill ten rats” quest, except it’s pigs instead of rats. He goes out into the woods, and…
I turned around, expecting to see Wilbur out of Charlotte’s Web.
What I got was a lot closer to Bebop out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – just no mohawk, glasses, or standing on its hind legs.
Yeah, no shit. Why were you expecting an adorable little piglet as the target of an MMORPG quest? The only porcine creatures that exist in MMO-land are humanoid sub-species and boars.
The thing squealed – a sound more like the xenomorph’s scream from Aliens than an oink – and charged right at me.
This description-through-reference isn’t a bad way to go, especially for an author like this one who seems to have difficulty coming up with original character designs, which is not a deathblow by itself. Obviously good character design is better than bad, but it’s fine if a book is good at other things, and if it’s bad at character/monster design, then description-through-reference is a reasonably good way of getting the description out of the way in a hurry so the book can focus on things it’s actually good at.
No, what I’m bringing up here is all these references: Charlotte’s Web, TMNT, Aliens. This isn’t the random grab-bag of references that a mediaphile who casually references things from before their birth gets up to. They were all popular in the same time frame. Ian is a millennial, and from the status of his job hunt and what we know about his having graduated college, he’s probably no older than late twenties or early thirties, maybe even as young as mid-twenties. Being in his mid-twenties would make him on the young end for a millennial today. How soon in the future is this book set?
On the other hand, this is kind of a reign of terror thing (even though Succubus is giving me plenty of nits to pick without resorting to being wholly arbitrary). Succubus isn’t making a plot point out of the era it’s set in, and it’s fine to say that MMORPGs go from regular video games to full dive by the year 2020, while society is still otherwise fully recognizable, for no better reason except that you want to tell a story about full dive games in a society that’s otherwise recognizably similar to our own. Things are going to change a lot in the next couple of decades it’ll probably take to invent full dive (I am not particularly confident in any specific set of changes, but I am quite confident that there will be lots of significant changes), and not every LitRPG needs to also be sci-fi futurism. Indeed, I took Awaken Online to task for having sporadic sci-fi futurism that wasn’t nearly up to the task of making me believe Jason was living in 207X, when he seemed more like he was living in 2030.
Chapter 6
Ian continues into town imp-free, notes that it is populated entirely by shiny races, but apparently this has not stopped a level 23 warlock from waltzing around with his succubus like he owns the place. And, wow, level 23 and he’s already got the succubus, so apparently that’s actually kind of a low level trick. Which is honestly kind of refreshing. Ian’s not going to stumble his way into an end game demon and be catapulted to incredible power. He’s just gonna hit level ten and have a less useless demon.
I am not impressed by the description of the succubus, though. I’m gonna stick that below the break (she’s not naked, but she’s close), so first let’s take a look at her master:
There was a guy walking through the center of the town square. He was tall and good-looking, with long hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He wore all black – a badass duster jacket that came down to his calves, a black vest, black shirt, black boots, black pants. The shirt was open to expose a hairy, muscular chest. He had an awesome staff strapped to his back, apparently made out of an orc spine with the upper half of a skull at the top. Two huge rubies were fixed in the eye sockets and glowed faintly.
He basically looked like a Rock and Roll god.
Really? Dude has a black duster and a skull staff and your thought is “rock and roll god” and not “looks like he’s got his basic gear sorted out and found a decent magic weapon?”
Some LitRPGs just happen to take place in a world that runs on video game logic, and those worlds are no more required to be set up for player convenience or game balance than the real world. Others, however, are about actual video games that people actually play. Not usually in the sense that they’re full dive expies for games that exist in the real world, but still usually in the sense that the premise of the book involves playing a video game that was sold to market to be bought as entertainment just like real video games are now.
Despite this, there’s a couple of common game design mistakes that crop up in LitRPG that are about full dive MMORPGs that people actually play, features that are inconvenient for basically no reason. Books are copying one another without ever stopping to think if what comes before is really the best way of doing things. I have a pretty keen interest in game design – it’s actually a creative pursuit I chase at least as much as writing – so this particularly stands out to me, but even for general audiences, a lot of LitRPG readers want to read about a game they’d like to play, so for the love of God start writing games that aren’t a massive downgrade from what’s already on the market. For example…
1) Size your world to fit your content.
A lot of LitRPG games require you to take somewhere between 15 minutes to over an hour to get from the two nearest points of interest on a map. If you look at how actual MMORPGs or other games with big, expansive worlds are laid out, it never takes more than about five minutes to get between two adjacent points of interest. Hour+ journeys are limited to when people need to cross through multiple different regions, often to run something or someone from a low-level area to a high-level area for the sake of power leveling shenanigans. Usually, you can fast travel to any town you’ve been to before via either fairly swift flying mounts or straight-up teleportation (or both), so even these marathons are limited to people who need to get a brand new alt to areas far from their starting region. For normal situations, though? For when your player is just going from the starter town to the first quest location? Travel time is five minutes, maximum, often no more than thirty seconds.
Continue reading “How To Write Full Dive I Would Actually Play”
Chapter 4
The length of this post is constrained by the fact that I’m running the first session of Iron Fang Invasion for a paying group in thirty-five minutes, so we’ll see how much of the book I can review in that time. Start the timer!
I looked around the meadow. I didn’t really want to kill anything defenseless, but I reasoned that it was a videogame. I would be killing digital people soon enough. What was some wildlife compared to that?
Over by the nearest tree, a skunk was minding its own business.
I figured the world could probably use a few less skunks.
Currently, my LitRPG rating scale goes from Awaken Online to Threadbare (I could add in stuff I haven’t reviewed for this blog, but that seems kind of unsporting, especially since I plan to reread some of the stuff from Royal Road for blog purposes), which means just acknowledging that how inconsequential it is to kill NPCs gets this book halfway to the top all by itself.
Chamomile Has A Blog 