More Than A Game (Epic LitRPG adventure)

Chapter 5: Clan volunteer part 5

Then there was information about quests, since all MMORPGs on some level, are based on fighting, beating quests, and how the world is designed. PKs, social life, crafting, and roleplaying all come out of those three pillars, and without them, you simply can't have an MMORPG. If the world isn't well-designed or is imbalanced, the players can't buy into it and go find something else. If the quests are all easy and uniform, players get bored. Sure, you can do a quest like "Kill ten foxes," or "Collect five hip joints from jumping skeletons," or "Take the letter to the old goblin" once, twice, even five times. But who needs a game where that's all you do? And MMORPGs are about everyone fighting everyone else, but nobody would want to play anything that amounted to some kind of meat grinder. You need simple quests to help you level-up and have fun along the way, but the heart of the game has to be storyline quests traced across the canvas of the game. And the Fayroll world had superquests—both epic and hidden. Epic quests let you go through tough, multilevel tasks and get commensurate rewards: the respect and friendship of non-player factions and epic and rare items that were hard or even impossible to get during normal gameplay. Hidden quests were strings of tasks you performed to get something incredibly valuable: the support (including military support) of a whole group of NPCs, items from sets, or unique abilities. They were very hard to find, and players generally came across them randomly by doing something completely unrelated or because someone from the game admin told them about them, which happened very rarely and was frowned on by that same admin. And there weren't any quest guides for hidden quests, which made them unique. Lone players who found hidden quests preferred to keep quiet about them and clans who learned about them immediately classified that information. That last part made sense, seeing as how every clan had its analysts and spies trying to dig up any scrap of information they could find, and they were willing to pay good money to get it—even real-life money. Keeping information about epic and hidden quests from your clan was high treason.

Some things were straight-up forbidden. Clan members couldn't (or, at least, that's what I guessed) kill each other. You could kill other players, but only in self-defense, and each instance was looked at on an individual basis by the clan council. The clan policy toward PKers was simple: they were not tolerated. You couldn't disobey decisions handed down by the clan council, something I imagined was based on imperial policy. Obviously, you couldn't steal from clanmates or the clan storehouse. Giving clan information to anyone on the outside was strictly forbidden. You couldn't ignore a clanmate who needed help if you happened to be walking by (although that went without saying, as that's presumably how any normal person would react).

So, life in the clan wasn't a walk in the park, to say the least, as they had everything pretty locked down. On the other hand, there were quite a few advantages. The clan offered full and complete protection from everyone and everything, unless, of course, it was your own fault you were in trouble. As we had discussed in the pub, any PKers that tried to pick off a member of the clan were as good as dead. They were hunted down by many clan veterans who were only too happy to get in on the chase. They didn't have anything better to do, after all (or at least that's what they said), since they'd already beaten all the quests and explored all the locations, so it was a fun diversion. Actually, there weren't many of those veterans, and that story wasn't exactly true. The Fayroll world was so big—even limitless, I think—that getting around to all the locations and going through all the quests was impossible, not to mention the regular updates... Still, most important was that PKers knew not to touch anyone from the clan if they didn't want problems. And that wasn't just a Thunderbird policy; it was true of all the responsible, respected clans. Although you could still find people out there itching for a suicide who didn't listen to the voice of reason.

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