Dex Warrior (Libertas Online)

14: Crash Course

The wind blows the budding prairie grass like waves in the ocean. Sunlight warms my skin, and the chirping sounds of distant mobs fill the air. It's beautiful, and I'm totally psyched for some leveling action.

Felix stops and arcs his back in a stretch ahead of me, moaning in relief as he does. "All right, buddy. This spot will do, I think. Since you've only spent a few days in Libertas I'm going to give you the rundown on some basics in case there's anything you haven't picked up on already."

"Okay," I say, resting my hand on the pommel of my short sword. "But you're a bishop. It seems like a cool class, I mean just look at you. A flintlock-weilding holy priest? It's sick, but our roles in a party are completely different. How are you going to show me how to be a good warrior and tank?"

Felix smiles at the compliment, pushes back a clump of his black hair from his eyes. "I spent a little time as a warrior, a long time ago. While I built my character for damage, not tanking, I've spent plenty of time with others who have. I can teach you enough to get you started, although I won't be able to replace a warrior who has ran multiple character cycles."

"I understand," I say. "So, show me what you can. What do you know about Libertas that I don't?"

"Well, I'm sure you know the basics of your HUD. You know that health statistics don't appear until you examine a creature or a player, and the bar doesn't show up until you or a linked party member deal damage to them. Have you spent a lot of time navigating the menus?"

I shake my head. "No, I spent most of my time just trying to stay alive. At first, I had trouble finding the way out of the tutorial until Rin help me out. Then, within the next day I was a captive of the River Raters and forced to help them run the Five Roses Keep, and ever since then I've been on the road trying to get to you guys."

I can tell by the expression on his face he's feeling frustrated already. I almost apologize for the inconvenience when he says, "Well, some features you may not know about would be player search. While it won't tell you where anyone is or what their last name is, for privacy reasons, it can help you look up someone's statistics. You can see their class level and their guild association.

"There's your friends list, and your options to send them private messages. A party chat and a guild chat. I'm sure you know about the notepad for jotting down either sketches or notes for yourself, and the calculator. Then, there's the subject of maps. Firstly, the even though you have the 'world' map on your HUD menu, it only shows you the borders of Anticore and the towns and villages you've discovered yourself. How you fill it out is dependent on what you do.

"You can buy regional, national, town, and dungeon maps from certain specialty NPC's, or sometimes you can find them as drops. Looking at them also fills in your world map, and the features they reveal stay with you even after death, so you don't have to re-purchase or re-discover the world to see what's where. But, the most important tool of the world map is the ability to see what guilds own what town. Once a guild takes over a settlement that's already on your map, be it NPC town or another guild's creation, the map will instantly update and show you the name of the new owners. However, if a guild starts a village from scratch it won't show up on your map until you step inside it."

As Felix is telling me about the map, I'm going over it. In the upper right hand corner I can see Five Roses Keep, and just a little bit south-west of that is the village I visited called Tiengen, owned by the guild Dark Moon. Birch Castle is along the seaside cliffs on the eastern edge of Anticore, while I'm on the other side of the mountain range near the Twin Sisters lakes again. A dotted line on the left edge of the map, where the River Raider's village of Cutter's Cry sits, tells me it borders another nation. I know there has to be more to this nation; a majority of the map is still blank!