by Nate Crowley
Hi, Eliza, it’s Floyd. Listen, my battery’s nearly gone, and I’ve got to go back inside in a second anyway. What I’m saying is, I’ve got to be quick. So if I start rambling, which I probably will because I’m quite pissed, just go ahead and stop me, yeah? Oh, this is a voicemail, isn’t it, so you can’t. Well, I’ll just do my best not to ramble, then.
OK, so first things first. Do you remember all those rumours we kept hearing about … West? You know, the Cowboy World those backpackers swore they’d visited, but we could never find?
Well … I found it. And you won’t believe it, but they were right. You do just have to keep walking west, from anywhere, and you get there. It’s really hard to explain – it’s not like normal west, you see – but it makes sense when you’re doing it.
Unfortunately, I seem to be in a spot of bother here. And I promise you, I really do, that it’s not my fault this time. Or rather it is my fault, but it’s not anything I’ve done since I got here. Stop, Floyd, you’re rambling!
Right. Well. The problem is, while the backpackers had it right on one front – this place certainly is West – they were talking complete shit about the cowboys part. I was hoping it would be, you know, ten-gallon hats and gold mines and things, right? But it’s not. This isn’t Cowboy West at all. I think it’s— [inaudible]
Oh fuck, Eliza. I think this is the Bad West. Like, where I nearly ended up at the end of the Mittelvelde trip. The Elven West.
The big giveaway, I suppose, was the Elves. Antlered gits. I saw them on the sixth day, to the west of course, and I tried to walk away from them. I kept trying, but whatever I did, I just found myself walking west, right towards them. And now they’re here. Or I’m there.
Either way, there’s a whole shitload of Elves here, in a cave, and they want a word with me.
I know I always used to scoff at what you said, Eliza, about this whole Worlds business being an experiment of some kind. Well, I’m sorry for that. As it happens, I’m afraid you might have been absolutely right.
I think it has been an experiment. Or rather, a test – wasn’t that what you called it? – and they’ve been watching the whole time. And now, Eliza, I believe the Elves have drawn their conclusions.
And if that’s the case, then I strongly suspect this is goodbye. I’m not going to ask you to come and bail me out, because you’ve done that enough. And besides, for once, I’m not sure I deserve the help. So just … finish the book, and if you are inclined to be kind, try to make me sound like a bit less of an arsehole.
Oh, and since I won’t have to deal with the consequences now, you can tell the Bison King I always thought he was a total c—
[end of message]
FOOTNOTES
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INTRODUCTION
1. Well, that’s a professional way to start the book off, Floyd. – ES
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2. Not to mention your vast inherited wealth and sprawling old boys’ network, hey? – ES
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EDITORIAL NOTE
1. I’m a retired diplomat, thanks. And I’ll thank you to remember that I appeared on Noel’s Dog Food Challenge for charity.
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2. Entirely unfair. Those pirates were desperate for smokes, and there has only been the one civil war – which I thought we had agreed not to mention???
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3. Cheers for that.
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CHAPTER ONE: MITTELVELDE
1. Fysteros has – in my view – become little more than a cheesy, blood-soaked parody of itself at this point. I mean, honestly, there’s just no need for that much violence, even if it brings the cash in. How do they keep finding new pretenders to the throne at this point? What’s in it for these people?
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2. Often literally, if you take the opportunity to stay with Dwarves. They’re obsessed with hiding gems.
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3. Floyd, you realise putting this in quotation marks just makes you look like a bigot? – ES
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4. And their hoards increasingly comprise cheap watches looted from other unfortunate tourists.
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5. Please, though, forget the cheap Fysterosi ‘slayer ranches’: a chance to fight a dragon for the price of a mid-range meal may sound enticing, but when you’re handed a length of chain by a jaded knight smoking a roll-up and given two minutes to go mental on a heavily sedated alligator, you will feel nothing but shame. Believe me.
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6. Of course, there are plenty of dullards in exile who question whether the Bison King was ever truly ‘good’ in the first place. However, since his troops wore silver armour and fought Orcs in obsidian mail, (and especially since he was kind enough to offer you use of a summer villa in New Tharn, right? – ES) the ethics of the situation seem pretty bloody clear to me.
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7. Just for the record, Floyd, this is not even the first time in this, the first chapter of your guidebook, that you’ve given the thumbs up to the looting of dead bodies as a leisure activity. – ES
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8. They say Yattan-Gur means ‘final liberator’ in Orcish, but by ‘they’ I mean Orcs, so do take it with a pinch of salt.
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9. With the Elves slowly vanishing from the world, and the Dwarves increasingly focused on digging holes, the Forces of Good pretty much boiled down to the Bison King and his vassals this time round.
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10. Again, the Orcs say the mace was a piece of powerful healing technology and call Grimlakk ‘the traitor general’ – it’s a sobering indictment of just how badly brainwashed they were by the Duke.
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11. Given that it’s basically a big theme park built by what amounts to slave labour, perhaps? – ES
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12. They also grow an awful lot of weed here, so it’s a popular hangout for Wizards.
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13. This is partially because it’s always night underground and partially because the Dwarven metabolism runs on ethanol, meaning that keeping up with them requires a teenager’s enthusiasm for getting piss-yourself drunk.
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14. And he is generous: just last month he set aside a new fund to put up statues of himself all over New Tharn, to replace all the smashed ones of the Duke.
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15. Floyd – I know we’ve discussed, but … don’t you think your coverage of the King seems just a little biased? Does all this have anything to do with that villa? And just why has the Bison King been inclined to do so many favours for you? – ES
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16. And frankly, I’d only ask for a geographer’s opinion if I wanted to know which brand of colouring pencil to use.
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17. At the time of writing, the region is perfectly clement, but that won’t stop every single inhabitant of the place offering you their own grim weather forecast at the drop of a hat. It’s very repetitive.
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18. At least, it does to people who enjoy betting on fights in the Bison King’s Super Monster Arena, right Floyd? – ES
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19. Some Orcish scholars claim that Orcs were the original inhabitants of Mittelvelde, and that their land was subsequently carved up by successive waves of invaders – a tragic hangover of the propaganda inflicted by the Duke of Night on her once-noble subjects. Also, without wanting to sound rude, how scholarly can one really expect Orcs to be?
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20. This is almost certainly a spelling mistake, and they mean ‘Defiler’.
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21. Really. That’s the best cover-up for overhunting you could come up with? – ES
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22. Endlessly correcting
people’s language too. I spent the best part of an hour arguing with one about the definition of the word ‘haste’.
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23. There used to be an eighth classification – Halblets – for the people of Rannewicke, before it was determined that they were in fact just Humans who were a bit short.
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24. Floyd, I’m not sure Goblins are what you think they are. – ES
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25. Frankly, I won’t miss them when they’re gone. Creepy bastards.
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26. It roughly translates as ‘Party Time’
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27. Apart from Orc families, I presume? – ES
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28. A likely story.
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29. Oh for fuck’s sake, Floyd. You have to be kidding, right? You can’t seriously think … OK, never mind, it’s almost funny how much you’ve missed the obvious here. – ES
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30. Whatever you say about the Bison King, you can’t deny he’s made the carts run on time. I respect that.
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31. Please don’t learn this the hard way, like I did.
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32. That’ll be his secret police, then. – Eliza
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33. It’s only half a groat to throw rocks at an Ogre stooped in a muddy cage, but you’ll feel a bit bad afterwards.
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34. It’s a protest song, Floyd. – ES
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35. And I really mean big – the elephants out there are preposterously large.
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36. Except in Fysteros, where of course anything goes. You could show up there in a tracksuit if you were gauche enough.
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37. Unless you get rinsed by a fraud, that is. After the incident with the Dwarven rhino thing, I got sewn up by a local chancer posing as an Archmage, who was making up spells as he went along. I ended up with two arses for a fortnight, until a genuine Wizard charged me 80 Bison Groats to correct the work.
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38. Maybe the Orcs might have better medical technology if the Bison King hadn’t taken literally everything from them? I dunno, just a thought. – ES
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39. They’re actually really keen on Turkish Delight, if you ask them. – ES
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40. A further warning: Dwarven hugs are awkward. For a start, the height differential results in a very difficult chin-to-crotch dynamic, and then they go on for ages. Not just a moment or two too long – an entire minute or more, in total silence save for the occasional companionable grunt.
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41. Yeah, it was weird that. Wasn’t anything to do with you, Floyd, was it? – ES
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42. Which you may or may not expect.
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43. It largely depends on whether you’re able to wake from your feast-slumber before your hosts begin packing the next meal into your mouth.
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44. So named for its sign, a graphic illustration of an Orc getting brained by an unsmiling knight, which has taken on a controversial air since the end of the war.
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45. It’s worth bringing some air freshener, as Blozzh seem to fart constantly and the tunnels are pretty close. Nobody enjoys retching on bat guff, after all.
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46. The tour is truly relentless, and guides tend to have no filter whatsoever. As far as they’re concerned, it’s inconceivable that anyone could not be obsessed with mining. Expect to take in hours of degree-level knowledge of techniques for ore extraction, slag disposal and heat transfer (some of it in song), as well as chillingly detailed ‘fun’ anecdotes about every industrial accident over the last few decades.
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47. A Dwarven bookie will 100 per cent ask if you fancy ‘a little flutter’ on the outcome of a fight. It will be funny the first time.
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48. They’re much safer on the edge of the plains, where the Bison King can look after them, than in the dangerous depths of the wood.
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49. Eliza – can you find a nicer way for me to describe him before we go to print? Cheers.
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50. My advice: just write whatever you want on the paperwork to get it over with, then do what you like once you’re down there. Nobody ever checks what you wrote at the start.
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51. During my stay I met a woman who’d been down to Level Thirty, and the look in her eyes made my mind up against ever going past Level Five again.
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52. Eliza, you keep correcting this to “Syrillar”, but I swear there are 2 “r”s? (No, Floyd, just the one. No Pirates here. ES)
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53. In the old days you’d need a hired Wizard to do the necessary magic, making this an expensive proposition. With the advent of cheap canned spells following the Bison King’s nationalisation of the Gollimmar spellforges, however, this is now achievable on a reasonable budget.
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CHAPTER TWO: EROICA CITY
1. Before we get any further: it’s ‘Eroica City’, as in the Greek for Hero, not ‘Erotica City’, as in, y’know, boning. This is not a ‘sex place’. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe the number of lascivious sods who book tickets based on what they assume is a typo.
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2. I mean, you have an editor who advised you not to actively support the near-openly fascist Bison King, but clearly that wasn’t what you were looking for. – ES
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3. Who will ever forget the iconic duo that was Honkus and the Highland Soother?
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4. From everything I’ve seen, ‘Good’ looks a hell of a lot like ‘shareholder value’. – ES
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5. As far as I can tell, it would just mean less property destruction and a more reasonable distribution of wealth? – ES
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6. If they can’t find any criminals, they take on their secondary role as brand ambassadors and just sort of … sell to people. Loudly. It can be a bit disconcerting, but it makes sense – they’ve got to earn their keep when they’re not fighting, after all.
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7. Interestingly, for accounting purposes, paid Heroes are counted as intellectual property assets, due to the linking of character design and branding. As such, even speaking a sentence to a Hero from another company counts as use of a copyrighted brand and is expressly forbidden.
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8. Floyd, they distribute it to the third of the city’s population living in abysmal poverty. You know that, right? – ES
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9. And sends hundreds back to the tenements when they prove not to be that powerful, but that’s not on the prospectuses, is it? – ES
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10. As a power, this isn’t in the same league as flight or energy blasts, but Skeleton Key is a creative man, and you’d be amazed by how many crises he solved with wiggly fingers.
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11. There’s a reason construction companies make such a fortune here.
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12. Which in Eroica can mean anything up to and including high-calibre bullet wounds.
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13. I did – until some psychotic Adonis in tinned-soup livery descended on rocket boots and opened up with a flamethrower. As he bathed the alley in flames, he muttered some grim one-liner about standing the heat and getting out of the kitchen, but everyone was too busy screaming and fleeing to listen. – ES
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14. Indeed, many Baddies make their costumes as easily copiable as possible, and it’s not unusual to find who
le gangs of youths on poorer blocks wearing the mask of their favoured Baddie. Classified by the city as terrorist ‘antiheroes’, but calling themselves Henchfolk (or so Eliza tells me), these deluded kids will carry out astonishingly bold infrastructure raids in the name of their idols.
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15. ‘Marvels’, they call them.
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CHAPTER THREE: SPUME
1. Even if the ‘theft’ of a vessel is temporary and agreed with its owners in exchange for a reasonable donation, it works. I even heard of someone dodging the fare for a steamer on Chugholme and causing the whole shebang to end up on Spume because they felt too excited about getting away with it.
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2. I should know. On my first visit I assumed an ‘anything goes’ mentality, and immediately shot a man in the leg for garnishing my drink incorrectly at Hardtack Mulligan’s Bar & Grill. Over the following month in a rat-clogged brig, while Eliza explained my misunderstanding to the Council of Free Captains (CFC), I learned otherwise. I have to say, they were terribly reasonable about the whole thing in the end, freeing me in exchange for agreeing to … certain terms.
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3. They’re really boring.
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4. They had to politicise it, didn’t they?
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5. Controversially, some captains are now only allowing their crews to use foam cutlasses when there are tourists aboard, with rumours that this will soon be mandated by the Council of Free Captains. Critics are calling this a classic case of Pirate’s Code Gone Mad, but I for one can see the sense in it.
