Mogworld

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “What do you mean, O lord of battle?”

  “I dunno. I’ve just been getting this weird sense of something not being right.”

  She frowned, then untangled herself from my mighty thews. “Now that you mention it, I’ve been feeling off all day. And I can’t stop looking at your nose.”

  My war-calloused fingers rose to my face and stroked my fine, angular features, which somehow only strengthened my unease. “Yeah, there’s definitely something wrong with my nose.”

  Suddenly, the cursed volcano spewed forth a magnificent spurt of lava. My hand flew to the shining hilt of bloodthirsty Killbastard. From the abysmal depths of the earth rose the head of a titanic red snake come up from the deepest Stygian plains. Its visage was that of a hideous dragon, its eyes flaming with ferocious malevolence and its hungry maw an eight-foot grin crammed with spikes of a sharpness that no armor could slow. It appeared to be twirling a butterfly knife in one of its dreadful talons.

  “Hello there, my little toastracks,” it wheedled. “Care for a spot of ultra-violence?”

  “No, no.” I threw down the sword and folded my arms. “There’s definitely something up, and I’m not starting this epic battle until someone tells me what it is.”

  The fire serpent bit my head off.

  doublebill: he rejected it

  doublebill: hang on ive got another ide

  —

  A peal of thunder roared out from the storm clouds that spread across the blood-red sky, mingled with the wails of the damned. A hundred columns of smoke rose from the landscape, each a pulsating finger pointing out my countless dark temples as they completed the day’s unholy rites. I stood atop the highest tower of my mightiest fortress, one clawed hand resting on the parapet, the other casually brushing ants away from the hole where my nose had once sat.

  Below me, my legions of undead warriors fell to their knees rank by rank, their obeisance most pleasing to my undead eyes. “All Hail Jim,” they cried, in the kind of perfect unison only mindless zombie slaves can achieve. “Lich Lord of the Malevolands.”

  “Master,” said Thaddeus, my sniveling vizier, materializing at my elbow. “We have caught an adventurer attempting to steal from your treasure vault.”

  “Bring him here,” I growled. “No man will be spared the terrible judgement of the Lich Lord.”

  I stalked nobly through the fanged archway that led into my receiving chamber and settled into the Throne of Darkness, its many points of extruding bone curling comfortably around my body. My consort, the Black Witch Meryl, levitated him magically into the room and flung him to the floor at my feet.

  “He was able to sneak into the vault through the underground tunnels,” hissed Meryl. “We caught him attempting to flee with a sack of gold considerably larger than the manhole he was trying to climb down.”

  “So, man-fool,” I boomed, every syllable a symphony of evil. “To steal from the Lich Lord Jim is an act of either tremendous bravery or tragic stupidity. Which do you believe is the case?”

  “Well, Slippery John reckons it’d be the second one,” said Slippery John cheerfully. “Slippery John thought that would have been pretty obvious from the manhole thing.”

  I glared at him for a second, then threw down my staff and folded my arms. “No. No, this isn’t right at all.”

  doublebill: this is haerdr than I thought

  sunderwonder: what exactly are you doing again

  doublebill: i’m triyng to fix jim

  sunderwonder: okay I can see this is important to you but maybe your overdoing it a bit

  sunderwonder: maybe you should just do something small

  doublebill: what like

  doublebill: give him a new hat

  sunderwonder: not quite that small

  doublebill: i dunno hes a hard guy to shop for

  sunderwonder: well hes your friend

  doublebill: hang on

  doublebill: okay ive got somethnig

  doublebill: were gona need one of the really old backups

  —

  The sun began to rise, spilling orange dawn over the rolling green hills of the surrounding plains. I noticed that the horizon was a lot more textured than I remembered, and more bristling with siege weaponry.

  An army was advancing towards the school. Just as I had done on my first day, I deeply resented the fact that St. Gordon’s Magical College was not, in fact, a castle.

  “All right, chaps, settle down,” said the headmaster, resplendent in his star-patterned cardigan as he strode back and forth in front of the student body. “Let me assure you all that there is absolutely no reason to panic.” The rising tension was not eased in the slightest. “It’s probably just some misunderstanding—stop picking your nose, Bottomroach—but a Stragonoffian army appears to be attacking the college. Now, don’t . . .”

  “What’s he saying?” Nearby whispering distracted me from the speech. The rest of the student body was shuffling into place behind us, led by Meryl, the first year head girl. She had a hand on my shoulder and was straining to see over a lanky third year standing in front. “Is something going on?”

  “Yes, something’s going on,” I said.

  For the first time, Meryl noticed whose shoulder she was braced upon. “Jim, do you know what’s going on?” She squinted at the horizon. “Is that an army?”

  “It looks like one, doesn’t it?” The upheld weapons of the besieging horde on the horizon grew bigger and better-defined by the second, and I noticed at that point that we had been assembled in a manner that could be described as “regimental.” “I think they might be expecting us to fight it.”

  “Oh dear. Really?”

  “I think so.”

  Meryl jumped up and down a few times. “There’s a lot of them.”

  “How many?”

  “About a thousand. No, wait, two thousand. Perspective threw me off.”

  I stood on tip toe. The sun had risen further by now and the heaving mass of armor and sharp weaponry was clearer than ever. Our pathetic assembly wouldn’t even slow them. Neither, I suspected, would the school building.

  “I think I’m going to sit this out,” I said.

  “What did you say?” asked Meryl. “Where are you going?”

  The next thing I knew, I was making my way through the students. I pushed a couple of senior years aside and stepped out into the heat of the headmaster’s glare.

  “Did you have a question, Bottomroach?”

  “Yeah . . . I mean, no,” I said, fidgeting uneasily under everybody’s scrutiny. “I, er . . . I don’t really want to die. So . . . I’m just going to leave.”

  The headmaster’s face twisted as if he were marking an essay with particularly bad grammar. “You need not . . . die,” he said patiently. “This is your chance to prove yourself a hero.”

  I winced. “I’m still not terribly comfortable with it.”

  The headmaster’s complexion reddened. “THIS,” he barked, like a burst of air escaping from a balloon, “is a school of battle magic. You are here to learn magic in the application of combat and adventuring. If you honestly wish to eschew your very first real-world experience, then there is no reason for you to be attending this institution.”

  I took another look at the approaching army. It hadn’t gotten any smaller. Then I glanced back at the school’s defensive force, just in case fifteen hundred backup wizards had arrived while I wasn’t looking. “I guess I’ll be off, then,” I said.

  “Right,” continued the Headmaster as I made my way towards the back gate. “Now that the timewasters have come forward, perhaps those of us who are unafraid of victory can discuss strategy—”

  “Anyone want to come with me?” I interjected, turning around. “Anyone else not want to die?”

  “As I was saying . . .” continued the headmaster after a particularly thoughtful silence.

  “No, really, look,” I said. “There’s thousands of them. You will definitely die if you stay here. It won’t mean
anything. You’re not making any kind of grand gesture. You’re just going to be dead. So is no-one else going to come with me?”

  “I’ll come with you!” cried Meryl, raising a defiant fist.

  “All right!” shouted the headmaster manically. “Everyone with no concept of heroism is invited to get the hell out of my school! Everyone else can stay where they are and—” An arrow slammed into his temple. “Glurble burble fleep.”

  —

  “Jim?” called Meryl, after we’d begun climbing the big grassy hill on St. Gordon’s south face. “I think we should go back.”

  I was panting. The hill was getting steep, and exhaustion stung at my legs. “I thought . . . you were with me,” I wheezed.

  “Can I be honest? I hadn’t really been listening when I said that. I thought we were going on a secret mission.”

  “No, we’re pretty much just running away.”

  “We have to do something to help them! Someone could be killed!”

  My current position afforded me a spectacular view of the siege. I could see the whole disorganized mass of warrior thugs smashing through the school gates and bearing down upon the huddle of magic students, like a tarantula crawling towards a trapped ladybird. “Not really selling it to me, there, Meryl.”

  “But there has to be some way we can—LOOK OUT!”

  I felt the tremors through the ground before I heard the clatter of hooves and saw the massive golden horses come storming down the hill towards us. I flung myself to the grass just in time to slip unharmed between the muscular legs of a horse the size of a small cottage.

  I flipped onto my back to get a better look. The riders were almost as big and muscular as their mounts. Most of them had long, blonde hair trailing from their heads like comet tails, and their glittering armor clattered musically as they bounced up and down in the gyrating saddles.

  “They’re heading for the school,” said Meryl, pointing. “I think they want to join in.”

  There weren’t more than half a dozen of them, but they charged straight into battle without fear, hesitation or sanity. In one mighty leap the horses had cleared the fence as well as the entire student body of St. Gordon’s, and their hooves crashed down upon the gravel directly in the path of the invading army.

  The warrior students were taken by surprise, but continued to charge through sheer force of momentum. The members of the frontal assault fell almost instantly before the mysterious horsemen, whose effectiveness was matched only by their apparent ineptitude. Every single one of them was mechanically performing the same three-slash sword combo. And yet, they were ploughing right through the Stragonoffian louts. Those who tried to counter-attack managed only to bend and shatter their cheap school-issue battleaxes.

  “Oh, right,” said Meryl. “This is what my mum was talking about.”

  “What?” I asked, as she helped me to my feet.

  “Well, she was saying that some big golden guys have been appearing out of nowhere and doing odd jobs for people. Bunch of them chased the foxes out of her hen house.”

  “That’s . . . really weird.”

  “She had to get a new one built, but she was happy that the foxes were gone. She says she was visited by angels.”

  The battle had almost reached a decisive conclusion. Most of the Stragonoff side was trying to retreat, but were finding it difficult with their sheer weight of numbers, and the golden riders hadn’t ceased their relentless sword-swinging. I could see Mr. Everwind fidgeting nearby, trying to pick the best moment to thank them and ask them to stop.

  “Guess it’s safe to go back,” said Meryl, emphasizing the word “safe” with a hint of spite. She stopped when she saw I wasn’t following. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s just occurred to me. I’ve been at St. Gordon’s for a year and I’ve never known what’s on the other side of this hill. I think . . . I think I’m going to go find out.”

  “And then you’ll come back.”

  “Mmmmmaybe,” I said, honestly. “Actually, no,” I added, more honestly. “No, I won’t. Look at it, Meryl. It’s three buildings in the middle of nowhere, and it’s apparently got an invasion problem. I don’t need it.”

  “What’s brought this on?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was the siege.” I looked back at the mess in the school courtyard, which only made things clearer in my head. “I always felt my only options were college or working on Dad’s farm, but . . . I think my horizons just expanded. Does that make sense?”

  “No. None. I don’t understand at all. Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know.” I cast a look back at the hill. “I’ll ask someone when I get there.”

  I’d only covered ten more yards before her voice made me stop again. “There’s still time! They’re still cleaning up the last few fighters down there! You could still be a hero!”

  I didn’t turn. I stood and watched the dewy grass flutter innocently in the early morning sun.

  “I’d rather be a protagonist,” I said.

  MOGWORLD

  Loincloth Entertainment

  Reviewed by H. Morris

  Unless you’ve spent the last year on some faraway planet with an alien parasite stuck to your face, you’ve no doubt heard of Mogworld already. It’s been causing a big stir in the games industry for the amazing new creation process behind it: total procedural generation. Procedurally generated life. Procedurally generated AI. Procedurally generated quests. It’s just a shame they couldn’t procedurally generate some fun while they were at it.

  Mogworld is a Massive Online Game set in a world of magical fantasy, in a time of dragons and wizards and adventure, which may seem familiar to you if you’ve played any game ever made ever. The developers apparently set this up deliberately by tweaking the world’s evolution at several key points. It’s as if they thought the revolutionary engine meant they could skip the idea of innovating anywhere else. Even the title—M.O.G. world—is rubbish. It’d be like calling an FPS “First Person Shooting Adventure.”

  Your character is a beautiful angelic hero who descends from heaven to do mighty deeds. Which is weird, because in the beta you just took over an existing adventurer in the world. It seems rather a waste of effort to go to all this trouble to make humanoid races evolve, then have us slap together a custom-built hero to drive around in. I guess being able to customize appearance is nice, but unless all you ever want to play is a big golden swimwear model, there’s not much opportunity for role-playing. And none of the NPCs seem the least bit grateful when you do their quests. Most of them just come across as completely terrified of you.

  Mind you, I’d be pretty scared too if I knew I was living in such a cruel world as this one: NPC perma-death has been added since the beta. When an NPC dies, they never, ever come back. Any quests that they had, or any quests that involve killing or protecting them, can never, ever be attempted more than once, by anyone. I guess you can’t fault it for realism, but I end up having to ride back and forth across the land for hours just looking for quests to do. Maybe this wouldn’t matter so much if there was decent PVP, but there isn’t any; apparently the idea was that the NPCs are so smart you wouldn’t even need other human beings. No doubt the appalling basement shut-ins who still mindlessly defend this game on the forums will call this “immersion,” but I prefer to call it “boring.”

  However detailed the graphics or intelligent the AI might be, I really can’t get over the NPC perma-death thing. Seriously. I want to know what retarded gibbon on the dev team thought that was a good idea. I can only presume that an NPC murdered their entire family and this was their chance for revenge. Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed with the technology on display. I’d also be impressed if someone built a skyscraper out of brie, but don’t expect me to want to live in it.

  Innovation: 9

  Gameplay: 4

  Lastability: 3

  Overall: 72.85%

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw is the c
reator of Zero Punctuation, a popular weekly game review on the Webby award-winning Escapist online magazine, for which he also earned the Sun Microsystems 2008 IT Journalism award for Best Gaming Journalist. He has also worked as a game designer and dialogue writer for various studios. He was born and raised in the UK and now lives in Brisbane, Australia.

  Mogworld is his first published novel.

  Coming soon:

  a new novel from the author of Mogworld!

  JAM

  By

  Yahtzee Croshaw

  October 2012

  in bookstores, Nook, and Kobo

  from Dark Horse Books

  DAY 1.1

  I woke up one morning to find that the entire city had been covered in a three-foot layer of man-eating jam.

  I didn’t notice straightaway. Our apartment was on the third floor, so the day began as a fairly ordinary one. I got up at around eleven a.m. to go job hunting. I tried to take a shower, but the hot water was off. Then I tried to have some cereal, but the milk was off. The whole refrigerator was off. I fingered the light switch: nothing. The power was cut.

  None of this was any cause for concern. I glanced over at the increasingly urgent utility bills pinned to the corkboard by the front door. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford to pay them; it was just that none of us ever really got around to it.

  At that point Frank emerged from his bathroom, wearing his gym clothes and with gooseflesh dotting his arms and shoulders. “Hot water’s off,” he said, through his teeth.

  “Power’s off,” I replied.

  “Oh, christ.” He ripped the most recent payment demand from the board. “Was it off when Tim got back last night? Do you know?”

  “No. He got back late. I was in bed.”