Alice looked at the table which contained her (questionable) rendition of The Settlers. Cecilia looked at the board ga, before turning to the third player Alice had managed to convince to join the group. She had invited most of the other researchers she worked with to join the ga, but the only ones who had expressed any interest in the idea were Ezrien and Anne. Ezrien was busy today, and since Alice was going to start classes at her magic academy tomorrow, she expected to be busy in the future. Sadly, this ant it was a three player ga and not a four player ga this ti, but Alice hoped that in the future she would get a chance to play other board gas with more people. Though, admittedly, that may take a while, since Alice needed to make each ga and carve the pieces out of wood, and she was going to spend most of her future free ti in the library she had spent a ridiculous amount of money to gain a year of access to.
Anne gave Cecilia a cheery grin. “So you’re the ‘friend who owns an enchantnt shop’ that Alice ntioned a few tis? It’s nice to et you!” said Anne, giving Cecilia a warm handshake. “I’ve never been in your shop before today, but the enchanted items are decent quality. For soone so young, you’re doing pretty well at managing a shop on your own.”
“It’s nice to et you as well,” said Cecilia, who visibly brightened up at Anne’s complint. “Alice has ntioned you a few tis when talking about getting to know the research team. I hear you’ve given her a bit of help eting new mbers? Thank you for looking out for my friend.”
“Alice leaves a decent enough impression on her own. Even if she’s a bit quiet and spends a lot more ti thinking than talking, she’s at least passionate enough about the team’s goals and her work as a researcher to make up for it,” said Anne giving Alice a mischievous grin. “So this board ga is from your holand?” asked Anne, giving the various numbered tiles a dubious look. Alice was glad that she didn’t need to explain what a board ga was. This world, apparently, had a few board gas already in place, as well as a few card gas played with semi-standardized cards that [Scribes] sotis produced.
“Yeah,” said Alice, deciding to ignore Anne’s impression that she was ‘quiet.’ “The rules are actually pretty simple – every turn, you roll the dice. Then, tiles with the sa number as the dice produce resources, and every player with a settlent or city touching those tiles collects a copy of the resource. For example, if I roll an eight, all of ‘8’ tiles produce resources. If I have a settlent on a ‘brick’ resource tile that is numbered ‘8,’ I get 1 brick. You spend resources to build more towns, cities, and roads. The basic goal is to 10 points, which makes you win the ga. Every ti you build a settlent, you get one point, and upgrading it to a city gives you another point. The player with the longest road gets 2 extra points, and loses those points if soone else beats their road length. The resource costs for everything are explained in the little panel at the corner of the board. There are more specific rules, such as the robber and rules about settlent placent detailed in the little booklet I gave you. Any questions?” Alice asked.
“So the objective is to win the dice rolls and acquire resources, thus building enough settlents to choke out your competitors and monopolize as much land as possible?” asked Cecilia.
“That’s… one way to put it?” Said Alice.
“I see,” said Cecilia, nodding. “The important thing to do is ss with the other players as much as possible. If they have no resources they cannot win. In the anti, you want to monopolize as many resources as possible.”
“Uhhh…” Alice
“Is it possible to trade with other players as well, or are we just working to screw everyone else over?” Asked Anne, giving the board a more careful look.
“You can trade, but only during your turn.”
“Hmm… It’s an interesting way to build up Magic Skills and [Perception],” said Anne, after a mont.
Alice had an ominous feeling about that statent, but decided to move on with her explanation for now.
After a slightly more detailed explanation of so of the more specific rules, the three set up the board. Alice had carved the board itself out of wood, before using cheaper colors made from plants grown in Illvaria to dye different tiles and make it clear which tile produced which resource. Sure, the ocean surrounding the continent looked a little funny when it was grey colored, but blue dye imported from the Corellion Empire cost almost a gold crown for a small quantity, while grey dye was half a silver sun for the sa amount. The continent was also kind of lumpy and looked a little funny, but it no longer looked like a potato.
In addition to the board itself, Alice had made ‘special event’ cards out of smaller wooden slats, dice made out of a mixture of wood and iron (the iron being used to give the dice a proper weight and make it sturdier), and a variety of little wooden towns, roads and cities Alice had carved herself. The settlents and cities that she had tried to make with exquisite detail also looked kind of off, but they were serviceable.
Once everyone roughly understood the rules and the board ga, Anne went first. She threw the dice into the air… and imdiately stretched out a mana tendril towards the dice. Then, electromagnetic mana shot out of her and swapped around the trajectory of the dice. The dice landed on eight. Anne grinned. “Two sheep please.” She held out her hand at Alice, who was managing the resources for the group.
“Anne? What are you doing?” said Alice, trying to resist the urge to glare at Anne.
“What do you an?”
“You changed the trajectory of the dice with magic!”
“And?” Anne seed genuinely baffled by the notion that she had done sothing wrong.
“That’s cheating,” said Alice.
“Why would it be cheating? Isn’t the point of the ga to boost your ability to manipulate mana? It seems like an ingenious way to train [Perception] and Kinetic or Electromagnetic magic. Its use for Thermal and Organic mages is a fair bit more limited, since the wood used in the dice is already dead, but it’s quite a clever ga. I do think the penalties for having weaker control than the other players is a bit harsh, since you only get resources when you force rolls on the right number, but it’s a decent training thod. Isn’t that the goal?” Anne’s genuine confusion made it hard to respond to her statents, and Alice’s bad feeling intensified.
“But- I an, that’s not-“ Alice felt a sudden headache. Cecilia was frowning. Alice turned to her, hoping that Alice had another ally willing to enforce fair play in the ga, before Cecilia experintally reached out a mana tendril.
“I see,” muttered Cecilia, before she handed Anne two sheep tokens and picked up the dice. She tossed them into the air before shooting out one of her mana tendrils. Anne did the sa, and the two imdiately began struggling to control the rapid spinning of the dice in midair. Cecilia, whose Perks were much more focused on precise manipulation of mana and boosting enchantnt quality instead of ‘active’ mana use, was only able to influence one of the two dice. anwhile, Anne tilted the other die to make it a 6 and tried to tilt the second die into a two. Cecilia tried and failed to make it the second die land on four to give her a brick and a wood resource tile, but Anne reached out another mana tendril and slamd the die into the table. After wobbling a few tis, the die finally landed on five. The total roll ended up being an eleven. Nobody had any towns or cities on tiles with the number eleven.
“No, Cecilia, wait, that’s not- I an, aren’t you also upset?”
Cecilia also gave Alice a baffled look. “Why would I be?”
“You aren’t – I an, that’s not… using magic to change the outco of the dice isn’t in the spirit of fair play, don’t you think?”
“Why wouldn’t it be fair? She used her own perks and abilities to change the outco of the dice, right? And we’re all Mages, so using Magic is pretty reasonable. If there were any non-Mages at the table it might be a problem, but we can all influence the dice so it’s pretty fair right?”
Alice felt increasingly baffled by Anne and Cecilia’s attitude towards rigging the dice rolls. Was she the crazy one here?
“What do you an it’s fair? Isn’t playing the ga this way… odd?”
“Isn’t it just normal?” Asked Cecilia, frowning in concentration as she looked at Anne’s sheep and waited for Alice to roll the dice. “I an, in the first place, it’s similar to a [Gambler] having their Perks activate, right? It’s just that the user needs to be a bit more conscious about what they’re trying to do, and the outco of the ga doesn’t have any money riding on it. Which is a good thing – [Gamblers] only get experience towards their next level while gambling, but they don’t actually learn anything in the process. This ga instead trains a lot of different things, from {Basic Mathematics} to Attributes like [Perception] and [Magic]. It even builds skills for a variety of magic abilities, like {Mana Control}. While it might not be terribly optimized for non-Mages… ah.” Cecilia finally seed to rember Alice’s holand didn’t have magic or the System in it. She gave Alice a sympathetic look, before shaking her head. “I see. Your gas were actually just determined by luck. Don’t worry, here you can control the outco of the gas and play gas determined by skill.”
Alice’s bad feeling was fulfilled. Not only did Anne and Cecilia not see a problem with using magic to rig the outco of the ga, Cecilia, after realizing Alice’s circumstances, found Alice’s thoughts about fair play to be absurd. Alice felt a headache begin to build up as she tried to figure out how to convince these two to play the ga properly.
Wait, is this actually a problem? Alice suddenly had a strange thought. If three mages were trying to control the outco of each dice roll, the odds were probably pretty close to random anyway, right? And even though they weren’t playing the ga the ‘original’ way, it wasn’t a terrible idea to use the ga as a training ground. Anne was a woman who spent her days off working on getting levels and Stats. Cecilia wasn’t quite as obsessed with levelling as Anne, but there was nobody in this world that minded getting a few more Attributes and Levels whenever they could. Even Alice wanted to level up as much as possible, because levels gave her new tools to explore this world, increased avenues to earn money, and reductions in her aging speed. All three of those appealed to her. If Alice could have fun playing the ga while getting so Levels and Attributes, wasn’t it the best of both worlds?
Alice wrestled with this thought for a few monts as she looked at the dice in her hands, before she decided to give up and roll with the punches.
She probably wasn’t going to be playing a ‘proper’ ga of the Settlers in this world, given how different the culture was. So she instead decided to set up a few extra rules that she ‘forgot to ntion.’
First, one could only use magic to ‘spin’ the dice while they were in midair. They couldn’t push the dice ‘up’ with their magic – the could only rotate it. If they seriously altered the influence of gravity on the dice, they were disqualified from getting resources for that turn. This made sure that the dice didn’t infinitely hover in midair as the three mages tried to contest the outco of each dice roll, adding a fair bit of difficulty to the ga and avoiding multi-minute turns. In addition, the group was forced to set an upper limit on how much mana each player could spend per second trying to manipulate the dice. This was mostly a technical limitation – One of the dice slightly cracked when Alice and Anne were getting really into a battle to make one of the dice land on a one versus a six. From then on, the players all limited how much mana they could use at once to keep the dice from getting damaged.
There were all sorts of other disputes in the rules, such as whether using more than two mana tendrils at once was fair, or whether there should be so sort of ‘dropoff’ point where players could no longer manipulate the dice (it was eventually decided that one could not influence the dice once they were ten centiters above the table, which made it even harder to ss with the dice and, oddly enough, upped the speed [Perception] increased).
The ga lasted for a total of thirty-seven turns, before Cecilia threw out three once-per-day rchant Perks and conned Alice into trading away three sheep and a brick for one piece of wood, letting Cecilia imdiately win the ga one turn before Alice would have won. In that ti, Alice refined her control over Magic in a way she had never expected to, learned why pretty people were always dangerous in this world, and realized that her interpretation of ‘fair play’ in a ga was very, very different from the inhabitants of this world. At no point in ti during the entire occasion did she find herself bored, and while she found the experience bizarre due to the cultural clash in rules, she had fun. The three played a few more gas before Anne decided to go ho. Alice returned to her inn room as well, before she started preparing for her first day tomorrow. It had been a surprisingly fun last day of freedom, though to be honest, Alice was excited for tomorrow. Soon, she would finally be able to access the academy knowledge bases and libraries.
Na: Alice Verianna
Age: 16
Strength: 106 (112 -> 122%)
Perception: 127 (155% -> 165%)
Dexterity: 105 (114 -> 124%)
Intelligence: 164 (128%)
Endurance: 119 (121%)
Willpower: 143 (108%)
Charisma: 127 (107%)
Magic: 138 (117%)
Primary Classes: 6/6
Survivor: 41 -> 44
Explorer of Magic: 42 -> 51
Scholar: 24 -> 34
Scientist: 22 -> 38
Kinetic Manabinder: 1 -> 12
(Apprentice) Enchanter: 9 -> 24
Evolved Classes: 1
Student of Kinetic Magic: 25
Secondary Classes: 1
Fisherwoman: 3
Perks:
Foraging (Survivor 5)
Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)
Extremophile (Survivor 15)
Camouflaged (Survivor 20)
Sixth Sense (Survivor 25)
Enhanced Training (Survivor 30)
Sense Hostility (Survivor 35)
Moderate Tissue Regeneration (Survivor 40)
Magic Proficiency (Explorer of Magic 5)
Enhanced Regeneration (Explorer of Magic 10)
Combat Spellcaster (Explorer of Magic 15)
Improved Seed (Explorer of Magic 20)
Seeds of Magic (Explorer of Magic 25)
Three Seeds (Explorer of Magic 30)
Broken Seed (Explorer of Magic 35)
Infusion of Comprehension (Explorer of Magic 40)
Mana Construct Modelling (Explorer of Magic 45)
Reset (Explorer of Magic 50)
Enhanced mory (Scholar 5)
Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirent (Scholar 10)
Accelerated Thinking (Scholar level 15 (-5))
Rhetorical Flourish (Scholar level 20)
Photographic mory (Scholar level 25)
Improved Multitasking (Scholar level 30)
Precise mana asurent (Scientist level 5)
Sample Collection (Scientist level 10)
Tir (Scientist level 15)
Safety Analysis (Scientist Level 20)
Shared mory (Scientist Level 25)
Advanced Mana asurent (Scientist Level 30)
Degraded Seed Slot (Scientist 35)
Object Control (Student of Kinetic Magic 5)
Above Average Mana Sight (Student of Kinetic Magic 10)
Folds of Magic (Student of Kinetic Magic 15)
Split Mind (Student of Kinetic Magic 20)
Improved Object Control (Sensory Enhancent) (Student of Kinetic Magic 25)
Mana's Binding (Kinetic Manabinder 5)
Enhanced Focus (Kinetic Manabinder 10)
Enchanter's Vision (Apprentice Enchanter 5)
Monstrous Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 10)
Faster Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 15)
Faster Mana Regeneration (Apprentice Enchanter 20)
Skills
Academic Skills:
English (Language Proficiency): 100
Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 98 -> 99
Sigmusi (Language Proficiency): 0->7
Basic Mathematics: 122
Interdiate Mathematics: 78
Advanced Mathematics: 18
Magic Skills:
Kinetic Manipulation: 48 -> 57
Mana Control: 33 -> 41
Mana Precision: 31 -> 43
Kinetic Force: 29 -> 37
Projectile Awareness : 9 -> 12
Divided Attention: 8 -> 16
Basic Enchanting: 6 -> 19
Broken Mana Purification: 0->12
Crafting Skills:
Weaving: 27
Woodworking: 25 -> 28
Cooking: 12
Stoneworking: 11
Physical Skills:
Spearmanship: 19
Sprinting: 18
Dodge: 18
Climbing: 9
Fishing: 9
Digging: 8
Stealth: 4
Basic dicine: 3
Magic Seed: 4/5
(Unused Seed: Max 5% mana Conversion Ratio)
Kinetic Seed (135%)
Organic Seed (10%)
Pure mana Seed (50%)
Healing mana seed (10%)
Achievents:
Outworlder (Rarity: 10)
Seeker of Truth (III) (Rarity: 9)
Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)
Survivor of Winter (Rarity: 3)
Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)
Monster Slayer (III) (Rarity: 2) (Upgraded)
Well Trained (Rarity: 4)
Murderer (Rarity: 4)
Bookworm (Rarity: 3)
Kinetic Manabinder (Rarity N/A)
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