I played my first online game by taking a trip to Trent B’s New Feierland, a place every bit as horrible as I’d been told. I loved it.
What follows are the thoughts of Rasmus Carbuncle, Belligerent Soldier of Lost Fortune.
Well when I came to my senses I was below ground with a bunch of sketchy fellas that seemed to be looking for something, a little nimbly bloke had climbed up to the roof and waved at us when some stitched up dead goatmen fucks came wandering out of the dark.
The prancy magic man next to me cops a javelin through the arm but doesn’t cry much, so I yank it out and stab it in front of us like a pike while he starts waving his arms around. The first dumb dead goatfuck comes charging straight at the pike so while he’s flailing around I behalve him with my horrible blood-rusted claymore, then piss on the shards of his stomped-in skull for good measure. A fella in armour misfires with his fancy-schmancy pistol while another picks up a rock and dusts a goatskull with it, then nimbly little Blixa drops from the roof knife-first and lands in a cloud of broken beastbody.
Javelin boy’s arm-waving stops and the rest of the goatfilth finds themselves caught in some kinda magic web I guess, I don’t know, I don’t traffic with that stuff. We knife them real quiet and head off towards the grumbling roars that started after that useless pistol shot.
I pull one of these fellas up and ask for a refresher of just what I’m doing here apart from hitting goats with swords, and he tells me some eye creature is giving the filthy miners bad dreams that makes them not work which is bad. Fair enough.
Little Blixa’s up on the roof again but soon enough there’s sounds like something mighty huge digging its way up from below the tunnel and more of that godawful groany roaring. So we sets up a rope tripline with walrus tallow all smeared over the rocks in front of it while the noise gets louder, and Blixa buries red and blue gems under the stones further into the tunnel like a crazy fuck before climbing back up to the roof.
Out of the darkness comes this slimy bulk of god damn rock dragging itself along with its forelegs, staring at us with glowing green eyes and making our trap look powerful stupid. Blixa looks like he’s going to throw up for a second then handwaves something about eyes being bad but I don’t get it. It drags its body over the buried gems and there’s a great fucking explosion, the slimy moss covering it catches fire and it starts running at us and I take a few discrete steps backwards.
Blixa drops from the roof like he’s going to knife it in the face but falls flat on its head with a wet smack, staring into its eyes then sliding off and falling right in the fucking grease we were going to light up.
The fella in the heavy armour and this big Salt Soldier the prancy magic man summoned up start taking swings at the thing between getting smacked away, and rock-thrower Gaffer Grunion sticks with what he knows but passes out as soon as the rock leaves his hand. Okay eyes bad, I get it now. The handy bloke next to me lassos Blixa with a nice silk rope so I grab it and pelt in the opposite direction, which is pretty easy seeing as he’s all greased up.
Behind me fireballs are exploding and grown men are soiling their pants, I flip Blixa over and grab every explody gem he has left and stuff it into my ded rat sack.
The big rock sludge fuck is on fire now, stomping around in flaming grease and beating the shit out of the Salt Soldier. I open up my Monkey Skull Snuff Mull and breathe deep, I feel good, this is good, I run at the big dumb rock fuck staring at my feet and hurl my precious rat sack right into its big dumb face. I feel good.
What follows from this point are the thoughts of Remus Carbuncle, in New Feierland to find his father Rasmus.
Well, this place is awful. No one knew where my father had gone except for this dwarf guy and now that we’re here, the people my father had gone with are climbing out of a stinking hole in the ground covered in blood and filth, telling me that my father just saved them by blowing up a flaming rock creature with a stupid amount of exploding gems and dead rats not ten minutes ago. They say the resulting unholy green explosion vapourised one of their friends and a chunk of stalactite took my father’s head clean from his shoulders, leaving his body to slump to the ground in a fountain of blood. I don’t know why they would tell me that.
They lead me to his body and I lose it for a minute, screaming at the dark. I take his Monkey Skull Snuff Mull and his Sabatons, still full of warm piss, he would have wanted it this way I think.
They tell me all about the things you can find in this godforsaken hole in the ground and my ears perk up at the Alter of Transmutation, or Transformation, Trans-fuckingsomething and right now I want nothing more than to be something else. They lead me to it and I take a hit of booze for my father, then pour it onto the alter amid my falling tears. My knees go weak and my stomach cramps and I’m rolling around in the caltrops some fuck spread around the alter while I wasn’t looking and I’m vomiting and rolling in the vomit. When I can stand up the only thing that seems different is that looking at light hurts like hell and I want to scratch my eyes out. I hate this place.
We go back out into the caves and ignore whatever’s flapping around in the dark and come to a short hall with a barred door. Some stitched abomination is standing inside and the little guy they call Blixa spritzes holy water through the bars which of course makes it start sizzling and throwing itself against the door snapping its teeth. They’re all talking about throwing rocks at it until it dies or wasting crossbow bolts and I tie a rope around the hilt of my sword and start jamming it through the bars until the thing is dead, stupid thing doesn’t even stop throwing itself at the door.
When it’s in pieces they find a box in the room that Blixa pries open with a crowbar, he pulls out some axes and a book and some kind of spice pouch and I don’t care.
Back out in the caves and then we find a room with a round wooden door standing slightly ajar. The room inside is round too and looks like some kind of lab, with two benches carved right into the floor in the middle.
There’s a grated cabinet towards the back and they all start hitting it with things and fucking up their weapons, but hey the cabinet is slightly dented now so whatever makes you happy.
Blixa climbs up on the roof and I grab a hooked pole from the wall and walk towards the door with this Salt Soldier thing. Next thing I know some miner with pale skin like black-shot marble is pulling himself around the corner with a sack in his hand. The others try to ask him what he’s doing here but that black shit is pulsing and he’s getting closer so I swing at him with my new pole and break myself off a piece.
He screams to his friends of course but then Blixa’s dropped a net on him and I’m stabbing him in the back with swords, but then his friends drag him away and shut the goddamn door on us!
They’re yelling something about us stealing their treasure but we haven’t even got anything yet and from the sounds of dropping stones I think they’re trying to brick us in?
We smear oil around the floor and rig up a rope attached to the door, running it around the corner of a bench for leverage, three of these guys yank on it and get the door back open but two of them fall down and seven miners come running into the room, including the prick I sworded in the spine. I lob the rest of my booze right into his face but before I can throw a torch the Salt Soldier topples over and knocks it out of my hand. God damn it.
People are tussling on the floor with these miners and getting black vomit all over them, then Blixa smashes his lantern into the oil and two of the fuckers light up like pyres, so I hook booze boy with my pole and send him staggering into the flames.
And right there, when it seems like maybe things aren’t always fucking terrible in this place, right there is where the big guy in all the armour comes swinging through the smoke, misses the miners, and fucking stabs me. If I were to measure how good I feel on a scale of ‘hit points’ right now I would give it a solid none, none hit points. No wonder my dad is dead.
He mumbles an apology and scuttles off and I’m still standing so I charge at the smouldering miners with my sword, hoping for a shishkebab, and what I get is my sword knocked out of my woozy hands and black bile spewed all over my right arm.
The skin is tight and chewing and I’m on the floor, I reach for my poniard to hack off the arm and everything goes dark.
I’m cutting off the arm but no matter how much I cut there’s always more arm, and then all the right arms have been cut off but they’re always regrowing and the severed ones crawl up to my mouth and try to climb inside, the hands on the floor detach from their arms and they’re shiny new piles of goo and they tear at my ears and nose and they become goo too and always always I’m cutting and it’s eating and I want to wake up but I’m not asleep but this is a dream but there’s always more arm.
When I wake up we’re outside and they’ve amputated my arm to the shoulder, they say there’s still more of the black shit in my shoulder though, it’s spreading towards my face, they’ve tied me up and I have this overwhelming urge to bite something.
They say they’re taking me back to town to find someone that can help me, Blixa says he owes me a blood debt for what my father did, they say they need to lock me up in a box now. That seems reasonable.
Remus is now back in New Feierland, locked up in the basement sanatorium of the newly founded Baron Blixa Von Apfelsaft of Barovia and Barovania Center For The Amelioration of Unspeakable Afflictions. Blixa takes his blood debts awful seriously and is spending more money than Remus has seen in his whole shitty life to save him, giving the matriarch healer of the area 10,000gp now and promising another 40,000gp if she’s able to find a cure instead of burning the still-living body as is customary in New Feierland.
When they opened the box it was full of black bile and he was growing a new arm and snapping his teeth, so uh, we’ll see how that goes.
New Feierland: Utterly Terrible 10/10 Would Play Again.
Appended Obituary by Trent B:
The look on his face makes it wonderful.
Like… Pissing into his only nice thing, being a pair of steel boots, whilst not even using his fly correctly and holding a dagger… nothing in that registers as being anything worth any kind of thought or emotion. It’s just exactly what needs to be done. All of it. He’s not even looking. He’s like staring down the shitty road that he is in the middle of, just waiting to finish pissing in his boots so he can put them back on and keep walking.
Worst character.