one. It was just the ur-quest Item. Finding it means the game’s over and you won, which makes sense in a little ASCII dungeon game that doesn’t have to explain itself. But we were gaming in a realistic world at this point, and everything needed a reason.
Idol of Arn: A small jade figurine of a grinning, Buddha-like man, quite ordinary except that it is always warm to the touch. There used to be two of them. The other one disappeared in the Second Age, around the same time the Inland Sea appeared…
Mirror of Becoming: User polymorphs into one of the following: 40% chance, dragon of random color and size; 25% chance, giant rat; 25% chance, minor daemon; 9% major daemon; 1% chance, minor demigod. Transformation lasts anywhere between one and twenty-four hours. “Who’s the fairest now, dearies?” she hissed.
The Soul Gem: A faceted black jewel two inches across, ageless and imperishable. It has appeared in a variety of settings over the ages—pendants, crowns, breastplates, skulls. At the end of the Third Age it returns to the beginning of that Age, along with whoever possesses it. “Take it,” the old man said. “Make a better world.”
Staff of the Sorcerous Gentleman: All spells cast by the wielder have quadruple effect and duration. Intelligence increases. Staff cannot be discarded. After 3–4 hours, wielder will involuntarily begin moving toward the nearest body of salt water and immerse him- or herself, there to die unless sustained by artificial means. “Do you know extended underwater breathing? How fast can you teach it?”
Unique Monsters: Liches, Daemons, Demigods
Arch-lich: mightiest of the undead; the animate corpses of mortals too proactive to die. Being a sixteenth-level spell caster with genius intelligence was merely the price of entry. You’d need a 120,000-gp soul repository, a dream quest to the Negative Material Plane, the sacrifice of a true innocent, and the iron will to die bodily but just keep on trucking. Whenever you saw an arch-lich walking around, you saw the remains of somebody who didn’t mind having a skull for a head, if that was what it took. You may as well use its name.
Daemon Prince. Did this mean the Devil? This is where my fantasy theology got muddled. Who were these guys, again? Did they live in hell? If so, why was there a hell in Endoria, if the Christian God wasn’t there?
I had to be one of only a few English majors to find Paradise Lost of practical, on-the-job utility. But how did “the unconquerable Will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield” translate into to-hit and damage values?
Chapter Twenty-Three
The black sword came back. This time it was in a test level I built in the old game to look at all the different terrain types—just a big room divided into strips of grass, marble, ice, dirt, and cobblestone. I looked away and looked back, and there was a goblin with an outsize black sword in its hand. It was a standard broadsword, but it was a flat black and had markings on it.
It was charging straight toward me and I watched it come. It had spawned from nothing. Just before it closed to combat distance, I took my hands off the keyboard and mouse, as if the sword held a mysterious charge that might have come up through my own character and into me. My stats cratered at its touch and I watched from the remains of my default first-level fighter as it collapsed in a heap. The sword vanished. I checked; invulnerability was set to ON.
But I knew, now, what it made me think of.
“Hey, Matt, what happens in the Second Age?”
Matt was in the kitchen, planted before the snack machine with the solemnity of a pagan idol.
I no longer felt bad about interrogating Matt about the Black Arts canon. I needed to know these things if I was going to be in charge of the story, and if Matt was shocked at my complete ignorance of a large section of my job he never showed it. In fact, I gradually realized that his fundamental good nature was one of those intangibles that made it possible for the office to function. That and I was pretty sure these conversations were the best part of his day.
“The Second Age? Well, of course, there are conflicting accounts.” He paused, maintaining a sleepy professorial air as he considered the uppermost tier of treats, the chips and trail mix.
“But there’ve been actual games