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GF Story (read please)


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This is the story of geneforge 1 . Please read it over and tell me what you think.

 

Geneforge

 

Prologue

 

The Shapers are the oldest, most respected, most secretive, and most powerful of the magical sects. The Shapers have the power to magically create life. The Shapers can make new life forms from nothing but raw materials and pure magic. They can mold this life to serve their purpose, be it as light as housework or major warfare. The Shapers guard the secrets of their powers very closely. To learn their techniques without permission is to court a speedy death, at the hands of a Guardian in the day or an Agent in the night.

After years of work, study, and testing, you have finally been accepted into the Shapers. You will spend your life advancing their will and delving into their secrets and powers. However, none of those secrets have been shared with you yet. First you must complete your apprenticeship. You must spend five years out in a Shaper colony on a remote island, watching their work and aiding their research.

After a brief welcoming ceremony and a last night’s celebration, you don your traditional garments and board your craft to the remote islands. The journey is two weeks long. You travel on a living craft, a specially modified drayk which will carry you through through the rough seas to your destination.

After a week’s journey, you pass close to a small chain of islands. You consult your chart and find that one of them is named Sucia Island. It is marked on your chart as Barred. Shapers declare places as Barred for a number of reasons. Experiments gone wrong. Dangerous accidents. Valuable secrets. Whatever the reason, any outsider in a Barred place is punished with instant death. Curious, you stand at the edge of your craft, carefully watching Sucia Island, wondering what secrets lie there. As you watch, you fail to notice the sailing ship dead ahead of you, off the southeast coast of the island.

Your craft shouts out an alarm, alerting you to danger. It is a strange ship, of a style you have never seen before. That is why you don’t recognize the weapon on its prow. It fires a long spear at your craft. The razor-sharp bolt strikes your drayk in the neck. It roars in anger and breathes a bolt of fire at you attacker. It strikes the sails, which sets them alight. The battle takes only seconds. You living craft flounders, mortally wounded, dropping you into the water. Your goods and tools sink into the depths. You attempt to swim to the surface.

You barely notice that the ship which attacked you is aflame and having great difficulty. Your whole being is consumed with the struggle to reach the shore. Your strength is not enough. You start to sink. But, with one last effort, your living craft assists you. Bleeding from its neck, rapidly dying, it manages to lift you with its head and carry you to a crumbling dock.

Then it dies. It sinks away. You are left alone, abandoned, on this forbidden shore. You are alone on Sucia Island.

 

1

 

You stagger off the dock, weakened to the point of collapse by your desperate swim here. After a few minutes, you manage to regain enough of your senses to look around. You are on the south coast of the island you saw before your craft was slain. However, apart from the fact that this isle was declared Barred by your people, you know nothing about it. The structures around you are ruined and crumbling. You would guess that they ave been abandoned for at least a century, probably two.

Islands are generally declared Barred because of a failed experiment and the presence of horrible, rouge creations. Fortunately, except for the waves lapping at the base of the dock, all is quiet. If you are going to be devoured, it won’t be soon. However, you are still standing here, and desperately weak as well. Fortunately the beach stretches off the the east. Maybe there is something useful there.

There is a tunnel to the north, built into the side of the hill. Your guess is that it is a storeroom ore warehouse. Usually, one is placed near the docks of a settlement. After all of these years, most of the goods inside are probably useless. You might be able to scavenge something useful, though.

You walk over to the cave and start in. It is very dark but as you approach a crystal shard on the ground lights up. You are amazed. You find a tunic and a cloak. As for weapons you manage to find some javelins. You walk over to a door. When you stand in front of it, it opens.

Inside this small chamber, you find several cylindrical containers. They look like canisters, each a little over a foot high. The sides are made of thick, carefully blown glass. Most of them have been broken, and the contents lost. One of them, however, is still intact. Inside, you see a glowing fluid. It swirls and moves about, seemingly under its own power. It looks like it is, in its own way, alive.

It probably is. You have never seen anything exactly like this before, but you have seen similar objects. The Shapers can contain fluids, filled with life and energy, which heal or energize those in need. This must be something like that. There is a section of fragile glass at the top. If you break it with the palm of your hand, the substance will come forth and energize you. It your weakened state, it seems hard to resist.

 

2

 

You break it. When you open the canister, the agents inside begin to act upon you. You feel yourself changing. You walk farther into the cave and discover a chest. you open it to find old records of goods that came through this port. You also find some coins and a key. It is old and rusted, but it may become of some use to you.

When you come out of the cavern you head east again. You find a passage leading to a small plain. You go go up it but you stumble a bit. You feel a bit woozy. It’s not caused by hunger, though, but by the effects of the strange substance in that canister. The stuff didn't heal you or revive you like you expected. It changed you. It’s like it soaked into your skin and rewrote some of your being, making you stronger.

You take a minute to experiment. You extend your fingers and focus. Tiny trails of flame come out of them. You can work magic! You weren't able to do that before. Your training would not have reached that point in years. Its exhilarating and, at the same time, terrifying. This is completely unknown magic, alien to you. It seems like it was made by your people, but you had no idea that they could do something so wonderful. You feel, deep within you, an eagerness to find more of the canisters and see what they do.

You continue down the path to what looks like a barracks for some Guardians or Agents. There isn’t much left, and the beds are ruined. It’s starting to look like whoever was here left very quickly. A bunch of stuff was left behind. Inside is a lever to open the gate outside the building. When you pull it you hear a grinding noise. The gate has opened. There is a bend in the path and you see a little cave with two pots in it. You search them and come back with two healing pods. Healing pods are gourds filled with a magical paste that can restore your health.

Farther on the path you see a building. When you step inside you immediately recognize where you are. It was an inn, where visitors and travelers could stop for steaks, drinks, and sleep. The crumbling roasting pit still dominates the room. You are confused. Why is there so much here? Most islands are Barred because of experiments gone awry, and most such experiments are performed by very small groups, in crude quarters, far from society.

Yet you’ve seen warehouses, guard posts,and now an inn. At one point a lot of Shapers lived here. Now they’re all gone. Why? What could have driven so many people off? And what took their place?

3

 

After you assemble some more supplies you look to the north. You can see that you are not alone on this island. Though you were worried about horrible creations and mutations, the first life you encounter is nowhere near so terrifying. It’s a flock of ornks. The ornk is a Shaper creation. It’s a slow, clumsy livestock animal, hardy and laden with meat. Shapers created them to stock areas unfriendly to non-created animals, such as, apparently, this one. You notice that these ornks have large tusks, probably added by the Shapers to protect them from predators. Fortunately, they are likely to leave you alone if you leave them alone.

You explore this grassy plain and find another ceramic pot. This time it has a gemstone in it. You also find a supply cache built into a hill. You take some magical crystals and some other useful supplies. You continue north and find an old shaping hall. You knew there must be one on this island somewhere. Here, the Shapers did their work, using magic and force of will to make creations-both established and experimental designs. If there was a cataclysm, though, it didn’t take place here. This building is undamaged.

To the side, you can see energizing pools. Holes in the ceiling allow sunlight to shine on them. Remarkably, despite years of neglect, they have survived. The goo inside the pools is semi-living, plant like in form, capable of drawing energy from the air and sun. If you stand near a pool, you will be able to replenish your health or essence depending on which pool you use.

You use the two canisters sitting in the back corner of the building. You feel the power draining into you. To survive on Sucia Island, you will probably need to make creations to fight for you. To make a fyora*, you will need to know something about fire shaping. You also need to know how to make a fyora. You can make a fyora now because of the canister to the left.

Creating a creation takes essence. The more powerful you make your creation, the more essence you will need to spend. That means that you will have less essence to create more or cast spells. The maximum number of creations you can have is seven. You can’t get your essence back until you absorb that creation or it gets killed. It is usually a very good idea to make the creations at least a little bit intelligent. That way they won’t go rogue on you and in battle you will be able to control them. Otherwise they will act on their own, and they might not do what you want.

When you spend essence to cast spells, like heal that you got from the other canister you get it back by returning to a town or by approaching an essence pool. However, making creations decreases the amount of total essence you can have. If you have a total of thirty essence, for example, and you make a fyora which costs ten essence. Your new maximum is twenty. You can’t get the other ten back until the fyora dies or you absorb it.

It is up to you whether to make a lot of weak creations or a few strong ones, save your essence for spells, or mix the three. Since you only have enough essence for one fyora but it will be help. With an odd squelching noise you give life to your first creation.

 

4

 

There are three paths that you can take from here. The paved one has been blocked up by a thick stand of trees. The most southern path has a dead servile at the end of it. The people that lived here must have been in a hurry to get away if they left a servant. The middle path leads around the paved road. When you round the corner you see a fyora on the path ahead. It is a very familiar kind of creation. Shapers have made them for centuries to serve as bodyguards, watchdogs, and even pets. You’ve been around hundreds of them. This one, however, is different from any fyora you have ever seen . It doesn’t have the usual expression of servility and obedience. It doesn’t look at you as master but... but... as food.

You have heard tales of creations which have turned on their creators, have gone rogue, but it almost never actually happens. If it did, the rogue creation would be instantly destroyed. This fyora has definitely shed any Shaper control. It bares its teeth at you, seemingly daring you to step forward.

Your fyora sees the rogue and unleashes a flaming spit ball at it. But before the glob could strike, the enemy spits out a flaming mass of its own. You see the rogue crumple but your own creation is injured. You cast heal on it and the injuries close up. You continue like this until you find a storage warehouse. But now, instead of housing useful supplies, it holds moldering trash. The sacks of meal in the corner, for example, have not been treated well by their years here.

On the counter to the west, however, you see something which looks very useful. There are several thorn batons, one of which looks like it’s alive. Thorn batons are one of the Shapers’ most ingenious creations. They are a mix of living and inert matter, plants with a touch of animal around a metal frame, capable of firing a small, sharp projectile at high velocity. When unused, they go into hibernation and can like for a long time.

Most of the batons abandoned in this room have died, but one managed to survive. There are two “rounds” of ammunition next to it. You pick them up and find that the baton is loaded. You decide that the baton is better for fighting with than the dagger you find so you carry the baton in your hand and your dagger in your pack.

After two more encounters with rogue fyoras you enter a quarantine hall. People wishing to enter or leave Sucia Island through this port waited here to be questioned and inspected by the servant mind. And sure enough, the mind is still here, resting to the north. You marvel at the skill of the Shapers that made these remarkable creatures. Their careful construction and ability to hibernate gave them remarkable life spans. It is still alive.

A servant mind is a very specialized and useful sort of creature. Once grown, it never moves again. It spends its life in a stone crib made to fit it. Once there, it spends its entire life thinking, remembering, analyzing, and advising the Shapers. As you approach, you can see the creature struggle to rouse itself from its slumber. It seems likely that it is eager for company after its years here.

You carefully approach the servant mind, unsure of how its time alone in these ruins has affected its faculties. Fortunately, its eye are clear and bright, and it’s body appears whole. It has the massive skull characteristic of these strange creations.

“Welcome, Shaper. I am mind Tavit,” it says, reflexively reading from an internal script centuries old. “Do you wish to pass through the quarantine?”

“Please allow me to pass through quarantine. “ you say.

The creature looks at you carefully. It makes a low humming noise. You don’t feel anything, but you suspect some magical augmentation is allowing the creature to analyze you in minute detail. Eventually, the noise stops. Tavit says, “I find no reason to impede you progress further. The exit door will open at you approach. “

“Thank you,” you say looking relieved, “One other question. What happened to this island? why was it barred?”

“I am sorry Shaper. The I am limited to the scope of my knowledge. When I was left here, I was given no further information or instructions.“

“All right.” you say. You turn away from the mind and continue to the door on the other side of the hall. Just as Tavit said, the door opens at your approach.

 

5

 

On this side of the quarantine hall, you can see another flock of ornks. This group, however, is not alone. It is being watched by a servile*. Serviles are one of the greatest Shaper creations. They are the most common and valued servants of your people, intelligent, hardy, obedient, and featuring opposable thumbs. They are also easily controlled.

If there are serviles here, this isle must be nowhere near as savage and uncontrolled as you had feared. Serviles are weak and easily cowed creatures. If there were any real threat here, they would have been quickly wiped out. Your emergence from the hall is clearly the last thing this servile expected. He looks terrified at first, then curious. He leaves his flock behind to come and speak with you. He probably wants fresh orders.

The servile moves close to you and inspects you carefully. It seems to be the same design of creation with which you are completely familiar. Same haunched posture, number of limbs, and so on. It looks very surprised to see you. However, it doesn’t have the attitude of immediate obedience you have come to expect. It seems more curious than anything. After a few awkward seconds of staring, it speaks.

“I don’t think I’m mad. It’s a Shaper! A shaper has come at last! Oh, it has been years since anyone came through that door. A Shaper has come! This is so wonderful!”

It continues looking a little ashamed of its self, “Oh, but where are my manners. I am Timo. I am a shepherd. I graze my ornks here because nobody comes here. Oh. I must go to Vakkiri. I must tell the people that a shaper has come at last!”

Now you are curious too, “Tell me about Vakkiri.”

“It is our humble village.” He points east. It is that way, not fat, not far; I should tell them a Shaper has come at last. It is humble and small, but, with no shapers around, we did what we could.”

“And another thing too,” you say, “I have been stranded on this island. How can I get off of it?”

He looks worried. He clearly has no idea. “Oh. I... I... I am a humble villager. I do not know how to leave. But in Vakkiri, there are old and wise people. They can help you. “

That is odd. Timo is referring his fellow serviles as “people.” Creation are called creations, not people.

“There are no other Shapers here?”

Timo looks even more nervous now. “I... I do not... no. You are the only one. You are the Shaper. You have returned, and we... we can serve. “He seemed somewhat reticent about saying that last word.

“I do not require your total obedience. I only need to leave this island.” You say to comfort him.

Timo looks incredibly relieved. “Of course, we serviles will be glad to help you in any way we can. It is our way. And we thank you , mighty Shaper, for your kindness.”

“That’s all for now. Thanks.”

Now you continue to the east, towards Vakkiri.

 

6

 

You meet, for the first time, a colony of serviles on Sucia Island. There is a good deal of astonishment on both sides. The creatures seem to have well on their own, much better than you would have suspected. They have moved into the Shaper ruins and made them their own. They have crops, shops, and guard patrols.

The serviles, in turn, are speechless. They have clearly been without Shaper influence for many years, and have no idea how to react. They look overjoyed, relieved, and terrified at the same time. Most of all, though, they look expectant. They watch you carefully, gauging your every move, wondering how you are going to treat them. The power of the Shapers has always completely overwhelmed that of their creations.

You , however, don’t have the full power of the Shapers. You are weak, tired, untrained, and alone. Fortunately the don’t seem to know that. You could stay here and help the serviles or you could explore the wonders of Sucia Island.

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You wrote it in second person... "you," as a main character is generally not a very good idea, even when rewriting a story; I find reading second person stories extremely annoying. I'd look over it, and change "you," to something like Billy Bob.

 

Are you taking the in game messages and copying them on word?

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Coming from an RPG, though, "you" is acceptable. I've read entire role-playing books (Choose Your Own Adventure style, but not as pathetically bad) written in the second person.

 

And some of it looks like in-game text directly, and some of it is not. I'd rather it be one or the other. (Correct me if I'm mistaken and it's all original, though; I haven't gone back to verify whether it is or not.)

 

EDIT: Yes, um, the actual question. I like it. Keep going.

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I haven't finished yet. I have to write 75 more areas yet.

 

Most of it is from in game text but I had to put in some parts like you walking or other things like that.

 

With the "you", that is what it says in the text.

 

I use Apple Works (iMac)

 

I hope to finish it this summer. I'll let you know when it is done.

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  • 2 months later...

Hey!

 

I like it. Keep it up.

The "you" question. I don't mind it. "you" is weird to read as the main character of any story, but in rpg you do see it, as pointed earlier, in Choose Your Adventure kind of literature (word used loosely for some of those books. . .)

However, you may want to think about using "I" or a name, any name, if you want to sell it. Since the "you" will get into many people's skins.

 

Good luck!

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Quote:
Originally written by George A. Custer Declares You To Be:
Quote:
Originally written by Tris10101:
FatbatMonkey, I may want to sell this when i finish it.
Uh, by volume it has to be at least 80% someone else's work -- I'd avoid that like the plague...
Alec speaks the truth. You don't want the dark god of plaugerism(sp?) to descend on you, do you?
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  • 1 month later...

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