Blade’s Rest
Hamlet: Level 2
Population: 7
We learned a lot about the blacksmith family, and we learned it quickly. We learned that Gorgal liked to get up at least an hour before sunrise and fire up his forge and set out his work for the day. Much of this involved clearing away the mess Frenrita had left the evening before. The husband and wife took their blacksmithing in shifts, and it meant that they only spent an hour or two together each night.
Gorgal liked to eat pickled lake herring while he worked. He bought this from Atticus and Argyle, who, I discovered, had played a trick on me.
Their fishing hut wasn’t just to keep them warm – Atticus’ wife, Crystal, had started a kitchen there, where she prepared and sold their catches. Sometimes she deboned and then cooked them. Whenever Gorgal needed water to put heated metal in to stop it going brittle, he’d wander down to the lake, inevitably stopping by Atticus ‘n’ Argyle’s Fishery on the way home.
I was annoyed, but what was I gonna do? Burn the place down? I didn’t know that it would have changed much if I knew what the hut was really for in any case. Maybe I would have charged them a little extra, but that was it.
Even so, I felt a faint flicker of annoyance when I saw Gorgal heading down there to fill his water buckets, then stopping at Atticus ‘N’ Argyle fishery to buy pickled herring on the way home.
“We gotta dig a well,” I told Hilly one day.
It was just me and her because Linc had been gone for two days, which was halfway through the four-day trip into Crookshack woods that he’d planned. He was there to map out the woods and inventory all the herbs and stuff that grew there. We talked to him on teamchat from time to time, but he hadn’t run into much trouble save for seeing a grizzly in the distance.
Hilly: Go and poke it
Linc: Poke a grizzly bear? Are you crazy?
Hilly: Come oooon. Just do it. It’s only a game. When else will you get the chance to poke a bear on the ass?
Linc: Sure it’s a game, but this thing looks too real for my liking. I ain’t poking it.
I had been on Linc’s side in the exchange – this place felt way too real sometimes, and I wouldn’t like to get close to an apex predator like this. I told them so, and the matter was settled – Linc wasn’t gonna poke the bear.
With Linc away, I only had Hilly to run my ideas by. She considered what I had said about building a well.
“Build a well,” she said. “Maybe. But the lake’s right there, and we don’t need to drink in any case.”
“I was thinking for Gorgal. It’d make it easier for him. Plus, we’re gonna have to attract more businesses if we want this place to grow, and they might need a well.”
“Hmm. Seems to me you could build a dozen wells, and he’d still go to the lake. Never seen a guy eat so much pickled herring.”
His peculiar appetite aside, Gorgal was a dedicated craftsman. He could spend hours in his workshop, heating metal and then clanging away with his hammer. All day long the sounds rang out, with barely any breaks. He specialized in making swords and tools, while Frenrita was adept at making metal armor. Together, they offered a pretty good complement of metal products.
Gorgal worked from morning until evening, at which point Frenrita took over. When it was her turn to work the forge, Franz and Hanz accompanied her and tried to learn. Franz didn’t have much appetite for it, but Hanz always kept a sketchbook with him, and he made diagram after diagram of his mother’s working methods. The two boys were not allowed in the workshop when Gorgal was working, since he couldn’t stand distractions.
“It’s pretty amazing, ain’t it?” Hilly said to me one night, as we watched Frenrita working while Hanz scribbled in his leather bound notepad.
“Amazing?”
“Just how you could watch her work and your brain starts to forget that she isn’t really here.”
I nodded. “Honestly, it seems dangerous to me, this place being so lifelike. Some folks might never want to come out.”
“Tough titties. It boots you out if you stay in too long. They don’t want a lawsuit on their hands.”
Just then, Franz picked up a loose piece of metal the size of a pebble from the floor and threw it at his brother. Hanz punched his arm, and Franz punched him back, and before long the boys were wrestling on the workshop floor.
“Boys! You will get out or I hammer you!” bellowed Frenrita, before focusing back on hammering a sword into shape.
“Safe to say that the AI in Gobbler’s Crook has been bumped up,” I said.
“You reckon?”
“Look at them,” I said. “This isn’t low-level NPC behavior.”
“I don’t know. Might be some kind of pre-programmed routine. You know, the boys getting in trouble, and that kind of thing.”
“Nah. I reckon the devs have sent a big vat of Turing AI our way.”
“Ten silvers says they haven’t.”
“Done.”
Blade and Sheath being such a dynamic game, the arrival of Gorgal and Frenrita had wider effects on Blade’s Rest. It started when Gorgal went to Dustpost and secured a contract for making 100 pickaxes for a mining company who were heading to the Thunderstrike Mountains. Those were the mountains that we could see from Blade’s Rest, which I intended on exploring one day.
Gorgal and Frenrita were working twenty-four hours per day to get the order finished, and they just about managed it when the mining company came to collect. They arrived in a convoy of four wagons – three of them to transport the miners, and one to carry equipment. They were pulled by four mules each. When Polli, Gorgal’s mule, saw the others, she wandered over to say hello.
Hilly, as her usual paranoid self, watched their arrival while holding her sword. I peered out with my hand pressed against my forehead to shield my eyes from the sun.
The head of the mining company – Flintlock & Sons – rode separate to his workers, covering the miles atop a black stallion. Approaching Blade’s Rest, he swung off the horse. He took a cigar from a leather burlap sack that he wore around his shoulder. He clicked his fingers, making a spark light the cigar.
I went out to meet him.
“Name’s Gaben Flintlock,” he said. “Pleased to meet ya.”
“Josh Boothe.”
“Boothe. You got a cousin in the Yarmel Peaks?”
“Yup,” I said. I don’t know why. Maybe I just enjoyed getting into character.
“Ah. I met him not long back. Might be heading that way again, in the future.”
“Tell him I said hello.”
Hilly gave me a sidelong look as if to say what the hell are you talking about? I shrugged.
“I’m here in an official capacity,” said Gaben. “I own Flintlock and Son. There ain’t no son, though. At least not that I know of.”
“Then why do you have it in your company name?”
“Because people trust a family business. Anyways. I’m here to see a fella named Gorgal Muller.”
“He’s in his workshop right over there.”
“Gotcha,” said Gaben. “Say, you don’t mind if my boys visit your tavern, do you?”
“We don’t have a tavern.”
“Ya don’t? Well. Gotta say. On a list of places I’m likely to visit again, somewhere that ain’t got no tavern is at the bottom. You sure you ain’t got one?”
I gestured to the hamlet behind me. “Pretty sure.”
Gaben walked away muttering, leaving me to dwell on what he’d said. One of the requirements of future hamlet and village levels involved attracting folks to Blade’s Rest. Maybe Gaben was right – we needed a tavern. I resolved to start planning one. The materials we’d need, the skills I’d have to learn, and so on.
Linc returned from his trip to Crookshack woods a day early. There was good reason for that – he’d gotten too close to the grizzly that he’d spotted, and it tore him to shreds. He respawned in his hut and then came out of the door, swearing to himself.
That night, the three of us had a meeting in my hut. It wasn’t what you’d call a cozy place, but it was getting there. On one side I had my crafting table, which I pushed up against the wall. Opposite it was my bed.
Using my crafting station, I had crafted a bedframe for each of our huts, and Hilly had gone to a farm a few miles east of Westfell and bought four crates worth of wool. Frenrita had let her borrow their cart for 1 copper, and Patti the mule had gladly undertaken the trip. Using the wool and some quilted heavy cloth that Linc had bought in town, I improvised a mattress for each of us.
As well as the bed, I had crafted a table and three chairs for us to sit at whenever we had a Blade’s Rest meeting. If I described the table and chairs as shoddy, then I was being generous. In fact, by sitting in them, we were playing the odds as to which of us would end up with the chair shattering beneath us and dropping us on our asses. But still, they were better than nothing.
It wasn’t a big hut to begin with and all this stuff – as well as three people – made it feel like a tiny cave. But we made do.
“To get to level three,” I said, “We gotta have ten buildings, and one of them’s gotta be a store of some kind.”
“You can whip those up, can’t you?”
“Yup, but we’d have to convince someone to open a store in one of the huts, too.”
“We have Gorgal and Frenrita,” said Hilly.
“Nope. They make big batches of stuff to order. They don’t sell to the general public. Although, it’s worth bearing in mind that in terms of BaS, a store is just a place that sells things. So anything is okay, as long as people can purchase stuff in there.”
“It can’t be hard to convince someone to set up shop here,” said Linc. “I might even do it myself. I’ve been thinking of learning the potioneer skill anyway.”
“Alright. But there’s another requirement for level 3. We’ve gotta have a passing traffic of at least 50 people. These can be NPCs or players, but they’ve gotta go out of their way to travel to Blade’s Rest and stay within the hamlet boundaries for at least four game hours.”
Hilly jerked her finger at the hut door, which was open and offered a rectangular windowed view of Blade’s Reach and the fields beyond. Just outside the town boundaries were four carts, a bunch of mules, and some fellas sitting around a campfire. “There’s a bunch of miners out there scratching their asses. Get them to spend a little time here.”
I shook my head. “Ever since I told them we don’t have a tavern, they haven’t stepped foot into the hamlet itself. So. I’m thinking that we better build a tavern. It’s the perfect way to draw passing traffic our way. What do you reckon?”
“I’d prefer something a bit quieter,” said Linc. “I enjoy the calm vibe we’ve got going on. Pubs have never been my thing.”
“Then why’d you sign up to be a town builder?” asked Hilly.
“For the cash, of course. But now that I’m here…well. I guess I didn’t realize just how immersive this place would be. It kinda gives me the same feeling I get when I’m out foraging in real life.”
“Are you a complete hermit, Linc? No offense intended.”
He shrugged. “Mostly. It’s the way I like it.”
“Well I’m with you on something, Josh,” said Hilly. “We need something to draw folks to Blade’s Rest. Only, I’m thinking of something with a little more bite. Something like a fighting pit where we capture animals and throw ‘em into the pit to fight it out, and folks can bet on the winner. Hey. Linc could fight a bear!”
“That’s the complete opposite of the vibe we were going for,” said Linc.
I drummed my fingers on my chin. “So you guys have suggested I build nothing, or I build a fighting pit for animals. Think I’m gonna have to overrule you on this one. A tavern it is.”
Building a tavern was way more complicated than I expected, and it involved me taking a trip to Westfell town, which was northwest from Blade’s Rest. I traveled to it using the Travelers’ Road about five minutes’ walk from the hamlet.
Travelers' roads were laid out all over BaS, offering a safe way to get from one part of the world to another. The mobs that spawned randomly across the landscape never attacked folks on the travelers’ roads, and you could often find merchants or transport carriages along its various routes who’ be willing to give you a ride for a copper or two. Sometimes there were even mini-quests offered by NPCs you met on the road. Stuff like defending a carriage from bandits while the merchant fixed his broken axel. That kind of thing.
I didn’t run into anyone on the way to Westfell, except for walking past a group of lumberjacks who were heading to join the rest of their company in the Crookshack woods. Their foreman tipped his fur hat at me. I nodded back, and the group filed past.
After spending a while in a tiny hamlet, it was strange to approach a town like Westfell. This was a dev-generated settlement, which meant that it was part of the furniture, where the game was concerned. It had always been here, and always would be. It wouldn’t stay the same, however.
Like many towns, Westfell was growing dynamically as more and more players bought houses and opened player shops within its walls. Said walls were twenty-foot-high stone monstrosities, upon which perched stone carvings of eagles with giant talons. These were the town mascots, and you could find eagle souvenirs and eagle murals everywhere in Westfell.
My visit was brief, and it took me to the Office of Planning on the fourth floor of the town hall. Despite its official-sounding name, the Office of Planning’s in-game purpose was to be a reference point for crafters and builders.
In the office, a man wearing an impeccably neat suit greeted me. His hair was pulled into a ponytail so tight that I could only imagine how uncomfortable it must feel.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“I’d like to see some plans.”
“Certainly.”
He held out his hand. I put one copper coin on his palm. He snapped his hand shut and nodded at me, then turned about and went back to his desk at the far end of the room.
A menu system appeared.
Please select a craftprint:
- Two-story townhouse
- Standard-sized shop
- Standard Sized shop with cellar
- Tavern
- Church
- Church with spire
There were a dozen more items on the list, but I’d already seen the one that interested me. Whereas in a real-life town planning office you’d be able to access the blueprints of existing structures, it was a little different here. In BaS, the planning office showed you the prints for potential buildings – in other words, it was a guide on how to build them. What materials you need, what skills, everything like that.
Looking over the craftprints, there were two problems that stuck out to me. For one thing, I would need the carpentry skill. There was no way to improvise a tavern, not even if I joined lots of wooden panels together. A tavern was a ‘purposed structure’ within the game, and it had to be made properly or it wouldn’t function as a tavern.
The second problem was the materials that I needed. The crafting system in BaS was, of course, way more stripped down than in real life. Even so, the wooden sticks we’d collected from Crookshack woods wouldn’t cut it. We needed lots and lots of timber.
I had hoped it might be a little easier than this, but that was just my impatient side. The tavern took as long as it took. I needed to relax a little. Get into the flow of hamlet life.
Before leaving Westfell, I stopped by the butcher and the grocer’s shops and bought a bunch of ingredients. This being a growing town, I got ripped off. It didn’t help that my bartering skills were low, either. I made a mental note to hire someone with good bartering or charisma to act as a negotiator for Blade’s Rest. Or maybe, as head of resources, Linc should be leveling his charisma a little more. I’d talk to him about that later.
Outside the town gates, I looked into the distance and could just about make out Blade’s Rest. It seemed a long way away, and I was tempted to pay one of the carriages departing Westfell to give me a ride.
“Safe travels,” called out a voice. I turned around to see one of the steel-clad town guards standing at the gate, waving to me.
“So long,” I told him.
Instead of hiring a carriage, I saved my money and walked back. At least my walking speed was a little bit quicker after putting two points into agility the last time that I leveled up.
In Blade’s Rest, steam rose from the vent that I’d cut into the roof of Frenrita’s workshop and carried in swirly spirals into the starless night sky. From under the workshop door came an orange glow, an inviting one given how cold it was tonight.
I checked Hilly and Linc’s huts, but neither of them were at home. A quick look at my map revealed that Linc was over in the woods. He always tried to get back before it was dark, given that BaS’s hostile critters were way more active when night fell, but he sometimes got so wrapped up in his work that he didn’t always make it in time. His current project was to make a complete field map of the herbs and stuff in Crookshack woods, so that he’d know where to find certain things.
“The beauty of this place,” he said, “Is that stuff always grows back in the same place. You can pick something from the ground, and in a days’ time it’ll have grown back.
Hilly was somewhere way out west. I hadn’t traveled that far yet, so my world map didn’t tell me much about it. She was probably hunting or something, I guessed.
I sent them both a message.
Josh: Need to meet you both in Blade’s Rest in ten game hours.
Hilly: Be right there.
Ten game hours gave them ample time to get back. In the meantime, I headed to the cooking station that we’d set up in the middle of the hamlet, near the fire pit. As well as the clay oven and the cauldron, I crafted a standing table with a thick chopping board on top, as well as drawers on the side to store cooking essentials.
Using the ingredients I’d bought from Westfell, I started cooking. I spread some fat on the pan and got it sizzling, before throwing in diced onions and seasoning them with a little sea salt. When they were golden but not burned, I threw in a handful of chopped mushrooms, waited a few minutes, then added a glug of white wine.
When the wine had mostly evaporated, I poured on some risotto rice and stirred them until they soaked in the oniony, garlicky, tasty-smelling wine flavor. Meanwhile, I had heated some stock in Linc’s cauldron, and I began ladling this into the riot pan and letting it soak up the flavor.
The aroma became so strong that it tempted Frenrita, Hanz, and Franz out of their forge. Gorgal left their domicile hut soon after and stomped toward us.
“What are you make?” he asked me.
“Mushroom risotto.”
“Isotto. Hmm. Did I ever offer sun-dried tomato bread that I make?” he said.
“Nope. Don’t think you ever did.”
“Tomorrow. I make.”
“On the condition that I give you guys some of this, huh?” I said.
“Leave Josh alone, Gorgal. He makes for friends,” called Frenrita.
I held my hand up. “It’s ok. It’s okay. I figured you might want some. What’s the point in calling this place a community if we can’t share a little food?”
By the time the risotto was ready, Linc and Hilly were back. Linc was wearing a thick fur coat that he’d bought in Westfell. It was artificed so that it helped him blend better into his surroundings, which he hoped would spare him from more grizzly bear attacks.
Hilly’s sword-bearing muscles were a little more pronounced today, indicating that she’d leveled up again and put her attributes into strength.
“Where’ve you been?” I asked.
“Killing stuff. What’s cooking? Smells delicious.”
“Grab me some bowls, will ya?”
Gorgal, Frenrita and the boys provided their own bowls, and I dished out enough grub for everybody. The seven residents of Blade’s Rest sat under the night sky, with the firepit spreading warmth on our faces. Gorgal brought out a miniature barrel of ale that he’d brought all the way from his home in East Sydentland. Despite it being the only serving of his favorite beer that he was likely to get for a while, he shared it willingly, and he spent the rest of the night in an uncharacteristic, good cheer. But when Frenrita told him to get his lute and sing a song for us all it seemed that his disposition had been pushed too far, and he returned to his grumbling ways.
When the family retired to their hut, the three of us stayed up. We didn’t need to sleep, obviously. That was one of the perks of full immersion – you got the good things such as nice tasting food, without the trappings of feeling pain or tired. The BaS devs had always been open about their view that people didn’t want to play a game where they got hurt or felt like they needed to sleep. So, any tiredness we felt while playing BaS was our own, real tiredness.
“I went to the planning office to check out what we’d need to build a tavern,” I said. “Turns out it ain’t gonna be easy.”
“What’s the deal?” asked Hilly.
“Short of it is that we need money. First, I need to get instruction in carpentry. I could either go hire a master to train me, which would be quick but crazily expensive. Or I can buy a skilltome and then practice, practice, practice.”
“Can’t you practice without the tome, like you did when you learned improvisation?” asked Linc.
“Nope. Carpentry is a little more advanced than that, so it’s harder to learn.”
“How much is a master?” said Hilly. “Coupla hundred?”
“Five hundred. At least in Westfell. There might be a cheaper one somewhere else.”
Linc made an impressed ‘Woooooooooo’ whistle. “I’m still getting used to how much 1 gold is worth in here compared to real life. Then again, I never spend much in real life, either. Foraging is a nice lifestyle, but it ain’t a lavish one. I’m guessing five hundred gold is a lot here?”
Hilly nodded. “Enough.”
“So what about a spell tome?” asked Linc.
“Skilltome. Maybe thirty bucks. Gold, I mean.”
“So go for that.”
“I guess I will. I just…well. I’m being impatient, is all. I wanted to go to a master and just get the skill and that’d be that.”
“You don’t appreciate nothing you don’t earn,” said Hilly. “My grandpa taught me that. I’ve worked all my life. Even when I was a kid I took whatever Sunday jobs I could. Nothing feels better than working.”
“Working isn’t everything,” said Linc.
“I didn’t mean it to cause offense.”
“I know. Just what I'm saying is, folks can get by without taking a check and living by the rules. There are all kinds of different ways of living, and that’s what makes life so special.”
“I’ll go to Westfell and hunt down a skilltome,” I said. “But there’s another problem, and this is one we gotta solve. To build a tavern, we’re gonna need lots of lumber.”
“So don’t build a tavern. Build something else,” said Linc.
“Any purposed structure that we wanna build are gonna need more materials than we can gather ourselves. It’s just the way it is.”
“So we need to start making some cash,” said Hilly. “By the way, are there any seconds of the risotto?”
“Nah. There would have been, but I couldn’t say no to Gorgal and the clan.”
“Damn it. That blacksmithing SOB better make me some of that tomato bread he’s always bragging about.”
“Okay, so cash. Blade’s Rest needs a GDP,” I said.
“GDP?” said Linc.
“Gross domestic product. Didn’t you pay attention in business class?”
“I never did business class. I never went to college. Dropped out of school when I was sixteen.”
Hilly said, “Well it means a measurement of the value of the goods made in a certain place. I don’t think Josh here is applying it properly, to be honest with ya, but I get the sentiment. Blade’s Rest needs to produce things that people want.”
I nodded. “We’re already getting rental income from Gorgal and Frenrita, as well as 10% of their profits. That’s already buffering the treasury a little, but it ain’t enough.”
“Go kick those damned fishmongers outta the hut you made for ‘em. They seem to be doing okay. I’ve never seen so many people by the lake.”
“Can’t. I sold it to ‘em.”
“Okay. So maybe we could set Linc up as a potioneer. He’s already got the foraging skill. He can gather whatever he needs. Now he’s just gotta learn how to blend stuff together.”
“I’m finding myself agreeing with Miss Hilly-Rose here,” said Linc. “But I looked into it. Same problem as Josh – it costs a ton to get someone to train me. I didn’t know about spelltomes, though. Skilltomes, I mean So I’ll look into that.”
“I had another idea,” I said.
“The way you just said that all mysteriously, then stopped talking, makes me think it’s something we won’t like,” said Linc.
When Linc was right, he was right. I didn’t think they were going to react well to my plan.
Hilly, who loved bad ideas because they were often dangerous, leaned forward. “Go on then. Spit it out.”
“So this might sound crazy…”