For funsies, though, sometimes I liked to organize tournaments and offer prizes, usually drawn from my vast collection of loot. I was aware that hoarding all four epic artifacts for very long wouldn’t be particularly sporting; better to redistribute them and see if that generated any meaningful competition.
I decided I would keep Blades Per Minute and make it my primary weapon, but the other three artifacts I would award as trophies during a two-day tourney that would start as soon as I could get the word out to all the regulars on our servers. (Couldn’t spam every server with an invite, of course, or you’d have eleventy billion people crowding everyone out; you had to be savvy enough to regularly play on the same servers as the Queen to get a chance to participate.)
We’d start the tourney with sharpshooting, where we’d use a trebuchet to launch mirrorballs into the air for targets. We’d have dance competitions, where your freestyle moves had to impress judges who were shooting at you with crossbows. Obstacle courses, where the obstacles included deadly pit traps, poisonous arrows, and progressive trance music. Race against the clock to find the secret rave before Digweed had to leave for the airport. We used to stage these tourneys in the practice levels where you couldn’t actually take damage, but everyone agreed they were more fun when real risk was involved, so now we played out in the King’s courtyard, where the only NPCs we’d encounter were harmless: just ordinary city folk, heading to ye olde gear shoppe to buy samplers and phono preamps for their families back home.
As the courtyard began to fill with contestants and spectators, I briefly imagined that I’d pulled this off with sufficiently short notice to avoid being hassled. I was spectacularly wrong about that. My scouts all pinged me practically at once: the spawn points were suddenly clogging up with hundreds of identical generic avatars—faceless humanoids in matching, anachronistic biohazard suits—pouring into the Realm and chanting up a storm and making a beeline for the courtyard.
Gorvod’s Frenzy had arrived.
We’d be overrun within seconds.
The Church of Gorvod was a tax-exempt organization headquartered in a massive, modernist campus in the heart of Los Angeles. Hundreds of believers were housed in dormitory-style accommodations inside the campus, which was protected on all sides by walls topped with razor wire. “Ministers” patrolled the grounds at all hours, carrying concealed weapons. These measures were mostly in place to keep people from getting out. Sometimes you’d see vehicles entering or exiting through a heavily guarded front gate: usually armored jeeps or vans, but occasionally fancy sedans or limousines as well. If you lived in LA long enough, you’d inevitably hear rumors or horror stories about the Church’s highly absurd belief system and its very serious brainwashing tactics.
I wasn’t originally interested in the beliefs of the Church of Gorvod, but then they started fucking with Sparkle Dungeon. Now, I had reason to know that Gorvod was supposedly a multidimensional locus of elevated alien consciousness, which first appeared in our dimension billions of years ago. Humans were said to contain tiny drops of “Gorvod’s Truth,” or slivers of psychic energy that Gorvod shaved off its own self-awareness and seeded throughout a near infinity of galaxies to create life. The Church of Gorvod, in turn, considered itself steward of these slivers of Gorvod’s life force, offering psychic training and proprietary technology to help its believers refine Gorvod’s Truth throughout their lifetimes.
Judging by reporting on the Church in mainstream media, you’d think its primary members were all elite-tier movie stars, rock stars, and TV stars, but in actuality the vast majority of its rank and file seemed to be pulled from all walks of life without much discrimination, and were treated to a pretty rough life once they were on the path. Refining Gorvod’s Truth was a process involving hard labor, mental and physical intimidation, and giving the Church all your money, for starters.
“Gorvod’s Frenzy” was the name we’d given to mobs of identical first-level characters that appeared periodically to swarm player targets and interfere with quests. They refused to negotiate, and they never backed down once they engaged. They were easy to kill individually, but they were dangerous en masse because they’d found a loophole in the spellcasting system. The game theoretically knew the individual characters were first level, but as a swarm, they could fire off so many instances of a single spell in unison within a very small region of the map that the game engine just kind of started treating twenty first-level spells as a single twentieth-level spell. They couldn’t aim very cleanly as a mob, but burst effects and area attacks seemed to work pretty consistently; the game engine would essentially guesstimate an epicenter for the spell to go off. Now scale that across several hundred people controlling these fucking swarms, turning normally low-level spells into weapons of mass annoyance. An ordinary Mist of Glitter spell would become a deadly glitter monsoon.
They weren’t trying to hide their Church affiliation. You’d find yourself suddenly besieged by “Eye of Gorvod 2317” all the way through “Eye of Gorvod 3041” and you’d figure it out pretty quickly. And they were eerily coordinated about their missions, too—their behavior was tightly focused, and they’d disappear at the drop of a hat when they met some inscrutable goal.
Now, if you asked me, or anyone else who’d been a victim of Gorvod’s Frenzy, I’d tell you they were exploiting a bug in the game engine. Maybe multiple bugs, because I suspected they were running automation to help with their eerie coordination, which was against the terms of service. And I reported this situation over, and over, and over, and over, and over. Dead silence. No movement on any tickets submitted on this topic. Definitely a mixed signal to send to us. If Gorvod’s Frenzy was a legal tactic, then in theory any of us could pull our own frenzy together for dubious gains. But the few times people genuinely tried, they couldn’t reproduce the effect; the level of coordination required was apparently mind-boggling. I guess it really took the steady guidance of an actual Church to align that many asshole trolls toward a single unified goal at the exact same time.
It was customary when Gorvod’s Frenzy was spotted to broadcast a coded rallying cry on the main chat channel to summon reinforcements to your location. The coded rallying cry was something like “HOLY FUCK IT’S GORVOD’S FRENZY,” which my scouts were now blasting to everyone.
Naturally I decided to show off.
Turns out it takes about ninety seconds for a person wielding multiple epic-tier artifacts to mercilessly annihilate a six-hundred-person Gorvod’s Frenzy. Blades Per Minute did most of the work, spinning like a whirlwind and dicing my foes to pieces so smoothly that I wondered if I was even controlling it or if it was semiautonomous about choosing targets and delivering blows. The Psybient Crystal dropped bubbles around me where time slowed to a halt for anyone caught inside, making them essentially defenseless. Occasionally for variety I’d thump the Electronic Dance Mace on the ground and the resulting wall of massively amplified bass frequencies liquefied my foes in a wide radius around me. I didn’t use the Remix Ring; I wasn’t sure it was useful in combat in the first place, and I also didn’t want to break the map a second time by having all four artifacts in play at once.
Unfortunately, ninety seconds was also enough time for Gorvod’s Frenzy to thoroughly disrupt the state of affairs on our server. Instead of showing off for the masses, I was showing off for a steadily dwindling group of players who had no interest in taking pointless damage from this crowd of weird jerks. Some fought briefly, but mostly they winked out or took off to their own domains, leaving me to brutally finish off the Frenzy for an audience of simply the Keeper and Sir Trancelot.
As the encounter came to a close, I left one Eye of Gorvod alive inside a time bubble, basically trapped in amber. I doubted the actual player behind the character was even still connected to the game at this point, but the game wouldn’t let the character exit until I killed it or released it from the bubble.
Maybe the Church recorded all its players’ sessions, though, for post-game analysis purposes, in which case I could leave a nastygram in this avatar’s buffer for their functionaries to find later. I could warn them in no uncertain terms that they’d made a powerful enemy today, and that they could expect merciless retaliation. I’d make it my personal mission to locate and defeat all future instances of Gorvod’s Frenzy with the same ruthless brutality they’d seen today. They’d angered the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon, sworn protector of the Realm, and I would not see my precious blingdom sullied any further by their brazen disregard for decorum. I positioned myself in the frozen avatar’s line of sight, preparing to put fear into the hearts of these pitiful wretches from my coveted perch atop the mighty leaderboard. This day, on these hallowed tourney grounds, I would teach them to respect their Queen, yea verily.
“Okay fuckwads,” I began.
From the stands far off behind me, the Keeper of the Moonlight Prism aimed a kaleidoscope in our direction and fired a beam that incinerated the Eye of Gorvod.
“I killed their last dude,” said the Keeper. “Do I win the tourney?”
“We didn’t even get to start the tourney,” I complained. I tossed the Electronic Dance Mace to the Keeper and said, “But yes, you win.”
“What do I get?” Sir Trancelot asked. “I didn’t kill any of their dudes, but I yelled at some people in chat, got real snippy about it and everything.”
I sighed and flipped the Psybient Crystal to Sir Trancelot. No sense having sidekicks if you couldn’t reward them with loot.
If this encounter had been good for nothing else, though, I’d clearly learned the value of my shiny new favorite weapon, Blades Per Minute. I had a feeling we would be inseparable, unlike the body parts of my enemies.
“What do you think they get out of raiding parties like that?” I asked, feeling unexpectedly philosophical about the carnage I’d just perpetrated. “They can’t be getting meaningful opportunities to level up with those tactics. What the hell is the point?”
“Maybe they came here just to witness the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon up close,” the Keeper said. “Maybe they’re all back in some dormitory crowded around a big screen, studying your moves, searching for any sign of weakness.”
I didn’t live stream my sessions these days, so I guess if you wanted to study my moves, you had to show up on my doorstep and, uh, get obliterated.
“Then they wasted their time,” I said. “I didn’t suffer a single scratch in that battle.”
“Who knows. Gorvod works in mysterious ways.”
“That’s not a real saying.”
“Sure it is.”
“No, it is definitely not.”