(You vile degenerate, you and your hundred million cyberspatial compatriots!)
Not that you’re much given to probing the time-travelling condition when you can go rushing around bashing goblin brains with your clan buddies, which is what you’re doing right now—a bit of mindless recreational hack’n’slash to distract yourself until you’re tired enough for bed.
You’re running around as Oberon, a high-level warlock of more or less human origins who you’ve been developing for a while, out of idle curiosity—he’s well optimized for playing in a variety of fantasy zones, mostly ones that branch off the old dungeon paradigm—and you’ve hooked up with a trio of adventurers you just met in the guild-house to go and kick short green butt in a cave complex somewhere north of Castle Greyhawk and east of the rising sun. Alice (on morningstar and clerical anti-undead duty), Helmut (on war-axe and attitude) and Fantomas (lock-picking and garottes) are reasonably experienced players, for which you are gratefuclass="underline" So far the goblins have just been a minor nuisance, but you’ve got a feeling there’s more to this cave complex than meets the ultravision-augmented eye up to now. Which is why you’ve got half a dozen defensive spells locked and loaded, a neon-red knife missile floating above your left shoulder, and a serious case of paranoia as you tiptoe after Fantomas towards the running water you can hear ahead.
It’s a cave complex, of course, because you don’t generally run across anything as small as a mere cavelet in Greyhawk. There will be underground rivers, vast and wide, and huge cavernous killing zones with mist-wreathed stalagmite islands and waterfalls thundering into the subterranean depths—and stepping-stones and brokeback bridges to traverse under fire from the chittering hordes. Plus at least two side-quests to fulfil if you want to acquire the plot coupon to open the door to the money shot on the third sub-basement level guarded by the Klingon security detachment—except you made that last bit up: Whimsical, but that’s how the automatic scenario generators work, they’ve got all the subtlety of a play-by-numbers adventure book or a Hollywood motion picture.
Still, you can enjoy the art-work. Someone put a lot of effort into the music score, which is variations on a vaguely classical theme with a trance background: And the stony footing actually looks as if someone who’d been down a limestone karst or two in their day designed it, bedding planes and all. It doesn’t look like off-the-shelf tiles, and you’re almost beginning to wonder whether someone at Wizards of the Co$t has finally cracked procedural sedimentary rock formation in Zone when you run up against Alice, who has stopped and is crouched behind a boulder.
“What is it?” you ask, using your private chat channel.
“Someone else ahead. Don’t look like NPCs.” That’s Fantomas talking. He’s got a thick Yorkshire accent, which is pretty weird coming from a halfling swathed in black assassin’s silks.
“Eyeballs, oh great mage?” That’s Helmut. There’s a suspicious buzz to his voice that bespeaks either a suspiciously lossy routing or a voice remixer—the latter’s most likely, so you peg him as a transvestite, but that’s his privilege—but the sarcasm comes through undimmed.
“Certainly. Give me one second.” You hit on a spell slot and the knife missile shimmers with a shield of invisibility, then you send it forward into the dark cavern that vaults across the underground lake on whose shore you are playing hide-and-seek.
There’s a beach about fifty yards out across the expanse of black liquid, and a rickety wooden pier running out from it to a gondola-like boat that rocks slightly in an invisible breeze. You look through the missile’s eyes as it closes in on the boat, then, as if by magic (as if! In a place like this!) it pierces a shield of some description, and a small horde of bad guys appear beneath you. There are at least twelve of them, lumpen green-skinned warriors in heavy iron armour, skull-helmets and horsehair fringes nodding above beetle-browed faces: And they all bear a red ideogram on their shields. But they’re sure as hell not NPCs—you can hear a low-key conversation, the strange (to your Western ears) nasal-sounding intonation of mandarin speakers, and they’re equipped like adventurers, and that one in the sorcerer’s robe is an—
“Oh shit,” you manage to say, just as the enemy mage looks up expressionlessly, stabs his staff of power at your knife missile, and you lose contact. “Hostile clan, look like dark-dwellers, at least a dozen”—and then you flip back to your local context and look around and everything’s going to pieces around you. Half a dozen of the skull-helmed intruders march up out of the placid lake waters at the double, shedding their magical gills as they lower their halberds. You begin to trace a rune of protection, but you’re too late: A crossbow bolt, burning with alchemist’s fire, takes you in the back, from the trio of archers who have appeared from cover in the passageway behind you.
That pisses you off, and you’re a sufficiently powerful sorcerer that you don’t have to take that sitting: So you turn and prepare to zap a fireball at them as your magic armour comes online.
But nothing happens. You twitch. “Give me fire support!” yells Alice. “Someone heal Helmut—”
You line up another fireball and let rip. Nada. Huh? Something’s clearly wrong.
Another hostile steps out from behind the archers. This one is wearing a suit of powered battle armour and carrying a small tactical atomic grenade launcher from SPACE MARINE. Which is just not possible in Zone—it’s a tech-level transgression, not to mention a red flag to the moderators—but the last thing you see of your enemies is the red-glowing ideogram floating in the depths of his helmet face-plate as he pulls the trigger.
And brings the curtain down on Oberon the Warlock as neatly as any game you’ve ever lost.
Fucking cheats!
The next morning you awaken in a breathless near panic, one of those I’m-late-I’m-late-I’m-late tension dreams you get just before the alarm tweedles. You bounce out of bed too fast, get dizzy, stagger to the shower, begin getting dressed, and realize you only bought the one dress shirt to go with the suit. So you end up being ten minutes late out the door, unshaven and wearing a grand’s worth of pinstripes over a STEAMING tee-shirt that promises to bam yer pot, Jimmy.
You hop the bus from the high street out to Drum Brae, shifting the time with a wee dip into Ankh-Morpork. The bus trundles past ominously looming hunchbacked houses, cars replaced by noisome horse-drawn wagons, pedestrian commuters by a mixture of dwarfs, golems, werewolves, and humans from various periods of History-Land™. There are only a couple of icons spinning over players’ heads, though—Discworld™ isn’t too popular among the nine-till-five set. It’s all a bit drearily boring, so you drop out of the overlay and into your newsfeed for the rest of the trip.
The Hayek Associates’ offices—well, you’d heard about the old government nuclear command/control bunker out near Corstorphine hill, but you weren’t sure you believed in it until now. The car-park is full of Porsches and Bentleys, plus a Police van: All it needs is a bathroom with a Jacuzzi full of brightly coloured machine parts to make your day. You head for the entrance, where a big guy with a badly trimmed moustache and a suit that screams “cop” in sixteen different languages steps into your path.