Introduction to the World
Since I’m going to be kicking off the Welcome to the World series in the next couple weeks, I thought I might go ahead and give you a quick overview of what the World is and how it works before we get started. If you’d rather let the World reveal itself over the course of the story, you can ignore this post. Anyway, without further ado…
Whereas the Planet in the Tellus Arc is a parallel world to our Earth with the same overall dimensions, the World of WttW is a little more abstract. Rather than a sphere, it’s a helix, starting with the Royal Capital of Axios in Upper Midgard (what one might term “the Zeroeth Trial”) and terminating in the Womb of the World, the site of the Twenty-first Trial. The World is divided into twenty-one zones known as the Trials, with an additional four Hidden Trials that branch off the Golden Path running from one end of the World to the other. The Trials vary in size but are limited and bound by invisible walls known as the Barrier. There is one way in and one way out of each Trial (excepting the ones that branch off into a Hidden Trial). The Exit Gate can only be activated after defeating the Trial Master, the boss monster of each Trial. Because each Trial is not connected by ordinary geography, you could face wildly different biomes going from one Trial to the next. The further you descend, the stronger the monsters are, and as a general principle, if you’re strong enough to beat one Trial Master, you will be just strong enough to survive in the next Trial.
There are two kinds of humans in the World: the Summoned (Players) and People of the World (NPCs). The People of the World are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the World, while the Summoned are brought into the World from Earth to participate in the Game. The goal of the Game is to complete the Trials and defeat the final Trial Master, the God-Dragon Ur-Tiamat, who is said to be the root of all evil in the world. The Summoned have greater potential than the People of the World (in numerical terms, the People of the World are level-capped at 40 while the Summoned are level-capped at 80) and are therefore the only ones with any chance of winning the Game. One way the World ensures the division between between the Summoned and the People of the World is that the two cannot interbreed. Another is that it is very difficult for the Summoned to survive without adventuring, but adventuring also has a high mortality rate (with a single annual cohort typically being reduced by half in the first year alone). Players are able to have children with each other, but a small portion even survive long enough to reach child-bearing age, much less find the stability to raise children, then Second-Generation Players have challenges of their own, such as a high risk of being orphaned and being pushed into adventuring too early with fatal results. Second-Generation Players are valued because they inherit some of their parents’ abilities, which gives them an advantage over the newly Summoned, though overconfidence in this potential often leads to the aforementioned fatal results.
Tied to the goal of winning the Game is the concept of the Brave. It is believed that the Brave is the only Player capable of reaching Level 99 and therefore most likely to stand a chance against Ur-Tiamat, who is also said to be Level 99. What’s more, it is believed that the Brave will possess the Blessings of all of the Twelve Gods of the World. You see, each Summoned chooses a Patron among the Twelves and receives Blessings as a reward for their faith. These Blessings can be inherited from parents to children, so in theory, a child with all twelve Blessings could be achieved by the fifth generation, but efforts to orchestrate a breeding program have failed to yield fruit, as it were.
I’ll stop here as I could keep on going for a good long while if I let myself. I’m thinking of doing little featurettes on different aspects of the World and the game system as we go, breaking things up into digestible chunks (though I may actually publish the full game guide on the site at a later date). I don’t know if we’ll have one of those featurettes next week or if we’ll do something else. Stay tuned.
Tags: Commentary, Else Arc, Miscellany, Welcome to the World, WttW
Commentary, Else Arc, Miscellany, Welcome to the World | James Carmack | 11 December 2023 |
