Players Perspectives

  Birth of the Fungal Lord

  I was hooked on the new game Age of Adventure within the first few minutes of playing. The sights, the sounds, the feel of wind on my face. It was all so much better than any game I had played.

  As an escape from the world of high finance it was perfect except for one thing, I wanted to be a druid. The problem was that animals had never liked me, even though I loved them. I had wanted to be a vet as a kid, not join the family business in finance, but the fact that most animals hated me made it a pipe dream. So, I became a businessman and with my fortune I supported animal rescue organizations and sanctuaries.

  After the mandatory phase of standing around and marveling at the realism, I set off to find the druid trainers. After accepting their quest, I was delighted that the animals didn’t run away or attack me on sight.

  It was then that I realized I had a problem. After so many years of not being able to even get near an animal, I did not know how to befriend one. To become a druid, I needed to get an animal’s blessing, and I was clueless on how to do that.

  My play time was limited on most days, so I spent all the time until the Highlight Reel trying to befriend animals in the underground grove of the druids.

  I canceled all my meetings for the morning of the Reel, and it was so worth it. I got to see what other players had accomplished in such a short time frame, and the guy being hailed as the best in the game, Lazarus, was some sort of druid. A few minutes later Lazarus sent out an information packet, and I read it twice.

  I completed the mage quest and then I promptly spent the next few days getting instruction in mana use. When I returned to the Preserve, I asked the many druids there for advice, they told me to let the animals come to me.

  I sat at the base of a tree, playing with my mana. My mana suffused the area little by little, and I finally felt a connection. Not to an animal that I had expected, but to the mushrooms growing next to me. The mushrooms I had been unconsciously feeding my mana to. I gained my first Blessing, the Blessing of the Mushroom.

  With that, I completed the quest and could learn from the druids.

  In the next few play sessions, I befriended several animals; it was a dream come true. I played with fox cubs, I helped feed baby birds, and I had a weasel ride around on my head for a few hours. It was heaven; I was so disappointed when I had to get going for a meeting.

  A druid wandering through the forest had shown me how to transform mana into blessed mana, a different process than turning normal mana into affinity mana. To make blessed mana, you needed to focus on the connection to the blessing you had in addition to the normal visualization.

  I let a small ball of mana float above my hand and focused on the fox; after a few minutes, the mana formed into a slightly silver and translucent fox. The detail wasn’t great, but it was recognizable as a fox. I didn’t know what to do with Fox Mana, so I let it disperse.

  I went through my blessings one by one, forming the mana into the shape that represented the blessing. This was the basic exercise the druid had taught me. I continued this until I got to the last one, the mushroom.

  The pale gold projection of a mushroom took form above my hand, much better defined than any of the others. While thinking about my connection to it I suddenly knew what to do, I blew on it gently and it exploded into a puff of tiny lights carried by my breath. Where they hit the forest floor, mushrooms the size of a pinhead sprouted.

  Yes! I got my first spell! That makes a great high point for logging off for the day.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  When Lazarus’ second information pack came out, it was all about classes, and it reminded me I still hadn’t picked one. I quickly jumped into the game so I could check out my options after reading it. I had some support or pet classes, and a couple mage ones based on the animals I had befriended.

  I thought about going for support or only using pet classes, but Lazarus had advised against full support and I realized my pets would get hurt. I wouldn’t want any pets I got to get hurt. Sadly, I discarded the idea of using the class that called to me so much.

  Looking over my unlocked classes, I found a couple others that might work. All the time I had played with the animals, I had kept up a small output of mana to practice and stayed in the same clearing. The mushroom I had connected with had continued to feed on my mana and grown, and so had its blessing. At 11, it was now my strongest one.

  As much as I originally wanted to just ‘be a druid’, now that I had choices it was much harder to pick a class.

  The three classes I had it narrowed down to were all solid choices.

  The Beast Mage option seemed really cool, but it spread its stats so far that I wasn’t sure it was the right choice. Fox Mage seemed fun, but I didn’t really want to be locked into a trickster path. From what Lazarus wrote, my first class could set the whole tone of my future ones. Looking around at the natural sanctuary around me, I knew I wanted to protect places like it in the wild.

  I looked over at the not-so-humble mushroom nearby; it was my first Blessing and the clue that mana could help form connections with animals. That mushroom meant a lot to me, it let me fulfil a dream I had been denied for so long. I would never have to worry about nonaggressive animals hating me in this world again, hopefully. Its class also seemed like the most combat focused of the three.

  With that thought, I chose the Apprentice Mushmancer. I leveled up once from my banked exp and got two new skills.

  Woah, I know mushrooms now. The head rush was disorienting as knowledge of the most basic mushrooms poured into my head. It wasn’t a lot since my stats and skill were so low, but I knew at least 5 times more about mushrooms than before. I will still admit that wasn’t much. The expanding of my mind from the Wisdom and Intellect boost felt strange but amazing at the same time.

  As I left the Preserve, I decided that this was the true beginning of my adventures in this world. The adventures of Typo the Mushmancer, druid extraordinaire.