Being a gamer in his past life this kind of book seemed very familiar to him. A few minutes into reading he whispered to himself, “Fuck, isn’t this a player's handbook to creating a character?”
Reading further into the book he thought, Interesting! There are 12 stats, and the system doesn’t seem to use dice. Flipping to the table of contents then quickly to the mechanic's system he realized the system truly did not use dice. It even let the players borrow initiative from the next round. However, the combat system was really well fleshed out. It ran fluidly and made logical sense. It was just weird that the book was written like a tabletop game but the mechanics worked like a video game.
Continuing to flip through the book he found everything he expected; race, stats, talents, bloodlines, negative and positive qualities, and some strange affinities. The weird thing was under skills section there were no skills, but instead talent trees like a crafting section of a video game.
After reading for a while, Kael looked down at the book in his hands. It looked normal, like it would have 200 to 300 pages, but so far he had flipped through and read at least 300 pages of junk. Even to that point, he had not found items or anything of that type, and yet he was only about 15% of the way through the book. Thinking, Shit this is going to take forever, but I need to read as much as I can so when I wake up I can create this awesome game system.
He quickly got back into the book. Reaching the section on materials he found hundreds of thousands of materials listed. Not just herbs and ores, which took up the majority, just the section on trees had thousands listed and their usages. Becoming annoyed he flipped back to techniques and found that there were tens of thousands of those as well. The majority of them were based on qi techniques while the minorities were body refining, spiritual techniques, and even odd science-based systems. At this point, he realized this was some sort of eastern system.
Throwing these thoughts to the back of his mind, he flipped back to the table of contents to get a quick look at what the hell was in the rest of this book. Looking through the table of contents he saw it was broken into 5 sections; Mortal, Earth, Sky, Heavens, and Immortal.
Jumping to the first page of the earth section and only finding a title, he tried to flip the page. For some reason the page would not change, it was like the rest of the book's pages were all glued together.
Looking at the title page of the earth section again he saw writing appear that read, The soul you are trying to create was birthed on a lesser plane with only mortal existences, and has never existed in a higher plane during any previous life. This soul may only access the mortal rules of Samsara.
“Well fuck” Kael shouted, “even in my dreams I get boned”. Fuck it, there are like 1,200 pages to read anyways, and this dude is never coming back. I might as well just create my character.
Looking around the office for a spare paper he finally opened the book of Kael Fae. While flipping through in search of a blank page he was happy to find an actual character sheet in the back of the book. Pulling it out and grabbing the quill off the desk, he flipped the book of Samsara to the beginning and began to create his character.
Thinking about his overall character template he decided since he could only use mortal techniques, and there was no qi he was aware of on earth, he would just focus on being a super buff dude. Of course, the crafting stuff was interesting as well, and the talents seemed to help a lot, so he decided to make a buff, smart dude and ignore all the cultivation, skills, and techniques.
Starting from the beginning of the book he looked at the stats. Thinking the author could really use an editor, it looked like it was written on a spreadsheet, in shorthand, then printed out. He carefully reread the statistic section to be sure he understood everything.
After reading all of this, Kael thought, Who the fuck makes such random numbers and weird progression up? The purchase price seems really low too, 60 karma for like 200 points. How the hell was I just an average bloke in my last life? That’s how I know this must be a dream. Whatever, onto making my super buff dude.
Apparently, group C filled itself in, since I never got the actual math for it. It looks like (group B*2 + group A) /2 is the formula, really weird. Yeah, Willpower x2 is 16, +8 is 24 then divided by 2 is 12. That should be right, it works for Endurance and Reflex also. What a shitty book author to leave that out.
Looking it over one last time Kael thinks to himself, this looks good, buff dudes are not agile, and I should be smart enough to get rich crafting things. Kind of a strange build unless I am a blacksmith, but I think alchemists were the money makers in those novels. Oh, didn’t the skill talents say you had to have primary fire with partial wood affinity for alchemy and blacksmiths needed fire and metal? The combat mechanics looked like splitting your affinities would lower your capabilities, but it’s only 10% for each, so screw it, I’ll just do both later.
Ok stats are done, next section then; Cycle of Samsara. Oh yeah, this was that weird ass, I wanna be OP section. All sorts of strange items, inheritances, and other things. What the hell is a “Grandpa in a Ring” and why does it cost 500 points. Who would pay to turn their grandfather into a ring? Isn’t that shitty? That also totally goes against the morality section I read earlier I think, makes no sense. Maybe I shouldn’t have skimmed over that section. Damn, I can’t believe I need to read some bible thumping section. I guess it’s not really a bible thumping section since it is all eastern.
