Throughout our flight, Odum chanted in our minds. He didn’t comment about his villagers tearing apart his city. Instead, he stuck to the talking points about the virtues of servitude. Odum might not poll well with nonbelievers, but I had to admit, the demagogue-in-chief stayed on message.

  When I heard chunks of stone falling beneath us, I earnestly worried. The building shook, and I doubted we could escape and hide somewhere. Fabulosa and I still radiated green.

  Fabulosa turned to me. “Is your Slipstream up?”

  I checked my cooldown. It still had a minute left. I shook my head. I scanned the neighborhood for a neighboring building. They stood too far for running jumps. Only Slipstream could deliver us to the next rooftop. Assuming the structures could withstand enough pounding to let Slipstream’s 5-minute cooldown reset, we could hopscotch across the city.

  “Wait, a second. Before we do this—where do we want to go?”

  The building shifted.

  Fabulosa’s eyes widened. “Anywhere but here.”

  “Yeah, I know that. But we can’t come back to this building again. We’re burning our bridges as we move.”

  The building shook as if to emphasize my point. The shock caused us to throw up our arms for balance. We scanned the horizon. The temple became the obvious answer. We could now enter it, and it looked stronger than other buildings. Besides, Odum wouldn’t let a mob of Samsons bring down his house, would he?

  “What about the temple?” As the roof vibrated beneath our feet, I counted a dozen buildings between our position and the temple walls. While it looked like we could bridge each jump, the blemmies could surround and pound each structure. That these weren’t proper buildings made it impossible to count on their sturdiness.

  Fabulosa gestured to the street. “Maybe we can kite them around town. That’s a lot of experience points down there.” Judging by the concentration of blemmies, her Fireball could hit dozens—each would lose about 5 percent of their health. If I took Fireball, we’d only need to cast 10 each to kill them in bunches. It wasn’t a crazy idea. By the time I hit level 23, I’d earned three power points, and Fireball had been available for a long time—it practically begged me to take it.

  I looked down. So many blemmies attacked below that our Fireballs couldn’t hit them all. Killing dozens wouldn’t solve our problem.

  A structural shift in the building interrupted my thoughts.

  Fabulosa began casting Fireball on the rabble below us.

  “Stop! No!”

  She canceled her cast and waited for me to explain.

  “Fab, this is going to be one long combat. There’s no Rest and Mend between buildings. Slipstream costs 30 mana a pop. We need to conserve if we’re making a dozen jumps. What’s your mana pool?”

  “It’s 270.” Fabulosa frowned. For a dozen jumps, she would need 360 mana. My pool stretched to 320, so I could make it with a minor mana potion. Fabulosa could not.

  We considered our options when we felt something heavy crash beneath our feet.

  Fabulosa threw her arms up for balance. “Wait! The cooldown for potions is ten minutes. I can take a potion every two buildings. How many mana pots do we have?”

  We counted two dozen between us, which solved our Slipstream issue, but we didn’t have enough to sustain a Fireball bombardment against these slobbering masses.

  I recovered after the footing beneath my feet shook again. “My cooldown is up. Once we cross the city, the buildings we land on won’t last. Are you good with going to the temple?”

  “I don’t see any other way. Let’s go.”

  We Slipstreamed to the structure across the street. Unfortunately, none of the buildings stood next to one another, so we couldn’t hop across adjacent rooftops. That would have been too easy.

  After we jumped, the blemmies focused on their new target with undiminished zeal. From our vantage, we could see the extent of the first building’s destruction. Their efforts mushroomed the previous structure’s base. If we jumped onto a thin structure, our pursuers needed less time to collapse it.

  When our Slipstream cooldowns finished, Fabulosa and I jumped again. The blemmies followed.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  We spent the next hour leapfrogging over the blemmies toward the temple, from one building to its neighbor, all the while enduring a booming voice. We suffered self-aggrandizing announcements from The Almighty Odum—monotonous be His dialog.

  “Immutable is the reign of Odum, blessed be His name.

  Embrace the splendor of bondage,

  Freedom from choice and worldly concerns.”

  Ignite your unrealized devotion,

  And cast yourself upon His ever-burning pyre.”

  Fabulosa ran her fingers through her hair and yelled at the temple. “Argh! I wish he would give it a rest already!”

  The hypnotic and distracting voice wore away my nerves. We listened to it while waiting for our cooldowns. The shaking building broke our reverie and prompted us to make the next jump.

  I regarded the headless besieger below. If I had to listen to Odum any longer, I’d end up as mad as them.

  At last, we landed on one of the temple’s partial wall sections. Unlike standard castle walls, no ledges, handrails, or crenelations prevented people from falling. The sandstone barriers were decorative, not functional.

  Upon reaching the temple walls, the sight of the blemmies breaking off their pursuit caused us to sigh in relief. The blemmies stopped along what I assumed to be the outer perimeter of hallowed ground, standing like well-trained dogs at the invisible boundary of the neighbor’s yard. They made no noises or gestures.

  As we waited for our Slipstream cooldowns to expire, it surprised us to see the crowd dispersing. When the first few peeled off, I worried they would bring missiles or a priest who would grant them passage through the holiest of holies. Instead of summoning reinforcements, the mob disappeared into the city.

  Fabulosa scanned the city streets. “Their job is done. They delivered us to Odum.”

  “Out of the frying pan, eh?”

  “I hope they don’t mind us bouncing Odum into the air. We both have Compression Sphere this time. Remember when you did that to Tardee at the Lady of Balance temple?”

  I smiled at the memory. “Let me go first. If the blemmies change their collective mind and rush me, I can reset Hot Air and escape.”

  Fabulosa nodded and got a rope ready, just in case. I leaped from the walls. When I neared the ground, I Slipstreamed safely onto the sand. I peered upward to Fabulosa, who scanned the city for reactions to my reaching the ground. After searching the city streets for signs of movement, she shook her head and shrugged. She cupped her hand and called down. “It’s dark, but I don’t see any movement.”

  I shouted to Fabulosa so she could hear me over Odum’s sermon. “Let me check out the temple first. Maybe I’ll see what’s making them berserk.” I ascended a wide stairway leading to the yawning entrance. Before the Mote in Odum’s Eye debuff reduced us to living dolls, the temple rose to our chest, but now it seemed enormous.

  Behind me, I heard a whoosh of air as Fabulosa Slipstreamed to a standing position. “The blemmies lit out for the city. The stragglers aren’t doing anything. I reckon we can take ‘em if they jump us.” When I gave her a concerned look, she rolled her eyes. “Check your combat state. We can Rest and Mend before checking out the temple.”

  I did. The game log showed us leaving combat a minute ago.

  Unlike the city’s buildings, the temple's interior looked realistic. The polished white and gold tiles reflected a green shine from a marble sculpture. The statue rested at the bottom of a recessed floor section, which a balcony overlooked.

  We approached the terrace overlooking the glowing green sculpture. Below us, primitive paintings depicting war victories covered the walls, yet no stairs led down to the statue. The temple’s upper floor held only candelabras. Each brightened the temple’s corners, adding orange accent lights to contrast with the statue’s green radiance.

  As our eyes adjusted to the glow, I studied the seated figure. Odum’s furry bench wasn’t a recliner but a headless, hooved animal whose facial features covered its chest and stomach. Hair matted its four stout legs.

  Atop the beast sat a giant blemmy. From our 6-inch-high perspective, it appeared twenty-five feet high. No nameplate appeared over it, so we couldn’t judge its level or health. Behind the statue hung a giant gong and mallet. The instrument almost certainly kicked off a boss fight.

  I turned to Fabulosa. “Can you reach him with an arrow from here? Maybe we can cheese him from up here and forgo the whole boss fight.”

  Fabulosa shook her head. “Even if I could damage someone without a nameplate, my arrow needs a valid target. It’s a statue.”

  The expansive floor space seemed like a movie studio or an airplane hangar. Aside from a repeating pattern of marble tiles, the area with the statue looked devoid of decoration.

  “Do you think the blemmies went down there somehow? Why is there so much space?”

  Fabulosa didn’t seem overly impressed. “It’s a boss fight area. Maybe they toss one another down there when sacrificing to the specters gets boring.”

  We circled the balcony and contemplated the statue like our circuit around the city. We checked out the temple from every angle before committing ourselves to the pit.

  Nothing in the temple’s upper level caught our attention except for the candelabras, but Fabulosa inspected them with unusual attention. The wrought iron objects had four candles stuck on metal spikes. She picked up a candle and blew on the flame, but it wouldn’t extinguish. “Ever-burning candles. Let’s take these for Hawkhurst.” She held her hand over the flame as if it weren’t hot. Like the fountains surrounding the city, the light supplied an illusionary fire.

  The candelabra’s top wobbled on its base when she removed the candle. She shifted the top piece and seemed lost in thought.

  “What’s up?”

  “I have an idea for what we can do with them.”

  I sighed with impatience. Candelabras could cheer up our town hall or make light posts outdoors, but we weren’t browsing for decorations. I wanted Odum’s chant out of my mind. We could collect souvenirs on the way out.

  Fabulosa removed the candles and lifted the top piece off the base shaft. “The stick and candelabra are separate pieces. See?” As we circled the room, she disassembled it and placed its parts in her inventory.

  As we circled the floor, I sized up our opponent’s probable combat mechanics. I imagined how we would battle the statue after it sprang to life. We could reach the belly of the mounted mammoth, across which stretched its facial features. Fighting beneath a giant animal’s face wasn’t appealing, but we had no other choice.

  The floor’s repeating tile pattern made it easy to estimate its space to be thirty yards square. We dropped a rope into the area and secured it to the railing, making sure it held because The Book of Dungeons firmly believed in falling damage.

  I could use my robe in a pinch to reset my Hot Air ability to levitate out, but I would probably need to reset something for the boss fight.

  A God Complex

  From Azeroth to Miros—What’s in a Map?

  Warcraft 1’s dev cycle, he wrote stories about his characters, almost afraid his peers would call his obsession to write lore a waste of time. When someone found it, the team liked the idea of putting their real-time strategy game in a setting. They included the two-page story almost as an afterthought—it filled out the manual in the boxed game. His stories reappeared a year later in Warcraft 2. Since then, he wrote all the stories for Diablo and Starcraft, and his lore played a central role in Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft over the next ten years.

  The WoW Diary, but I never let on that he never used them. In the year his office stood across from mine, I’d never seen them open. He never referred to them in a creative meeting. Eric Dodds, WoW’s trade skill designer, once remarked that there seemed no point in writing lengthy design documents because anything written becomes outdated in weeks, days, or hours.

  Clash of the Titans, Lawrence Olivier cries, “Destroy Argos!” The movie flopped, but the few kids who saw it weren’t paying attention to the story. Instead, we patiently waited for the stop-animation monsters to ensue carnage—even so, we instinctively knew Argos to be a place.

  The Book of Dungeons changed over the four years of writing. If I came up with a better character name, I’d do a global find and replace. You might think it’s a minor issue, but I don’t see it this way. I’ve played Paizo’s Pathfinder every week over the past decade, and their names are terrible. It slows down story-telling, breaks immersion, and hobbles role-playing.

  The Adventure of English. I highly recommend it. It is a history of the language that is as entertaining as it is informative.

  The Adventure of English.