Rewind: A Grimdark LitRPG Series (Pyresouls Apocalypse, Book 1) by James Callum (reading tree .txt) 📕

Not very informative.

What it really did, was determine your speed and encumbrance. Guilt functioned similarly to weight in a lot of other games.

Each piece of gear had a certain amount of Guilt associated with it. Mostly, this coincided with heavier armor but sometimes special armors, those that were uniquely powerful, had a high Guilt cost as well.

Each point of Guilt slowed you down as its burden upon your soul increased. There were certain breakpoints that people had found out by comparing information.

The general consensus was that each 25% of Guilt you carried incurred another penalty. From 0% to 25% then 25.1% to 50% and so on. Under 25% Guilt, you had full movement and no Stamina penalty. Each tier of Guilt above that slowed you down further and made your Stamina cost higher.

For example, your basic Human started with 5 TMP. That meant they could only have a single point of Guilt before they were penalized. Luckily, most of the starting gear had 0 points of Guilt on it.

Like the medieval gear they raided from collectors and museums, it would stand up to the monsters of Pyresouls, but it wasn’t particularly strong. It possessed enough Guilt to make it stronger than even the hardest nanowire weaves back home but not enough to encumber your movement.

But very quickly you could get gear dropped off the various monsters, or find it in chests – if the traps didn’t kill you first – and sooner than later you were moving like a fat old man in a girdle instead of some badass knight.

If you couldn’t move, you died.

Which made increasing TMP one of the most important things you could do. Especially early game, when you didn’t have many stats to begin with. It was the stat Jacob intended to boost first.

On his first attempt, he had found a piece of armor that even Alec didn’t know about. But it was so damn thick with Guilt that the first time he tried to wear the breastplate, he was killed trying to swing his sword at the half-armored Vacant he was fighting.

It didn’t matter how good the armor was if he was left vulnerable to every attack. Pyresouls wasn’t like a typical MMO where you loaded up on HP and armor, tanking everything the game could throw at you.

Even with an incredibly good set of armor and a proper shield, you had to play smart. The weakest enemies in the game could still kill you. They never stopped posing a lethal threat, even after the hundredth creature was slain.

In that sense, it wasn’t too dissimilar from the reality he knew for the last decade. While most skilled fighters could take a Vacant or two in single combat, all it took was a single mistake to die.

The only difference was, in Pyresouls Jacob would respawn at the last Pyre he touched. And for some reason on Earth, there were no Pyres.

Nobody ever quite figured that one out.

There was a theme of balance and picking stats wisely in Pyresouls. Having super high TMP was great to wear the best armor but if you couldn’t put down an enemy fast, you were at exponentially greater risk of death.

STR boosted the Attack Rating (AR) of any non-finesse based physical weapons. It was also required to wear certain gear and to wield specific weapons.

DEX boosted the AR of finesse weapons and increased spellcasting speed. Like STR, a lot of armor and weaponry required a specific amount of DEX to wear or use properly.

You could equip the items even without the required stats but there were a host of negative effects that usually didn’t make it worth doing.

INT and FTH were two sides of the same coin. They each increased a secondary stat like AR. INT increased Vile Intent while FTH increased Noble Intent.

Both were magical stats but for entirely different schools of magic that did not mix. And that was the reason that Jacob had failed so miserably on his first attempt. He picked Fairy as his race thinking he would be a spellcaster and then began to raise FTH to offset the imbalance.

Big mistake.

The problem was, Vile Intent and Noble Intent were incompatible to the extreme. Raising INT increased Vile Intent just as the game said but what it didn’t mention was that raising INT also decreased Noble Intent.

The inverse happened when you raised FTH.

It didn’t completely invalidate the other stat but it severely hamstrung its efficacy. And with each stat point being so hard to get – you only get one per level up – it was a waste of both stats.

You picked one based on the magic you wanted to use. INT for Sorcery and FTH for Clemency.

Jacob took a closer look at the description for Humans.

Human

The most fundamental and proliferate of all the known races. Humans have spread far and wide across Lormar due in no small part to their capacity to take up any role in society and see it filled. As a result, humans are very well-rounded individuals with no inherent weaknesses nor strengths.

VIT: 5 | AGI: 5

END: 5 | TMP: 5

STR: 5 | DEX: 5

INT: 5 | FTH: 5

Curse: Undeath

Boon: Bleed Resistance, Physical Resistance.

Bane: Reduced Speed, Fire Vulnerability.

That was the other thing about Pyresouls that people didn’t fully understand. You not only had to pick a race – a difficult enough proposition for most MMO players even without the stakes of the competition – but also a curse. A negative effect that likely caused more deaths than the game’s monsters.

Each race had its own curse. Human’s curse was turning into the undead. And as Earth was entirely populated by humans, it meant that any dead human would rise up again unless dispatched before they turned.

It gave rise to the Day of the Dead shortly after the Collapse and the proliferation of the Vacant.

In-game, the curse was different. You could influence it to a degree but it was painful and grueling. Most people opted