Tukasana the Witch King; Undead, Evil Spirits, and Slaves; Savage Fantasy World, Jungle Continent

You never did like your life. That was the simple fact of the matter, unfortunate though it was. You always felt powerless, worthless… like an insect tossed between the tides of a life that had no use for you and very little pity. The only way to avoid this crushing feeling was to bury yourself in fantasy, in games where YOU were the most important creature in the world. YOU shaped the fate of nations, YOU decided whether the world was saved or not, YOU were the tyrant or the savior, you, you, you… And that was pretty much the only way you could deal with the utter insignificance of your actual life.

You couldn’t hide in fantasy forever of course. Real life caught up with you. And when it did, you took a gun, put it in your mouth, and pulled the trigger. And that was it really, no girlfriend, no children, no legacy, no life. Just a bloody smear back on the wall and a mess for the police to clean up when someone found out you were dead, a WEEK after you bit the bullet and started to stink. But all was not lost. Because when you pulled that trigger, you didn’t fade into a black nothing as you’d expected. Instead, you wound up here… in some kind of giant white expanse with a bunch of pop up windows telling you that you were going to reincarnate into a game-world that was, more or less, of your choosing, and giving you the options to do so.

And that was AWESOME!!! You could not BELIEVE how wonderful it was! You wanted to cry, you wanted to yell, you wanted to scream! You would finally get to be the biggest, most powerful, most important person in the world! And you’d MAKE IT!!! … But first, you needed to decide who you’d be, the Avatar screen very clearly showing that there needed to be some kind of alteration. Frankly, you were all for it, your body wasn’t particularly impressive in your last life, hardly a surprise. So what and how to alter it to make your new one worthwhile…

Well, first off you’d be tall and fit, 6ft5 with a good and athletic body that was easy! You also decided to make it lithe as opposed to muscular, always preferring that more streamlined look. But then you had to think on what you wanted, what you REALLY wanted to be in this new life. And you decided that you wanted to be scary, powerful, someone to fear. Now that could be done with pure physicality sure, but it was so much more terrifying when that someone was supernatural, strange, with access to otherworldly powers. Because then you had to fear not only for your body, but for your soul, and that was in a way far more terrifying than just having some guy bash your brains in. So, after some consideration on the subject, you decided that you’d style yourself more along the lines of a mystical witch doctor, with power over the dark mystical forces of the world.

With that decision made, you began to fine-tune yourself. Your skin would be very dark, as you felt was appropriate for the role, and your body would be shaved of hair. If you let any grow in it would be a pitch black, but for the moment you felt as though wanted to start off fully shaved and see where that took you. Your eyes were a lime green, frightening and bright, and you took especial care to adjust the facial muscles and skeletal structure in these menus to make your eyes look more intimidating and aggressive, giving you a rather nice looking glare. For your age, you settled on twenty-two. You didn’t want to still be in your teens, but did want to be young, at the prime of your life, and figured you could work to immortality spells or the like to stop further aging in the course of the game.

But none of this was complete without, you felt, a very vital part of any Witch Doctor ensemble… tattoos. You used some of the more interesting options in the Avatar customizer, and began to give yourself a rather thorough tattoo, in dark green ink. Up your chest upon your skin was displayed a skeletal rib-cage, down your legs and arms skeletal limbs, ending with skeletal fingers and toes over your real ones. Upon your face was portrayed a skull, in intimate, terrifying detail, and you made sure to get a skeletal look along your back as well, thoroughly tattooing your body. After a moment, for effect, you tattooed black ink all around your eyes, inside of the skull-socket, emphasizing them even further. You played with the idea of filling in the rest of your skin black, but decided that that’d be overkill, at least for now, you could always add more ink later.

With all this done, you finally moved on to Skills and Abilities… now this was hard. You didn’t have anywhere NEAR as many points to spend on this part as you would have liked. And since you were going for a mage class, you’d have to divide them between talents for your personal management and kingdom running, and actual magic for casting. And even that first started with spending some points to get ‘Magical Ability’, to be able to even unlock everything else. With a sigh, you spent the points and dealt with the blow. If this game had RPG elements as well as RTS, you knew there’d be ways to vastly improve your spell-casting beyond just these menus. Still, you wanted to start off as a competently scary magic user…

Now despite your theme, you didn’t want to use or rely on ACTUAL voodoo magic, or the names and identities of actual Voodoo deities from your world. Perhaps you were paranoid, but you didn’t want to risk attracting powerful entities from across dimensions who you honestly weren’t entirely familiar with and couldn’t predict. So while you’d base it around the style of Voodoo, with summoning and bargaining with spirits to do your bidding and harness their powers, you’d actually make it up pretty much on the spot, just create a new set of ‘Evil Spirits’ to work for you. With that in mind, you gave yourself numerous spells and talents, both for that and other dark magic.

‘Necromancy’ was something you’d always loved, and so pushed in enough points to get it up to Level Three, spending a huge chunk right there. Its actual benefits were a bit less direct than you’d expected, but apparently it helped unlock Undead units, buildings, and rituals, giving you more to work with at the start and making things easier to acquire in the long run.

Still, you wanted to actually summon Undead mid-combat to, so you purchased the simple ‘Animate’ spell which would cause the dead nearby to rise and fight for you, clumsily and without the point spending of your customizable minions, but still obedient and useful. While you only bought it at level one, the stats of the spell showed that it did gain help from the Necromancy Level Three selection, so that was a bit of good news.

You didn’t stop there of course. Life Drain, an essential part of evil necromancy, was taken and leveled up to ‘2’ in your stats, allowing you to steal life from your opponents in combat, usually one at a time. Again, it got a bonus from Necromancy 3. Then Dark Magic and Dark Summoning were selected at Level 2, and after a thought, you actually took Blood Magic, Level 1, mainly because you could see yourself sacrificing people to Dark spirits and wanted to kind of run with that. With an offensive spell and a summoning spell already acquired, you then went with a defensive spell in the Dark Magic school, ‘Kept in Shadow’ which at Level 1 would cause shadows to mass about your body and turn you invisible for half a minute, buying you time to move or escape. Then, a healing spell, ‘The Red Mend’, a Blood Magic special which would help seal cuts and clot blood, repair damage on your person to give back health.

Although it wasn’t as varied, grand, or overpowering as you would like, it was a good start to work off of you felt. And as you suspected, all this spending in magic left you with very little for other talents. With some agitation you mused over the options, realizing that you’d have to cherry-pick the best and not go for everything that you wanted… You only hoped there’d be in-game ways to acquire most of the better options later on.

After much of this muttering and searching, you finally decided to select a trait called ‘Intimidating Presence’ which generally increased the fear and trepidation people would feel at your presence. It wouldn’t affect those who knew you well and felt safe around you, or were leagues more powerful than you and knew it, but it would give a general boost to your attempts to be imposing, and at least make weak foreign dignitaries and slaves nervous.

Another you picked was called ‘Magically Gifted’ which increased your magical abilities in general and allowed you to level up in them and learn new spells faster. After selected it you went back and were pleased to note that it further increased the power of your spells, making it very much worth the cost to you. Then after a bit more musing you took a level in ‘ Master’, which would allow you to more easily command your servants and have more slaves without organization or discipline problems. You were something of a sadistic dominant in your sexuality, something you could never really show in your home world… you were fairly sure you’d get to show it in this one.

Finally, you scraped together the points for a level in ‘Orator’ increasing your ability to speak and give speeches. You weren’t entirely sure how useful that last one would be, but every good villain did a monologue at this point, and you weren’t exactly shaping up to be nice guy of the year with your stylistic choices. It couldn’t hurt at least.

It was only after all of this that you were able to move on to gear… and it wasn’t very impressive. Most of your points weren’t especially useful there, you could get very little of any reasonable value that also went with your theme… After looking it over, you decided that you’d try to just get yourself a loin-cloth, colored black for at least some level of creepiness factor, and gave yourself a curved sacrificial dagger, made out of black glass with a white human-bone handle. You considered purchasing a crown of some kind, but after mulling it over, noted that what was unspent here would carry on into the unit selection for points, and considering that you didn’t see anything of particular value, you decided to just go with that and move on. You’d find/create cool loot for yourself as time went forward you were sure.

After all these menus and options and selections were made, it was time to start looking at your actual army… And this is where it got a bit difficult for you. You knew you wanted Undead. You knew you wanted Evil Spirits. But you also wanted living slaves. Why? Because the other two probably weren’t going to be scared of you, mortals were, that was kind of the point really. Now you could just take them from conquered areas, but you didn’t want them to be automatically converted to undead, and you could see yourself making a society of worshippers around you, forming a new dark tribe that hinged on your every word and whim. As a result, you decided to make your army selection a full mixture of ‘Evil Spirits’, which gave quite a bit of variety and wiggle room for you, Undead, which you figured would likely be the primary forces of your armies, and Slaves, who you were least sure of, but would see where they fit in…

With all of that done, you started on the basics of the world, noting that ‘Unit Design Specifics’ could be done after you entered. You decided that you’d handle Unit Creation when you saw what you were working with. Now by this point you’d actually gotten a rather good idea of what you wanted the world to be like… You had always been drawn to the ‘savage’ and ‘ancient’ times, when might made right, the rule of the sword was the rule of law, and frankly the only rule was ‘the one who wins gets to make all the rules’. In that spirit, you decided that you wanted a world of ancient and tribal era technology, up to the times of the Roman Empire level tech, and would have it be multi-continent with oceans betwixt, much like your home.

What was different than your home, for one, was that there was a huge continent in the center that was pretty much a massive jungle-land, separating the Eastern and Western hemispheres from each other, on one side at least. Here was where you decided that you would make your play for world domination. Adjusting the scales, you made it a dark and savage fantasy land, full of strange creatures and dangers, and the lands over the oceans to the East of it would be mostly deserts, while the lands over the oceans to the West would be more or less garden lands. In the Jungle Continent, there would be numerous tribes and societies, but the greatest would be the Amazon Queendom, a collection of matriarchal warrioress tribes, ruled over by the greatest of their tribes and their mighty warrior-queen… A powerful rival to face, and dominate. You always did love the idea of dominating not just any women, but the STRONGEST of women...

From the West, a patriarchal society styled after Rome, with similar motifs and some similar designs, but with their rank and file having Leather instead of steel for their armor, more gold and gilding, and female politicians able to rise and command… Differences here and there from original Roman, mainly keeping the attitude and the ‘Legions’ that march for world conquest. They would have a presence in the Jungle Continent, outposts, fortresses, inching their way in to try and dominate the local tribes, fighting against the Amazon Queendom for territory. Very much in the spirit of Rome you felt. Then, to the East, would be an interconnected series of Desert Tribes, with different cultures, much like many within the Jungle, but operating a vast ‘Trade Network’ between them, the peoples ruled by a Council of Clans, in which the greatest and most widespread families had a voice, and the powerful Merchant Princes of their people lead the tribes as one. They would only recently begin inching into the native Jungle, mostly interested in trade and profit, and they would be the least… certain of the factions.

However all three of these major civilizations would have a presence in the center continent, and there would be many minor tribes for you to, potentially, expand into and take over… And with that general setting selected, the question mainly became where and how did you want to start? The menus were telling you that basic unit selection and creation could occur AFTER insertion into the world, and now it was asking you about a base and position in the world. Did you want to start out in a vast chasm in a mountain close to the Eastern shores? An abandoned ‘Imperial’ fort closer to the West? A dark temple in the heart of the Jungle, where Amazons were most likely to be found? Or even a village in the Southernmost or Northernmost parts of the Continent where the least interference could be had? It was your choice, and you were gnawing your lip over it…