Chương 40: Q & A

Wednesday's chapter marks the end of the first book of Live at the Forum. After I posted it, I had the idea that I should have ended it with a Q & A from Zeke's POV. I would have taken a few questions from RR, SB, and my Patreon, and woven that into a Q&A post. But I didn't because I'm a moron and only had the idea once I posted last night's Patreon chapter. Still, I wanted to mark the occasion of a new book starting on Friday, so I'm gonna answer a few questions right now.

I'm going to mostly stay away from spoilers, but I'll still talk a little bit about what I have planned in the story. And I'm going to draw attention to a few comments.

Q: Kerrowe - Who is Sera again? The name is unfamiliar. A: Sera was the character at the beginning of the story. She's the one who was raiding the Orbis facility and freed Zeke from the container he'd been stored in. I'm not going to go too deep into spoilers, but she will be popping back up in the story at a later time. I can also tell you that her class is Hellbound Gunslinger. I'm actually pretty excited to write about her later on. Q: Novalis - How does the DeepFracture forum work?

Can users upload images, mp4s or pdfs? Can Zeke view those? Let's say someone wants to help Zeke level up Instrument Mastery and links an image with the sheet music for fur elise, would Zeke be able to view it? A: The forum can upload images and pdfs. In fact, later on in the story there is going to be a bunch of pdfs being uploaded. Someone will give Zeke a primer on how magic actually works in the Fracture-verse and the thing is 93 pages long. Another important plot point will be a pdf given out by CrushDaddyXx.

Again, don't want to get too deep into spoilers but someone from the Patreon already commented on what could happen with that part of the story. Q: I. F. Ister (and a few others) - asked about if some things might retroactively be found in the game after Zeke's experiences with them. Specifically, he cited the journal in the House of Seasons. Maybe it wasn't there before Zeke found it. A: A few people have asked this question and I'm a little hesitant to give too much of an answer here for a couple reasons.

While I know the next several beats of the story, and I know how it all ends (as well as the why and how Zeke got isekai'd into the world and what that means for "outsiders") there are still chunks of the story I haven't written in my head. I don't want to lock myself out of possibly retroactively changing some of the games. But I will say that, currently, I have no plans to have the games change based on what Z3ke does in the Fracture-verse world.

Josh183rd - I'm waiting for the moment someone collects the dots by Zeke to find out that he's actually a missing person. ThatFedoraGuy - the mods finally figure out that Zeke "the character" is based on a real life missing person, then ban him for doing something VERY INSENSITIVE. Blazer66 - I bet that gangster he poked when he was getting supplies is gonna pop back up. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

A: 🙂 Q: Cringelord - how does the battery charge? Solar power, heat, electricity? Crank? A: I'm pretty sure cringelord is asking about the Solaris Vaultstone. It charges based off ambient mana in the air. NullSigil will talk about how magic works in the Fracture-verse, and he'll go more in-depth about the subject. I'll just say that the Vaulstone takes mana, stores it, and lets Zeke do some interesting things with it. Q: ThatFedoraGuy - how exactly are you picking our usernames as cameos to be listed in the forum?

Do we have to also pretend that we're actually forum posters in-universe reacting to Z3ke's fanfic? A: I read all the comments on RR, SB, and my Patreon. I love the theorycrafting that everyone is doing, and enjoy reading what people are coming up with to explain some of the mysteries of the Fracture-verse. You don't have to comment as if you are in-universe.

For most of the comments that I choose, I will either put them directly in the story as is, or I'll edit them a little bit to make the story flow a little smoother. I actually have a document up with a bunch of quotes that I pulled from people. They're quotes dealing with areas that I want to touch on later in the books. One of the big ones right now is a bunch of arguments about Corva, and people trying to figure out how to confirm that he's a body-snatcher.

I also have a bunch of posts from people that I'm keeping off to the side but having some trouble inserting into the story. I can give you two examples of those. The first is from Novalis where he was talking about Zeke and the idea of the Rockstar class being a rebel against authority, and that you could easily argue that Zeke is actually a conformist sellout. He's entertaining the forum (the authority) and only rebels in the most sanitized way possible. I really liked that comment.

Another is from Royal Road where a guy called Pericles_Ozymandias pitched an idea of a phoenix sitting on the council of The MIZ. I like it when people pitch story ideas for what Zeke should do next. That's something I'm thinking will pop up a bit later on. Unfortunately, with Pericles' idea, I've got a lot of the next few story beats all planned out and an immortal city councilor doesn't completely fit.

I might try and have it come into play when Zeke heads over to the Emberveil side of things, but right now the idea is on the backburner. In short, the way I pick people is that I like your comments and believe that it would fit in one of the future chapters when the forum is discussing aspects of Z3ke's story. Q: Anonymous S - why is a classless run so hard? A: There are a few reasons why people didn't really do classless runs in the game. The main one is that nobody thought it would lead to anything.

Being classless isn't a big boon or anything. Obviously, there are people who did classless runs, but that doesn't mean that they found any lore that was specific to not having a class. In the Fracture-verse games, the system basically throws classes at you as long as you start getting levels in your skills. You can keep ignoring them, but why bother? It's only now that Zeke is saying "hey, I was classless and found some lore surrounding Corva" that people are actually interested in doing a classless run.

Q: BioBugV - the chapters on patreon are just ahead and won't be exclusive to patreon? A: I'm not planning on locking story content behind patreon exclusives. That being said, I'm pretty new to the whole patreon thing and I want to add a bunch more stuff for fans of the story and I've been thinking about how I could go about doing that. A few thoughts I've had are "alternate failure paths." What that means is paths that Zeke (or other characters) could have taken in the story.

These would be mini-scenes, kinda like a what-if. What-if Zeke stuck around the Glens? What-if Zeke had picked up the Bartender class? What-if Zeke had earned an archaeology class instead of the Rockstar class? These small what-if scenes would be… small fractures. I might also do a little bit more of a deep dive into some of the mechanics of the system in the world. There're a few things that don't get fully spelled-out in the story, and I might try and delve a bit deeper into it for the patreon people.

It would be something like "here's how the system really works, but no one has figured it out yet." I'm also thinking about having the patreon members vote for gangs and factions and the names of characters. They can also submit artifact ideas. Then they'd vote on which ones would become canon and I'd weave them into the story. And there's a final idea of explaining a bit more of the unseen consequences that are unfolding in the story. Zeke hasn't done anything too crazy in-world yet.

He's mostly just run away from the Eaters and then uncovered that Corva is body snatching people. But he's about to have a bigger effect on the world. So while the main story is focused on Zeke and his interaction with the forum, I was thinking I might write some smaller stories about how people who intertwined with Zeke's story are changing things in the world. It would be something like, which regions are destabilizing due to Zeke's actions?

Which factions are benefitting from Zeke being a crazy outlier in this world? Those chapters would be told from an outside perspective, and would be something almost like an interlude in the story. There's a lot of stuff that I've been thinking about, and I'm sure I'll ask the patreon subscribers what they all think.