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  Praise for Yahtzee Croshaw

  “. . . hilariously insightful. . .” —Slashdot

  “The first legitimate breakout hit from the gaming community in recent memory.” —BoingBoing

  “Yahtzee consistently makes me laugh, and even though I dig computer and electronic games, he has cross-genre appeal to anyone who enjoys a sharp wit, unique sense of humor and plenty of originality – not purely gaming fans.” —TheFutureBuzz

  YAHTZEE CROSHAW

  Dark Horse Books®

  Mogworld™ © 2010 by Yahtzee Croshaw

  No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the copyright holders. Names, characters, places, and incidents featured in this publication either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, institutions, or locales, without satiric intent, is coincidental. Dark Horse Books® and the Dark Horse logo are registered trademarks of Dark Horse Comics, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Zero Punctuation is a trademark of Themis Group, Inc. Used with permission.

  Cover Design by David Nestelle

  Cover Illlustration by Matt Cavotta

  Book Design by Krystal Hennes

  Special Thanks to J. Harrison Barber, Jemiah Jefferson, Chris Koeppel, Jonathan Quesenberry, John Schork, and Robert Simpson.

  Published by Dark Horse Books

  A Division of Dark Horse Comics, Inc.

  10956 SE Main St., Milwaukie, OR 97222

  darkhorse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Croshaw, Yahtzee.

  Mogworld / Yahtzee Croshaw. -- 1st Dark Horse Books ed.

  p. cm.Co

  ISBN 978-1-59582-529-2 (pbk.)

  1. Internet games--Fiction. 2. Fantasy games--Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.4.C735M64 2010

  823’.92--dc22

  200010939

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-6211-515-3

  First Dark Horse Books Edition: August 2010

  Printed at Transcontinental Gagné, Louiseville, QC, Canada

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  To Blizzard Entertainment, for the three months

  of my life I will never get back.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  QUEEEEEEK QUEEEEEEK QUEEEEEEK QUEEEEEEK QUEEEEEEK

  A dream about my father chasing me through the fields with a pig sticker took an even more nightmarish turn when he started emitting a rhythmic high-pitched screech. Then I swam dizzily into full wakefulness to find an alarm sprite floating through the dormitory.

  It had to be an emergency. They didn’t deploy alarm sprites lightly—it takes two fairly high-level mages to shut the damn things up. And I’d spent enough time at St. Gordon’s Magical College to know that any emergency involving magic is something you want to get away from as fast as you can.

  After a minute of confused bustle in which dressing gowns were thrown on and several sets of slippers thudded their way downstairs, I and the rest of the second-years followed the squealing ball of light into the entrance quad. The ear-molesting noise was immediately joined by the screams of several other alarm sprites as the rest of the student body filed out into the pre-dawn gloom.

  That’s when I knew that something was really wrong. An alarm in itself wasn’t that unusual, especially not in the second-year dorm. After spending the entire first year learning theory and taking the mandatory psychological tests, students tended to be overly enthusiastic with their first firebolts. But a full evacuation of the entire student body (57) and faculty (four) wasn’t usually necessary.

  “Jim!” called Mr. Everwind, my tutor. Sweat was dripping from the brim of his pointy hat. “Line up the second years at the back.”

  We were too rattled to do anything but obey, taking up position behind the third years. All of the students had been arranged by year into a rather haphazard rectangle that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the usual drill procedure.

  Suddenly, the sun began to rise, spilling orange dawn over the rolling green hills of the surrounding plains. I noticed that the horizon was a lot more textured than I remembered, and more bristling with siege weaponry.

  An army was advancing towards the school. Just as I had done on my first day, I deeply resented the fact that St. Gordon’s Magical College was not, in fact, a castle.

  “All right, chaps, settle down,” said the headmaster, resplendent in his star-patterned cardigan as he strode back and forth in front of the student body. “Let me assure you all that there is absolutely no reason to panic.” The rising tension was not eased in the slightest. “It’s probably just some misunderstanding—stop chewing, Haverson—but a Stragonoffian army appears to be attacking the college. Now, don’t worry. You are only here as a precaution. We have enlisted a former graduate, Ponyleaf the Enchanter, and his adventuring party, to aid us. And I want you to show them the same respect you’d show to me, understand? I said spit that out, boy.”

  Ponyleaf was tall and thin, with a curly beard and the kind of rugged tan and fidgety nervousness that comes from a career adventuring through the gnoll-and-goblin-haunted wilderness. He stepped forward, separating himself from a bored-looking Loledian dwarf and a poorly dressed Anarecsian warrioress who looked chilly in every sense of the word.

  “Good morning,” he said with a cough, turning his staff over in his hands.

  A furious ongoing roar was slowly edging into earshot, punctuated by the clash of swords against shields. “Good morning, Mr. Ponyleaf,” droned the bewildered student body dutifully.

  “Now, what we’re dealing with here is a loose alliance of student fighters from the warrior schools just over the border in Stragonoff. Obviously not much of a match for veteran adventurers like us. They’re here because the king of Stragonoff has put out a quest to recover the Stone of Solomus that was left with this college by its founders hundreds of years ago. Now, obviously we will never surrender the stone to such bully-boy tactics, but I would ask that I and my fellows be allowed to look after the stone for its protection, and so that we can wave it at the enemy for purposes of psychological warfare.”

  “We don’t have the stone,” said the headmaster, as Ponyleaf met his gaze hopefully.

  “You what?”

  “We’ve only been open six years. There’s no such thing as the Stone of Solomus. The king’s mad. Last year he made his son marr
y a koi pond.”

  An awkward silence passed. Or at least, it would have been a silence were it not for the increasingly loud warcry and wet thudding of booted feet upon the dewy morning grass, not to mention the subtle clinking of light armor as the two other members of Ponyleaf’s adventuring party attempted to shuffle towards the back gate unnoticed.

  “Can I be perfectly frank?” said Ponyleaf eventually. “We’re kind of only doing this because we were hoping you’d let us have the stone as a reward.”

  “Well, that’s obviously not going to happen.”

  “No, no . . . I see that.” He looked behind him and did a double take that was just a little bit too obvious. “Sorry, it seems my colleagues have wandered off somewhere. I’m just going to . . . see where they went. And . . . come . . . right back.” Then he left, quickly.

  The frontmost rank of armored fratboys was now over the last hill and had broken into a run. The ground was quivering in almost perfect synchronization with my stomach.

  “Right then,” said the headmaster, tight-lipped, eyes fixed on the fence over which Ponyleaf had just vaulted. “I know most of you didn’t really expect to be practicing this level of combat magic this early in your career. But I think I can say that if I were an invading army I’d certainly be given pause for concern by such a formidable rank of enchanters as—God damn it, Haverson, I told you once before about—” The vibrating rear half of an arrow suddenly appeared in his temple. He concluded his sentence with a few spit bubbles before falling over.

  A large chunk of our defense force took this as the invitation to run away. But I didn’t. Furious tears were forming in my eyes. I’d spent my last vegetable tray on tuition fees. Home was at least five turnips’ worth of journey away and, more to the point, the last place I wanted to go. St. Gordon’s might not have been the most prestigious magic college in the world, and its graduates generally couldn’t entertain any ambitions beyond running a pest control business, but it was all I had.

  The creaky wooden gates were pulverized into splinters under a whirling cloud of iron boots and training warhammers. I extended a hand and began to incant. “Arcanus. Inferus. T—”

  I don’t actually remember if I was able to get a firebolt off. I have a vague memory of seeing orange light splatter harmlessly against a spiked breastplate, but that might just have been sparks from all the metal rubbing against metal. Then there was a sound rather like a bag of wet laundry being hurled across a gravel driveway, and that was the first time I died.

  —

  Everything seems a whole lot more peaceful when you’re dead. Even watching your own pelvis being kicked around the quad by guffawing adolescent berserkers has something transcendental about it when you’re looking down on it from about six feet up and ascending. Maybe it was the way everything was tinted a strange bluish-gray, and seemed to be glowing with an eldritch light.

  As I continued to drift upwards, the world began to fade. The majestic sight of the warrior hordes breaking all of St. Gordon’s front windows blurred, and not just from distance. At the point of death, all sound had suddenly crashed into silence, as if I’d thrust my head into ice-cold water, but now the quiet was somehow deepening. What I had previously accepted to be complete silence was a cacophony compared to what I wasn’t hearing now.

  The land of the living was still there, barely. It had been reduced to a collection of dim shadows that were almost invisible against the cosmic brilliance of the beyond. What I remember most vividly of all is the light. Bright as anything, and my ghostly eyes were open wide, but it didn’t dazzle me. It wasn’t just a light at the end of a tunnel, unless the tunnel was also made of light. It was everywhere, all around me, and I was part of it. I was watching the light, and at the same time, I was the light watching me.

  I think I was still ascending, but it was becoming harder and harder to tell. The world was turning below me, reduced to little more than a faint smear against the light. I saw the college, the surrounding county, and the lands of Stragonoff toiling under the heel of demented monarchs. I saw the kingdom of Borrigarde, where I had been born, along with all its neighboring territories, their ancient borders and writhing battlegrounds now made meaningless. I saw the entire continent of Garethy, a thousand rural hues of brownish-green and greenish-brown spreading from ocean to ocean like rotting seaweed on a calm beach. I saw the entire planet, from the jungles of Anarecsia to the urban sprawl of Lolede City. I saw the glittering sphere hanging in the blackest darkness, and somewhere at the back of my mind, I realized that “Flat World” Frobisher owed me twenty quid.

  I could see it all, but I was still ascending. The world of my birth shrank from a planet to a moon, to a beach ball, to a pea, to a grain of sand, to . . . gone.

  Now there was nothing but the light, and a new sound was drifting through the stillness. A beautiful voice was calling me, singing songs of beckoning, and as the delicate tones passed my ears I felt a giddy and instinctive state of rapturous love. For just a few more songs I would have done anything for that voice. I would have—well, I wouldn’t have died for it, obviously, I was ahead of the game there.

  The light took form around me, breaking off bits of itself like clay and reshaping them into—what else could they have been?—angels. Their blank, featureless faces were strangely beautiful, shining with a golden inner light. They took my spectral arms, holding them ever so gently, and aided my ascent. Their every touch, every movement, every sound they breathed into my ears, all communicated the same thing: love, undying and all-powerful. I had passed on from life, from the world of struggles and hardship and big fat women with annoying laughs, and entered a glorious new existence of utter peace, and joy, and love.

  And then some git brought me back to life.

  ONE

  It began as a soft pulling sensation, and grew violently in strength. The light went away fast. The world was speeding back towards me, a gigantic custard pie hurled by a universe determined to make me the butt of some cruel, cruel joke. I scrabbled for purchase with my astral fingers, desperately clawing for something to cling to, anything that would mean I wouldn’t have to go back down there. . .

  But no. The universe refused to see things my way, and my spirit returned to my body like a punch in the gut.

  I sat bolt upright, or at least tried to; my forehead discovered something hard and wooden overhead, and my skull fell back down with an audible crack. A handful of dust in my lungs interrupted my attempts to swear and I spent a few instructive moments in a wretched coughing fit, clutching at my head. I noticed that most of my hair was missing, and as my hands travelled down, that my face was thin and sunken.

  Okay, I thought. I’m not going to panic. I’m going to take a deep breath—okay, I’m not going to take a deep breath, but I’m going to count to ten, and take stock, and I’m going to stay calm.

  “I died,” I recalled, mouthing the words airlessly. “Oh well. Could happen to anyone. Everyone, even. And now I’ve come back to life. So I can’t exactly complain, can I? I’m in a coffin. That’s where they put dead people. It makes sense. Ho hum. There’s no air in here. La de dah. Who needs air? Not me, anymore, apparently. My body seems to have been wasting away for many years. Well I never.”

  A loud rumbling from deep within the bowels of the earth shut me up. The ground shook violently. I could feel the spiders in my lungs clinging to alveoli for dear life.

  “And there’s an earthquake going on. Fiddle de RAARGH LET ME OUT LET ME OUT—”

  The nails were old and gave way almost instantly, but then there was something heavy on top of the coffin, pinning down the lid. I strained until both wood and limb were creaking like talkative garden gates, until finally I felt weight shifting, my lid flew off and I was catapulted bolt upright.

  Light drilled uncomfortably into my long-unused retinas. Normal, boring torchlight, not the glorious holy light of recent memory. I knuckled away a succession of fat pink after-images and coughed up something that looked very much lik
e a cobweb.

  I was in a crypt. That made sense—I was dead, after all. The walls were lined with alcoves containing battered coffins like my own, mostly smashed open. The torches on the walls were freshly lit, and the thick piles of dust on the floor were disturbed by very recent track marks.

  There came a clattering to my immediate right. I glanced over just in time to see the coffin that had been on top of mine burst open and a skeleton tumble out. “Khak!” it went. “Khakkhakh khakh!” Then it fell apart.

  I was attempting to crawl along the ground away from it when another quake shook the crypt. A large portion of plaster and stone disassociated itself from the rest of the ceiling by an inch or two, and reddish dust rained down. “What the hell is going on?!” was what I tried to say, but my lungs were still dusty and it came out more like “Whrrf kkkrghhaff?!”

  It did the trick, though. A grayish head peered around the corner of a nearby tunnel. It was a corpse, his complexion pale and scarred, one glassy eye dangling down a waxy cheek. His body had clearly been dead for quite a long time, but the message apparently hadn’t reached his brain.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, his voice reverberating as if his throat was full of gravel. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

  “No!” I had coughed out the last of the dust, but my voice was just as rough and raspy as his. “No I do not know what’s going on! I was dead! I kind of expected things to stop going on!”

  “It’s just a bunch of us just woke up in here and no-one seems to know why.” He offered a hand and helped pull me to my feet. “You got off pretty lightly.”

  “Got off lightly?!”