Rucesion
Walk the western woods all the way to the far end, past the goblins and the faeries we opened up last time, and the trees give out onto a bridge. Cross it and you are standing in Rucesion, the third town of our world, and as of this update it is open and lived in.
Rucesion is not laid out like Mileth. No row of shopfronts down a main street here. It is an open-air market: one wide plaza with the church at the head of it, fountains and lamp-posts and a couple of market squares, and the shops set around the edges, each its own little building you step into. For a while the place was a mess. Seven made-up guards and townsfolk loitered in the square who had no business existing, half the shop doors were painted shut, the jeweller's room had no door at all, and the dock to the south led nowhere. We went through the whole of it.
The square is empty now, and that is the point. The traders are not standing out in the open; they are each inside their own shop, the way a market works. Walk into a building and you meet the keeper.
The charms that finally do something
Start with the armor shop, because something in it reaches well past Rucesion.
Carlos keeps the place, and he sells the five element charms: necklaces of Earth, Wind, Sea and Fire, and a Wind Belt. We have had element gear sitting in the game a good while doing precisely nothing, just a name on an item with no effect behind it. That changes here. Put on a Fire Necklace and your swings carry fire, and against an ordinary monster with no element of its own that lands about four times harder than a bare hit.
It runs on a wheel. Fire beats wind, water beats fire, earth beats water, wind beats earth. So the same charm that quadruples your damage against a plain creature can fall flat against one carrying the element that counters it, and bite deeper into the one it beats.
| Charm | Strong against | Weak against |
|---|---|---|
| Fire | Wind | Sea |
| Sea | Fire | Earth |
| Earth | Sea | Wind |
| Wind | Earth | Fire |
The necklaces are for attacking. The Wind Belt is the other side of it: wear it and wind-aligned blows coming at you land softer. The thing to know is this was never a missing piece of the game. The wheel was wired into our combat math all along, it just had nothing you could put on to use it. Carlos's shelf is where it finally connects. It also means the element-touched gear the woodland beasts are meant to drop has somewhere real to go now.
The rest of the market
Marcelo the bladesmith has the weapon shop, the long swords and the eppe and a broad sword and a moon dagger, the usual run of blades at fair coin.
Off the plaza there is a little room that used to be sealed, a made-up name on the door and a made-up man standing in it. It has a real door now, and Braz the jeweller behind it. He deals in the dear things. Rings of spinel and emerald and jade, an iron gauntlet, a cup of wine, and the two-handed Claidhmore, a great slab of a sword that will set you back better than four hundred thousand coins. He buys your woodland spoils too, the skulls and pelts and old blades you haul back out of the trees.
Huberto runs the goods shop, a tailor with eleven garments on his rack, coats and leathers cut for the magic classes and a row of caps and holy hats. Antonio in the storage room sells a priestess's Mystic Gown. And while we are in there, one thing worth settling: Rucesion has no bank. The "storage" room is only a shop, so your vault still lives back in Mileth or Abel.
Baltasar the lockpick master has the special-skills shop and sells lockpicks, which for now are a tool waiting on the locks to use them on. Up at the inn, Maria keeps something none of the others do, the Spring Bouquet, a hundred-thousand-coin armful of flowers you can buy and press into another Aisling's hands.
Gods, government, and one dark door
The church at the head of the square is the Temple of Luathas, god of wisdom and Rucesion's patron, and Ereno tends it. A little way up the north road, in a small shrine off to the side, Gabriela keeps a quieter altar to the same god. Ask either of them who Luathas is and you get the story of how the wizards came to turn to him for their learning.
That north road had its own troubles. A made-up guard posted on it, and a shrine you could walk out of but somehow never into. Both sorted: the guard is gone, the shrine has its way in, the signpost reads real directions when you click it, and the road's notice board is a live community board you can pin a post to, same as the ones around Mileth.
East of the road sits Rucesion's seat of government, the same sort of civic quarter Mileth has. Eduardo keeps the records in the Town Hall, Ramiro is the Bailiff over in the Justice Hall, and the four civic boards in those halls, the political ones and the judicial ones, are all writable now. The voting and the trials those boards are for are still ahead of us, in Rucesion as in Mileth, but the halls have their people and the walls are live.
And one last door, a dark one. Tucked off Rucesion is a shadow of the town claimed for Chadul, the sleeping lord of darkness, and a man called Jonathan stands at its threshold telling the living to turn back. You cannot reach it yet, and what walks its halls is deep endgame we are not ready to build, so for now Jonathan and his warning are the whole of it. A door marked for later.
Anyway. Walk the western road to its end, or step onto the dock at the south of the square and the map of Temuair opens so you can sail home. Rucesion is on the map for real now.