THE LUNEFABLE REVIEW
The Two Rings Tan Mo Leaves in the Ground
A player can collect almost anything in Realm of Innocence. A pair of wedding rings makes a surprisingly good argument for walking away empty-handed.
THE SHORT TAKE
The opening earns its elaborate character sheets when two versions of Motan remember the same afternoon and disagree about what they owed a stranger. The quieter scenes at a tavern and around a dinner table are just as good.
A door can have very good manners
A golden door moves away when Motan reaches for it. I liked it for the delicacy of the insult. Another door has already gone to pieces under his hand. This one has impeccable manners and just as firm an opinion of the person standing outside. A machine is supposed to be assigning moral alignments. For one delightful minute it resembles a row of hosts deciding whether to admit a difficult guest. When the white door finally lets Motan through, the system credits him with a choice. He has spent enough time touring the alternatives to appreciate the joke.
The date over that doorway matters. The book opens in 2050 with a dwarf offering a valuable staff to a man going into danger for a blacksmith’s child. The family once mended his armor. He remembers the repair and she cares enough about him to lend the staff, even as she declines the trip herself. Only afterward does the book wind back to the delivery of a game cabin on the last day of 2048. By then the labels on the doors already have a human complication waiting for them.
Read chapter 1 · Follow Motan past the golden door ↗The shortest audition for a priest
Hei Fan gets into the army on the strength of a talent he lacks at the beginning of the interview. The officer gives his approval and then asks for a demonstration. That order of operations releases a quest reward. Hei Fan can now select a profession, make light appear for two seconds and walk away with an iron badge and sixty copper coins. The neatest part of the trick is the officer’s ordinary courtesy. Move his approval to the end of the sentence and the whole performance collapses.
Being clever has already cost this man a ridiculous amount of physical effort. In his starting room he searches under furniture and at last finds his supplies behind a plant, exhausting nearly a third of his stamina. Downstairs somebody remembers what he said he would do yesterday. As far as Hei Fan is concerned, he has only just arrived. I wanted a little more of that disconcerting hospitality. It gives the impression that he has walked into a life whose minor promises may come due before he even knows what they are.
Read chapter 2 · Watch the officer approve Hei Fan’s application ↗A ring worth equipping
Tan Mo, a second arrival with a better gift for persuasion, finds a necromancer by talking to a man shopping for vegetables. Nearly everything thereafter rests on the difference between what Tan Mo has learned from a quest and what he allows another person to believe he knows. He can pass off a piece of written information as an uncanny sensitivity to death. The old man checks his visitor’s voice and heartbeat. They tell him precisely how relaxed his visitor is. A calm liar still has a calm pulse.
After the encounter there are two wedding rings. The game describes what the jewelry could do for its new owner. Here the length of an equipment description serves a purpose. I had time to weigh up the benefits before Tan Mo gathered the dead man’s ashes and buried both rings. That small expenditure of time and potential power is the first thing about him I could imagine Mor respecting. When Mor remembers the encounter, though, he goes back to the language of the assignment. Preventing a plague left other courses open. A considerate burial can sit very uneasily beside the choice that made it necessary.
Read chapter 4 · Read the equipment description and the burial ↗The friend who notices at dinner
The switches have a cost outside the cabin too. At breakfast Motan has missing hours to account for. He makes noodles while he thinks about it. A phone call from Yidong soon gives him another problem altogether. His friend wants company at a dinner with strangers and offers to owe him a favor. This is a nice concrete measure of their closeness. Yidong knows how to secure a yes, and Motan knows when to stop making him work for it.
At the restaurant Motan has researched the menu on the way over. He gets people laughing about the suit Yidong wore and makes a recording of his suddenly generous offer to host another meal. By the time Motan changes in company, everyone is comfortable enough to carry on eating. Yidong notices. That quiet moment carries more weight for me than several pages of the narrator’s efforts to classify his friend. There is a whole history in the difference between what one person at the table can see and what escapes everybody else.
Read chapter 7 · Sit at the table when Yidong spots the change ↗Two people compare their clocks
Double Leaf gives Hei Fan information he can put to use the very next morning. He has been told to report for patrol at seven. She has worked out how a day inside the game fits into the hours when players can actually log in. Their conversation starts with the practical question of getting to work on time and ends with Motan intensely interested in who sits inside somebody else’s cabin. In between, Double Leaf makes a little piece of ice to cool herself. Watching a mage adapt a spell because she feels hot tells me more about why she keeps playing than another inventory of attacks would.
There are stretches, particularly during the marsh fight, where the story stops to explain an ability at just the instant I want to know who gets out. A reader impatient with game statistics will feel every one of those stops. I would stay for the moments when somebody else can use a rule Motan has discovered, or take an entirely different lesson from it. Eight chapters in, the image that stays with me is still a jar of ashes and a player giving up two perfectly serviceable rings.
Read chapter 8 · Hear Double Leaf work out the patrol time ↗Based on chapters 1–8 of the English edition. The prelude occupies entries 1–3. Each of the next eight chapters runs to three entries, through entry 27. This is an opening impression, not a full-series verdict. No later plot developments are discussed.
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