Prince Herald's Unfinished Kingdom

The original description of The Kingdom as seen on CYOC.net in the Interactives by me under the pseudonym no1Uknow—lightly edited for grammar and typos—and posted there at 08/10/2009 05:44 is as follows:

http://www.cyoc.net/interactives/chapter_45162.html

"The Game was known as Prince Herald's Unfinished Kingdom... a name that made about as much sense to those outside of gaming culture as The Old Republic or Jet Grind Radio. Still, it was an up-and-coming, slickly designed MMO that could potentially rival World of Warcraft. It's visuals were pretty, it's Gameplay Systems interconnecting and multi-tiered, and it was sure to be addicting to anyone who'd liked anything about any MMO ever.

"You can play out even the most mundane of tasks, of any gender, of any walk of life. You can level up and become more powerful, or you can side-level and make your way creating goods for money, power, and influence over a given area. The Unfinished Kingdom is perpetually so, as it is a purely user-driven experience. The ability to create towns in the desert or raze communities to the ground is all up to the Players.

"It's a life away from life, and that's what its appeal is. Knowing that whoever and whatever you decide to play can take on a life of their own... but that your own life lay in wait for you just beyond the logout command. It draws upon many settings from Fantasy (the most popular) to Science Fiction and even into situations that resemble the real world…

"The Kingdom is what you make of it."

Even in 2009, spell-checking, grammar-checking, and proofreading had me missing more mistakes than it should have before I posted that. Still, this was an idea I'd posed as a means for people to have a starting point for a transformation into a character not their own. A hiccup in the system made it so that when you next logged in, the only characters you had to choose from were not your own. Essentially, if you wanted to play, you had to play on someone else's character history.

I expanded this opening story concept further to have other breaking points… new and later story starts that would take this simple opening premise and give you other things to do with it. "The Battle for Prince Herald's Unfinished Kingdom" was the first of these, involving an out of game donation campaign to try and save the game from death in litigation after the mistake that caused the opening arc I just described. Players would need to gather together to fight, in the game, and donate outside, to draw attention to the plight of The Kingdom so that they could keep playing there.

"The Future of Prince Herald's Unfinished Kingdom" goes ahead and assumes the Players succeed in this task and that years have gone by. Tech is to the point where Full-Immersion Units allow Players to spend extended time inside the game world. These units keep track of player's brain activity and memories, and it is here that a new set of stories begin. During the Live Beta, accidents happen where Players die in the real world, but end up living on in the game world due to memory backups.

Keep that last one in mind, and we'll come back to it.

By the time of "Expanding Prince Herald's Unfinished Kingdom", the game multiverse has become ginormous, not unlike Oz from Summer Wars. People work and play inside the game world, and it has over 900 million active subscribers. Various real-world IP's have been brought in as, just like mobile gaming earlier in the century, PHUK is essentially printing money. Indie companies and AAA publishers alike invest time and money into making additions, big and small, to The Kingdom and that further enhances it's staying power and keeps it at the forefront of gamers minds.

At the point in which we reach the "Evolution of Prince Herald's Unfinished Kingdom" the AI has become so sophisticated concerning NPC's that some have begun to become aware of the world around them… slowly understanding that their universe is the digital creation of people above and beyond them. These creations live in a literal "Simulation Hypothesis"… where everything about them, their friends and family, and the world around them is all digitally designed and created by forces they are only just becoming aware of.

"Now, Huntermun (A.K.A. no1Uknow)," you might be asking, "what does this have to do with the Adaptation series or AD21XX games?" Well, I've taken this MMO I previously created and plotted it's existence inside the Adaptation multiverse from within 20XX to 21XX, and I've even started to poke at a little side-story involving a character based closely upon the Lorna Williams character introduced in the CYOC version of The Kingdom.

Jennifer Williams is an NPC you'll meet in AD21XX in or before the year of 2154. She will be a mirroid who was once human, which isn't all that uncommon for mirroids… but what is uncommon is that she's from The Kingdom. How does that work? It's pretty straight forward: in an event related to both a 20XX Ultra Wolf moment as well as "The Future of Prince Herald's Kingdom", Jenni was in a Full-Immersion Unit when she died originally. The back-up of her mind lived on, trapped in the game universe she'd been playing in… a Horror/Action series called Necrotic Galaxy.

I won't go into too many of the details here, but she's not alone in this… and this event, along with the others of The Kingdom's basic timeline, are now fully incorporated into AD21XX. Sometime soon, I may even post my rough timeline for all the events, but mainly I wanted to put something up here for you all to sink your teeth into while I keep working on many things at once.

On a related note, the CYOC's version of PHUK is still up and running, so if you yourself wanted to add in your own ideas or characters to the setting, maybe try and do it there. It's old writing by me at this point, but I think it still has some merit to it. Perhaps it will give you some idea of my past experiences in creative writing. The truth is, over the years I've very much enjoyed using Addventures to practice my trade. I find the lack of obligation to finish a given story and the ability to go back and take the story in a different direction without deleting what's already been created is very freeing. You should try it.

See you in the Future,
—Huntermun