Brute Force: System Notes #2

More work on the system underpinning my next big LitRPG project, Brute Force. You're all the first to see this: not even my wife has read this yet!

==Basic Concepts==

- Post-Mortem Virtual Realities are commonplace as of the 2070s. They are officially called PMVRs, but are often referred to as EdenFRAMEs (named for the company who developed and still runs most bespoke PMVRs). Eden is the 2070s Microsoft for dead people, holding a virtual monopoly on afterlife sims and braindata storage (through its satellite company, Argos Secure Data). 

- 'Survival of the Fittest' is a criminal bootleg EdenFRAME. It is a clone of a 'real' V.R immersion survival game, Ascend, which was a fun and challenging V.R survival/taming game made in the early 2060s that was madly popular in Russia, S.Korea, and Brazil. Ascend itself drew from early VR headset survival and taming games developed in the 2030s, and those games were inspired by digital PC/console games from the '00s and '10s such as Pokemon, Subnautica and ARK.

The Solonov Bratva cloned Ascend and its A.I and modified it into an EdenFRAME which could support permanently uploaded players: a  PMVR they call Eстественный Oтбор (Yestestvenni Otbor; 'Natural Selection' or Survival of the Fittest). This means its UX is about 10 years out of date compared to other games and FRAMES in the 2070s; only the player support functions and system features are regularly updated.

- Post-Mortem VR environments with 'survival' features are HIGHLY illegal. Legal EdenFRAMEs are heavily regulated in most countries and are still outlawed in some, and  PMVR packages are extremely expensive. Government programs exist for exceptionally talented people. Most people finance them like insurance or a 401k, paying into a fund that is often pricematched by their employers. There is a thriving black market for virtual afterlives, some of which are perfectly pleasant, some of which are sadistic, exploitative, or both. Virtual human trafficking is a huge problem, as human data can be used to make everything from virtual sex slaves to AIs assisting terrorist organizations.

- Because the Crucible is run by a criminal organization who make money from VR bloodsports, all gore/pain/sex filters have been stripped from the base game and the difficulty has been increased compared to the original Ascend. They removed most humanitarian functions from the FRAME's A.I, Emerald Tablet. The Solonov mafia developers added more challenging monsters and created a custom map - the Crucible - that is designed to encourage interpersonal conflict by centering resources in nodes vs having them evenly spread through the map. The rarer the resource, the more cached it is. For example, Iron Ore has many bulk nodes throughout the map, but Iridium, needed for end-game items to defeat the final boss, only has one node that is currently camped by Solonov's son.

- In the original 'fun' game, you could tame and keep any number of Legions. Because of the unique demands on a spectator EdenFRAME (mostly the massive memory and network requirements), the Solonov Devs reduced it to two. You can now have one Greater Legion and one Lesser Legion, and all players - even Dmitri Solonov - have to release or kill their old Legions when replacing them.

- The premise of the original game is that the human race is in decline and is close to extinction, dwelling in a dark, dead underworld known as Stige. Humans live below ground, as the surface world was wiped out by a cataclysmic battle between the divine personification of evil, known as Urgos, and the divine personification of good, known as Awe. Awe has chosen you (of all people) to transcend your humanity, restore Stige back into a living Gaia, and become one of the gods overseeing the New Golden Age of humanity - provided you can defeat the five guardians of the current Dark Age to restore balance to the world. 

The guardians dwell in dungeons in the dimension of Psyche. To defeat the Guardians, you may tame and bond with Legions, demi-god spirits who will lend your power to yours. You must survive the wilderness of Psyche, which resembles the various biomes found on Gaia before its destruction, defeat the first four guardians and claim their totems, then journey to the Temple of Daksha to defeat the demon of the same name. After this, you and your Legions fight Urgos, and if you beat it, you become a god, ascend to Paradise, and witness the rebirth of Earth and humanity before being given the option to reincarnate.

- The criminal bootleg has scrapped Ascend's story and kept the mechanics. Its focus is PvP, so they have turned it into more of an arena setting. However, the Ascend lore is still present - by finding these pieces of lore, Vance realizes that the Crucible is a modified instance of Ascend. Some players have anchored themselves psychologically in the lore, worshipping Awe or Urgos (and even some of the guardians), and either playing the whacky cult angle for kicks and sponsors (as the Hell Pigs do) or building genuine cults around them in a cargo-cult fashion (Knights of Awe, Daksha's Legions).

- About  5,000,000 viewers around the world tune into Survival of the Fittest every day; about 500k of them act as sponsors, sending money to the 'Gladiators', and there are about 87,000 hard-core fans constantly streaming and showering their favorite players with gifts. Fans come from all around the world, but the US, Mexico and Russia feature prominently.

- Players have 9 lives, and that's it. No bonus lives and no second chances.

- Players who are able to survive but not progress through the game or gain significant numbers of viewers or sponsors are functionally NPCs. If you don't take on and defeat the bosses or gain a minimum of 50 subscribers a month, you start to age at a rate about 9x that of a living person - with accompanying debuffs. As most people are between their 20s and 40s when they're uploaded, that means a person theoretically has a maximum of 5-6 years they could live within the Crucible. If you miraculously manage to survive and die of old age, you die forever: even if you had all nine lives. This is to stop vast numbers of non-combative or boring players from cluttering up the server.