The dragon, who was slowly flapping his wings, hovered above the clearing filled with men without shirts. He was super confused, he just wanted to return to his lair, and someone called him a sausage. Cinders of anger slowly started to blaze in him, pushing away the confusion as he started to realise how offended he was after being called a sausage.
‘What do they want?’
The dragon opened his mouth and shouted in the shirtless player’s direction, causing the grass to move from loud noise, “You mortals? What do you think you are doing? You are lucky that I have a good mood. Otherwise, you would be already dead!”
“Wow, dudes, that sausage can speak!” a bulky shirtless man with no hair jumped up, pointing both of his hands at the dragon.
His rage finally flared up from such incredible disrespect, ‘I have to kill them. They can’t be left alive after this… That would only create a precedence that anyone can fuck with me!’. He opened his mouth and fired a stream of blazing hot magma at the shirtless players.
“Ohh shit, it is a chilli sausage!” Then the stream of magma reached the ground and swept through the players, incinerating everything in its way.
[+70]
[+80]
[+70]
Bubbling pond lava replaced the clearing, radiating heat, causing nearby trees to catch on fire. The dragon flapped his wings and continued his flight to his home, still not understanding what just happened. Hoping that the thieves mentioned by his minion with the spear didn’t already rob him.
‘Well, I can understand players wanting to have fun… But this was just weird. No one can consider calling a wyrm, sausage, as fun. There must be something more behind this. Is it possible that they just wanted to give thieves more time by holding me here?’
He put even more force into each swing of his wings, propelling himself towards the mountains, with anxiety spreading over his body.
He finally reached his mountain and entered through the entrance tunnel. There was still the small pile of glittering gold coins and two pouches with rings. He immediately walked towards it, brought his snout closer and sniffed his hoard, making sure that nothing was missing.
He breathed out in relief, ‘Nothing is missing that means that the players that want to ride me weren’t here. Well, I was probably too paranoid. There is no way that low-level players would get so fast here; the mountains are filled with strong monsters, and they can’t use shortcut as they can’t fly.’.
He sprawled on top of his hoard, enjoying the comfortable feeling of golden coins under him. Then he grinned, illuminating up the whole cave as he opened his mouth filled with burning magma, ‘If they want to rob me, I will give them a lesson that they will not forget!’
He started to feel sleepy. That was something that he had already noticed. As a dragon, he sometimes needed to sleep much longer than humans. However, he wasn’t sure if it was because he was young or if it was a permanent problem shared by all dragons.
He soon fell asleep.
Later next day:
The dragon opened his eyes and stood up, everything around him looking slightly smaller. It wasn’t by much, but it was still noticeable. His stomach loudly growled as his rapid growth needed lots of nutrients to power it up.
// Your grew up a little bit!
All of your physical stats increased by 2
//
He stretched his limbs, opened the system menu, and entered the management window of his faction.
‘I need to finish setting up my faction. There are no rules and no faction subsystem.’
Rules were currently of the highest priority as he needed to restrict the actions of the players under him. His faction was supposed to be small and operating mostly in the shadows, at least for now, so he knew the first set of rules he needed.
He tried to enter the new rules into the system; however, he got an error message.
Ding!
// Error!
Missing penalties, you need to specify penalties for breaking the rules.
Possible penalties:
1. Restriction of faction functions (Requires already created faction subsystem)
2. Kick out of a faction
3. Marking as an enemy of a faction
4. Jail Time in faction prison (Warning! Not automatised by the system!)
5. Court to judge transgression (Warning! Not automatised by the system!) (Judge can impose any of the mentioned penalties or make custom one outside of the system support)
6. Revocation of rewards obtained from a faction (Warning! Transgressor needs to be successfully imprisoned maximally one day after transgression for this to work!)
//
Vesuvius frowned, remembering automatic moderator tools banning people for absurd stuff. ‘Well, I don’t want to implement an automatic system to judge crimes; that would lead to many problems. I will rather judge them myself and make decisions based on context. At least that makes setting this up much easier.’
He added penalties and entered the rules into the system again.
Ding!
// New faction rules added:
Rules are ordered by priority.
1. Do not speak with anyone who is not a member of the Dragons faction about the faction or its leader without the approval of the faction leader.
Penalty: Court to judge transgression
2. Orders of higher ranked faction members are absolute; listen to them!
Penalty: Court to judge transgression
3. Do not attack any faction member outside of mutually agreed duels.
Penalty: Court to judge transgression
4. Do not attack other factions at your own discretion without authorisation from the faction leader.
Penalty: Court to judge transgression
//
‘These should be enough, they are simple, but that is all I need for now. Too complex rules would just scare players away. I guess that the system should monitor the actions of faction members from now on, and it will probably notify me if something goes wrong. However, if they are no witnesses, then there is no punishment. I still need to be careful.’
Players noticed a long time ago that the crime system in LOMM was highly sophisticated, meaning that as long as there were no trails or witnesses leading to criminals, there would be no punishment, just like in the real world. This created a relatively big network of players playing as criminals. That meant that as long as news of his faction members breaking the rule didn’t get to the ears of relevant faction officials, they could still get away with it.
The point of these rules was just to set up clear guidelines for players to follow and also to add an additional layer of punishment through the system in addition to punishments outside of the system.
‘Now, let’s check what that custom faction subsystem is.’
(AN: Dammn, these chapters introducing new mechanics are always the hardest to write. At least for me, they took the latest twice as much effort to write than regular ones.)