Behind the Scenes Interlude III (1/2)

Forty five years ago, the world was a different place.

There were no character screens, there were no random numbers, there were no class unlocks, and if you wanted to craft something you had to do it the old fashioned way, with lots and lots of practice, time, and education.

Back then, luck was pretty much unseen, invisible, and more often than not entrusted to Rando, the god of the unexpected.

But everything changed, when the event happened.

The first notice some communities had of it, was when meteors started dropping out of the sky, monsters blitzed forth from the wilderness, and plagues struck without warning. It was sheer chaos for a while there, and it took the various sages, mages, and other learned folk a while to make sense of it.

Luck was a quantifiable thing now, and the lower YOURS was, the more bad things would happen to you.

And then the first wave of births after the event hit, and many prospective parents found, to their dismay, that when people are born their luck is the lowest it's ever going to be.

Human infants come out of the womb at around 25, plus or minus a few variances for reasons nobody's ever been able to figure out. Other races, like orcs, average in at 12. That's roughly out of ”inexplicable meteor” range, but still around ”lightning magnet from freak storms” range.

Some people whisper that given how fast orcs breed and how many they drop, it's probably best that the orcs were hardest hit during the event, while everything was chaos and many established communities were struggling to recover. This is a commonly-held but rarely voiced sentiment, especially around orcs, half-orcs, and other ”uncivilized” races like goblins, gnolls, and football hooligans.

At any rate, clerics petitioned the gods for an answer, particularly Rando. But most prayers to him were met with uncontrollable weeping, so a horrible theory began to surface;

Whatever had happened, the gods were not behind it. In fact, they were no longer in control. (If they ever had been, some heretics whispered. Those guys mostly got burned for saying that.)

But the gods could help in other ways... as could practitioners of the world's oldest profession.

What? No, not THAT. I'm talking about midwives.

Clerics have access to the Blessings skill, which allows them to massively boost an attribute on someone they bless, at the expense of tying up some of their sanity while the blessing is going. Thus they were able to bless newborn infants, until the kids were able to get their luck up out of the danger zone.