To borrow a device from Kieron Gillen: Ser1s was the first one that made it.
I had spent the gaming hours of the better part of a week before I had managed to create a character in the wonderful Mount & Blade that survived for longer than a week of in-game time. Ser1s’ creation – which was done quickly, as I assumed that she would be destroyed as quickly as any of the tens of others that had come before her – achieved two things that her priors had not, and each lead equally to her survival in Calradia.

This allowed me to quit the game without saving it – and reload an older save. Although an old, time-proven method of cataloguing game progress and repairing terrible player errors, I initially chose “Realistic Mode” during the creation of each character. Some motivation about challenge that it turns out I wasn’t quite up for.

2. The choosing of character creation attributes based on how entertaining they sounded rather than the stat benefit they provided.

In Mount & Blade, character creation is accomplished by way of a series of questions pertaining to how you spent certain portions of your life. For example, choosing “Son/Daughter of an Impoverished Noble” will not only net you strength, but also a sweet emblem that would appear on your banner and on the shields of your soldiers. Initially, I’d built my characters around either strength or agility. Windir, for example, began the game with as-high-as-possible strength score and solid skill development in pretty much all weapons – although very poor, with nary a cent nor fur to his name. He, like so many others, more or less died in captivity, poor, depraved, and without companionship.

Note that killing wasn’t listed among the terrible acts of barbarism that the NPC hordes just loved executing upon my poor, earlier characters. That’s because they couldn’t – instead, upon losing a battle, the defeated character is captured and taken hostage, and forced to move around with the brigands for a period of days. Although not necessarily a bad thing on its own, the effects are terrible – you lose a great deal of money, items in your inventory and, worst of all, your Characters and soldiers leave your group in varying degrees. While it’s possible to find them again, it is not always easy – they return to a certain city, at which they will appear at random, and it can be a pain to track them down.

If the player is captured several times – or even only once very early in the game – then that character becomes more or less ruined. Without money, one cannot recruit an army, or even pay the one that you have. Without money, one will not be able to replace the horse that the bandits surely stole. Without money, one cannot have success in Mount & Blade.

So victory on the field depends on a wise hand at the coinpurse – and at least something of an initial vault to pull from. However, all of the money in the world wasn’t going to save Ser1s from a string of kidnappings and thuggery. What would was being able to screw up and not necessarily have to deal with the consequences.

Ser1s complained to me that it felt like cheating – I tried to convince her that it was rather hedging our bets and taking necessary precaution. She tried to tell me that by removing the potential sting of defeat from losses, motivation for performing at peak output levels was diminished, and all hazards in foolhardy gambles removed – which, according to her, diminished the brilliant flavor of victory when it came. My response to her was that I was more interested in experimenting and seeing what I as a player could accomplish, and that being annihilated for seeing if I could prevail against four-to-one odds seemed unreasonable without at least getting a second chance.

The two of us managed to come to an agreement: there would be no repeated attempts at non-crucial battles and events, like tournaments held in cities and major conflicts with enemy states. We agreed that, in situations where she was fairly likely to lose, then multiple attempts could be had – if only to attempt to find a solution to the riddle of steel. It was determined that, in the interest of fairness, quest failures and botched financial gain attempts would not be attempted multiple times. Where we did not come to an agreement, however, was concerning financial loss. Not the sort that comes from stealing trade goods from villages and getting caught, but rather the kind that comes from prolonged imprisonment.

Ser1s began her glorious campaign humbly and perhaps barbarically: by hunting down small groups of brigands and, instead of slaying them, knocking them unconscious. This enabled her men to capture them, whereupon they could be sold into slavery. This provided finances far and beyond those necessary to pay and recruit soldiers, and Ser1s quickly had a reasonably large amount of money. With the peace of mind that comes from limited wealth and expanding power, Ser1s decided that the life of a thief-catcher and brigand-slaver was beneath her. Ser1s wanted nobility, lands, and peons.

And lands she would have! Ser1s set out to Reyvadin, seat of King Yaroglek, and swore fealty to him. Well, she tried to – the king would have none of it, having only heard of Ser1s in passing, and did not believe that Ser1s would be a noble and righteous addition to his coterie of lords. So she did what any good soldier does when faced with layers of beauracracy in their way: she went straight to his wife. His wife, Lady Seomis, had been grievously offended by another lord of the kingdom, and needed a champion to clean her good name. Righting the wrongs done to her would bestow some prominence upon Ser1s, and she set out for Castle Rhadogir to seek the craven scum.

Lord Vlan presumably had brutally oppressed his people and neglected their needs – every town under his control was miserably poor, and brigands roamed the countryside just outside of the viewable range of Castle Rhadogir. Gaining entry into the castle, Ser1s laid out the rules real clear and calm-like for Lord Vlan – apologize publically to the Lady, or be humiliated by a commoner in a trial of arms. His arrogance, which I had been warned of, came through in spades – he wouldn’t even consider an apology, and even insisted that he had nothing to apologize for, claiming that every word he uttered about the Lady was a truth. Ser1s does not deal with insults well: she removed her iron gauntlet, swung it brutally across his face, and left his hall and went straight to his tourney grounds.

Lord Vlan did not disappoint her, and made himself present in the tourney grounds shortly after.

He should not have, as he was defeated soundly – although his horse was of excellent meat-stock and his lance of top-quality oak, he brought the wrong weapons to bear against Ser1s. A natural with a greatsword and warspear, she made short work of the lord – Ser1s and the lord charged one another atop horse at the beginning of the trial, and Ser1s’ lance proved to be the more true, outright slaying Lord Vlan’s horse from beneath him, sending him tumbling. She then refused him the dignity of fighting him on equal ground – although it is customary to unmount oneself after dehorsing an opponent, Ser1s felt that Lord Vlan deserved no such honor. She instead circled the tourney grounds multiple times before charging him and running him down as a dog.

She chose the resplendent unicorn affixed over purple, and was given the town of Fisdnar.

Having sworn fealty to the Vaegrian Crown, it was now Ser1s’ responsibility to not merely be a vaguely decent and noble woman before the gods of Calradia and the crown, but also to wage war against her enemies – most notably, the Nordic Kingdoms, and to never rest until the foul King Ragnar had been slain.

The king must not be too serious about the no-rest bit, because Ser1s reined horse at her fief, Fisdnar, and took a much-needed rest before going to war.

Next: Horse-Based Stabbery, Part II: King Ragnar Must Die!