Valkyrie's Shadow

Stone and Blood: Afterword

Stone and Blood: Afterword

That was a relatively short one, at least by this series’ standards. Thank you, dear reader, for your continued interest in Valkyrie’s Shadow!

The Tiger and the Dragon was written as two volumes: the usual ‘updates’ in the Sorcerous Kingdom, and the Saraca introduction divided by the lighter intermission with Nemel. The first volume was uneventful in terms of reader commentary, but the second volume, with its philosophical exploration of the Draconic Kingdom, Rol’en’gorek, and the Beastman Confederacy sparked a surprising amount of…discussion.

I can already imagine more than a few people thinking ‘obviously!’, but I would argue that the people who were mentally bluescreening at the portrayal of those societies are in the minority. Rather than alien, the perspectives presented use the same foundations that over four billion people on Earth(yes, the one that you live on) have built their societies on, though modified to fit into the New World setting.

At a certain point in the reader commentary during The Tiger and the Dragon, it became quite disturbing that some could shut down their brains and make things up out of nothing, claiming that what they fabricated was what was written. It sort of felt like I was thrown back to the colonial era with the comments being made by people from colonial powers so insufferably assured of the superiority of their own cultures and moral values utterly failed to understand what they observed in the rest of the world and made up the craziest things in the vacuum.

I suppose it could be considered a testament to how distinctly written the characters and societies in The Tiger and the Dragon were. However, it’s clear that two volumes weren’t enough to explore the more alien(supposedly) parts of the setting. That’s fine though, since there’s more of it to come in the future.

Until then, I will refrain from adding author’s notes on those subjects since they may prematurely spoil the experience.

I’ve been travelling a lot for various projects since the new year, and I’m still out there somewhere. The last time that I participated in any reader discussion was back near the start of this volume. Most of my travels take me to places with shitty to no internet, so I’ve just scheduled a crapton of chapters in advance. Before you say Starlink, it hasn’t been approved here yet! Hopefully, I haven’t screwed up somewhere with chapter scheduling, but I’ll be back to civilisation soon enough to check. Anyway, onto the notes for the volume.

I’ve noted some accusations of ‘sameness’ between the members of the Noble Quartet, even to the point where they’ve been coined a ‘lesbian hive mind’. This is something that I’ve never understood, as I’ve made sure to present Ludmila, Clara, Liane, and Florine as unique individuals with very different perspectives and approaches to life. At some point, I simply gave up thinking about it and decided that some people can’t discern differences in character unless an argument between Florine and Liane over a cute boy ends with Liane clubbing her best friend in the back of the head with a monkey wrench.

All I can really say about that is this story isn’t written like some sort of reality show. The world doesn’t stop turning because one character realises that another character holds a different opinion and people work out their differences in a manner befitting their station and the situation that they find themselves in. With the Noble Quartet, overt character conflict only happens when they’re in ‘casual mode’. It has happened in previous volumes and happens again in Act One of Stone and Blood.

What was surprising this time was that there were comments about Ludmila becoming ‘dumber’ or ‘changing’ from her original portrayal. And to that, I say…huh? To make it perfectly clear – and I believe that this was mentioned in the Afterword of Birthright – Ludmila’s initial portrayal was that of a naïve teenager who is more book-smart than street-smart when it comes to territorial administration and local politics.

In short, she was written to be what some might consider ‘stupid’ at first – something like a student taking their first steps out into the real world. Now, she’s far ‘smarter’, having gained a mountain of experience, Job Class growth, and the confidence to tackle the issues that she considers important. Ludmila’s stance on various aspects of kingdom-building has always been expressed through her territorial policies and military thinking in previous volumes. Act One of Stone and Blood is the first time she tries to frame that stance comprehensively.

And it’s confusing. Because it’s meant to be confusing. Why is that? Mostly because I write things to be both true to character and setting in Valkyrie’s Shadow. In her region of the New World, the vocabulary that you and I might use to explain what she’s trying to does not exist and the concepts that she is trying to cover similarly have no formal terminology. As a result, Ludmila must resort to analogies and anecdotes in an attempt to get her point across.

It should also be noted that this ties into the exploration of linguistics and communication in the New World and how language frames thought and action. By extension, it also serves to point out how the existence of a simplistic autotranslation mechanism in the New World continually sabotages its denizens in many ways. A world where the vast majority of people only hear what they already understand is a hellhole of echo chambers.

At the core of the difference between herself and her friends is Ludmila’s existence as a Ranger through her Revenant Racial Class Levels. Rangers and Druids have always existed as a champion or at least a component of natural order in traditional fantasy. They have the fantasy version of earth system science built into their classes and also have a working knowledge of what we on Earth currently consider complex systems theory.

How Ludmila has applied this to other fields has also been shown in previous volumes, though I suppose it might not have clicked back then. Her thinking isn’t linear, mechanistic, or superficially structured around relationships between different things. That type of thinking is ‘anachronistic’ projection on the part of the reader. It is modern thinking that has become entrenched in 21st-century common sense, though the philosophical framework for modern common sense is fundamentally unchanged from its emergence during the industrial revolution. Instead of that, Ludmila’s thought processes tend to factor in the intricate matrix of feedback loops that form the world around her, and the way that she investigates the world and takes action within it is indicative of her thought processes.

For those who are still confused about what Ludmila was trying to express to Florine, it was not about economics – it was the fact that she functions under a completely different philosophical framework than her friends and most Humans in the region did. This, in turn, affects how she sees everything, including things like economic modelling. In this case, the existing economic model was simply the example that Ludmila settled on because it just happened to be the source of the friction in the incident with Liane and she thought that she could relate to Florine better by using it.

On a related note, the perspectives and value systems of most of the tribal cultures explored in Valkyrie’s Shadow are the way that they are because they are dominated by Druids and Rangers(mystics and hunters). I’ve seen a few comments about how there’s some sort of pro-nature platform or the promotion of a ‘noble savage’ ideal in this story, but that is what I’ve frequently referred to as an externality that some readers insist on not only forcing into their interpretation of the story, but also try to tell everyone else is what’s going on.

Aside from Player influence(like the fantasy Buddhism that somehow entrenched itself in the Beastman Confederation), these people and societies are the product of their native setting. Many things in the writing may reflect various real-world issues, conflicts, concepts, or even people, but they are built out of the setting rather than forcefully injected out of the desire to promote some agenda.

I’m sure there will still be those who insist that the latter is the case, however. In this case, it almost seems as if there’s a subset of the readership that takes anything that detours from what they consider ‘advancement’ as savagery or even anarcho-primitivism. Perhaps the most amusing – and mind-boggling – instance was when Vltava pointed out that an entire civilisation relying on a single monoculture would inevitably get owned by something that negatively affects that monoculture and a handful of people decided that he was saying ‘return to monke’.

As stated multiple times in the past, Valkyrie’s Shadow presents characters that are not reader inserts in a world that is, well, its own world. Readers that insist on attempting to self-insert or force what is presented into whatever their version of common sense is only do themselves a disservice and probably blind themselves to two-thirds of the story in the process.

Way back in Winter’s Crown, Jaldabaoth had a little bit of work done in the Abelion Hills before his stroll through half of the Holy Kingdom. Some of the effects of that work were immediate, such as the internment camps and their associated genocides, the Happy Farm, and the forced migrations – one of which we followed headfirst into the Upper Reaches. Others, however still affect events in the story to this day and will continue to do so in the future.

Stone and Blood includes several echoes from the past, including the arrival of Qrs Gan Zu’s tribe in Ludmila’s demesne. It turns out that his wife and two of his daughters survived the battle at the ford in Winter’s Crown. His son, Dyel – who met Ainz in Volume Twelve of Overlord – serves as a sort of liaison between Ludmila and his tribe. Fortunately for them, Ludmila doesn’t hold anything against Qrs for threatening Warden’s Vale and even feels guilty about being unable to reunite him with his family. To make amends, she immediately enacts measures to get his tribe back on its feet.

As with so many things, Demiurge uses his power to create problems that cannot be fixed by power. I suppose that some may consider that a mark of his genius. Like the Gan Zu Tribe, many of Abelion’s remaining tribes are left shattered and their populations are suffering from various renditions of PTSD. To make things even worse, they’ve been force-relocated by the Sorcerous Kingdom in the administration’s desire to order things to their liking. At least they weren’t eradicated to make room for a highway, I suppose.

It doesn’t stop there, however. In the west, we find that the Holy Kingdom of Roble is going downhill fast under the ‘guidance’ of their new Holy King. That is a story for a different volume, however.

In canon, Ainz promptly dumps responsibility for Abelion Hills on Albedo’s lap. I’m sure more than a few readers envision Death Knights being stationed everywhere and everything being peaceful, productive, and perfect, but that’s not how things work in this story. The place is way too huge to have Death Knights everywhere, there are countless tribes of different races still living in the region, and the behaviours that once sustained them are illegal in the Sorcerous Kingdom. Now what?

Conveniently, a certain Demon Emperor was hard at work preparing the way for the Sorcerous Kingdom’s eventual control over the area. Many of the ‘problematic’ species have already been exterminated through a program of brutal captivity and experimentation, capped off by the two-way genocide that was the invasion of the Holy Kingdom of Roble.

For those that managed to survive to become citizens of the Sorcerous Kingdom, there was a giant-ass war in the Draconic Kingdom that just so happened to provide them with sustenance for the time being. Things can’t go on forever like that, however, so the increasingly short-staffed and ever-more-annoyed-with-stuff-in-Re-Estize Albedo sends Florine Gagnier to sort things out and get the mechanisms of civilisation going in the Abelion Wilderness.

It’s far from Florine’s first time working with tribal Demihumans, but this time she goes into her job with more than simply setting up a network of trade posts in mind. Her time with Ludmila has made her far more conscious of the fact that her idea of civilisation may not really make sense for members of other races and she is swiftly introduced to many examples that drive that reality home.

There are races that evolved to develop mutualistic relationships with another species left lost due to the purposeful eradication of their partner species. Others only want to be left alone and many don’t care about commerce. Some of them are incapable of caring about money and don’t even share the same fundamental realities as other species. There are creatures who are more magical than biological and many to whom many of the laws of the Sorcerous Kingdom cannot be applied.

Even for those to whom the law can be applied, troubles immediately manifest as the denizens of Roble hold no qualms about exploiting the arbitrary terms of a treaty between ‘civilised states’, assured that there can no longer be any violent reprisal for their actions. Fortunately, Florine comes around to ensure those problems are addressed before too much damage is done. Unfortunately, Roble is not her jurisdiction so there’s nothing she can do about what’s going on over there.

As for the rest, it’s a work in progress. Her work there will definitely have her coming out with many new perspectives on the world far removed from her Human one, which may just be what Albedo was really aiming for…

Another character introduced back in Winter’s Crown, Falagrim Felhammer is revisited once since then and his more permanent appearance in Stone and Blood. For some reason, people thought that Demiurge was going to do something to him when he came around to sell his stuff. I suppose that did happen since Falagrim made a killing equipping the Demihuman coalition before it met its end in Roble.

As many quickly noted, the Dark Dwarves in Valkyrie’s Shadow are essentially Duergar. How did I come to the decision to use them? Well…

Before the Overlord Light Novel, the Web Novel had a little snippet about the Dark Dwarves in the Abelion Hills:

“Others include Dark Dwarves, and in exchange for Goblin, Ogre and Orc slaves, they provide metal arms for the war.”

There was a nod to this in the Author’s notes of Overlord Volume Twelve, which mentions that Buser got his gear from the Dark Dwarves.

On a side note, the Hill Dwarves are also mentioned in the Web Novel, occupying the area under the Abelion Hills and getting their asses kicked sometime before Nazarick’s arrival. Florine goes through some of the ruins of their country in Valkyrie’s Shadow. Hill Dwarves having racial Ranger aptitudes is also canon, as mentioned in KBA.

Additionally, the iceberging in Volume Eleven of Overlord suggests that the New World has a classic ‘Underdark’ setting that many western fantasy fans are familiar with. Most of Ainz's adventure in the Mountain Dwarf realm took place underground in the Upper Realms. It’s a stupidly dangerous place for surface-dwellers and even has species with psionic capabilities.

When you throw that all together, you get, well, Duergar. A nasty, evil race of Dwarves with latent psionic capabilities that build their massive slave empires in the Underdark Realms Below.

Falagrim is something of an exemplar of his race: bleak, cynical, and coldly utilitarian. He lives to work and finds no joy in it. The only sense of superficial joy or entertainment that Dark Dwarves appreciate is when they’re making others suffer and when they’re butchering their enemies. His entire family is like that, as is most of his kin. The sole exceptions come from the Deepingstone Clan, who still have strong traces of Hill Dwarf blood in them.

In terms of governance, the principalities of Khazanar share a similarity with the clans of Rol’en’gorek in the fact that they are elective monarchies and each monarch is seated on a council that – in theory – manages the realm’s collective interests. This form of government is rare in fantasy writing, but it is historically the most common form of monarchy on Earth. I suppose the notion isn’t as romantic as the tropey form of hereditary monarchy that is so often portrayed.

The Dark Dwarves’ entire civilisation would be considered ‘Lawful Evil’ to TTRPG players, and they’re the fifth Lawful Evil society to be presented in Valkyrie’s Shadow after the Sorcerous Kingdom, Fasset County(representing the Lawful Evil elements of Re-Estize), the Goblin Army of Winter’s Crown, the Frost Giants, and a good chunk of the Baharuth Empire. As you may have noticed by now, Lawful Evil isn’t only characterised in one way.

The Tiger and the Dragon had plenty of murmurings on this and I assume that those murmurings will come out in full force in Stone and Blood. In short, it feels like a number of active commenters have a severe case of recency bias when it comes to the institution of slavery, pretty much only considering the slavery that occurred during the colonial era in Earth’s history. I’m no supporter of slavery, but parroted statements like ‘slavery stifles innovation’ and ‘slavery is economically uncompetitive’ conveniently ignore what qualifies those statements.

During Earth’s colonial era, this was true because slave owners made decisions based on their desire to uphold the institution of slavery, which caused them to reject the innovations brought about by industrialisation and the revolutionary technological progress of their time. This, in turn, made them uncompetitive because they were no longer efficiently or effectively running a business, but instead defending an establishment that was becoming irrefutably obsolete.

What made slavery obsolete in our world cannot do the same thing in the New World setting of Overlord. The limit of non-specialised labour(aka crafting without Job Class Levels) is ultimately mundane. This includes anything produced through unattended processes like automatic assembly lines.

This is a setting where a Level Fifteen Swordsmith can fashion weapons out of unobtainium and a Level Fifteen Artificer is enchanting those weapons to the extent that they can slice through modern MBTs. The crafting and enchantment systems of the New World are capable of producing things that are absolutely impossible for industrial automation to match.

Is there a place for industrialisation as we know it? Sure, because a +10 Adamantite Train of Hedonistic Pleasure is not required for everyday logistical operations. But people will always remain on top when it comes to high-quality goods and services, as well as in menial labour that benefits from Job Class Levels. Job Class Levels simply offer benefits that no mundane technology can replicate. Thus, slavery remains competitive in the New World, especially in places where the institution can consistently produce excellent slaves. How those slaves are produced and slave economies are maintained also differ from society to society.

Florine’s little trip to Khazanar is our first real taste of what is colloquially known as The Realms Below. Basically, it’s the Underdark that you find in many fantasy settings. Since Valkyrie’s Shadow always presents things from a kingdom-building perspective, however, certain realities that come with a vast, subterranean realm are explored when they otherwise wouldn’t.

First of all, it’s huge. If the surface is a house, the Realms Below is a skyscraper that extends to the stratosphere. Of course, not all of it is open space, but there’s still plenty of it and some things can just live in and travel through solid rock.

Something more subtle about Florine’s journey is that it shows us many of the more mystical processes that drive the New World. Photosynthesis is not available and chemosynthesis is too inefficient to support what we see. The primal energies of the world are no longer obfuscated by the mundanities of the surface. Life, death, and elemental forces give rise to extraordinary supernatural ecosystems, teeming populations, and extremely powerful beings.

We’ll be back in the Realms Below at some point in the future, but, hopefully, this taste of it will help readers be more aware of the magnitude by which the mystical elements of the New World influence its myriad of environments.

A few people correctly guessed right away that they’re Beholders. It’s a sort of running joke in fantasy writing – both in Japanese light novels and western fantasy – to have some form of these copyrighted fellows floating around.

Gazers are what many people seem to think Dragons are. In terms of personality, at least. They are the ultimate tyrant that each believes they are the pinnacle of perfection, possessing pride, avarice, narcissism, and evil in spades. Every Gazer is also some degree of insane, as the two halves of their brain are each individually cognizant and usually plotting against the other half.

They’re bonafide aberrations whose biology is almost entirely magical. They have unlimited eye powers, have a palette that revolves around visually stimulating things and they usually reproduce by dreaming other Gazers into existence. When they die, they only leave a boulder behind. Probably the only thing that prevents Gazers from taking over the world or going spelljamming is the fact that they’re continually killing each other in an endless battle to prove themselves the true perfect being.

This section is more of a bit of housekeeping. I thought I’d explore the statistical difference between various classes and how this is practically applied to the setting. The topic has been visited several times in previous volumes, but a certain portion of it that I sort of took for granted seems to have caused some confusion in power comparisons. That portion is the stats of a ‘Level Zero’ Humanoid.

Just because a character doesn’t have any levels yet doesn’t mean that they don’t have any stats. Life would be terrifying if babies just collapsed into piles of jelly because they had no strength or constitution(yes, those stats exist in Overlord, see Volume 10). Every Humanoid has a stat array aside from what they receive from Job Class Levels. This stat array is based on age, sex, genetics and overall physical fitness. To put it simply, a ‘Level Zero’ Human is the statistical equivalent of a normal Human on Earth.

Of course, as Overlord is a power fantasy, the big question is how this factors into versus battles. It’s fairly simple, but let’s go through some examples to try to make it perfectly clear. I’ll be using nice round numbers for simplicity’s sake.

Initial stats have a pretty big impact on how one starts out. We’ll look at the average Level Zero female Human teenager first. We’ll call her Jolene. Like ninety-five per cent of the population, Jolene was born in a rural village, chores around the farm keep her pretty active and she doesn’t suffer from any long periods of malnutrition. Her base physical parameters look like this:

80 Strength / 90 Dexterity / 100 Constitution / 100 HP

Next, we’ll take a Level Zero male Human teenager in the same situation. We’ll call him Joe. His Base physical parameters look like this:

90 Strength / 80 Dexterity / 100 Constitution / 100 HP

For the sake of this example, we’ll also make a clone of Joe and call him Jo. He will go on a different career path.

Now, we’ll take Ludmila. As a Level Zero teenager, she’s already the equivalent of a super athlete with her uber bloodlines, highly-fit frontier lifestyle, and awesome diet. Her base physical parameters look like this:

120 Strength / 140 Dexterity / 130 Constitution / 130 HP

Even at Level Zero, she(and her brothers) stand clearly above the average civilian, but not so much that they’d be considered monsters. Why is that? Well, let’s see what happens as they gain levels.

In Overlord, civilian Job Classes only confer 20% to 50% of the physical stats of a combat Job Class. We’ll assume the bog standard Fighter, here. We’ll also assume that the high end of the spread goes to physically-demanding vocations while the low end goes to professions that barely see any physical strain.

Upon reaching adulthood, Jolene marries a childhood friend from the same village and continues life on the farm. She gets a Farmer level. Farming is a physically demanding vocation, though probably not as physically demanding as being a Miner. We’ll say that it gets 40% of the stats of a Fighter, and that a Fighter grows by 10 Str/Dex/Con/HP per level. That means Level 1 Farmer Jolene’s stats now look like this:

84 Str / 94 Dex / 104 Con / 104 HP

Relatively speaking, she only gets a little bit more powerful compared to before. She can do a little bit more work, lift a bit more, and screws up a bit less. Maybe she gains access to a Job Class ability that lets her dig up weeds twice as fast as before, though, to her village, this is just a normal thing.

Joe, on the other hand, is a spare and gets kicked out of the house shortly after reaching adulthood. He still gained a level in Farmer, however, so his stats look like this:

94 Str / 84 Dex / 104 Con / 104 HP

Again, nothing spectacular. Pretty much no one takes any note of it because it’s just a part of growing up. In our world, on the other hand, people would be asking what the fuck you’re doing to achieve that.

Joe’s clone Jo, however, was a rebellious kid and ran away to become an Adventurer. He trains in whatever scuffed ways he can and becomes a Level 1 Fighter. His stats look like this:

100 Str / 90 Dex / 110 Con / 110 HP

As you can see, Jo is statistically not too far off from Joe. If they got into a fight, Farmer Joe actually has a not-terrible chance of beating Fighter Jo. Assuming their equipment was the same, of course.

The above comparison is the reason why places like Re-Estize with their extremely low average levels end up with leaders that think that a levy is sufficient to win against a professional army. A low-level civilian is statistically not very far off from a low-level soldier. If you muster 200,000 levied civilians with spears against 60,000 low-level soldiers and have elites that keep the enemy elites in check, you will undoubtedly win.

Now, we’ll move on to Ludmila. She gets her first Level in Noble Fighter. Noble Fighter is a Fighter Prestige Class and she also has a (Genius) modifier for it. Her stats now look like this:

134 Str / 154 Dex / 144 Con / 144 HP

These are just her physical parameters. In addition, all of her elite training starts to kick in and she’s stabbing way above her weight. Her iconic figure is the romantic ideal for Nobles who believe in their inherent superiority over the common folk. Except, you know, they’re civilian Nobles and more like Fighter Jo than Ludmila Zahradnik. They have a privileged upbringing, but not the uber bloodlines that they think they do and definitely not Noble Fighter(Genius).

Let’s fast forward a bit now and see how they’re doing four levels later. Jolene has a challenging life as a Farmer and has also raised three children. Since Humans have no Racial Class Levels, she doesn’t get any ‘experience’ for that. Mundane tasks in general don’t give much experience, if any at all. As a result, she just piles on those Farmer Levels. Now, her stats look like this:

100 Str / 110 Dex / 120 Con / 120 HP

She can beat most of the young men in the village in an arm wrestling contest and is a generally terrifying mom as she waves her wooden spoon around. As a Farmer, she’s gained the ability to mysteriously produce a 5% larger harvest as well as improved crop resilience against drought and disease, which has added a bit of luxury to her life. Overall, she’s seen as a success and is a respected figure in the village circle. Since she lives an ordinary life, however, she’ll maybe get one more level before she dies of old age.

In terms of Adventurer Difficulty Rating, she’d be about 4, which is above the national average of 3.

After toiling as a labourer for a while, Joe manages to land a job as a weaver. He’s just barely getting by in town. He and his wife struggle to make ends meet and provide for their single child. His Levels are as follows:

1 Farmer

4 Tailor

Tailor is on the lower end of the stat spread for production classes, so his physical parameters look like this:

102 Str / 92 Dex / 112 Con / 112 HP

If he had the means, he could try for master tailor, but the owner of his workshop is a jealous asshole so he’s just stuck as a regular weaver. Additionally, while he has several Tailoring Skills/Abilities, build contamination keeps him from getting a signature Ability at Level 5. Sucks for him.

In terms of Adventurer Difficulty Rating, Joe is a 3.

Looking at this from a societal angle, you can see that men are still ‘stronger’ than women at this level even when the woman is in a profession with more favourable stat growth. The average level in Re-Estize is even lower than this, allowing for gender role shenanigans to ensue despite being in a universe where levels determine stats.

Adventurer Joe has managed to elude death and is now an Iron-rank Adventurer. He has continued plugging on as a ‘boring’ vanilla Fighter, but he feels that it’s finally paid off as he senses that he can start figuring out his first Martial Art. Due to his informal, haphazard training, however, grasping Martial Arts may be a long way off even if he does already have a Focus Level. His stats now look like this:

140 Str / 130 Dex / 150 Con / 150 HP

Even without his Iron Tag, people can see that this man has stepped beyond the realm of the everyday Human. Three Level 1 Farmers with spears can still easily kill him, however. Or just a rando that puts an arrow in his head. Helmets are important.

In terms of Adventurer Difficulty Rating, Joe is a 15. This is also the average strength of a regular Imperial Knight, though their equipment is far better than his.

Now, for comparison’s sake, let’s take a look at a Civilian Tiger Beastman from Rol’en’gorek. The average Demihuman has double the physical parameters as Humans from their Racial Class Levels, so while a Level 2 Tiger Beastman Tailor’s build looks like this…

1 Tigerfolk

1 Tailor

…their physical stats look like this:

182 Strength / 162 Dexterity / 202 Constitution / 202 HP

In terms of Adventurer Difficulty Rating, this kitty is a 30. He comes with natural weapons and armour, too. Life is fucking pain for Humans in the New World.

Now, we’ll take a look at Ludmila. For my sanity’s sake, we’ll say that she didn’t get any Ranger levels as she would normally have in her situation.

190 Str / 210 Dex / 200 Constitution / 200 HP

At Level 5, her fantasy-genetics driven head start gifts her with the stats of a high Silver-rank Adventurer. New Worlders don’t have any concept of levels, so she’d simply be hailed as a prodigy or something and the marriage proposals from the local Noble houses would be flooding in. A wealth of Martial Arts from her childhood training regimen are just waiting to be unlocked and she’d be considered Difficulty Rating 33 by Adventurer standards.

Hopefully, this helps to illustrate how power differences work in this setting. The ‘Level Zero’ Human stat array creates a situation where it can be very difficult to discern the physical gap between people in places like Re-Estize, where the average Level is extremely low. Being a Fighter doesn’t necessarily guarantee a win against a Farmer at those levels, and multiple opponents are highly likely to result in a single Fighter losing. At higher levels, higher-bracket Classes have much bigger stats which basically makes these starting nuances a non-thing. Too bad the average level cap for Humans in the New World is 15.

Other notable takeaways from this exercise would be just how ridiculously disadvantaged Humans are in this low-level setting, as well as the fact that, while Racial Levels are strong, any standard Job Class Levels that Demihumans and Heteromorphs get give the same stat growth to them as they would a to a Human. This makes Racial Prestige Classes(like Ilyshn’ish’s or PDLs) an absolute necessity if one doesn’t want to gimp themselves relative to other members of their species that levelled a ‘pure’ build.

This is another mechanical commentary – this time regarding skill checks and how they work in Valkyrie’s Shadow, which is also how they appear to work in Overlord canon. For those who are unaware, a skill check is basically a number that one has to beat to make a specific skill work on other characters. To be clear, these skills are not the same as Yggdrasil’s Skills, which are activated attacks and special abilities, but things like climbing, swimming, stealth, deception, intimidation, wilderness lore, metalworking, and so on.

These checks happen constantly throughout Valkyrie’s Shadow, though every check, regardless of success or failure, is written in a narratively plausible way. In Overlord, many of those checks are purposely written to be noticed to indicate that it’s part of the New World’s systems. The most well-known of these are various NPCs wearing masks that somehow perfectly deceive observers, Ainz spouting random bullshit to New Worlder natives and they quickly agree with it, and also Ainz just failing to learn anything that doesn’t mesh with his build, like ruling a country populated by the living or learning new languages.

Every skill-related action has a specific difficulty, which is abstracted as a number to beat in the skill check. Many games, from TTRPGs to MMOs, use some variant of this system. Most probably know it as ‘resource node requires x skill to harvest’ or ‘recipe requires y skill to craft’ or ‘you have a 95% chance to succeed at this action’ (and then you fail and die).

In d20 systems, a twenty-sided die is rolled and the result is added to a character’s related skill rank to determine success or failure. Additionally, related stats for that skill add to or subtract from that score. People with high charisma are more persuasive(and vice versa), those with better endurance can swim for longer, high dexterity makes delicate tasks easier, etc.

The difficulty of the skill check itself is determined either by how ‘reasonable’ the action is or how high the target’s opposing skill is(eg. hide vs spot). Environmental factors also influence things like stealth. As a basic example, a Rogue gets caught pickpocketing by a city guard. They can…

1. Tell a believable lie to a common guard to mitigate the repercussions, and the difficulty of doing so would be 10.
2. Tell an outrageous lie to a common guard to get oneself off the hook entirely, which has a difficulty of 20.
3. Convince the common guard that the perpetrator was actually the guard standing next to him, which has a difficulty of 50.

If one simply rolled the d20, they’d have a 50/50 chance of getting away with A. Option B would require extreme luck. C is impossible.

Rogues, however, can put points in their Deception skill. A Level 6 Rogue with 10 points in their Deception skill can get away with option A pretty much every time and pull off option B half of the time. Option C is still impossible.

This is where the silliness with skill checks in Overlord canon comes in. If one puts on a mask with +50 in Deception in a place where the average Character Level is 3, basically no one can tell who they are even if everything else about them is the same as the person they saw just a few seconds before. As long as they don’t see them put on or take off the mask, of course.

Character Level does not necessarily matter in a skill check and there are usually ways to get around hard ones. For instance, sneaking by a Ranger pits their detection skills against your stealth skills, but you can take their detection skills out of the picture entirely by convincing them to not be around at all(lying about trouble elsewhere, saying that someone’s asking for them, etc). Suddenly, they have to sense your motives instead of thwarting your stealth, which is usually far harder for a Ranger to do, resulting in a much easier skill check.

We see Ainz do this all the time in canon, asking questions or dragging people into debates that are out of their character builds’ depth, resulting in easier skill checks. The fact that he tends to always employ attractive or ‘irrefutable’ vehicles in his interactions also drastically lowers that difficulty. This is not because he’s a nice guy or a persuasive individual, but because he can do what he says and no one can stop him. The narrative, of course, will always offer a plausible line of logic as doing so is a fundamental literary component of gamelit. In Japanese Light novels, the ‘plausible logic’ always seems to either be some form of stupidity or a trope.

By the way, successful skill checks cannot be resisted. They can only be thwarted by opposing skills or the sheer difficulty of the task. In the same way that Ainz can influence others, he can, too, be influenced. Much of the doormat effect and the strangely smooth interactions that go on between characters in Overlord may be attributed to this. Someone succeeds at a skill check and things just go their way until someone else opposes that skill check. The latter usually doesn’t happen because those that can act in opposition to a plot usually aren’t aware of it or not present at all.

That brings us to the Diplomancer. Rather than a specific class, ‘Diplomancer’ is a term coined for builds that focus on getting ludicrously high ranks in diplomacy-related skills in order to succeed in every skill check that a campaign can throw at them. In a low-level setting like the E-Rantel region of the New World, diplomacy-related skill checks would range from 5 to 50, with the vast majority being 10 or lower. The Diplomancer, however, is running around with 100 ranks in persuasion/deception/intimidation through a min-maxed combination of race/class/feat/trait selections. At Level Five.

And, then, they just go around boobing everyone, as Liane would say. They can ask people to carry their stuff for them, and they will. They can tell people to give up their possessions, and they will. Telling people to kill themselves is not out of the question, nor is convincing a god to surrender their godhood to them. There are countermeasures against Diplomancers, of course, but they’re rare in the primitive backwaters of the New World.

Though nowhere near as extreme as the abovementioned example, Florine Gagnier is a Diplomancer. Unlike the munchkin min-maxing their character to metagame their way through a campaign, however, Florine Gagnier is a real person in a real world. Thus, she’s basically a hardcore roleplayer Diplomancer. Her moral compass, sense of duty and responsibility, and her personal and societal values are what stops her from just doing whatever she wants to and getting away with it.

We see a lot of that in Stone and Blood, not to mention in previous volumes. Florine very rarely unleashes her powers on those around her, preferring to work out real, lasting solutions. Like her friends, she does her utmost to stay within the bounds of her duties. She does lose her temper once, however, though even then the result was extremely mild. I’m sure that more than a few people lost patience with Florine’s patience somewhere along the way, but, well, Florine is something like an anti-power fantasy character.

How will she develop from here? That’s a long story – one that I hope everyone will enjoy.

There have been rumblings of this for a while, with a handful of chapters to whet the appetite. Now, we’re at the point in the Overlord timeline where we can jump right in. The next volume of Valkyrie’s Shadow is The Paladin of the Holy Kingdom, Part III. We’ll be following Liam and Saye as they head back to the Holy Kingdom of Roble to help push Phase Two of Demiurge’s plans.

For those that somehow haven’t yet, please consider helping Valkyrie’s Shadow out on Royal Road by leaving an awesome rating or review. The bots are still bombing this story on a regular basis and downvoting every positive review while upvoting all of the negative ones(this has been going on for nearly two years, now), so it’s a constant battle to keep the story afloat since a series on the site can only be rated once by one account no matter how long it is.

Once again, thank you very much for reading Valkyrie’s Shadow, and I hope you continue to enjoy the story~