SwordsVale

From Candypedia
SwordsVale
First appearanceLocal Area, page 6
April 9, 2014
GenreMMORPG
TypeOnline game
Related charactersStacy, Abbey, Sue, Amaya, Mike

SwordsVale is an online fantasy role-playing game that a small guild of Roseville High School students plays together every night. It first turns up on Stacy’s computer screen in Local Area, and it has kept resurfacing every few years since then, whether as convention cosplay, a lunchroom scandal, or a guild meeting crammed into Mike’s bedroom.

Description

SwordsVale is a PC MMORPG, played at home in the evenings. On screen it is a rather pretty fantasy world of green fields and mountains under a pale sky, and its player characters run from elves to armored cat-like warriors to a bovine humanoid.[1][2]

Sue plays a blue-haired male elf named Yearrug, in a blue-and-purple robe with layered gold-green pauldrons. Stacy’s character is a brown cat-like warrior with spiked pauldrons and a pink cape, and she role-plays her as a Sylvarian ranger. Amaya also plays a male character, a yellow cat-like fighter in blue armor with a gold-studded helmet, and Abbey’s avatar is a brown-haired bovine humanoid.[3][1][4] Mike, for his part, plays a female flower mage in a green dress with pink flowers in her hair, on the grounds that he “really liked her design!”[2]

The comic shows the game in bits and pieces. There is a character-creation menu,[5] there are nightly quests,[6] and there is a server list that separates the public servers from the group’s own “serious server where we remain IN CHARACTER.”[1] Guilds come with a working /gkick command,[7] the raid system is “actually very simple for newcomers” according to Sue,[8] and levels and gear matter enough that Sue can vouch for Stacy by pointing out she is level 56 with iridium armor.[9] When the guild gets together in person, the talk runs to raid schedules, an upcoming expansion, PvP sign-ups and an event calendar.[10] The game also has its own events, like the Crimsonflame Festival.[11] In the planning for that one, the idea is to save Forestgale for the 2.11 patch, once the bugged Hellfiend spawns are fixed.[12]

The guild itself consists of Sue, Stacy, Amaya and Abbey, with Mike recruited in Local Area and Daisy offered a trial copy years later in Behind Closed Doors.[1][13] Sue runs things, from festival planning right down to the disciplinary kicks.[11][7]

History

In SwordsVale, Stacy’s avatar stands with Yearrug, Abbey’s bovine character, and Amaya’s armored cat-like fighter.[14]

SwordsVale debuts in Local Area, where Mike bumps Stacy’s mouse and wakes her computer, revealing her secret character.[3] Stacy is mortified, and she insists that nobody needs to know about any of this.[15] Mike learns that Sue, Amaya and Abbey all play too,[1] makes his flower mage, and is soon questing with the group every night.[2][6] Later, Mike ventures onto a public server alone, where a crowd of male avatars swarms his flower mage with come-ons. Sue is horrified. “You joined a PUBLIC server?! Oh my god.”[16]

Mike’s flower mage avatar beams as a crowd of grinning male avatars crowd around her in SwordsVale, dialogue bubbles filling the screen.[17]

In Guest of Honor, Stacy, Sue, Abbey and Amaya attend a convention in SwordsVale cosplay, in costumes that match their avatars right down to Yearrug’s gold pauldrons, and Paulo catches the group in full regalia.[18] Mike comes along without a costume. When Paulo mocks the group, Sue tells him she’d like to see him in cosplay.[19] The group eventually heads off to a panel together.[20] Abbey later leans on his membership to keep his place in the friend group after his breakup, telling Sue in Moments Apart that, differences aside, “we DO share the same guild, Yearrug.”[21]

The guild gets a whole chapter to itself in Popularity Contest. It opens with lunchtime planning for the Crimsonflame Festival, where the plans run to scavenger hunts and a rehearsal run that still needs scheduling.[11][12] The trouble is Stacy. She has decided her new popularity is worth more than her guildmates, and she disowns them in public.[22] Sue answers her in the computer lab with the game’s own vocabulary: “Consider yourself /gkicked!”[7] Stacy folds by the end of the chapter. She still loves SwordsVale and doesn’t want to lose the guild, and she is let back in.[7][23]

By Behind Closed Doors, the guild has a standing monthly meeting, and this month’s lands in Mike’s bedroom after he forgets about it and leaves Sue, Stacy, Amaya and Abbey waiting at the library.[24][25] Paulo has been ribbing Mike about the game for a while by this point,[26][24] and he ends up hiding in Mike’s closet for the entire meeting, grumbling about “these fucking nerds.”[27] On the other side of the closet door, the agenda covers the raid schedule, the next expansion, PvP sign-ups and the event calendar.[10] Sue also offers Daisy a trial copy of the game, and Abbey volunteers to help her make a character.[13]

Trivia

The SwordsVale character creation screen displays the words ‘New character’.[28]
  • Veronica herself is “NOT an MMO player.” SwordsVale suggestions are “an INSTANT rejection” when she picks ideas for commissioned comics, since drawing the game properly “requires research and asking MMO-savvy friends.”[29] Fittingly, the game’s world has only ever been drawn in Local Area. Every later appearance is meetings, cosplay, or table talk.

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 8
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 11
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 6
  4. ↑ Chapter 109: Popularity Contest, page 8
  5. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 10
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Chapter 82: Local Area, page 12
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Chapter 109: Popularity Contest, page 7
  8. ↑ Chapter 109: Popularity Contest, page 4
  9. ↑ Chapter 109: Popularity Contest, page 6
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Chapter 120.1: [Unknown Title, page 10]
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Chapter 109: Popularity Contest, page 1
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Chapter 109: Popularity Contest, page 3
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Chapter 120.1: [Unknown Title, page 9]
  14. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 8
  15. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 9
  16. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 13
  17. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 13
  18. ↑ Chapter 89: Guest of Honor, page 30
  19. ↑ Chapter 89: Guest of Honor, page 31
  20. ↑ Chapter 89: Guest of Honor, page 42
  21. ↑ Chapter 98: Moments Apart, page 14
  22. ↑ Chapter 109: Popularity Contest, page 2
  23. ↑ Chapter 109: Popularity Contest, page 14
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Chapter 120.1: [Unknown Title, page 3]
  25. ↑ Chapter 120.1: [Unknown Title, page 7]
  26. ↑ Chapter 119: New Year’s Resolution, page 6
  27. ↑ Chapter 120.1: [Unknown Title, page 11]
  28. ↑ Chapter 82: Local Area, page 10
  29. ↑ “Veronica’s rules for accepting BCI commissions”. 2026-02-11.
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