The First Crawl of the Broken Coast

Colin Clarke is a analyst in Orlando, Florida. He optimizes shipping routes. He drives the same commute every day. He has mapped fourteen predictable failure points between his office and his condo. He is, by every measurable standard, fine. Then a floating blue rectangle appears in his car and tells him he's a Woodland Elf now, and "fine" stops being an option. The system that rewrites Earth overnight gives Colin enhanced senses, a Ranger class, and pointed ears he has opinions about. What it doesn't give him is an instruction manual. The tutorial exists, buried in a deprecated module that the system apparently forgot to delete. Colin finds it anyway, because Colin finds everything, and he is the first person in the world to complete it. The bonus is nice. The implications are terrifying. Because if the tutorial was hidden, then seven billion people just woke up in a world full of magic and monsters, and none of them know the rules. Colin knows five who need to. They meet every other Thursday at a gaming bar called the Loaded Die to play Dungeons & Dragons. A construction worker turned Barbarian. A bartender turned Rogue. A nonprofit coordinator turned Cleric who is trying not to think about the presence that chose him. A freelance engineer turned Gnome Artificer who has lost three inches of height and gained an obsession with taking things apart. And a music store employee turned Bard who has discovered that humming at his cat makes it fall asleep in three seconds. They have been playing pretend heroes for two years. The universe has decided to make it real. There is a dungeon in the swamp off Colin's commute. It has goblins and gold and a system that grades their performance. They bring a fire axe, two hunting knives, a Glock, and an acoustic guitar. The guitar does not survive. But they do. Barely. And Colin does what any systems analyst would do with a broken, scaling, increasingly dangerous system that produces real gold and real monsters in equal measure. He optimizes. What follows is the story of six ordinary people becoming something extraordinary, one dungeon run at a time. The money gets real. The monsters get smarter. The stakes get higher. And somewhere along the way, between the goblin sparkles and the gold coins and the twelve-dollar harmonica that turns out to be a weapon of moderate magical significance, they discover that the dungeon isn't the only thing that needs clearing, and they aren't the only ones who need saving. The First Crawl of the Broken Coast is a companion novel set in the world of The Dark Wizard of Tower 9, following an original cast in central Florida as they discover that the best preparation for a magical apocalypse is a regular D&D game, a healthy respect for system architecture, and the willingness to walk into a swamp with a fire axe and see what happens. The guitar doesn't make it. Everyone else does. Probably.