• Story
• Features
• Engine
• Channel rules

The story

The story of Realism began late one night, in a room lit only by the glow of a computer screen. The person sitting in front of the computer could have had his picture in the dictionary, next to the word "nerd".

As nerds are prone to do, he was typing away at the keyboard. What he was typing was also something nerds do often: programming. Specifically, he was writing an RPG. Nothing special there, but the RPG he was writing, it was unusual in one important way.

It was bad. It was very bad. It was the kind of bad that could cause karma to come looking for blood. And, in an unusual way, I suppose that's exactly what happened.

You see, the nerd had only finished about half of it when he decided that his RPG needed graphics. Bleary-eyed and tired from the late hour, he went searching for a quick fix, and that is where karma struck. A single bit, flipped on its way to find a website, turned the letter B into the letter J, so instead of Bob's Place, a site about computer graphics, he got Boj's Place, a site about mysticism.

Had he been awake, our friend the nerd would have noticed the error immediately. At that hour, he did not. So instead of downloading a graphics library called Hex--a nerd's pun--he downloaded a real hex. And promptly hooked it up to his RPG. And started it.

The menu looked the same as it had before, but when he clicked "New Game", the program tried to call its new graphics library. The hex, as it turned out, was designed to imprison its target. Running inside a computer program, and with only one person nearby, it did the only thing it could: It pulled the nerd into his own game.

And that, dear reader, is where you come in. Karma, it seems, has decided to give the nerd a second chance, and you're it. With your help, he might just be able to repay his debt and escape from Realism. Then again, maybe not. It's up to you.