Welcome to the Jumpchain! You have been chosen for an absolutely miraculous opportunity. Incredible fame, fortune, and luxury is yours for the taking. Vast power awaits in a myriad of forms. Nations or worlds could kneel before you before you are done. Whatever your wildest fantasies might be, the CP you will get and the things you can buy with it can help deliver them gift-wrapped.

WAKE UUUUUUUUUUUUUUP!

Are we paying attention now? Good.

Because with a prize that vast on the horizon, it is very important to not get so starry-eyed about the future that you forget where you actually are now.

And where you are now is sitting in whatever your particular Jumpchain Administrator uses as a pre-Jump waiting room, staring at your CP menu and making picks for your first jump or whatever Supplement options they may or may not choose to give you before your first jump. You have nothing you didn’t have in your pre-jump life yet. You don’t have survival instincts, you don’t have survival skills, you are not the badass you dream yourself of being, and you are not the hero of the story.

Yet.

You will reach this point in time and with effort. But never forget, the first time you die without a 1-up your entire Jumpchain ends right then and there. There is no tutorial level here, there are no free respawns until you level up a bit, there is no boot camp exemption. It is entirely possible for you to land in your first jump, immediately get eaten by a bear and die, and the only thing Jump-Chan will do is laugh at you and send you home. All that cosmic potential, all those infinite worlds, all that immortality and power and waifus and whatever else might float your boat… gone. Close enough to taste, and then snatched away from you. So near, and yet so far.

That would really suck, wouldn’t it?

So, here’s some things to keep in mind.

Note:

It is entirely possible that some of this advice may not apply to you. You may already be a combat veteran (thank you for your service), at which point you don’t need to cover that base again immediately. You may already have some of the life skills you need to get, at which point you obviously don’t need to get them again. You may already be strong, healthy, and fast, at which point.. you get the idea.

Your Jump-Chan be one of those that picks your first jump for you, or makes you roll it random, which means all the advice in here that relies on you getting free choice is not applicable to your situation and what you do then is make the best with the 1000 CP and the choices you do have available.

So, if something in this survival guide doesn’t quite fit with your situation or is superfluous, just acknowledge and move on. This is, after all, a generic survival guide.

And so, some things to keep in mind.

Everyone Thinks They’re Prepared For An Emergency. Odds Are, They’re Not.

Relax, this isn’t a knock on you. This is a generic survival guide, I don’t even know who you are, much less what your backstory is. Its an acknowledgement of how the human nervous system is designed sub-optimally in some respects and of a general widespread trend across, oh, pretty much the entire human race.

Everybody has, at least on an idle daydream level, wargamed out how they’d react to certain stress situations. If the zombie apocalypse started, you’d totally know what to do, right? If somebody tried to rob your store, you’d use those basic self-defense moves you rehearsed a few times, yeah? If somebody tried to carjack you, etc, etc.

And then you actually do drop in this shit and you spend entire seconds standing there, mentally blank, and maybe you respond and maybe you entirely forget the mace you left under the counter for just this occasion or etc.

Relax, I said. That doesn’t mean you’re a coward and it doesn’t mean you’re an idiot. It means you are an average intelligent human being who grew up in a civilized society and didn’t spend their childhood having to dodge tigers or Viking raiders or civil wars in their own front yard.

Because here’s the thing about the human brain. Left to its own devices, its completely fucking useless in sudden danger situations. It’s got a giant Off Switch marked ‘IN CASE OF TIGER ATTACK PRESS HERE’.

The fight-or-flight reflex takes the part of your brain that exercises conscious thought and pretty much sends it to la-la-land. At this point you’re left operating on your primitive survival instincts and your conditioned reflexes… and as the average untrained civilian from the 21st century, you usually don’t have either one to fall back on. Both those storage locations are empty. You’ve never needed them while growing up here, so you never grew them. Modern civilization is awesome, but it ain’t perfect.

There are, of course, ways to get around this problem. One of them is to be repeatedly in dangerous situations. After a while your subconscious gets completely used to this shit and you can mentally process just fine even while dodging bullets. This will inevitably happen to you on the Jumpchain, so don’t worry about it.

Instead, worry about living long enough to finish this process.

The traditional methods used in the real world to get raw recruits to survive enough combat or emergencies to be combat or emergency services veterans are to partner them up with more experienced people for their first few times through it, and to not expose them to such situations until after they’ve already been trained to the point that the immediate necessary actions for such situations is engraved in their brains at below the level of conscious thought.

I testify from my own experience. During my own Navy time, I was once caught in a flooding incident. That’s when the ocean is suddenly coming into the ship through a hole. You can imagine this is kinda stressful.

And at this point a curious thing happened to me. Basically, I had an out-of-body experience. I was depersonalized and sort of watching myself do things in third-person, without thinking about them. This is that whole 'your conscious brain turns off’ thing I mentioned earlier. I had never before been in such immediate and deadly danger and my mind reacted by basically going 'AIEEEEEEE!’

However, I had also passed damage control training, which had made us rehearse the proper response to this exact situation so many times that I could almost literally do it in my sleep. So the fact that my cerebral cortex was on walkabout meant nothing; my hands knew what to do even if it took the rest of me like thirty seconds to finish mentally bluescreening and rebooting. (And thirty seconds is a fucking eternity in an emergency. That’s twenty nine and a half seconds longer than it takes to die.)

And this is my advice for this section. Get yourself past this part before you already start the jump .

Get a perk for never panicking under stress. Get a perk that insta-downloads you the education and training and reflexes of a professional combatant or emergency services person. Import into an Origin that gives you the jump-memories of someone who’s already spent a hitch surviving the shit. Any one of these will work to keep you from the deadly panic-freeze. Its entirely possible you already have this from your pre-jump life, even.

But if you don't have it, then get it. Or else make goddamn sure you never jump any place more dangerous than Generic Sugar Bowl.

Or you will get killed by your first common bandit attack, as that heroic martial-arts movie script you had all imagined out in your head suddenly turns out totally different in reality.

Even Tough Guys Get PTSD.

'Pain is weakness leaving the body’. 'Combat fatigue is a fancy name for cowardice’. Some of the most hallowed and famed warrior traditions and individual warriors in history, such as the US Marine Corps and General George Patton, have been known to fully believe in and promulgate such sentiments.

They were all wrong.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is something almost anyone will get if they see enough combat time, or even enough prolonged non-combat stress. It has nothing to do with moral courage or internal fortitude or the lack thereof. It has everything to do with the human neuro-chemical system and what level and type of environmental stressors it is and is not designed to handle indefinitely.

There are perks for sidestepping, rapidly healing, or decompressing from mental trauma. There are general 'sanity’ perks that keep you happy and well-adjusted by the power of jump-fiat, even through shitty circumstances and long-term stress.

For the sake of your health and sanity, make them an early investment in your jumpchain. They are only marginally less important than the perks or experiences that let you survive the combat in the first place, that’s why they’re on the list.

Don’t put off buying them, either. You are very often the last person to notice that you’re not OK.

The Boy Scouts’ Handbook Ain’t Near Enough

Before you enter any setting that has a wilderness you must enter, get a professional wilderness survival training package whether by perk or by jump-memories. Its pricelessly useful, and the Park Service has to rescue hikers every year who thought they could leave the pre-prepared Park Service paths without skillz.

There is no Park Service on the Jumpchain, and there are no pre-prepared paths with rest stations and emergency phones.

Tell Me About Your GAINZZZZZ, Bro.

You’re an adventurer. Get in shape for adventure. Being pretty is great, and very useful in fact, but you’ll need a minimum of cardio, resilience, strength, and reaction time so that you can outrun the nasties and fight back when cornered. There is no 911 on the Jumpchain. You will spend much of your time back in the bad old days when whether or not you got robbed and raped was totally on you, nobody else cares and damn sure nobody else is coming to the rescue. History is full of ugly, many fantasy realms likewise.

So, if you don’t get your Body Mod straight up, then get fit. Lose all your prior health problems. You want to be in the sort of shape that a guy just graduating USMC boot camp would be, and for the same reason; its the minimum necessary physical fitness and conditioning necessary to survive fighting, and the Jumpchain is full of fighting. Get a perk, import into a professional soldier ID, shoot up some super-soldier serum, ask your Jump-Chan for doing the Body Mod or Heroic Body before jump-one, Front-Load or Three-Free yourself some beef. Do something.

Memories, All Alone In The Jumpchain…

A short-term (within your first half-dozen jumps) need is a perk for making sure memories don’t decay over the passage of time. You’re going to live for centuries, you’ll need help. The human memory ain’t designed for that many years.

A long-term need, as you go on down the millenia, is for an 'unlimited memory storage’ perk and a heightened indexing system. Perks for that are rarer, but they exist.

Quality Of Life Is All You Got Out Here, So Make Sure Its Quality.

Your Jumpchain is how you’re going to be spending a huge chunk of the rest of eternity. Your Warehouse and/or whatever house(s) you bought that follow you from chain to chain will be the only permanent home(s) you have.

So don’t live in a shithole. If you already know how to cook and clean for yourself, congrats. If you’re the stereotypical basement-swelling NEET that LitRPG stories are written about, then might I suggest that in your early jumps you actually learn how to cook and keep house? Its far more complicated than our mothers made it look.

There are perks for that, or jump-identities for that, or even just a fast-learning perk and then a home ec course. Shit, you can potentially blow this off and get yourself a house-elf or a companion maid or a robot servant or something. Just make sure something is taking care of this, because Jump-Chan damn sure ain’t gonna keep your Warehouse from turning into a stinky cave for you.

And sure, this is a lower priority than your immediate combat/emergency training above, so don’t go blowing the Three-Free or whatever on it if you don’t have to. Just pencil it in for something to do early on.

Also, find an income source. Monopoly Gauntlet is a traditional way to do it, its fast and easy, but there are any # of options. Why live poor when you can live rich?

People Who Need People… Are Called People.

You don’t need to do this on your first jump. Given the vast and wondrous change in your life, your first decade is gonna fly by pretty fast. But within several decades the psychological effects of prolonged isolation will kick in.

So not necessarily in your first jump, but within your first ten jumps or so, it is recommended that you either get some Companions or else get one of those perks that lets you undergo prolonged social isolation and/or boredom without harmful effect, such as the ones in Elite Dangerous.

Because the human brain is hardwired to need social interaction of some kind. Yes, even those of us who are introverts and loners. That just means we want to get our minimum daily requirement of not talking to the walls from only a few people we know as opposed to from interacting with the world in general, but it doesn’t mean we don’t need it.

Otherwise you end up like Tom Hanks in “Cast Away”, having deep heart-to-heart conversations with a volleyball with a smiley face drawn on it.

Meta-Knowledge Is Awesome. Meta-Knowledge Can Kill You.

I will quote Eric Flint’s rendition of the First Law of Battles:

The battle plan always gets fucked up as soon as the enemy arrives. That’s why he’s called the enemy.



Don’t ever think for a second that just because you read the book, you know how the story ends.

Don’t ever think that because you’ve seen one way this situation can go, you are automatically prepared for all ways this situation could go.

Use your meta-knowledge, of course. If you know where all the Horcruxes are in Harry Potter, go get them. If you know that Littlefinger is a traitor to Westeros right away, then don’t believe him. Reading the book ahead of time gave you a mother lode of free intel, so don’t waste it.

But remember that every conflict has a minimum of two sides, and none of those sides are playing to lose. As soon as you change something, the enemy will change his plans too. He’s not going to take a dive for you. He’s going to try and react to this new setback.

And since you just went off-script, his reaction will be off-script too.

So any time you are making a plan that relies on things going the way you want, stop and hit yourself. Then go back and make a plan that has at least two plans, one for 'if he goes the way I’m expecting’ and the other one for 'what’s the worst possible thing I can expect? I need to prepare for the possibility of it showing up’.

Also, don’t try to be a supergenius planner without a supergenius planner perk. If going up against a canon supergenius planner, don’t try to be one without SEVERAL supergenius planner perks. Don’t think you’re going to beat Xanatos just by taking the Xanatos perk yourself – he has it too, and he has a lot more experience with using it than you do.

And never forget that simple plans can still fail, so just try to imagine the failure rate on complicated ones.

Willpower Isn’t Just For Green Lanterns.

The will to keep going despite pain, fear, and trauma can keep people going through the worst possible situations when all else has failed them.

And they sell it on the Jumpchain in convenient deliverable packages at prices ranging from 100-600 CP a pop. So buy one as early as you can.

Bad Habits Kill. Magic Them Away.

Perks exist on the jumpchain for magically getting rid of your procrastination, wishful thinking, and laziness. Make sure to pick them up as you go along. Your willpower that you got above helps too.

Every Single Person Believes That They Are Smarter Than Average, Funnier Than Average, And A Hit With the Opposite Sex. At Least 50% Of Them Are Wrong.

But you’re going to be in the other 50% because you entirely invested in making yourself as awesome as you wish to be, right?

In Conclusion:

Remember these useful bits of life advice:

Fighting for fun is called sports. Fighting for survival is called combat. Never confuse the two.

If it usually ends with a dead body, its not actually sports no matter what society calls it.



The best way to fight is from behind, in the dark, at a dead run, with a two-by-four. (Either metaphorical or literal).

Fairness is a myth invented by the enemy to try and get you to give him a free advantage.



Honor is not a myth. Its a genuinely necessary social tool for keeping minor conflicts from escalating into major ones. But it only works when both sides have it. So if you are an honorable man facing a dishonorable opponent, then fuck him. Repeatedly.



a myth. Its a genuinely necessary social tool for keeping minor conflicts from escalating into major ones. So if you are an honorable man facing a dishonorable opponent, then fuck him. Repeatedly. The problem with betting your ass on a secret staying secret is that secrets never stay secret.



stay secret. If you’re in a gambling game or an intrigue and you don’t know who the sucker is, then you’re the sucker.

It is much less stressful to have something and not need it than to need something and not have it.

Every possible use of your time falls into one of these three categories. 1) Necessary 2) Enjoyable 3) Total Waste Of.



Remember, You Do You.

Happy jumping!