Artificial Incident
is a LitRPG comic by Phil 'Sage' Brown.
- Ambiguous Gender Identity: Kevin notes that he doesn't have any issue with dissociative effects like that when he sees a warning about the possibility of side effects when playing a character with a gender different than one's own in real life, implying that he might be gender apathetic or something similar. Kaylin's biggest issues with her new state seem to be from the memory loss and not being able to find any interested ladies than being female.
- Cat Girl: Nyna, a nekomata girl Kaylin meets, and eventually gets into a relationship with.
- Cyborg: Mike, being from a sci-fi game.
- Deconstruction: As mentioned below, the story points out the flaws in how the society of a typical fantasy game would realistically work, especially when the adventurers/PCs all suddenly vanished.
- G.I.R.L.: Kevin's character is a female dark elf named Kaylin.
- God Is Flawed: Correndel is a lazy god who ended up getting promoted because his predecessor, per
Word of God, bragged about being extremely competent and that Correndel was so worthless he could barely function as an overseer and ought to be erased from reality, resulting in Sol getting put solely in charge of a far harsher world and Correndel being given the other god's far easier duties. Correndel has since been extremely happy to put in only enough effort to perform his own admittedly easy new role and try not to get their boss' attention for either doing so well they get "promoted" like Sol or get punished for incompetence by being sent to oversee a far harsher world because, in their own words, they're not built for hard labor. - Loss of Identity: Kaylin remembers the backstory in her bio better than Kevin's life and even remembers things he didn't write, to the point that she doesn't remember his last name. By the time she meets Mike, she clearly does not consider herself and Kevin to be the same person.
- The Magic Goes Away: The disappearance of the adventurers seems to have caused, at least in the area Kaylin is in, a lot of magical knowledge/items to be lost. The magic academies were later revealed to have all been destroyed due to fighting over them.
- Mistaken for Gay: Kevin acts like he's gay when a customer gets mad for talking to his girlfriend, who is apparently a flirt. It works.
- Mundane Utility: Callum's "Nailed to the Sky" spell. In the context of a fantasy RPG, it's an instakill spell that sends its victim hurtling into space, where they'll die to hard vacuum. On the other hand, this makes it an incredibly cheap and efficient way to achieve escape velocity for something that WANTS to be up there, like a landed space fighter.
- My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Mike, being from a sci-fi game to an extent. On one hand his cybernetics still work, and his gun is now extremely powerful, on the other hand his ship doesn't work because its item ID conflicts with an item from the fantasy game.
- Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Kaylin was a high-level adventurer but was only one of many, however in a world 200 years after they all disappeared, she's more powerful and/or skilled than anything that she's come across yet, save maybe the elders of Nyna's tribe. She deals with Nyna's attacks with no real effort, and wasn't even sure if she was seriously trying or not.
- Ontological Mystery: Somehow, Kaylin disappeared a century before the other adventurers did, only to reappear three hundred years after she vanished.
- Outside Context Magic: Mike's laser pistol shouldn't be able to exist in Rune Aria. The game's rules recast it as a "Tier 9 Wand of Lightning," on a scale that normally only goes up to 6.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As mentioned below, the adventurers disappearing caused a lot of issues, to the point that Kaylin's gold is so inflated that one gold coin is equal to 100 silver ones (which means they are 100 times more valuable than they were before), and towns had to drastically increase defensive efforts.
- In a less serious manner; Mike's cybernetics makes noises outside of human hearing range. But Nyna can hear them and, being from a fantasy world, finds the noises strange and annoying.
- Terminally Dependent Society: The society of the fantasy world was so centered on adventurers that when they disappeared, everything went to heck. Monsters stopped being slain, rituals and quests that the adventurers did go unperformed, and the economy collapsed because most of the wealth was in a system only they could access.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Well, non-humans, non-elves, non-dwarves, and so on, but monster populations in general. Within the game of Rune Aria, monsters were just enemies for Adventurers to fight and grow stronger from. They would give experience points and have a loot table that occasionally rewarded powerful items when slain. This property remained after the adventurers went away, but now they exist as people within societies of their own. Someone in Talithar had discovered a means to tap into these EXP and Loot Tables despite being NPCs, and spun up a genocide program to essentially farm monsters for profit by rounding them up and auctioning their deaths off to the highest bidders. They've nearly run out of monsters in their home turf and are now looking abroad.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: Apparently time in the game realm moves faster than in the "real world".