… when you suddenly realize that Manucci, like the protagonist of a Gene Wolfe story, is not telling you all that he knows.

How do I know that? Well let’s return to the teenage Venetian, suddenly orphaned of his foster father: “I was left alone, sad and anxious, having nothing to console me, nor anywhere to turn in order to recover my things”. Then things go from bad to worse: two other Europeans show up and steal the rest of Manucci’s stuff and coerce him into traveling with them to Delhi. But then somehow the young man scores an interview with the king’s vizier and, using the bits of Persian he picked up along the journey, convinces him to arrest the men who’d tried to abduct him. He parlays the vizier’s friendship into a royal audience, and thence into an offer of employment from the crown prince. In a short while, Manucci is a courtier hanging around the palace in fine clothes paid for by the state, getting tutored in Indian languages and Mughal history and correct deportment. He tells us that the only difficulty in his life was the need to constantly scheme in order to avoid being forcibly converted to Islam, and then interrupts his own narration to give us a few hundred pages of ancient Mughal history.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? Every bit of this story so far, starting from the moment he snuck onto that ship, is literally unbelievable. Irvine certainly seemed to feel that way, if his footnotes and interjections are anything to go by. He evidently flung himself into a centuries-later posthumous cross-examination, looking for any detail in Manucci’s narrative that’s out of place. He doesn’t find any. Worse, he finds numerous corroborating accounts in other contemporaneous sources. But if this story actually happened, then we are left with a nasty trichotomy. One of three things must be true: (1) Manucci is the luckiest sonofabitch alive. (2) Manucci has superhuman powers of persuasion. (3) Manucci is leaving out something important. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s a little bit of all three, because Manucci is a player character.

They walk among us. Lately the preferred jargon term has been “agency”. Before that people called them “live players”. In the old days they were referred to as “great men”, but that one’s my least favorite of the descriptors because it implies that they have to be like Cyrus the Great or Napoleon, when in reality they’re often much harder to spot. That’s because, as Samo Burja notes, player characters often deliberately cloak themselves in order to avoid detection by other player characters. These ones you may only notice by their aftereffects, like the lingering gravitational distortion after a singularity has whizzed by, reality warping as they knife through to their destination and then reconstituting itself behind them.

Humanity’s great sages have long known that every so often the planets are in a particular configuration, and a Child of Destiny is born. The real question is why. The fun-ruiners will note that in a world of billions of people, some of them are just going to be 6σ lucky. It is difficult for us even to conceive what it means to be 6σ lucky, and yet, like some bizarre object conjured by a non-constructive mathematical proof, we know such people are out there, somewhere in the wave function. But let’s not be fun-ruiners for a moment and consider the other possibilities. Maybe these individuals are chosen by God, or the gods. Or maybe they are the ones paying for the simulation, and therefore have access to the root login. Whatever their source, they exist. Often they spend part of their lives unaware of their true nature. And then … they awaken.

There was a little while when “NPC” was getting thrown around as a term of abuse, but as I have explained at some length,¹ there’s nothing wrong with being an NPC. We come by it honestly. At some point, in the Springtime of your life, you bumped up against the universe, you pushed the boundaries, you pushed your limits. On that day, the universe pushed back. Hard. You learned your lesson, like a little kid who touched a hot stove. NPCs are formed from scar tissue, a fibrous mass of tough lessons about the nature of the world. But, as we have just deduced, there must exist people who, whether by divine ordinance or fluke of probability, had a very different experience on that fateful day. They pushed against the universe, and the universe gave in and gave them everything they wanted. And what lesson does that impart? Something like: “Rules are for the sheep, but you can hack the matrix and get what you want”. Now they are awakened. And the crazy thing is that if you keep getting lucky, not 6σ lucky, but just on-a-roll lucky, the awakened state can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some parts of the world really can be hacked with a little luck and a lot of determination. So there’s a feedback loop that can rapidly amplify mere one-in-a-billion luck into miraculous, reality-altering luck. That’s my attempt at a purely naturalistic explanation of player characters. Or maybe they’re just chosen by God.

Manucci is a slippery one. I only caught him because I read the first part of this book twice: once when I was reading it through casually, and then again as I sat down to write this review and tried to figure out how the hell to convey all this. Again, as with a Gene Wolfe novel, to understand the beginning you must have read the ending. In all the thousands of pages of narration, the one subject Manucci barely touches on is himself. That’s because Manucci is a player character practicing very high-level obfuscation techniques. This sort of misdirection is also the hallmark of a con-man, and what do you know: there is one brief, brief moment when Manucci gets a little too sure of himself and lets slip that he actually was functioning as a super-effective con-man back there in 17th century India. He wove his web of shadows around the Mughal aristocracy, and then he nearly got it around us the readers as well.

So we finally have Manucci pinned down: he is the subtype of player character known as a “guile hero“. You know them from stories: Odysseus, or Locke Lamora, or almost every character played by Kevin Spacey. Manucci is like them, his character class is either rogue or bard.² At what age was he awakened? Was he already aware of his powers when he crept down that Venetian dock? And what really happened between him and Bellomont? Did he seduce the English gentleman? Or did he suss out his mission and blackmail him with a threat to make it public? Or did he just turn the full force of his personality on the hopeless cavalier and get 6σ lucky on his CHA roll? We shall never know. But if you are asking questions like these, then you now have the correct interpretive lens for what follows.³

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Storia do Mogor, by Niccolao Manucci”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-09-08.

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1. Twice!
2. This is a totally OP and broken build, since as a Venetian he already gets a racial bonus to DEX and CHA.
3. And you’re one step ahead of Irvine, who as far as I can tell never figured it out.