Old meets new as classic MMO players worship a famous Vtuber via gifts of bones so she can max out the Prayer skill
Every time an Old School RuneScape story crops up, there's a period of acclimatisation where I struggle to work out exactly what the players are doing and why. I'm not unfamiliar with the game, having played it way back in the day, but RuneScape at the extremes can be a pretty wild place, a world where players suddenly break the dam on a 16 year-old minigame by overwhelming guards en masse, or some thrillseeker risks a 370-hour no-hit account to get a fancy cape (to be fair, it does have flames).
But even by RuneScape standards this one is bonkers. OSRS players have been ganging up to shower dragon bones on a famous Vtuber, seemingly to help her max out one of the game's grindiest stats: Prayer.
Let's unpack this. Nerissa Ravencroft is a hololive streamer, presumably straight from the mean cobblestones of Hogwarts, who in recent months picked up OSRS and has attracted a bunch of the game's players to her streams (thanks, GamesRadar+). RuneScape being RuneScape, the adventuring soon went by the wayside in favour of more esoteric pursuits, and recently Nerissa found herself focused on Prayer Training.
Prayer training is done by gaining (wait for it) Prayer experience, and the quickest way to do this is to acquire or just straight-up buy a whole load of bones and then offer them at an altar. This maximises the XP gain from the bones, and if you've got dragon bones then, relatively speaking, it's an XP bonanza.
A recent Nerissa stream was entitled, ahem, "I'm sick but there's always time to bone." And in some sort of meta-shift for RuneScape, a whole load of players queued up to genuflect and gift Nerissa as many dragon bones and even superior dragon bones (la-di-da) as they could. "It's boning time," declared the Vtuber. "Now I just await the bone donations."
And the bone-ations did flow. Nerissa's fans, who for reasons I don't understand call themselves "Jailbirds", absolutely drowned her in bones. The max level for the Prayer skill is 99 and Nerissa currently rests at 96 (in OSRS the XP required for each level increases exponentially, such that the halfway point to level 99 is level 92).
The whole thing is something of an OSRS in-joke. Prayer is one of the skills that's basically a pain in the ass to max out, being both hugely expensive in terms of the bone outlay (if you want to do it efficiently) and taking a lot of time regardless, and the benefits of hitting the higher levels aren't even that good. It tends to be something that players do after they've doing everything else, rather than an important focus.
Unless you're a Vtuber with an army of fans bringing you the bones, of course. Nerissa never had to leave the altar (where you sacrifice bones) because a steady stream of OSRS players were lining up to hand over their dragon bones, superior dragon bones, and even doing the busywork of lighting the altar's incense burners.
Nerissa is probably the highest-profile Vtuber to get into OSRS, which is probably why the game's community has responded so enthusiastically to her interest. They're not just offering bones for the bone god, but creating fan art of her in the game and even remixing some of her songs in the OSRS style.
As far as OSRS goes this is pretty wholesome, not least because the appeal of some of the game's more bananas stories is in the time commitment some folk make to this game. Maxing out Prayer skill is all well and good, but what about grinding the worst version of a minigame for 149 long hours (and abandoning 88 levels of XP) just to get a cute raccoon without committing a crime? Heck, there are some out there who've beaten odds higher than winning the lottery jackpot to get hold of the game's rarest item. In that kind of context, getting crowds of worshippers to bring you bones seems like a pretty sane approach.