Roll For It

(Somewhere around Escalation)

"Okay," Ray said. He turned to Ruth. "Druid Morning Light, you're ready to return to the Murky Forest of Ill Boding. The King will be sending along a party of representatives to meet with the Arch Druid, hopefully to sign a treaty, and to consult on identifying the threat from The Mountain of Mournful Monsoons."

"I'm more interested in the threat, really," she replied.

"He knows, but he's a king. Politics is what he does all day. So with that, he sends Sarah, the Duchess of Blood Hollow." He nodded to his wife who picked up her character sheet.

"Um, human, blonde, I'm a noble and able to speak for the king, in the interests of the kingdom, and I'm a decent magic user, to protect us on the trip and to maybe suss out the 3M threat." She greeted the druid on a more personal note after Annie hissed, "In character!"

She also introduced her bodyguard, Tok. Annie cleared her throat. "Tok fighter. Tok human, but stronger than almost everyone. Tok been mistaken for siege tower a time or two, but not terrible smart." Annie had used intelligence as her dump-stat and proudly claimed that the four she'd rolled made her Owner-Smart.

In retaliation, her owner regularly made her roll saves versus confusing things like math, adverbs, doorknobs and not tripping over the shadows of trees.

Tok was devoted to the Duchess and mostly just killed whatever he was pointed at.

Pet made a big fuss over meeting the druid, playing her baron as a nobleman concerned with socializing, but not any actual cultural exchanges. "We have a lot of trees on my estate, perhaps you know some of them?" "I don't… We don't really converse with individual trees, milord."

"Ah. Of course." Verrifien was presented as a courtier just looking to be attend, without being useful. He claimed political connections had forced the king to include him on the expedition. He tended to drift behind the Duchess and agree with her.

No one was quite sure if he was expressing solidarity with the only other noble or just too lazy to argue. They kind of suspected that Pet just wanted to make Denny happy.

Buttercup's paladin was added by other political pressures in the king's court. The Church of Law kept the throne stable, so their warriors were involved in almost all diplomacy. Lady Glory to The Rule of Law vowed to take the Duchess' leadership to heart, as long as it didn't appear to be irrevocably sinful.

They prepared quickly, purchasing supplies with the royal purse, and were on their way.

Travel through the populated areas of the kingdom went without incident, along with a good portion of the trip through the early wilderness.

Then they were beset by ettin.

Ray revealed a surprise just before having everyone roll for initiative. Tiny dice.

"Oh, so cute!" Ruth cheered.

The sylphs each grabbed a couple. They were about the size of each woman's fist.

"Any smaller and I wouldn't be able to see what you rolled," Ray explained.

"And you can't just take our word for it," Annie pointed out.

"Who is it that makes the game master roll dice in front of his screen?" Ray replied. Annie waved away the point. "Anyway, I rolled each one several times and they appear truly random. So, there you go."

"How many times in a 'several,'" Buttercup asked.

"Knowing him, a hundred," Annie said.

"Each?" Pet asked. She glanced at the dice set with wide eyes. "That's a lot of rolling, Ray."

"Well, spreadsheets won't fill themselves out," he said dismissively. "So there you are, in your marching order, and three two-headed giants rush up out of the woods before you. What do you do?"

Pet demonstrated a convincing 'I scream in fear like this' and ducked under the wagon.

Tok shouted 'Tok kill things' and ran for the closest monster. "Evil things," Glory shouted and ran for the next monster. Sarah stepped to the side for a clear shot at the farthest monster. Morning Light turned and scanned the forest around them. Something about the woods seemed off to her druidic understanding of Nature. She was almost the first to notice the flanking attack.

Verrifien was watching Sarah's back when the goblin stepped into view. With her back turned, the Duchess had no clue that death was approaching even as her fireball deep fried the third ettin.

Verrifien snapped off a shot with his pocket crossbow and rolled a natural crit.

"Okay, Pet," Ray said. "Where did you want to hit him?"

"In his…ear?" she guessed.

"Right, right. The bolt goes in one ear, completely through his brain and out the other side. He falls down headfirst onto his own sword so it looks like he just rolled a fumble and stabbed himself to death. Through both ears."

"Now THAT'S a crit!" Annie cheered. The others joined, except for Denise.

"Denny?" Pet asked.

"That's a good shot, Pet, but you shouldn't be concentrating on protecting me, alright?" Denise cupped a hand around her little pet. "Play your character in DarkWorld, not my best and truest friend in this one, okay?"

"I AM!" Pet insisted. "You're in charge of the expedition and you outrank me and if you die then everyone'll expect me to be party leader because I'm the only other noble here and chosen by the king himself but I'm an assassin illusionist and the last thing I need in a fight is everyone asking me what to do because I get everything done best by saying, 'Hey, did you drop a gold piece?' and disappearing and the person in charge can't do that, unless I tell everyone to look away because I'm an assassin illusionist and then I don't think the paladin will like me anymore. Even though the paladin is my mom, who loves me."

"Oh," Denise said quietly. Then she smiled at Pet.

"That's fifty experience points for characterization," Ray said in respectful tones. Pet squealed and ran across her character sheet to jot that down.

The goblin's apparent lethal fumble and collapse in the road's gravel alerted Sarah and Morning, who turned to face three more goblins from that side of the road.

The druid caused the branches of the bushes to entangle the attackers and the mage drilled them between the eyes with magic missiles.

Glory rushed over just as the last one expired. Tok's ettin wasn't quite dead, but he didn't want to miss out on the new attack. He grabbed the gasping beast by the still-working throat and dragged him over to the wagon.

"Tok fight goblin!" he announced.

"Finish your ettin or you won't get desert," Sarah told him. Tok stiff-armed his victim headfirst into a tree.

"Roll," Ray said. "Only one of his heads is dead, roll to see if you knock the dead one into the tree."

Annie grumbled that even a Master could tell a living enemy from a trophy, but rolled the dice anyway. Ray leaned way down to count the pips on her tiny tools.

"That's a fumble," he said softly.

Tok's attempt to push an ettin's head into a tree's bole missed so badly the fighter broke his own arm.

"Is it a compound fracture?" Annie asked, lip trembling.

Ray said, "Thirty percent chance," then rolled a 25. "Yes," he said, "I'm afraid it is."

"Then I stab the jagged end in the ettin's jugular!" she shouted, eyes alight.

"Roll-" Ray started to say. Then he shrugged. "Eh. I'll allow it. You've done worse."

The paladin patched the few light wounds they party had taken and the mage authorized a healing potion for Tok. "Make sure he takes it internally," she told the druid as she handed the vial over.

"Tok know not to eat the glass part," Annie said cheerfully. "Not unless Tok chew glass one hundred times."

"Can you count to one hundred, Tok?" Morning asked.

"Tok never have that kind of time," Tok replied, swallowing the healing potion. And the cork.

The baron was coaxed out of hiding and the party moved on.

----------

Three hours later, they'd met the druids, defeated the threat, enjoyed a victory party and, as usual, reached the silly part of the evening.

Morning was just starting to notice that Verrifien was never around when someone suddenly grabbed their throat, choking on a throwing knife that apparently burst up out of their voicebox.

She noticed this while describing the most recent inexplicable death of a Grand Druid opposed to the king's treaty. "I can't believe you missed this one, TOO!" she told the baron. He shrugged and listened to the story.

Glory was starting to get worried about the druid nation's practice of blood sacrifice, but then Sarah reminded her of what the God of Law demanded to keep the city safe.

That started Tok worrying that he still qualified for a virgin sacrifice. Technically. In at least four orifices. He started asking for help in specific defloration.

Morning's fellow druids turned out to be willing to assist, though Ray begged Annie to stop shouting "rolling for penetration!" after the nostrils.

It was probably the wrong part of the adventure to consider trying to gain familiars.

Morning tried to 'befriend' a badger, but only ended up getting one drunk enough to cry on her shoulder.

Sarah hoped for a mini-dragon but ended up with a flamboyant brownie who called everyone 'Muggsy,' and talked like a gossip columnist for two days. "Guess what diplomat has more than one knife in his trousers?" and "Who's been seen trying to be perfectly good in the company of evil?"

On the third day, the brownie was found to have committed suicide in the night.

"Has to have been suicide," Glory concluded. "No one would have accidentally covered him with barbecue sauce then thrown him at a badger with a hangover."

"I don't know why I didn't see it coming," Sarah sighed, recovering slowly from the death of her familiar, and the accompanying loss of her own hit points. "He didn't feel suicidal, not in my head."

"Sometimes the depressed ones can hide it, even from themselves," Morning said, gently rubbing her badger's distended belly.

Tok had gotten someone to cast a 'cure light wounds' spell on an arm chopped off of one of the last warriors of the Threat. It didn't bring the fighter back, but the arm stopped oozing.

He cleaned off the blood, draped it around his neck and called it his famili-arm.

Everyone groaned theatrically. And when it came to life just enough to try to choke the shit out of him, no one came to his rescue.

"What am I going to do to an animated arm?" Verrifien asked. "There's no throat to slit."

"Say what?" Glory asked.

"Out of character!" Pet said immediately.

Glory grunted and went back to brushing her newly-summoned warhorse. She paid special attention to Goliath's flank. The stallion bore a cutie mark there, a silver rune that acted as the holy symbol for her god. As that was also etched into her shield, her breastplate and her sword, her ability to turn undead in four directions at once had turned the tide in the Great Battle.

Tok thought that the rune looked like the 'intel inside' logo, and found it ironic that a god of LAW had plagiarized his symbol. She didn't mention it out loud, though. Even Tok wasn't THAT stupid.

The party finally retreated to the lodge set aside for them. Even Morning Light chose to spend a last night with her friends before they returned to the city.

As they curled up in their furs, listening to the badger snore, and the famili-arm try to free itself from the burlap sack, everyone felt a deep contentment at a job well done, new friendships forged and a truly original recipe for werewolf chili.

Ray folded down his screen and looked at the sylphs. "Okay, Pet, Annie? Was that adventure a good enough birthday gift."

"Yeah," Annie said with a shrug.

"It was GREAT!" Pet shouted, jumping in the air. Ruth offered her a high-point-five and Buttercup hugged her warmly. Ray saw, but ignored, the smile that kept tugging at the edges of Annie's mouth.

"Oh, wait, I get it!" Annie said suddenly. "Tok's arm! It was the left arm, wasn't it?"

"Yeah," Ray asked, confused.

"Well, next time, I try it with the right arm." He shook his head softly. Annie sighed and spoke slowly, as one explaining shirt buttons to Tok: "The right arm? The dexter? The left arm is the sinister one! No wonder it turned evil!"

"You cut the arm off of a third level fighter/necromancer and turned it into a zombie," Ray said.

"That's not a zombie!" she protested.

"It exhibits a semblance of living, though without a beating heart or working lungs," he said. "The Dungeon Master says it's a zombie."

"Could be a flesh golem," Ruth said.

"Like Frankenstein's Monster!" Pet cheered.

"Anyway," Ray went on, "it wouldn't matter a damn if you picked right, left or straight up the middle, it was going to try to kill you."

She crossed her arms and turned away from her Master. "You have to spoil everything, don't you?"

Then Denise shook her car keys and said there was a high-inventory alarm at the nearest Baskin Robbins. All was forgiven in the rush to find seats in the car. Or the carrier.



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