Gamer Fantastic

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  I don’t know. All I know is that they’re your characters by now if they’re anyone’s.

  Look, I know that you have dice. After all, you’re reading this, so there’s a 90 percent chance you’re a gamer. I walk over to the box that hold the dice I used when I gamed, and I pluck out two d20 and roll it: yep, you are.

  So there it is: the story is in your hands. You grab that d100 of yours, the clear yellow one you once bought at a con because you thought it looked especially nice. You think of all the ways this story could end. You smile as you think of that last possibility, and you write down the probabilities for each ending.

  You pick up the dice, you shake it in your palm, thinking about the way you’d like this to end.

  And you roll.

  “YOU FORGOT WHOSE REALM THIS REALLY IS!”

  Brian M. Thomsen

  “And, onceagain, let the games begin!” Percy hated it when that old coot Ned Greenbriar said that.

  There he was: all potbellied six-foot-two of him decked out in a patchwork bathrobe version of a wizard’s gown, acting as if he was the real thing rather than just some lucky guy who twenty-some years ago came up with a campaign setting that was exploited at just the right time to cash in on the whole D&D craze.

  Percy remembered it well; never had he seen so many sheep flocking to join in the land of the generic quests and heroic adventures.

  Happy campers became happy questers and they all deserved to become dragonbait . . . but Ned Greenbriar of the soft-hearted/headed never let that happen.

  “Now fair questers let us venture into the darkness down under and find the hat of the man without . . .”

  Percy had really wanted to disinvite him from RealmCon, but as the convention was a license and not a holding, even his recently acquired fiscal and custodial powers didn’t reach that far.

  It’s amazing though, he thought to himself, the full powers that he did possess.

  Him, a gamer turned MBA turned entrepreneur.

  And now he was the one who would determine the fate of the Famed Empire.

  True it had taken longer than he had anticipated, but at last dominion was all his and Ned Greenbriar was going to have to accept that.

  Ned’s campaign world had passed through many hands since he initially allowed it to be used as the setting for the most successful set of fantasy role-playing rules in creation.

  First it was owned by the Shoemaker’s Elves Company, then the Artisans and Budd Boys, then Gordon & Gerkin, then finally his own company Trolls of the North (which at the time, unfortunately had a board of directors who didn’t want to rock the boat), then sold it off to Sorcerers Associates which then went under, allowing Brothers Toy & Tobacco Corporation to step in and acquire the assets.

  And despite the continuous change of ownership, Ned Greenbriar was always allowed to tag along.

  He was the creator of the Famed Empire after all and was the physical personification of the Masterwizard Grand Mage himself, “the Old Master” . . . and besides that, he was always very cooperative.

  He never required a larger payment than an average freelancer.

  He was more than willing to update and consult free of charge.

  He was an A#1 glad hander.

  And, most important, he never minded allowing others to share in the glory of the realm that he had developed.

  He never said boo when one manager killed off the gods and then brought in an entire new pantheon.

  He didn’t object when the pet author of an editor was given trilogies when he himself was always contracted at a single book at a time.

  He didn’t even mind when “the Sullen Warrior” replaced “the Old Master” as the signature character of the empire.

  Ned just tried to get along with everyone, and the workers in the wordage trenches appreciated that.

  But those workers were gone now and with them the residual good will.

  Such things happen when a company goes bankrupt.

  Brothers Toy & Tobacco Corporation really didn’t care about the Famed Empire. They bought the company largely for the fantasy doll line whose popularity was on the upswing as well as the Do-It-Yourself Anime Coloring Books division.

  The role-playing division and its book department was just an ancillary part of the deal, and when Percy helped them broker a cartoon deal for two of the worlds (which didn’t involve any author royalties, since certain papers had gotten misplaced during one of the buyouts and never made it into the record in the bankruptcy court), the corporate masters were more than willing to give him dominion over the role-playing division to do with whatever he wanted.

  Contrary to popular rumor, he didn’t want to destroy the role-playing division and its miscellaneous nerd worlds—he just wanted to remake it in a manner more to his liking.

  Sort of what George W. Bush did to the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

  And that involved getting rid of Ned Greenbriar once and for all.

  The first thing he did was to sign the author of the Sullen Warrior series to a long term deal with the understanding that his character could do whatever he wanted as long as each book featured a scene of him and his gritty visage chopping up some critter with one of his signature bits of cutlery.

  Next he announced that the entire realm of the Famed Empire would be updated and relaunched, and appointed as the architect of that relaunch was the guy everyone called “the Fascist Butcher,” who was a staunch advocate of the Frank Miller approach to revision (“Let’s take our hero and drag him through the mud until he is completely impotent . . . and then rebuild him from the gutter on up”).

  It worked in comic books, why not in RPGs?

  And best of all, Percy knew that tFB (as he liked to be called) despised humor and goodness and had no respect for Ned Greenbriar.

  And finally he appointed Lance Sparta, a person with no publishing experience at all, to run the book division.

  Indeed, Lance was the only holdover who had managed to last through four different proprietorships of the company, by managing to avoid any real responsibility for failure while latching on to any available successes that seemed to have been unclaimed.

  Lance had wanted to turn down the promotion, seeing it as the surest way to have a target placed on his back for some next round of responsibility driven layoffs, but Percy knew Lance’s soft spot.

  Lance was an ardent Neo-Con and a deep-thinking fan of Russian novelists.

  So when Percy told him that his first act as head of the book division could be to sign himself up for a quartet of books set in the Famed Empire that could be his Neo-Con manifesto done in the style of Dostoevsky, there was no way this former stockboy was going to turn him down.

  (The fact that he planned on plotting the books using his ten-sided die didn’t bother Percy either; no more than the fact that he was incapable of writing above the level of an arrogant fourth grader. Worse books had been published in the past and no doubt would be published in the future.)

  Lance accepted the promotion and had no problem with assuring him that Ned would never get another book contract.

  Ned was now completely cut off from his world.

  All that remained was to apprise him of this fact.

  And that was a moment he would now relish.

  Once the convention was over, everyone trekked back to Vancouver, and as usual, Ned tagged along to get himself up to date with the game division and the book division and find out what was planned for the coming year.

  First he went to the book department where he was informed that Mr. Sparta did not have time to see him (despite the fact that Ned could see Lance at his desk rolling a set of polyhedral dice while downing shots of vodka). When Ned asked for the usual information on his work for the coming year—locale, theme, due date, etc.—the cordial but clueless secretary couldn’t find his name on the schedule, which meant that no new books had been allocated to him.

  No books? That can’t be right, he thought.

&n
bsp; Then, as he was leaving the cube land of the book division while en route to the game division, he bumped into Dick Butcher, the new designer supposedly attached to the Famed Empire.

  “Dick,” Ned said, stopping him in the hall, “I was just on my way to see you.”

  “Can’t talk now, Ned,” Dick replied. “I’m on my way to a conference with Lance about my new book deal.”

  “Your new book deal?”

  “Yup. As lead designer on the relaunch and revamp, it’s only fair. It’s gonna take a lot of destruction and carnage to bring this world into the modern era. Hard to believe its still around when better worlds have gone wanting.”

  “You mean better worlds like . . . ?”

  Dick scratched his head for a moment and quickly answered, “Well like Bloodreign,WarWasteland, and Faerie-Fortress . Nice talking to you. Gotta go.”

  “Didn’t you design all of those worlds?”

  Dick chuckled.

  “So I did,” he replied. “Imagine that. Gotta go.”

  “But you and I need to talk about next year’s schedule . . .”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .”

  Dick tarried for just another moment.

  “There’s no need for that,” the Butcher replied. “We’re going in a different direction. Airships. War. Devastation. That kind of stuff. No hard feelings. Gotta go. Imagine—me an author. Who’d a thunk it?”

  And with that he vanished into the cube land of books, leaving Ned quizzical and on the verge of anger.

  After just a moment of contemplation spent fingering his beard, the man who was the personification of the Old Master headed off to have a face-to-face with the new man in charge.

  Ned arrived at Percy’s office a few moments later and asked his pleasantly buxom and borderline underage secretary if he could have a few moments with the new man in charge.

  She intercomed her boss, and quickly escorted the Gandalf-like figure into the lavish executive suite.

  Percy was waiting for him, and laughed at the obvious distraught turmoil pervading the face of the formerly revered world-builder.

  “I expected you to barge in here when you found out,” Percy sneered.

  “That would have been rude,” Ned replied courteously. “This is your office, after all.”

  “It’s all mine, now” the MBA shark replied. “And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Ned interjected. “I’m being cut out of the Famed Empire.”

  “So?”

  “But it’s my world.”

  “You may think this world is yours but the current legal papers indicate otherwise. Though you originally had an arrangement with Tactical Strategies Inc., which was then bought out by the Shoemaker guy then yadda yadda yadda . . . and most of those records and papers were lost when the company moved to the West Coast, which was two owners ago, the current bankruptcy buy-out fails to recognize your claim, and, gee, all of the copyrights and trademarks were registered in the name of my holding company. Imagine that.”

  “You can’t go forward without my involvement.”

  “Oh, yes, we can. In fact no one will even notice. There is going to be a great disaster and everyone is going to die in terms of the game universe because we will then jump the timeline ahead a hundred years or so to allow us to relaunch the world.”

  “But . . .”

  “The only holdover from the old world will be the undying ‘sullen warrior’ that Sally writes those books about. They make the bestseller list each year. Who’d ’ave thought there’s that many pimply faced dweebs who got off on two-sworded rangers who never smile? And when you mention the Famed Empire to them, they think of Sally, not you.”

  Ned was not happy. You could tell by the way he stroked his beard.

  “Well if you are all Tartarus bent on doing this to the Famed Empire, I guess, I’ll have to play along. What do you want me to do?”

  “Get lost.”

  “But . . .”

  “Go back up north and don’t come back. The days of pen and paper games are dead. Everything is online now.”

  “You want me to work from home. Online, as you say.”

  “No. I just want you to go away. The gravy train has left the tracks and, sadly for you, it will not be coming back. You will be seeing no more royalties, no more signings, and no more creator credits.”

  “But I can still help shape the world.”

  “But I don’t want you to. You’re a dinosaur. Gary Gygax is dead, long live X-Box Mach 5.”

  “. . . but . . .”

  “Famed Empire is now subject to a massive overhaul. Maybe we will gear it down and fill it with colorful animals to feed the plush toy market or maybe we’ll add a bit of spice and leather. I understand that goes over real well in Asia. Either way, things will change and the realm as you knew it will be gone, and you, you old coot, will be forgotten. And do remember, the last contract you signed had a retroactive proactive unto infinity non-disparagement clause which means if you so much as open your mouth about any of this I will sue you for everything you have, including that flea-bitten robe and that termite infested staff.”

  “You have forgotten whose realm this really is!”

  “All of the proper legal papers say it now belongs to the Brothers Toy & Tobacco Corporation, and I am now its corporate controller, and you are just a thing of the past.”

  Ned stared at the balding little butterball with an ill-deserved MBA, his visage one of surprising composure even though his eyes burned with the fires of vengeance.

  “We will see about that. Tell me, why do you treat me this way? Let me guess—it’s not personal . . . it’s strictly business.”

  “Hell no! It’s completely personal. Twenty-two years ago, at RealmCon, you DM’d an adventure into the Dragonlands of the Famed Empire and you wouldn’t let me kill the dragon.”

  “I remember. Dragon killing is a team sport. First you get some troll meat for bait, then everyone in the party has a role to play.”

  “So you said at the time. But you’re wrong. We don’t live in a team world, we live in a cutthroat world. Your honor and goodness guidelines are crap. That’s why I got behind Sorcery and Slaughter and the Dark World of Renton Dwarves and Evil Elves of Bakersfield, but they never got a fair shake no matter how much money and resources I put behind them. It was always Famed Empire this and Famed Empire that and everyone was too dumb to realize how inferior your world was to mine. Rule number forty-three of the cutthroat world of corporate competition is: ‘if you can’t always come in first, eliminate the competition—then it won’t matter.’ ”

  “The cutthroat world of corporate competition—that is a game you like to play.”

  “It beats the hell out of jackassing around in the Famed Empire.”

  Ned Greenbriar fingered his beard one more time, his index finger twirling a few chin strands into a point, nodded, and silently left the two-bit “Trump with a Napoleon complex’s” office.

  “Well, that’s that,” the balding and pudgy MBA crowed. “I have to remember to have that stupid oaf Sparta handle all calls on why Ned Greenbriar is no longer connected to the Famed Empire. He wanted to run the realm, he can take the heat as well. A small price to pay and better than being unemployed. At least until the next round of budget cuts.”

  Percy Kobold was satisfied with the way his day had gone.

  He treated himself to sushi and saki at Pike’s Market and then retired to his mansion on Queen Anne hill.

  His soon-to-be ex-wife was nowhere to be seen, but feeling unexpectedly fatigued, he refrained from calling up some company for the evening and just retired to the satin sheets of his king-sized bed.

  “Percy! You pint-sized demi-troll! Get your green ass off that pallet and get to work! There’s piss pots to clean and sewers to scrub, and you’d better get on it or you’ll feel the sting of the lash again!”

  “Huh?” Percy replied, trying to wipe the sleep from his
eyes and wondering who had let Harvey the DI from Celebrity Fit Club into his home.

  Gee, why is my face so rough? And my hands look . . .

  SNAP! SNAP!

  “Yeowww!”

  “I warned you.”

  KICK! KICK!

  “Yeow! A bender has never felt like this!” or at least that’s what he thought/tried to say as it all came out “Gargle glut ga ga Glu” because that’s how demi-trolls sound, and Percy realized with great revulsion that he had been transformed into a demi-troll of the most loathsome variety, namely one from the Famed Empire Creature Catalog Volume One (1st edition).

  Moreover, he was no longer home in his soft and satin upscale bower of Seattle affluence, but rather in a dirty and dismal kitchen corner in some great stone manor.

  “Clean!” (KICK)

  . . . and so he did as he recalled what happened to demi-trolls that didn’t follow orders, hoping that his shrew of a wife would eventually come home and snap him out of this bad trip from some residual past overindulgence.

  Within two hours, every inch of his misshapen body hurt from his labors, but still he was forced to toil on in anticipation of some great gala that was to be held that night in honor of the return of some arch-mage or something.

  Once the manor hall began to fill up, he managed to find a hiding spot to catch some of what he thought was well-needed rest, but was soon widely roused by a booming voice he recognized.

  “O Great Mage of Greenbriar, what marvelous quests have you recently undertaken?”

  The grandly cloaked Master Wizard fingered his beard and chuckled.

  “Not much really,” he replied in gentle amusement. “I had been working on this little bit of divertissement, a game world actually. It was called The Cutthroat World of Corporate Competition.”

  “Sounds exciting.”

  “Not really. More depressing, actually, and filled with particularly unlikable souls. After a while I couldn’t imagine anyone actually enjoying playing it, so I just wiped the slate clean, and started over again.”

  “So what will be the entertainment that you promised if the game you were working on has come to naught?”