Gary hated playing paintball the one time he’d tried it, and these lizardlings weren’t using harmless, paint-filled pellets that would raise a welt at worst.
The combined group moved together, fighting the whole way.
On a separate Initiative roll, just before Gary’s turn, a gout of flame washed over Braeleigh, Zeeto, and the Sunspear Four’s rogue.
“Get that wizard!” Gary shouted, doing nothing on his own action but drawing his rapier and taking up a position to protect Caspian—the only one in the whole group who might benefit from Gary’s aid.
Braeleigh and the Sunspear ranger, Zeefus, loosed arrows in the direction of the fire-hurling lizardling. Gary didn’t see the creature go down, nor did he stop to check on its health. If the two archers missed, so be it. Everyone needed to keep on the move lest sheer numbers and minor injuries wear them down.
They traipsed through a tent city that was barely Gary’s height. Lizardling homes and shops became obstacles to topple in their wake to slow pursuit. Lacking foes to fend off, Gary hacked at support ropes and overturned wheelbarrows of mushrooms and grains behind them.
At the fore, the Sunspear Four carved a path toward the central pillar.
Had Gary made this stretch too hard for such low-level characters? In his mind, working together, they could have created a distant distraction in the city, then fought a much smaller force to gain the chimney shafts. This was the brute force method, taking on the majority of the city’s inhabitants.
Heck, if anyone in the party had learned any language with roots in the draconic vein, they might have negotiated a non-violent exit to the surface.
No. Those ways ran contrary to the Zane-and-Marty School of Role-Playing. If it was loot, they took it. If it was worth XP, they killed it. This whole adventure in Gelzhearth was supposed to have punished that approach. The Sunspear Four had been created because Gary wasn’t sure his players had it in them to think their way through a problem that had an obvious—if daunting—martial solution.
When they reached the pillar, Gellar and Corbin led the charge inside. A trio of lizardlings in smith’s aprons fled via the first-story windows.
Zeeto approached the forge to peer up at the vent shaft above it, then drew back quickly. “Holy phoenix-kabobs, that’s hot!”
Sira took a quenching bucket from the floor and dumped the contents into the red glowing coals. With a hiss, an instant, near-boiling fog filled the smithy.
“Um, Gary,” Braeleigh said between coughs, shielding her eyes from the burning steam. “You think, like, maybe picking one without a roaring fire in it might have been a better idea. You know, just thinking—”
But Gary wasn’t standing there to take the party’s abuse when his perfectly good plan hit a speed bump. Grabbing a shovel propped against the wall, he dug into the burning coals and flung them into a far corner of the smithy.
A lizardling-crafted wooden rack of hand tools smoldered from the errant coals, but Gary kept on shoveling. Beldrak set Miriasa’s frozen form aside and grabbed a shovel to help. The elf was frozen in time, not temperature, so the walk-in oven in which they found themselves posed no threat to her.
“We’ll guard the door,” Gellar promised.
Of course, he did. This was the escape clause. Let the slightly higher level throwaway NPCs bear all the risk. If Gary had been running things, the party would get half XP for this whole venture—everything since collapsing the deadfall at the bridge.
Then again, even if someone else was running his campaign per Gary’s rules, they’d already be getting an uneven split of the XP just because the shares were pro-rated for level. All of them were level 3 while the Sunspear Four ranged from 4 to 6.
Soon, enough of the embers had been cast aside that the stone edges of the forge were safe to stand atop. The fire in the corner of the room would be a long while in causing real trouble in the nearly all-stone chamber.
“We need someone to climb up with a rope,” Gary said. He dreaded the idea that he’d be among the climbers once someone secured a line high above. Distances that had seemed so paltry on the blue grid of lines on graph paper now seemed insane. It was over a hundred feet just inside the pillar, before the shaft cleared the height of the city proper.
Zeeto peered up the shaft. “There’s light coming in the sides. I think there are vents or something along the way. Shouldn’t be too bad a climb.”
“I’ll do it,” Shlan volunteered. They were the first words the Sunspear rogue had spoken, even allowing Gellar to handle his introduction. His voice was a gravelly whisper, the sort that delivered a message before slitting a throat.
“Stuff it, new guy,” Zeeto countered. “I’ve got climbing in my blood.”
That wasn’t, technically, a true statement. Halflings had a racial bonus to Dexterity but nothing specific about climbing. Nevertheless, Shlan allowed Zeeto the honor of going up first as the rest of them spliced sections of rope to make up the extra-long climb.
Meanwhile, Gellar and Corbin held the doorway against the lizardling army. At first they’d kept the door open to fight back but soon realized they just needed to keep the creatures at bay. Shutting the door left only the windows to defend. The thick oak door was dwarf-made, sturdier than the axe blades that thudded ineffectually against the outside of it.
Foot by foot, the rope disappeared up the shaft. With no knot-tying skills, climbing expertise, or combat prowess to boast of, Gary sang and strummed his lute.
“We didn’t set the fires. The forge was burning since the world’s been turning. We didn’t set the fires. No, we didn’t stoke them, but we recently broke them. Durrotek, Previn’s Mine, found the city just fine. Found the puzzle broken. Elven woman frozen. Visions. Wishin.’ Fountain’s not for fishin’…”
Inspire: +2 To Hit
Gellar chuckled from his defensive position at the window. “Is your bard always so clever with songs?”
A distant voice echoed from up the chimney shaft. “You like him? You’re welcome to keep him.”
23
Beldrak wasn’t the last one up the shaft. The final passenger, tied by the waist to the end of the rope, was the stasis-bound elf. Beldrak and Gellar pulled together on the rope, hauling her into the stone cupola at the top of the shaft that kept out the snow. As they’d hauled, the others had busied themselves digging out of the snowdrift that had closed off the exit to anything larger than a stream of warm, smoky air.
“Apologies, my lady,” Beldrak said, placing a hand over his heart. “Thy treatment of late hath been like unto a journeyman’s rucksack. I hope that in thine wisdom and mercy, thou may forgiveth mine transgression.”
Gellar looked at him dubiously. “Can this elf… hear you?”
“I knoweth not,” Beldrak said. “Until such time the enigmatic waters clear, I shall showeth every courtesy to this lady.”
Gary could have answered that. Miriasa was a piece of furniture. But he was too busy rubbing sore arm muscles from a climb he regretted every putting into the adventure to correct the paladin. Besides, it was yet another subject on which he didn’t wish to admit inside knowledge.
There was a faint murmuring from inside Gary’s pack. He’d nearly forgotten the wizard’s skull inside it.
“Be right back,” Gary said. “Gotta take a leak.”
Zeeto pointed down the shaft. “What’s wrong with saying a wet goodbye to our reptilian hosts? At least you won’t freeze your Shlan off.”
Gary ignored the halfling and squeezed out the opening that Braeleigh and Corbin had dug in the snowdrift on the cupola’s western side. The young fighter had been clearly smitten with the elven ranger, even going so far as offering to carry Caspian up the shaft—though Braeleigh had declined. All it had taken was for her to bat her eyes and bite her lip, and Corbin had leapt at the chance to help her dig.
The mountain air was biting, and if Gary had heard nature’s call, he’d have risked an unfortunate case of frostbite to answer it. Instead, he dug in h
is pack until he located the skull of Randal Vintner and extracted it.
“Ah, so much better,” the skull said with an affected sigh.
“You couldn’t have been suffocating down there,” Gary replied.
The skull quivered in his hand. “In that knapsack, no. But in those infernal mines, my soul was bereft of vital force. Not a suffocation of air but of some ethereal quintessence vital to sanity and peace of mind. I clung as long as I could, and I hope that I can last the final leg of this overlong journey to the afterlife.”
Gary wagged a finger at the skull, careful to keep out of reach of the teeth in case they had ideas of nipping at him. “We have a deal. I get you properly interred. You deliver a message to the gods that I want an audience.”
“You could just kill yourself,” Randal suggested so deadpan that Gary might have believed the ghostly wizard meant it.
“Then I wouldn’t need you, now would I?” He cocked his arm as if to pitch the skull down the mountainside.
“No! Wait! I’m good. I’ll be good. Just tell me, what message and which god.”
“I don’t care which god, frankly,” Gary said. “Preferably one not known for killing or destruction but take what you can get. As for the message? Simple. Gary Burns wants to talk to them.”
A chuckle emanated from the skull. “Gary Burns? Why would Gary Burns want to talk to the gods? And if he did, he could just command them into his presence or whisk them there himself.”
Icy hands gripped Gary’s heart, colder than the mountain air, stronger than the stone. “You’ve heard of Gary Burns?”
“Few have, I imagine,” Randal Vintner said primly. “But I have studied the origins of the cosmos. I was a wizard of some renown and considerable breadth of knowledge. And I know if you plan to pretend you’re the creator of the universe, demanding things of the gods is liable to get you smited.”
Gary could hardly breathe. He existed in this world—at least in its mythology. That had never been his intention, but neither was it untrue or completely implausible. He’d created a world where magic was real, where ancient beings of unfathomable intellect and power ruled. Why, within that context, would it be so implausible that someone would figure out who had created it all?
Stuffing the skull back deep in his pack, he muttered a warning to it through the leather. “Just deliver the message. I’ll deal with whoever answers.”
24
The hike back to Durrotek was blessedly quiet. A single encounter with a pair of hungry frost wolves hardly bore mentioning. The dwarves who’d created the city had also carved paths through the mountains’ lower reaches, leaving a network of walkable roads for maintenance of their vents.
Trekking down the winding snow-covered trail left Gary time aplenty to collect his thoughts. Howling winds limited all other conversations to a shout, and not even Zeeto felt his opinions so strongly to bellow them at the top of his lungs. And time was an ally Gary welcomed since the fighting had leveled him up again.
Presumably, everyone else in the party had leveled as well, but no one was discussing XP or the Paths of Power while the Sunspear Four was around.
Player Name: Gary Burns Character Name: Gary Burns
Level/Path: Bard 1,2,3B XP: 4,026/4,000 Race: Unknown
STR: 7 DEX: 9 CON: 8 INT: 18 WIS: 17 CHA: 17
To Hit: +1 Weapon: Rapier (1d6-2) , Hair Splitter (1d8+1)
Armor Rating: 11 Armor: Leather (+2)
Path Powers: Inspire (+2), Lullaby, Fascinate
Skills: Persuade (+6), Music (+6), Study/Search (+7)
Tricks: Fast Talk
Profession: Cook (+1)
With an even numbered total level coming up, Gary was eligible for another stat boost. Leaning into Charisma felt like the right thing to do as a power gamer, but taking the edge off his abysmal Strength or Dexterity scores was so tempting.
What would it be like, Gary mused, not to be a liability in combat, a weakling klutz whom everyone rushed to protect out of some ingrained sense of camaraderie that wouldn’t exist if not for the game setting? Could he be a real hero? Beldrak and Braeleigh were so raw, yet their potential for heroism shone so clearly. Sira and Zeeto might not have been cut from that cloth, but neither were they as useless as Gary. His only real contributions had been slipping the party insider information.
There was also the matter of a choice along the Path of Music. The fourth ring was still completely available to him, but planning ahead, his choice could affect access to the fifth ring, which was wide enough that choice 4A couldn’t reach 5C, nor could 4B reach 5A.
The A choice on the fourth ring of the Path of Music was Historian.
Historian: Intelligence test to identify historical objects, events, and architecture 20-200 years old.
His other option was Gossip.
Gossip: Charisma or Wisdom test to identify relationships, glean truth from rumors, and know events from the past twenty years.
The problem was that Gary had both those abilities by default. There was nothing of consequence that he hadn’t written into the campaign himself. At best, the ability he picked would serve as an easy reminder if he forgot something. Not the most compelling of selections.
A lurking option tugged at Gary’s collar, perched on his shoulder like the miniature devil representing his conscience’s adversary.
Taking Path of Music Option B at level 3 had left him directly adjacent to the Path of Arcana. He could advance laterally to Path of Arcane 3A, picking up Spell Power +1 and a Lesser Arcane Spell.
There were a million reasons not to go that route. Not the least of which was the persecution of arcane spellcasters in the kingdom of Kovia. Even if he convinced his superstitious fellow party members that he was on their side, the populace at large would still be a danger to him.
And given their reaction to Randal Vintner, Beldrak, Sira, and Zeeto weren’t ready to have a mage in the group. Braeleigh, having grown up in an era before the vilification of wizards had gripped the cowards’ hearts of the kingdom and with a cultural grounding in elven mysticism, seemed likely to accept him.
The other pitfall was that without starting at 1 on the Path of Arcana, Gary wouldn’t learn the arcane language. Of course, he hadn’t paid any points at character creation to read dwarven, either, but that hadn’t stopped him. Still, the Path of Arcana was a dicey prospect for skipping around.
Biting the bullet, Gary picked Historian, a point in Charisma, and topping up the same 5 skills he’d been maintaining all along.
Player Name: Gary Burns Character Name: Gary Burns
Level/Path: Bard 1,2,3B, 4A XP: 4,026/8,000 Race: Unknown
STR: 7 DEX: 9 CON: 8 INT: 18 WIS: 17 CHA: 18
To Hit: +2 Weapon: Rapier (1d6-2) , Hair Splitter (1d8+1)
Armor Rating: 11 Armor: Leather (+2)
Path Powers: Inspire (+2), Lullaby, Fascinate, Historian
Skills: Persuade (+8), Music (+8), Study/Search (+8)
Tricks: Fast Talk
Profession: Cook (+1)
All the XP he’d gotten thus far, and he’d have to double it before he’d level again. In that moment, Gary wondered whether his decision to make the XP thresholds exponential through level 10 was going to come back to bite him in the ass.
By the time Gary had squared himself away as a level 4 bard, the two adventuring parties were nearing the gates of Durrotek. It was time to part ways. The Sunspear Four left to follow their own adventures. For Gary and his unnamed troupe, it was time to take a respite from their wilderness foray and enjoy the comforts of city living.
While it lasted.
25
Durrotek had changed in the brief span of days that Gary and his friends had been gone. There were more people in the streets, but many were loading wagons with household goods and supplies for a long journey. Others were out in the brisk autumn air on scaffolds, enacting repairs on cracked masonry or rebuilding caved-in roofs.
“Pray tell, what hath befallen this fair city?” Beldrak aske
d, approaching a carpenter preparing to scale a scaffold with a fresh armload of planks for a residential roof. Though he carried Miriasa still, the elf woman was wrapped in a blanket tied on with ropes to the point where his bundle could have been nearly anything.
The carpenter paused to size up Beldrak and the others. “You just come from up north or something?” When Beldrak nodded his reply, the man shrugged. “Don’t know how you could’a missed it, even out in nowhere’s back alley. Earthquake. Big sucker too. Durrotek’s built on solid bedrock, but that don’t mean she can’t get banged up. Some folks are leaking a yellow trail all the way down to Ord Margid. Rest of us are just putting her back together.”
Gary cast a sidelong glance at Zeeto who had carefully averted his gaze from the carpenter and his fellow workers.
“Oh,” Braeleigh said. “That must have been right when—ow!”
Zeeto had kicked her in the shin. “Yeah, right about when ow, all right. C’mon. I’ll buy you a drink.” He headed off in the direction of The Uncommon Room.
Braeleigh followed, Caspian tagging along at her heels, looking bigger than ever. She wagged a finger at the halfling. “OK. But you know the rules.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Zeeto grumbled. Braeleigh had made it clear that there was to be no funny business with any of them, and that getting her drunk was cheating and liable to result in a wolf mauling once she sobered up.
“Everyone meet at the Sleepy Inn for dinnertime,” Sira called after them. “Take care of any personal business before then.”
“Who gets to tell Arguile we didn’t get his payment?” Gary asked, deciding it better to kick the hornet’s nest himself and let someone else deal with the angry insects.
Homebrew (Metagamer Chronicles Book 1) Page 13