Homebrew

by Xavier P. Hunter

  d20: 8 + (To Hit +1) + (Strength -2) = 7

  That wasn’t enough to hit an average pedestrian on a city street, let alone an official monster with its own entry in Gary Burns’s three-ring binder of campaign info.

  He was feeling woozy. It was all psychosomatic, of course. As long as he had hit points left, the blood oozing from his legs and abdomen was all for show. The moleants weren’t venomous. He’d have noticed the roll to resist the poison.

  Behind him, carapaces cracked. Pained, animal shrieks heralded the death of each moleant as Gary’s companions picked them off one by one.

  Gary got another chance to exact revenge.

  d20: 16 + (To Hit +1) + (Strength -2) = 15

  The tip of his rapier skidded off the thick shell beneath the moleant’s fur. The pair of creatures bit back. Gary twisted aside to avoid one, contorting like a failed contestant on a dance show’s open casting episode. The other sank its pincers into him.

  Damage Taken: 5 (sharp)

  Gary swooned. The dim light from Sira’s mace stopped dancing and faded to black.

  A moment later, Kim was kneeling above him. Her hand was inside his shirt, palm so warm against his flesh it nearly burned.

  He put up a hand to rub his temples. “I just had the weirdest dream.” There he’d been, right in his own campaign world. Everyone was cosplayed to the nines, completely in character. It had been so vivid he’d felt the mandibles of a moleant tearing into his flesh.

  As he tried to rise, Kim forced him back down with businesslike efficiency. “Stay down until I’m done.” Her voice lowered to a murmur. “Sevius, cast pity on this poor unworthy fool who stood beside your servant in battle. Close his wounds that he might serve again.”

  The warmth of Kim’s hand redoubled, spreading through Gary’s entire body like someone had filled his veins with fresh-brewed coffee. He snapped upright to find himself sitting in a dingy mine tunnel with his friends gathered around. The only light came from the head of a bloody mace lying at Kim’s side.

  No. Not Kim. Sira. This was still the dream world. Somehow, Gary’s brain had attempted a reset and failed to escape the imaginary realm.

  Then he remembered the moleants in a panic.

  “Rest at ease, friend,” Beldrak said, first laying a comforting hand on Gary’s shoulder, then offering the other to hoist him to his feet. “These fell beasts are no more. Thine efforts hath not been in vain.”

  “Yeah,” Zeeto said. “You can even see where you clobbered one—for a pretty loose definition of clobber.”

  “I liked your song,” Braeleigh told him. “I think it did better for not having the lute.”

  Gary took a deep breath to help get his bearings. He was still in Pellar. This was still the tunnel complex that connected Previn’s Mine to the abandoned dwarven city of—

  Quickly, Gary forced back the thought. He couldn’t afford to give away clues that might spoil the surprises yet to come. Let them discover the adventure without forewarning.

  “Well,” Gary said. “I’ll keep that in mind. There’s an instrument from back home that I’m a lot better with. The lute’s new to me.”

  “We should keep moving,” Sira said, interrupting. “We’ve got food for the trip back to Durrotek, and every moment we waste finding our way back to the surface cuts into our reserves.”

  Gary was tempted to suggest not mentioning hunger. Depending how realistic this world decided to be, running out of rations might be one of those things lost in the shuffle of travel distance charts, wilderness survival checks, and harrowing escapes. It wouldn’t have been unprecedented for a band of adventurers under Gary’s rule systems going days at a time without food because no one brought up the subject of keeping track.

  With everyone watching him for signs of readiness to travel, Gary cleared his throat. “I’m game. Which way should we go?”

  Zeeto kicked a thumbnail-sized pebble down the tunnel. It rolled and clattered into the darkness. He shrugged. “Follow the grade. Downward.”

  13

  “Anyone get a count on those moleants?” Gary asked. He was still trying to manually keep tabs on campaign info.

  Player Name: Gary Burns Character Name: Gary Burns

  Level/Path: Bard 2 XP: 1,453/2,000 Race: Unknown

  STR: 7 DEX: 9 CON: 8 INT: 18 WIS: 12 CHA: 17

  To Hit: +1 Weapon: Rapier (1d6-2)

  Armor Rating: 11 Armor: Leather (+2)

  Path Powers: Inspire (+2), Lullaby

  Skills: Persuade (+5), Music (+5), Study/Search (+5)

  Profession: Cook (+1)

  “Eight,” Braeleigh reported. “One for every one of their creepy little legs. It’s like that rhyme. I met a moleant with eight legs. Each leg carrying eight eggs. Every egg hatched—”

  “Got it,” Gary said brusquely. “Thanks.” He preferred the vile little beasties when reduced to a statistics block.

  Crunching numbers, at eighty XP apiece divided five ways, that left Gary with fifty unexplained XP. Somehow, somewhere, and for reasons unknown, someone had doled out bonus XP to him somewhere along the lines.

  Was it for a clever song? Had it been for mustering the bravery to draw his sword and flail around like a drunk at a pool hall? Hard to say. It could have been for coaxing the party to accept Previn’s offer of a peek down the mine shaft or delaying them long enough to encounter Kurgath. Game masters appreciated a player who could keep a team on course.

  More importantly, who was giving the XP? The very concept of adjudicated experience gain implied an adjudicator. Killing monsters and completing quests was all well and good, but Gary wanted to know who was running this universe if it wasn’t him.

  The obvious answer would have been Zane. He was the only one not present.

  But that made no sense either. Zane was a player in this campaign, and this whole thing was cooped up in Gary’s skull, probably taking place in hospice care after someone drugged him and his friends with magic eight-ball gas bought on eBay.

  “Listen,” Braeleigh said, cupping a hand to her tapered ear. “Can you hear it?”

  d20: 15 + (Perception +1) + (Elven Assist +2) = 18

  They all stopped and quieted their gear. There was indeed a faint whoosh like a distant air vent. “Wind,” Gary reported. “There’s air flow down here.”

  “We must be close to the point where Previn said we’d break into the dwarven excavation,” Sira reasoned. At her invocation of her deity, the light spell on her mace renewed.

  There was a minor cave-in where a hint of a whistle called attention to the passage of wind through the rubble. A map in Gary’s head told him exactly the spot they had come to.

  “Lendeth what aid thou canst,” Beldrak said as he slid away his sword and picked up the nearest basketball-sized boulder. “Yonder humorous vapors speak of open skies not but far from here.”

  Braeleigh scrunched her nose. “Air, yes. Fresh… not so much. Don’t get too excited.” Nevertheless, she lifted a smaller rock and shifted it aside.

  Sira joined in as well, though Zeeto hung back. The halfling cast a raised eyebrow in Gary’s direction. The implication was clear. Some of these rocks were half Zeeto’s size. What was Gary’s excuse?

  With a sigh, Gary climbed the shallow run-out of the underground rockslide and selected an imposing specimen of stone.

  d20: 9 + (STR -2) + (Not Really Trying -2) = 5

  With a grunt of feigned effort, Gary managed to shift the rock slightly but not dislodge or lift it.

  “I’ve seen snakes with bigger arms than yours,” Zeeto commented. “Honest to Denee snakes.”

  “Then help him,” Sira snapped. “Between the two of you, you ought to be able to scrape together a man.”

  Ouch. That bit deep.

  As Zeeto grudgingly sauntered over to lend him a hand, Gary started up a work song.

  “You haul sixteen stones, and what do you get? Another level lower and deeper yet. Treasure, don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go. I’m still trapped be
hind half a mile of stone.”

  Inspire: +2 To Strength Checks

  He made up three more verses before looping back around to start over. The second go round, Braeleigh joined in, fumbling through the words but trying. By the third time through the song, everyone but Sira was singing it.

  “I can fit through!” Zeeto exclaimed, though he declined to suggest scouting ahead on his own. Even if he took little Caspian with him, they’d have been cut off from the support of the rest of the party.

  Soon enough, the gap had been widened to the point where even Beldrak’s broad, armored shoulders could fit through. The paladin came through last, with Gary and Braeleigh taking an arm apiece to haul him past the narrowest point.

  “This certainly looks different,” Sira said, holding her lighted mace high. “Previn and his goons didn’t do this work.”

  Indeed, they hadn’t. Gary could have expounded on the history of the place. The dwarves had called it Gelzhearth, and it had been abandoned since the war against the orcs some eighty years past, thought lost, and forgotten by humans.

  “Keep a sharp eye,” Gary warned. “This isn’t some fly-by-night operation down here. I think we just cleared a deadfall trap sprung long ago.” Previn’s mine had expanded, but it had begun its life as back door dug by orcish sappers to surprise the dwarves.

  Gary’s party was in a mine shaft tunnel, but the quality of the excavation was worlds better than the haphazard network of sloppily chopped holes the orcs and humans had bored. The floors were smooth enough to shoot pool on, if not for the gradual slope. Walls came with a thigh-high lip with an upturned edge—a dwarf-height handrail—carved straight into the stone. When they came to the first four-way intersection, the side passages met at right angles an architect would have envied.

  Braeleigh scouted side passages with Caspian, neither fearing the darkness—perhaps unwisely. But neither encountered anything but disused mining equipment and empty shafts.

  Farther ahead, there was a series of holes set into the wall with bent and rusted spikes sticking out. Another trap, long since sprung and left to decay.

  “Verily, these beardsmen did defend this mine against those who might despoil it,” Beldrak said as he stepped gingerly around the tips of the rusty spikes.

  Gary had never written up rules for tetanus, but it never hurt to play it safe.

  A nagging idea tugged at the sleeve of Gary’s brain. He knew the layout of the mines, but specifics had been buffed from his memory like scuff marks from a car’s paint job. But one notion stuck hard and stayed stuck.

  There were unsprung traps down here.

  The question was: where?

  Zeeto yelped. His scream trailed off, followed shortly by a thud.

  Everyone rushed forward to the edge of the pit trap he’d sprung. The halfling lay beside more rusted steel spikes. One such implement had skewered an earlier adventurer, whose rag-clad skeleton sat supported on one spike.

  “I’m alive,” Zeeto reported, calling up from the bottom of the pit. “Built for thicker bodies than this one.” He patted his gut. “Glad I’m not some oversized, beer-guzzling human.”

  Gary smirked. Zeeto might not have been, but that was an apt description for Marty.

  “Who’s got rope?” Sira asked. “I swear someone packed rope.”

  A ghostly form wrapped itself around the skeletal remains. “I believe the servant of Makoy appears to be carrying a coil,” the ghost stated with prim, educated diction.

  Zeeto shrieked like a cartoon character afraid of mice. The humans above winced. Braeleigh covered her ears. Caspian howled. “Get me out of here!” the halfling shouted. “I don’t want to be ghost-kibble!”

  “I do not eat the living. Neither do I wish you any harm, small sir,” the ghost said.

  “Who are you?” Gary asked.

  “In life, I was known as Randal Vintner, a wizard of no small renown, at least locally.”

  Zeeto shrieked again. “Help! It’s a wizard! I don’t want to be a six-legged spider centaur or a pile of ash or a bowl of sexy, sexy halfling stew!”

  “Good gracious!” the ghostly wizard scoffed. “Wherever do you young people get these notions stuffed in your heads?”

  “Wizards are evil,” Sira reasoned. “And you’re a dead one.” She took her holy symbol in hand. “Now release the halfling and begone!”

  “Begone?” Randal Vintner echoed sadly. “Ah, if only. I’ve been trapped down this miserable pit with only my own bones for company for longer than I dare guess. What year is it up there?”

  “’Tis the Year of the Gods 954,” Beldrak replied. Gary was impressed that any of his players knew the campaign’s calendar. Then again, none of them had broken character yet. Anyone who believed they belonged in the world should have known it.

  The ghost, if possible, went whiter. “Egad! I’ve been here seventy-nine years. And here I’d moped about it possibly being twenty.”

  Gary turned to Beldrak. “Can you just throw down the rope? The ghost clearly isn’t going to do anything. He’s stuck there.”

  “Please don’t leave me!” Randal pleaded as the loose end of the coil pooled beside Zeeto. The halfling worked at making a harness, showing off an impressive command of knot-tying.

  “We’re not hauling around a pile of bones,” Sira insisted. “Especially not wizard bones.”

  “Just the skull?” Randal asked. “Pretty please. Lay it to rest on consecrated grounds. I was a devout follower of Vynchee. If he’s fallen from favor, as your words imply, perhaps the clerics of Sevius might take pity on a poor, arcane foot soldier of the orc wars.”

  Sira quickly covered her holy symbol as if hearing Sevius’s name on Randal Vintner’s lips might offend it or the way a mother might cover her young son’s eyes at the sight of a naked woman.

  Gary studied his companions. None of them looked ready to step up. There was no way he could wake up in the real world and pretend he was ever going to be a heavy metal rock star if he was afraid of a stupid skull. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

  “Are you mad?” Sira demanded.

  “I ain’t bringing it up,” Zeeto said. “You wanna chauffeur this Yorick-mobile, that’s all on you.”

  Gary narrowed his eyes at the halfling. Marty was the closest to breaking free and admitting to being from Earth. No one else should have understood half of what he said. There was no such thing as a chauffeur in Pellar, and Yorick was straight out of Hamlet. Katie might have decided that French was elvish, but Zeeto still sounded like Marty—albeit a high-pitched version.

  As the halfling rappelled up the side of the pit wall, Gary leaned over to haul him over the lip. Once on the same level as the rest of them, Gary took the rope harness from Zeeto and squirmed into it. Despite a two-foot difference in height, the halfling was tubby enough that they wore the same improvised rope harness size.

  “Lower me?” Gary asked.

  Beldrak inclined his head. “’Tis a mission of mercy. Should yonder wizard prove the darkest blackguard in his mortal days, he hath not but pity left to pillage from us, and I say let him pillage.”

  Sira’s hand was glowing golden, healing the falling damage Zeeto took, as Gary began his descent.

  d20: 5 + (Athletics -2) + (Beldrak’s Doing All the Work +18) = 21

  It was somehow comforting—if not healthy for his self-esteem—to know that Beldrak was basically guaranteeing Gary couldn’t screw this up. He walked down the side of the pit clutching the rope white-knuckled.

  His fingers didn’t know what that roll meant.

  Carefully edging around the spikes at the bottom, Gary made his way over to the wizard’s corpse.

  “Oh, thank you, kind sir,” the wizard said, ghostly hands clasped in supplication. “Might I know your name, that I might thank you properly?”

  “Don’t tell him, Gary!” Zeeto shouted down.

  There was a fleshy smack as an unseen someone slapped the halfling.

  What could the wizard do with his name, an
yway? Though there was considerable room for creative spell development built into the campaign rules, there was none that gave a wizard power over you for knowing your name.

  Plus, once they got out of this underground maze, Gary was sending Randal Vintner packing straight off to the gods.

  The gods…

  A subversive notion entered Gary’s head. As he worked to pop the skull free of the sinews clinging to the spine, he lowered his voice so that only the ghost could hear him. “My payment for services rendered is this: when you get to the next life, tell the gods that Gary Burns wants a word with them. Got it?”

  The ghost’s reply was fainter than a whisper. “Yes. I acquiesce to your condition.”

  d20: 14 + (Perception +1) + (Vaguely Remember Writing This Part +8) = 23

  “That’s my payment,” Gary said. Then a dust-encrusted leather-bound book caught his eye. Randal Vintner’s book of spells. “That and this book.”

  Tucking it away alongside the skull, Gary tugged the rope. “OK. Haul me back up.”

  Acquired Randal Vintner’s Skull: Quest Item

  Acquired Randal Vintner’s Spellbook: Contents Unknown

  14

  The search resumed once Gary was back up with the skull of Randal Vintner. Tucked away near the top of Gary’s backpack, the dead wizard had the good sense to keep quiet.

  Down in the depths of the Dwarfcrown Mountains, beneath a peak that had no human name, the party picked over the bones of a dead dwarven work site. Shaft after shaft, they split up and searched, growing weary with caution after hours of finding no opposition.

  It also didn’t hurt that they’d picked up a scattering of pebble-sized gemstones, mainly rubies. Gary could well imagine that only Beldrak had reported every stone he found.