Untitled D&D Group Story; Part 4 (Patreon)

Reminder, these will all be bundled into an Epub/PDF release at the end of the week.

Also, I'm open to suggestions about the title. Usually I'm pretty good at coming up with them, but nothing catchy is hitting me so I could use some extra inspiration.

------

Chapter 9

I didn’t make the actual trip too difficult for the girls - they’d been able to rest up at the town, but I wanted to make sure their first session had a good variety of stuff going on. And more importantly, I wanted them to have a sense of accomplishment coming out of the first session and level up from one to two. Low-level gameplay was fun, but it was a little more deadly for some characters than others. Once they got into the level 3 or 4 range I wasn’t risking a character like Renee getting destroyed by just a couple of bad rolls.

The girls, and their guide Fergus, headed out of town and into the hinterland hills where the farmers and shepherds had mostly abandoned their homes. They ended up arriving at one of those farmsteads as night was starting to close in, about a day's travel from the village, and decided to try and set a trap for the wolves. Using the empty barn, they locked up one of the donkeys with Fergus inside and then tied up the other donkey outside in the yard. There was an argument among them about whether it was right or wrong to use the donkey as bait, but in the end, none of them wanted to be the bait and they promised each other their first priority would be saving ‘Phil.’

I thought it wasn’t a great idea to name a donkey they were using for bait, but then I might have been a bit jaded. Rhia’s father Dan had once played a Druid who specialised in summoning animals and the number of cows that had been sent to their doom in deadly dungeons and dragon caves, not to mention the one used as a distraction in the Unholy Halls of Despair, had reached absurd levels.

Still, they came up with a half-decent plan so I wasn’t about to punish them. They rolled Perception checks, and within a couple hours of sunset, Jade - the most sharp-eyed of the bunch - spotted the prowling wolves as they slowly made their way through the abandoned fields.

Of course, the girls then had to decide when they would spring their trap. Too early and the wolves could just run off. Too late and Phil the Donkey was a tasty snack.

It was a tense few minutes in-game as I described the hunting and stalking of the wolves, and the girls eventually sprang their trap moments before I was going to have the first wolves dart in try try and hamstring Phil. They had the element of surprise, having watched from up in the barn hay loft, and Renee was able to cast her big Magic Missile spell from above while Jade and Olivia slid down ropes they had tied off and positioned for their attack.

The fight was quick but dangerous. There were four wolves in the pack and they each paired off to fight Jade and Olivia. They each ended up needing to fight back to their feet after the biting of the wolves tripped them up, but Renee was crucial in putting the wolves down before the hand-to-hand fighters got taken down again. By the time the fight ended, with the last wolf fleeing, both Olivia and Jade had suffered some bites. It was just when Olivia was healing Jade again with her Lay on Hands spell that they heard the surviving wolf let out a long howl.

And that howl was answered, louder but far off, by another howl.

“Fuuuuck,” Elyse said.

“OK, we need to decide what we’re going to do,” Tori said. “Cause it sounds like whatever that was is coming for us, and it’s probably not going to be happy. Rhia, Olivia is still hurt, right?”

“I mean, I should be OK… probably,” Rhia said, wincing a little but sounding hopeful.

“Do we try to do the same thing as before?” Elyse asked. “I mean, I didn’t think we’d be fighting something else that’s big. I already used my two big spell slots, so I just have my little spells.”

Rhia looked at me. “Do we think that thing is coming for us, or was just answering the howl?” she asked.

“Do you speak Wolf?” I asked.

She gave me a deadpan look.

“Well, I guess you’re not sure,” I said with a little smirk.

“Well… are we going to use Phil as bait again?” Tori asked. “Or should we swap him out for Seymor? I think it’s only fair, Phil already played bait once.”

“OK, if that thing is coming here, I doubt we need bait,” Rhia said. “It’ll smell the dead wolves.”

“But if it’s smart it might stay away because of the dead wolves,” Elyse pointed out. “Should we hide them?”

The girls got to work, pulling the three wolf bodies into the barn and then doing their best to cover up the blood with dirt so it wasn’t as obvious. Then they decided that Phil had been through enough, and they didn’t want to risk Seymour (who I pieced together was the other donkey). They ended up getting back into their ambush position, watching from the hay loft of the barn, and since Olivia was still injured she tried to get in a short rest.

I had them roll perception checks for every twenty minutes in-game as they tried to stay vigilant, while I rolled behind the screen for when ‘the beast’ would show up.

It was right at the hour mark that I rolled high enough, which was just enough time for Olivia to have gotten her rest so I allowed her to use some natural healing to recover her lost hitpoints.

She was going to need them.

The creature that came out of the woods and started padding across the fields wasn’t trying to be stealthy. It may not have been ‘as big as a bull’ but it was definitely a little bigger than one of their donkeys, and that was big for a canine. They couldn’t tell it was a wolf-shaped creature at first though. I described how the first thing they noticed was its golden eyes as the moonlight glinted off of them, and then they noticed that a strange yellow-orange mist of energy seemed to follow in its wake as it moved.

The creature headed straight for the farmstead, its big and shaggy form still agile and almost sinuous in its movements. When it got closer, just outside the yard where the fight had happened, it stopped and sniffed the air.

Then it growled, its eyes turning an angry red, and that growl the girls could feel deep in their bones. And it looked right at them up in the hayloft.

The fight, if the girls hadn’t positioned themselves the way they did, could very well have been deadly for the three of them. I’d planned the fight with six characters in mind, and the action economy of the game was a pretty powerful factor in what made an easy or hard fight. When the girls came up with their plan I’d decided not to tweak the encounter.

The wolf-creature, a modified Warg, had the size that it was able to jump up and bite at them at the edge of the hayloft hatchway. The battle went back and forth, Jade almost getting pulled over the edge and into the yard when she got caught - if the girls backed off too much, the warg could try and scramble up into the hay loft, but if they stayed too far forward it could yank them out and that would be a disaster.

In the end, with all three of the girls wounded, the donkeys screaming in a panic as Fergus tried to keep them calm, and the warg looking pretty hurt by the burns and cuts along its face, shoulders and forelegs, Olivia threw caution to the wind and jumped out of the hay loft, coming down right on top of the warg and driving her blade deep into it’s back.

The warg let out an immense, ear-shattering death howl - more powerful than it ever should have been able to - before it died.

The mop-up was fairly quick, we’d been playing for almost four hours and I didn’t want to go much longer than that so I didn’t draw it out afterwards. The girls were able to rest after the battles, and in the morning Fergus set to work skinning the wolf pelts - they were damaged, but in his words, ‘Salvageable.’ The warg pelt in particular would make a fine sail despite the sword wound in the back purely due to its size.

As I described the girls starting to head back to the village, their spoils hung on the back of the donkeys, I could tell that Rhia and Tori both assumed the session was over.

It was, almost. But not quite.

“As you come over the final hill, the sun is setting over the village, and all seems at peace,” I said. “But as you get closer, you see even less of the townsfolk than you did on your first visit to the town. And as you reach the centre of the village square you see three things. The first is that the Town Hall front door has been sundered open and hangs off its hinges. The second is that the Inn windows and doors are missing, and there are heavy scorch marks around each opening, stretching up the sides of the walls as if there had been a fire.”

“Oh, no,” Jade said.

“Oh, fuck,” Olivia cursed.

“But what’s the third thing?” Elyse asked, obviously feeling nervous.

I’d had options of how this would happen. My original plan had involved the Headswoman they’d gotten along with. But then they’d given me a juicier target.

“Dragged into the centre of the village square is a big apple tree,” I said. “Cut down with haphazard axe strikes that must have taken an hour or more to accomplish. Its branches are broken and hanging limp where they haven’t snapped off completely from its collapse. And carved into the trunk is a circle with the vague shape of a howling hound, as if up at the moon rising above you.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Tori shouted, actually throwing the folder with her character sheet in the air.

“No! Fuck, no!” Elyse said, her eyes actually brimming with tears.

“We’ll find them,” Rhia said, gritting her teeth hard as she held onto the edge of the table so hard I could see her knuckles turned white. “We’ll fucking find them, and we’ll fucking end them.”

“And that’s where we’ll end the session,” I said.

Chapter 10

There were complaints, but they were the kind of complaints that I was used to after a particularly juicy emotional cliffhanger. I honestly felt like I’d outdone myself - if I wasn’t sure that Rhia would be sharing the story of the game with her parents, I would have held onto that first session to use with my regular group in the future.

Tori was a bundle of energy afterwards, already trying to come up with schemes of how they could track down the bandits who wore the symbol they’d found. Elyse had the exact reaction I hoped for, which was that her emotions gave way to energy as well as she fed off of the others and realised that, first, this was a tragedy in game and not in real life - in real life they had a week to talk it out and plan what they were going to do, and soon she was caught up in rehashing the fight with the warg.

I ended up finishing putting away my DMing gear in its various cubbies in the game room before they’d even stood up from the table, and it was only when Rhia’s stomach grumbled that they realised we were well into the evening.

“The good news,” I said as they started to clean up their stuff, “Is that once you have your long rest in the village, you’ll have levelled up! Rhia, I know you know what you’re doing. Tori, are you good with levelling and helping Elyse out with that during the week?”

“Sure, Shane,” the Indian girl said with a grin, then turned to Elyse. “You’re going to get more hit points, and another spell slot, plus some other stuff,” she said. “The trade-off is that Shane gets to throw harder monsters at us, too.”

“There’s harder than that giant magic wolf?” Elyse asked in surprise.

“Way harder,” Rhia chuckled, looping her arm through Elyse’s and pulling her from the room. “Is it OK if we get changed before we go, Shane?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said, waving them towards the bathroom and my back bedroom.

The girls changed, and when they came back out they were in their regular outfits from when they’d arrived. I was struck again at how… well, how coed all three of them were. They very much fit the part of ‘pretty and modern college student’ despite having varied styles and looks.

Rhia was the first one to hug me, thanking me for the game, which wasn’t strange at all. But then I found myself getting pulled down into a hug by Tori.

“Thank you so much for running the game for us,” she said. “Even if we scared off the boys. It’s so good to play again and you’re awesome at being a Dungeon Master.”

“You’re very welcome,” I said as I hugged her back lightly, one-armed. I wasn’t shy about hugs usually, but this was the first time I’d met her. And there was no avoiding the fact that she was a full hugger - I was very aware of her curves as she squeezed me tight for a moment.

“Thanks for helping me learn the game,” Elyse said, stepping forward and hugging me as well, squeezing me even tighter than Tori and even pressing her cheek to my chest. “Seriously, this was so much fun and I can’t wait to play again.” She pulled away, grinning, and then slapped a hand on my chest playfully. “Even if you’re a fucking mean bastard for killing a pretty tree!”

I laughed, having hugged her back the same way I had Tori. “Say that back to yourself and consider how mean I really am, or if we’re all just really good at playing imagination.”

She smirked and rolled her eyes. “OK, when you put it like that, maybe I’m overreacting.”

“Fuck no,” Rhia said. “He did that shit on purpose. He is a mean bastard.”

“That’s me, DM Meany Pants,” I chuckled.

Tori and Elyse gave me little waves, grabbing their backpacks and heading out the door, but Rhia said that she needed to talk to me about something quickly and asked them to wait a second, then she closed the door.

“What’s up, Snorey?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’re actually mad about the tree.”

“No,” she said, “Well, yes, I am, but I know that’s the game. I just…” She trailed off and chewed the inside of her cheek for a second as she looked at me. Usually, I could generally tell what was going on in her head, but this time I wasn’t sure what was going to come out of her mouth.

“Rhiannon, just spit it out,” I said. “I promise not to judge, unless you’ve decided to dedicate yourself to being a Mime. Then I will judge you harshly.”

She rolled her eyes at the joke that had gone around my circle of friends for a couple of decades. Then she took a breath and let it out, looking at me seriously. She was always pretty, her youthful features even making it tough to take her seriously sometimes, but in that moment I could tell that what she wanted to say was something she meant. “That was a really fun first session,” she said. “And I think you’ve really hooked Elyse. But I was kind of hoping the game would be a little more like your game with my parents.”

“Well, it takes time for it to be like that,” I said. “Big stories start best from humble beginnings. Just because you’re fighting wolves and bandits now doesn’t mean where we end up at the end of the summer won’t be much bigger and badder, and just as fun a story as what you’ve been hearing all these years.”

“No, Shane,” Rhia said. “I mean… When I was setting up this game and everything, I was hoping it would be like the one with my parents. Um. Content-wise. With the same sort of… role-playing.”

I felt the blood run out of my face. I opened my mouth, trying to think of what to say, because what she was insinuating would mean she knew things she shouldn’t. There was no way she could.

“It was a couple of years ago,” Rhia said. “Mom and Dad had asked me to sleep over at Kelly’s house since they were hosting game night, just like I always did, and I was doing that. But I had my driver’s license and had driven myself over, and we got talking and she wanted to watch a movie we had on DVD since she hadn’t seen it before, so I figured I would just scoot back home to grab it and grab some snacks if you guys had an unopened bag of chips or something.”

“Rhia…” I said, feeling like our world for twenty-three years was crashing down around my ears. Our secret world.

“You guys mustn’t have heard me open the front door. I only saw a bit, but it was enough,” she said. “I saw Aaron and my Dad double-teaming Veronica and I was like ‘what the fuck,’ and then I heard Mom moaning about how good ‘the Count’s’ cock felt in her ass, and I got out of there without anyone seeing me. After that, I put the pieces together and realised that you guys have sex as part of the roleplay in your game.”

I could remember the game that must have been, even if it was two years prior. Count Fiorenzi had been hosting a masquerade ball, but the masks had been cursed by Madame Isabella D’Lorenzo, the player character’s shady benefactor - she wanted them to use the resulting orgy as a cover to steal the Count’s art collection because one of the paintings held a secret map to an ancient shrine. Of course, the way we played, the orgy had to be played out.

I, as the DM, had played the Count. And I’d definitely fucked Melissa’s ass that night.

Rhia’s Mom’s ass.

And she’d heard it.

“After that, I paid more attention to the stories my parents would tell me and would be guessing about where sex might have happened,” Rhia said. “And my imagination kind of ran wild. And it didn’t help that I would occasionally… spy on you guys, to see if it was a one-time thing or not. Not for long, I just had to know it was actually happening, that I hadn’t dreamed it.” She was blushing now, but it was like she’d uncorked a conversation topic she’d bottled up for so long that she couldn’t stop talking even if she wanted to. “And it was so hot, and I wanted to - well, I didn’t want to join in because my parents were there, but I wanted experiences like that. Fun and friends where we could be like that. And then Tori told me she played and was interested in playing more, and things sort of snowballed from there, and I was hoping that, since you were the DM who got your group of friends playing like that, maybe you could do the same for us.”

I had to take a long, slow breath in and then let it out. Of all the things I might have guessed would come out of Rhia’s mouth, I had not been expecting all of that when I encouraged her to spit it out.

“Rhia,” I said slowly. Carefully. “What me, and your parents, and our friends do… it’s been our secret for a long time. And if it got out-”

“No, I know!” Rhia said. “I’ve never told anybody about it. Not a single person.”

“OK,” I said. “But what we do was something that developed naturally. It’s not something that just happened out of the blue. We were young and horny, and we took things too far and it turned out OK, but it could have been really bad if it didn’t.”

“That’s fine,” Rhia said. “Honestly, Shane. I only invited people to the game who I knew would at least be interested.”

“Interested is one thing, consenting is another,” I said. “And you didn’t exactly ask me for my consent either.”

“I- That’s- Well, I’m asking now,” Rhia said. “Please?”

I closed my eyes and wiped my hand over my face. “The guys bailed on you,” I pointed out. “And if they bailed on you that easily, they don’t sound like the kind of guys you want to drag to the table or the kind of guys who deserve an opportunity like you wanted to give them.”

“I know, and that kinda sucks, but we can still do it,” Rhia said. “Elyse and Tori are both bi, and I’m a little more experienced than bi-curious. And none of us are pure little virgins.”

“Rhia,” I groaned.

“You can’t tell me you wouldn’t fuck Tori or Elyse if you had the chance and they were open and consenting,” Rhia said. “And they think you’re hot. Attractive. And now they really like you for the game, too. And… I would be down to fuck you, too. In the game.”

Now I was blushing, trying not to dwell on what she was saying.

“Look,” I said. “I… fuck, Rhia. I can’t blame you for wanting what you want. We keep doing it because it’s fun, and you’re an adult who can make adult decisions. But there are lines here. Like - I have to tell your parents you know, and what you want this to be. I can’t hide that from them. They’ve been some of my best friends for decades.”

“I figured,” Rhia said. “But what if they say yes? What if, despite all the big question marks in your head right now, they tell you they are OK with it? Would you help make it happen?”

I closed my eyes, leaning back against the wall of my hallway. “I can’t see a world where they are OK with me and you having sex,” I said.

“But it wouldn’t be us,” Rhia said. “It would be Olivia of Parnasus having sex with… a Duke. Or a monster. Or Fergus.”

In that moment I realised how Fergus had somehow started getting described as ‘a beefy lumberjack.’ Rhia had already been dreaming up potential sexual situations in the game.

“You said you couldn’t blame me for wanting what you guys get to do already,” Rhia said. “So is it really a big deal that I want to do it with someone I know is safe, and will make sure we have fun but don’t get into trouble?”

“God, Rhiannon,” I sighed. “Trying to make logical arguments about this isn’t helping.”

“Just tell me that, if you talk to my parents and they say yes, you’ll help facilitate some sexy fun within the game,” Rhia said.

I knew the correct answer was to say no, but I was fighting a double-sided war in my soul. My position of ‘this is wrong’ was surrounded by the recent memories of how hot Tori and Elyse both were in their own ways. And then there was the pleading look on Rhia’s face, her big eyes and slightly quivering lower lip that I knew she was doing on purpose but I couldn’t ignore.

The last drop in my bucket of shame was her cleavage in my peripheral vision.

“Fine,” I sighed. “But that is a massive, gigantic If, Rhia.”

“Thank you, Shane,” she said, crashing into me and hugging me tightly. “I promise, if they say no way, I won’t bring it up again. I’ll respect it. But until that happens I’m going to fight like hell for it to be a yes. I want this to be the best summer ever and I can’t imagine it being any better than getting to make my dream game a reality.”

I felt awkward hugging her back, but I did, and then she tilted her chin up to kiss me on the cheek before slipping away towards the door. “The girls are waiting on me, so I better go. Thanks so much, Shane. I’ll see you next week!”

The door shut, and I knew she was making her escape while the getting was good and before I could change my mind.

“Fuck me,” I groaned, taking a few steps down the hall and then heading into my office, collapsing in my desk chair. I pulled out my cell and thumbed it open, staring at my contacts for a long moment.

“Hey, Shane,” Melissa said as she answered. “What’s up? How did the game go?”

“Mel, we gotta talk about your daughter,” I said.

“Uh oh,” Melissa sighed. “Should I go get Dan for this?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’ll both need to hear this.”