Chapter 7 (Patreon)

Just a heads up, this chapter will likely change when I begin editing the book. I like it, but I'm not sure how much of this needs to be in here or expanded. Originally, this had a second half, but it's now its own chapter.

Chapter 7

Outside of video games, the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons was my go-to way of having fun and relaxing before being reincarnated. The trouble was, I couldn't remember all the rules. And as a bit of a rules lawyer, I felt you had to have most of them right for the game to work correctly. Otherwise, arguments always kill the fun.

Once my intelligence had risen and I could remember every moment of my life, remembering the rules wasn't a problem anymore. I just had to go back to the moments where I'd flipped through the various books and write down everything I saw, copying out the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide.

I'd done that months ago and created a new irrational fear. For some reason, I was terrified that the fun and joy the game had brought me in my old life wouldn't follow me into my new one. The game reflected too much of what was already here, and I wasn't sure if people would like it or view it as work instead of fun.

It was a foolish type of fear. The kind of fear that makes you never try so you can delude yourself into believing you've never failed. It was the kind of fear that turned you into someone who sits in the living room grumbling at the news while everyone else is outside enjoying the 4th of July.

In hindsight, I should have started a campaign as soon as I could recall all the rules. Dungeons and Dragons is fun no matter what world you're in.

Convincing Torvac to join my campaign was as easy as asking him if he wanted to play a new game. Our friendship had started when the high-level adventurer became fascinated with the tabletop games I'd brought to the annual orc cull, so he was always going to be an easy sell. Misk, on the other hand, required a fifteen-minute breakdown of the rules and the game's purpose before agreeing. Gretel wasn't someone I'd ever thought of asking, but she'd listened in on our conversation and asked if she and her boy toy could join--her description, not mine--even offering to let us use the inn's cellar so we didn't have to worry about my ghost.

Initially, the plan was to play two nights a week, but despite everyone playing the game wrong, we all had so much fun that they found enough time to make it three nights a week. Tonight was our ninth session in less than a month, and I was looking forward to seeing how everyone would react to the surprise that awaited them.

I found it incredibly difficult not to grin as I laid out the food my ghost had prepared on the small table against the cellar wall. Their reactions were going to be the highlight of my week, but only if I didn't give anything away.

I heard someone climbing down the ladder as I finished laying out the food and glanced over my shoulder to see Torvac's legs appear on the far side of the massive cellar. The kegs and wine barrels were currently stored only to waist height, as they were used as soon as they arrived, making it easy to tell it was him.

Torvac had a lot of free time on his hands during the day since there weren't any monsters for him to deal with, so Jeric had convinced him to use that time to train the local guards. He'd been helping them develop their skills with a sword and shield and training them on how to use crossbows more effectively as a group, so he was frequently late.

Torvac's light brown hair was damp, and he wore a loose-fitting shirt and trousers over his extremely muscular physique, seemingly unconcerned with fashion. My friend was in his nineties, but looked like he was in his late forties. However, outside of combat, he acted like a teenager.

Torvac spotted only me and Misk as he looked around and realised that he wasn't the last to arrive for once. His face exploded in a cheerful grin, and he raised his fist dramatically. "Torvac is not responsible for holding up our mighty quest."

Misk rubbed his short black goatee as he sat at the table, rolling his eyes and causing them to glow. The glow gave his corpse-like appearance an ominous edge, which was made worse when another wheezing coughing fit overcame him. Misk buried his mouth in his robe, pulling it around him to ward off a chill that only he could feel.

Misk's coughing fits no longer bothered me. They were just a part of his condition, and they weren't as painful as they sounded. "I believe Misk was going to say that there is a first time for everything."

Misk nodded enthusiastically as he continued to cough.

Torvac chuckled in response as he walked over to an empty keg rack we'd turned into a shelf and collected his character sheet and dice. They were in a locked box because he was phobic about Gretel touching them.

She had a nasty habit of rolling 1s.

The time-honoured tradition of dice phobia had managed to cross from my world to theirs without me having to say a thing. I didn't want to either. Mentioning that this was something I had grown up with would ruin any chance of it naturally spreading and creating the feeling that I was home.

It wasn't the big things that made me feel like I belonged, but the numerous little things. My favourite beer. Songs I recognised. The little cultural rituals that everyone does but no one thinks about, such as whether or not you take your shoes off at the door. They all add up to making me feel like I was somewhere familiar and comfortable.

Misk's coughing fit slowly subsided before suddenly starting up again. Torvac glanced at his friend, and some of the cheer left his face. I now understood Torvac's expression, but only because I'd done as Isabelle said and gone to him with my concerns about attributes.

Torvac had told me precisely what Isabelle had told me, explaining that the only change was to what I now consider to be dangerous actions. It was something that everyone with high attributes went through, and while it was strange, it was no cause for concern. To prove it, he took me outside the village and gave me a personal training lesson.

He handed me a spear to fight his stick and then beat me black and blue, which hadn't concerned me because I healed so fast. However, the moment he said he was going to use a real sword, an overwhelming sense of dread came over me. Even with his skill, I knew that one misstep on his part could kill me and that I didn't want to be in that situation.

He'd seen my fear, which was the entire point of the lesson, and sat me down to finish putting my mind and ease about my worries. Showing me that I really hadn't changed as much as I thought I had. After he'd put my mind at ease, he'd opened up about how worried he was about Misk's health.

Misk's coughing fits were far more frequent than they used to be. It was a byproduct of working too much and a cause for concern. Misk hadn't survived the zombie plague because of high attributes or luck but by shutting down his body's connection to his brain and replacing the automatic actions that kept him alive with conscious magical controls.

Every action his body took, from the beating of his heart to the twitch of his little toe, was a conscious action on his part. Another spell woven to keep him alive and moving. If he hadn't done so, the plague would have made him a rampaging monster like it made everyone else who was infected.

However, turning your body into a puppet was not an easy task. Despite his best efforts, many of the body's normal functions were done far less frequently than they should be, which was why having a functioning microscope and working with my research and development teams to develop more of the technology he needed to study the zombie plague was a problem.

It reduced how much time he had each day to make his body work the way it should, and he was growing sicker because of this. It would be a different story if his research had produced something that could help his condition, but so far, it hadn't been able to help him.

Torvac didn't want to ask Misk to take it easy because he knew how much his friend wanted to be healthy again, so instead, he silently worried about him. Torvac placed his stuff on the table in his usual spot beside Misk and then went to get something to eat.

All the food my ghost prepared was made with perfect quality crops because I couldn't find enough people to buy it, so it tasted better than anything you could get in Blackwood. Instead of improving Torvac's mood, the perfect quality food always made him sullen. He missed his wife. He missed her cooking. Nothing my ghost could make came close to what Torvac was used to eating, so the perfect quality food made him homesick.

"Any questions before we begin the session?" I asked, loading roast potatoes onto my plate and trying to act casual before I dropped my bombshell on him.

"Torvac would like to know if Little Misk has level up."

Torvac had taken my explanation that they needed to pretend to be someone else to play Dungeons and Dragons literally. Torvac wasn't slow, so when he'd begun pretending to be Little Misk, the wizard, I realised he was being intentionally dense so he could mess with Misk. Misk had played along and rolled up a barbarian he called Little Torvac and had done everything he possibly could to get his character killed without being idiotic or suicidal, showing Torvac what his actions looked like from the outside.

I rolled my eyes. "You didn't complete any quests or kill anything last session."

"Did I just hear Arnold say we leveled?" Gretel called through the cellar door.

I turned and glared as a cougar of a woman climbed down the ladder and smirked in my direction. Gretel had been my landlady when I first moved to Blackwood and was someone who I considered a friend, so she knew exactly how to mess with me.

Gretel had a few more grey hairs than when I'd met her, but her curly red mane still stood out, making the freckles on her cheeks seem like features instead of flaws. Her dresses, which had been outrageously low-cut since I met her, had recently become only unprofessional low-cut because of the toyboy who entered behind her.

Ames didn't bother with the ladder, dropping to the ground behind her. The barrel-chested adventurer had his own mane of wild blond hair that had never seen a barber and hands that looked three sizes too big.

Ames and I had never spent much time together before the campaign. He'd come to repay his debt when I said I needed help, but after explaining what his party needed to do, we'd barely seen each other. He was always preoccupied with getting his landlady's attention.

Like Gretel, Ames was a terrible flirt, but no one in the village had thought their relationship was anything more than casual until he left Blackwood, and Gretel's cheerful mood disappeared. Everyone then thought her feelings were one-sided, but a month after Ames left, he walked back into her inn and told her that he couldn't live without her, and if she didn't feel the same way, he was leaving.

Gretel had said something along the lines of her needing sixty or seventy years to think about it, but he was welcome to help her behind the bar until he got his answer.

They'd kissed.

People cheered.

And I ended up with a fourth player for my campaign.

Ames took one look at Torvac and chuckled, no longer intimidated by the more powerful adventurer. "How did we arrive last? We live upstairs."

"He does, too," Gretel replied.

"And he's always late."

"Torvac is never late. Torvac arrives exactly when he means to. Torvac is inspiration to many people for this reason."

Ames gave a disbelieving nod and turned to me. "Now, what's this about us leveling?"

"No one is leveling," I said, carrying my food to the head of the table.

Gretel smirked as she went to get food. "You know we have to ask these things, Arnold. We're new to the game, after all."

"This is our ninth session. I'm no longer buying the story that you don't know these things."

Ames chuckled. "I'm very slow when it comes to these things."

Torvac smacked his chest. "Same."

I sighed as I stared at their grinning faces.

These questions about leveling started when they hit level 3. Until then, they had gone with the flow. After that, they began asking me every thirty minutes. They'd figured out I was a benevolent dungeon master who wouldn't punish them even if they annoyed me and were taking advantage of the situation.

I preferred to be a player, but no one knew how to run a campaign, so I had to teach them. It was faster than writing out the entire campaign books by hand, though I would eventually do that now that I knew people enjoyed the game here as much as they did back home.

I waited until everyone had food and was seated and then cleared my throat. "When we began our last session, you were all still at the Sleepy Willow Inn trying to subcontract your quest to investigate the recent disappearances from the town of Glenbrook. You spent three days talking to everyone in town, trying to convince them to take the quest over for you, but managed to fail spectacularly every time. It's now the morning of your fourth day at the inn, so what would you like to do?"

"Little Misk would like breakfast," Torvac said.

I'd made this campaign to reflect things they understood, so they'd started as new adventurers at an adventurer's guild. The guild had a quest wall with a list of quests they could take, along with information about each quest. They'd done surprisingly well for newbies, or not so surprisingly, considering three of them were actual adventurers. They'd quickly reached level 5 by taking the safer quests and clearing them quickly, but the moment Torvac gained the fireball spell, he got overconfident and pushed them to take more risks.

Their party consisted of a wizard, barbarian, cleric, and rogue. Each one of them had taken skills that would round out an adventuring party, so they had exceptional investigation, stealth, and tracking skills, which they'd used to discover what was killing the local townsfolk in record time, an adult green dragon. After several successful investigation checks, they all realised they had bitten off more than they could chew.

Instead of going back to the guild and asking for help like I thought they would, they'd come up with a plan to subcontract out their quest, which was something commonly done in this world that I hadn't known about. Instead of suggesting they go back, I'd let them do as they wanted, curious to see what would happen.

It had been a mistake.

A very amusing mistake.

Everyone had made charisma their dump stat, and no one had any charisma-based skills, so all of them had negative charisma modifiers for every charisma skill check they made. After a long string of poor rolls, they had burned every reasonable bridge that would have allowed them to subcontract out their quest.

Despite them playing the game wrong, we were all having a lot of fun, which meant they were technically doing it right.

Torvac noticed Misk was grinning after he'd asked for breakfast. "Little Misk looks around the inn's tavern. Does Little Misk notice anything strange?"

Ames and Grettel also noticed Misk's grin.

"I also look around," Gretel said.

"I'm there too and looking around," Ames added.

I finally let myself grin. This was going to be fun. "In the corner of the tavern, you notice a bloody and broken Little Torvac. His right arm is in a sling, and his face is a bruised mess, but you see he's grinning back at you despite missing teeth. You notice his muscles have grown substantially larger since you went to bed last night. They are now as large as the guild masters. You also notice his skin holds a deep green tinge. When you look above his head, you see that he is now level 8."

As the shouting began, Misk threw his head back and cackled like a madman. I laughed as they all started calling him an experience-hogging bastard and every bad name under the sun. He was about to learn why you didn't screw your party out of experience.

During their last session, I'd seeded the town with all sorts of items that would help them defeat the dragon. I hadn't done so with their previous quests, but when they'd all been so hesitant to fight, I'd given them some help. Misk was the only one to notice everything I'd added and came to me after the session ended with a plan, asking if it was okay to split the party.

Like any dungeon master should, I'd informed him it was always okay to split the party.

Last night, I'd run a one-shot for him, where he'd successfully snuck out of the inn and stolen everything around town that he'd needed to slay the dragon. He'd snuck into the dragon's cave while it slept and glued its wings and tail to the cave floor using magical glue before downing a cursed poison immunity potion and attacking it in its sleep. The potion permanently granted him poison resistance after the immunity wore off, but it also turned him green and reduced his charisma by one.

He'd barely won the fight.

And despite hitting him with disadvantage on every role once he got back to town, he'd successfully returned everything he'd stolen, except the cursed poison immunity potion, but he'd left the money on the counter when he stole it, which was one of the many reasons I felt they didn't play the game correctly. They were far too respectable and law-abiding for a proper Dungeons and Dragons party.

"Little Torvac has been replaced by an Orc!" Torvac suddenly shouted. "We must kill the imposter and rescue our friend. Little Torvac would never betray us in this way."

I laughed harder as Misk's eyes suddenly widened with concern, realising his party might murder his character.

What followed was an amusing shouting match where Misk had to defend his actions for soloing the dragon and prove he wasn't an orc imposter. It took more than an hour for everyone to get over their outrage, but even when they had, they never stopped making ridiculous accusations against him. They were having too much fun, and so was I. Little Torvac was taken all over the town and seen by every NPC that had half a chance of checking him over. This included a rectal exam by the healer he'd stolen the potion from, to everyone's amusement.

The final hour of our session was spent by everyone learning how he'd pulled it off and then joining him to loot the cave and butcher the dragon.

Torvac, Gretel, and Ames looked at me and grinned as their characters began heading back to the adventurer's guild with their loot.

"You didn't kill anything, so you didn't level," I said.

Torvac and Ames swore and glared at Misk.

Gretel scowled. "I butchered a dragon. That has to give me something?"

"Butchering a dragon doesn't give you experience."

"It does in our world."

"This isn't your world. It's a game."

"I want to level."

"Then find something to kill."

Gretel smirked. "We're not all bloodthirsty monster slayer like you are."

I laughed because there was no heat behind her words. "Your rogue can have a crafter make you a +1 studded leather armour that gives you poison resistance out of the dragon's hide."

"Really?"

I nodded.

Gretel stifled a yawn and smiled. "It's not a level, but I'll take it."

"On that note, let's call it a night."

Gretel gave me a grateful smile and began collecting her things. She didn't have our attributes, and she was up before dawn most mornings, so going any later was hard on her. Not that she ever complained.

While Gretel and Ames went to bed and Misk returned to his research, Torvac and I put the table and chairs in the corner of the room and packed away the leftovers so I could feed it to Farmer Otus's pig on my way out of town. Perfect food didn't keep for long once you made something with it, so by morning, I wouldn't be able to eat it.  

As we put the food table with the rest of the furniture, Torvac turned to me. "Little Misk would like to go off alone."

I chuckled because I'd known this was coming and was in a great mood. "You're party is currently travelling back to the adventurer's guild. You're camping in the open. Someone is always on watch. If you want to sneak off on your own, you'll have to do it while you're on watch. Otherwise, even if you do sneak out, someone will almost immediately notice, so we won't be able to do a one-shot."

Torvac pouted like a toddler, realising he would put his party in danger. "Little Misk would not like to go off alone."

"It also wouldn't be true to character. You might do something like that, but Misk wouldn't."

Torvac paused. "What has friend Misk told friend Arnold about Torvac?"

"He might have mentioned your first time in Lunar."

Torvac groaned. "Is not good comparison to what Little Torvac did."

"Why not?"

Torvac chuckled. "Little Torvac succeeded."

I laughed with him. "I don't even understand why you would try. The Monsters Compendium says that slaying a king toad alone is impossible."

"Friend Misk slayed king toad alone."

"What?" I couldn't keep the shock from my voice.

King toads were the largest living creatures on the planet. They were described as walking hills.

"It was tiny king toad," Torvac added. "No bigger than dragon. Friend Misk did not mention that part until after Torvac nearly died."

I smiled. "Every time I hear one of your stories, it makes me believe your lives have been nothing but crazy adventures. If you ever need a bard for one of your adventures, I'd be willing to help."

Torvac looked at me like I'd said the sky was red. "Why would adventurers need bard?"