Naked City

Roll The Dice

The Forest of the Damned is filled with trees over 50 meters high and as you walk by you notice the thickness of each tree varies from thin to extremely thick. The leaves are deep green and the richness of the branches makes it difficult for sunlight to peer through this dense forest. However, you can still tell it's daylight as if there is an unworldly glow coming from the trees themselves.

Then you come across a clearing about 20 meters in diameter. You've reached the eye of the forest and the mid point of your journey. The center of the clearing you see a rubble, possibly a pile of indistinguishable rocks, but floating right about it, is a Jewel of Fate. What do you do?

"Shit, that's real easy. I'm gonna run and go for it." Sean says. His character is Noran the Knight.

"Are you kidding? You don't know what's under that pile," Jason replies. His character is Kardoff the Wizard.

"Well that's why it's good to have a -10 armor class then," Sean says.

The rest of the guys shake their heads because this is how it always goes. Sean plays his character with reckless abandon. They've been playing this particular campaign for weeks and every battle has been sparked by him rushing head on into danger. Joseph is probably one of the best skilled dungeon masters out there. He has a unique sense of storytelling that goes way beyond the written materials. A lot of that is because he studies the books and surveys the maps so that when the fellas play Dungeons & Dragons, they're in for a truly exciting adventure.

"Roll percentiles." Joseph looks over to Sean.

Sean smiles and rubs two black 10 sided dice in his hands. He rolls and dice hit the big wooden table they're all sitting at. The red numbers stick out... 75. They all know what this means, the higher the number always means the higher probability that something terrible is about to go down.

Joseph looks around at the guys, "Do you follow him?"

The five guys are sitting around the table look at each other. Each person has a character sheet in front of them with their own set of dice. They all come together every Friday night to play this adventure which never really ends. Each campaign bleeds into another. They've been doing this for several years since they graduated from college. Despite all the fun, not all them want to be there. What was once an all night session of Role Playing Games has become 2-3 hours. Even though tonight they all agreed they would stay until 11pm, Jason has other plans, he checks his phone and there's a message from her: when are you coming over?

They all nod to Joseph. He takes a deep sigh and continues...

You see Noran run to the pile with a purpose. You all follow and what was once a pile bones is, in actuality, a pile of bones. Not just human bones, but bones of trolls and orcs. As you get closer the air begins to chill...

"Alright, fuck this, I stop," Benji says "There's no way I'm going over there. No Jewel is worth this." His character is Rodrick the Thief.

"He might be right about that, I'm going to slow up a bit," Jason agrees as he looks at his phone.