Mercenary Pen
2011-04-17, 04:45 PM
Shamelessly borrowing from Cogidubnus' thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=189905) I decided to put a fourth edition spin on things in an alternate continuity.
Read on, tell me what you like, dislike, make horrible speculations about my characters and plot, etc.
Part One- A hard night ahead.
Brendan's story was one that differed little from any of ten thousand others across the country; His formative years had seen him blunder aimlessly through the education system, almost directionless as nothing seemed to drive him to any real extent. Whilst he had been intelligent, he'd not had any great gifting towards any particular field and so, unable to decide where he was headed in life, he had decided not to stumble into just any university course, instead putting off his decision whilst he continued to work part time hours at the local convenience store. That had been four years ago.
Friday night, was just a regular friday night, busy as hell with the usual customers looking forward to a weekend away from work, ranging from all the rowdy kids who had been in school only six hours before to the even rowdier adults who shouted at their mobiles all around the store, oblivious to almost everything that didn't concern their wants and desires, some of them already half drunk by this time of night, having started on the alcohol as soon as they had reached a shop after work. On top of all of that, Brendan and his colleague had a massive delivery to put out from the company distribution centre (which was really just a posh way of saying warehouse)- yep, that's right, colleague, singular. The store was small enough that there were rarely ever more than two members of staff on shift at any time, even with the shop at its busiest short of saturday night...
At this time, Brendan thought, his closest friends would be at Mitch's house playing their fortnightly session of D&D fourth edition; he was fine with that since fourth edition didn't really appeal to him much and he had chosen to stick with the earlier 3.5 ruleset. This weekend, however, the usual weekly game of 3.5 on a saturday afternoon wouldn't be on because there was a convention in town, and half of his regular gaming group would be going to that instead.
At that moment, a bunch of guys in their early twenties and late teens walked into the store- six of them, all likely to be troublemakers with the way they were jostling each other about. He'd seen them before, though they looked somewhat different today, but he couldn't quite work out how they looked different. They'd just finished putting away the delivery they'd been working on and, with nobody needing to be served immediately, Brendan looked at the group who had just walked in, challenging himself, as he often did when he had time at work, to try and work out which race from dungeons and dragons each of them would be if they weren't human.
The first was almost six feet tall, but fairly scrawny in his early twenties physically, though mentally might be more open to debate, considering the way he was talking to the others, probably a gnoll, Brendan reckoned, in fact, he could almost see the dice roll in the back of his mind, and hear the monster manual entry being read out by the dungeon master, whose voice (Brendan could picture this well) would be dripping with a barely suppressed enthusiasm for the violent things this guy could do to your character.
The second and third were brothers, their ages barely a year apart, both of them at a height of about five foot three inches. They were constantly pushing about other members of the group, yet constantly ducking behind those same members to protect them from whoever else they had pushed, shoved, or otherwise irritated. Once again, he could see the die roll in the back of his mind, only an eleven, but with modifiers for trained skills, that became a sixteen. These were surely goblins, taking their fun at the expense of others, yet too cowardly not to hide when there was a chance that trouble might find them.
He did a double take at that, this was getting creepy, almost as if he were too far engrossed in a game of dungeons and dragons, and anyway, that wasn't how the skill system worked, he should have been thinking in trained ranks and adding his ability modifier on top of that and yet, he wasn't. Looking on, he found that the strangeness continued, as the rest of the grouping turned out to be a kobold, a bugbear, and the last guy who didn't really fit as anything but human.
Suddenly, things became much worse as the guy who seemed to be a gnoll shoved over one of the two goblins- seemingly playfully- and the goblin who had been shoved promptly cracked his head open and started bleeding out on the floor of the shop. With only 1d4 damage plus a strength modifier on the shove, which would count as an unarmed strike under any edition of D&D, that could easily have been fatal in the edition he was familiar with, but his instincts told him that this had been a low damage roll, and that things weren't playing out by the rules he had spent years of his life playing by.
Read on, tell me what you like, dislike, make horrible speculations about my characters and plot, etc.
Part One- A hard night ahead.
Brendan's story was one that differed little from any of ten thousand others across the country; His formative years had seen him blunder aimlessly through the education system, almost directionless as nothing seemed to drive him to any real extent. Whilst he had been intelligent, he'd not had any great gifting towards any particular field and so, unable to decide where he was headed in life, he had decided not to stumble into just any university course, instead putting off his decision whilst he continued to work part time hours at the local convenience store. That had been four years ago.
Friday night, was just a regular friday night, busy as hell with the usual customers looking forward to a weekend away from work, ranging from all the rowdy kids who had been in school only six hours before to the even rowdier adults who shouted at their mobiles all around the store, oblivious to almost everything that didn't concern their wants and desires, some of them already half drunk by this time of night, having started on the alcohol as soon as they had reached a shop after work. On top of all of that, Brendan and his colleague had a massive delivery to put out from the company distribution centre (which was really just a posh way of saying warehouse)- yep, that's right, colleague, singular. The store was small enough that there were rarely ever more than two members of staff on shift at any time, even with the shop at its busiest short of saturday night...
At this time, Brendan thought, his closest friends would be at Mitch's house playing their fortnightly session of D&D fourth edition; he was fine with that since fourth edition didn't really appeal to him much and he had chosen to stick with the earlier 3.5 ruleset. This weekend, however, the usual weekly game of 3.5 on a saturday afternoon wouldn't be on because there was a convention in town, and half of his regular gaming group would be going to that instead.
At that moment, a bunch of guys in their early twenties and late teens walked into the store- six of them, all likely to be troublemakers with the way they were jostling each other about. He'd seen them before, though they looked somewhat different today, but he couldn't quite work out how they looked different. They'd just finished putting away the delivery they'd been working on and, with nobody needing to be served immediately, Brendan looked at the group who had just walked in, challenging himself, as he often did when he had time at work, to try and work out which race from dungeons and dragons each of them would be if they weren't human.
The first was almost six feet tall, but fairly scrawny in his early twenties physically, though mentally might be more open to debate, considering the way he was talking to the others, probably a gnoll, Brendan reckoned, in fact, he could almost see the dice roll in the back of his mind, and hear the monster manual entry being read out by the dungeon master, whose voice (Brendan could picture this well) would be dripping with a barely suppressed enthusiasm for the violent things this guy could do to your character.
The second and third were brothers, their ages barely a year apart, both of them at a height of about five foot three inches. They were constantly pushing about other members of the group, yet constantly ducking behind those same members to protect them from whoever else they had pushed, shoved, or otherwise irritated. Once again, he could see the die roll in the back of his mind, only an eleven, but with modifiers for trained skills, that became a sixteen. These were surely goblins, taking their fun at the expense of others, yet too cowardly not to hide when there was a chance that trouble might find them.
He did a double take at that, this was getting creepy, almost as if he were too far engrossed in a game of dungeons and dragons, and anyway, that wasn't how the skill system worked, he should have been thinking in trained ranks and adding his ability modifier on top of that and yet, he wasn't. Looking on, he found that the strangeness continued, as the rest of the grouping turned out to be a kobold, a bugbear, and the last guy who didn't really fit as anything but human.
Suddenly, things became much worse as the guy who seemed to be a gnoll shoved over one of the two goblins- seemingly playfully- and the goblin who had been shoved promptly cracked his head open and started bleeding out on the floor of the shop. With only 1d4 damage plus a strength modifier on the shove, which would count as an unarmed strike under any edition of D&D, that could easily have been fatal in the edition he was familiar with, but his instincts told him that this had been a low damage roll, and that things weren't playing out by the rules he had spent years of his life playing by.