Some people have been telling me they enjoy reading about Ruby, my daughter's D&D character. The thing is that I am way behind in relating the Ruby story as compared to where we are currently in the game. So I am going to try to write up some more of what has occured. This helps me keep track of the ongoing story. Most of this stuff is now written down on notepads in the form of extremely sketchy notes. So I am going to try to translate that into something more like a real story. But it does come off as kind of cheesy. Oh well, I'm not trying to be Tolstoy or even Tolkien here, in fact I am not even trying to be Robert E. Howard - the master of Sword & Sorcery tales and extremely cheesy over the top prose.
In the past I've made some comments on the story. I'm not going to do that in this installment as it is all action oriented and there was no real decisions to be made except whether to press on or not. I also want to make it clear that Ruby is not supposed to be Julie. Ruby is just Julie's character for the game - in the same way when Julie plays her Nintendo she operates a little onscreen character. I say that because I would certainly not want any of the things that happen to Ruby to happen to Julie, and when Julie has her character do things they are not necessarily always what she would do in real life. That is the "role-play" part of this - it's a game of pretend and game of trying out different actions and seeing what the consequences are in the safety of "let's pretend." The last thing I would want is for my daughter to ever have to go on what the military calls a "bug-hunt" or "seek and destroy" mission for terrorists or enemy combatants - even if we will be doing things like this in Afghanistan, Iraq, and perhaps Iran soon, for some time to come, maybe we will still be at war when Julie has grown up. For now, this is just a game and the orcs are not supposed to be the Al-Qaida and the caves are in an enchanted forest and not the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. At any rate, Julie has told me that she doesn't like war movies and big battles - that it's too sad. Horror movies, she barely bats an eys (she said "I am Legend" was kinda scary but not much) but the battle scenes in Star Wars or Lord of the Rings sends her out of the room.
Hopefully this means that, unlike Ruby, she will not ever be joining the Marines or the National Guard. Of course, I personally think that as Americans we should be proud of those who do serve their country in that capacity by following the dharma of kshatriya or warrior (and should therefore take care of them and make sure that we don't send them into combat unecessarily for for unjust causes - which is a whole other issue) . I just don't want my only child and daughter to ever have to do it. So I am glad this is just a game and/or cheesy fantasy story about hunting terrorists in mountain caves.
Anyway, here is the story so far:
“Quick,” cried Ruby, “I saw some of them heading down this way.” With that, Ruby charged down a leftward passage of the caves after the fleeing orcs, the ranger Blain and the bestial wereboar Burgis right behind her. As they moved deeper into the mine, Ruby glanced up and saw that the enormous bat the orc adept had been riding earlier that morning was hanging from a stalactite apparently asleep. She decided it might be best to leave it alone for now. The cave twisted and turned and at one point they had to cautiously climb down a steeply dropping shaft, but eventually they cornered the three orcs in a dead-end. “I’m not wasting anymore magic or taking any more prisoners,” announced Ruby, as she and Blain dispatched two of them with their longbows. Burgis ran in and messily finished off the last one with his axe.
Just then, an elf from further back up the mine began shouting for Ruby. “Ruby, come quickly, Sergeant Nyra’s been hurt!”
Ruby and her companions raced back the way they came, to find Sergeant Nyra resting against the cave wall, a bloody orcish crossbow bolt at her side. It had been pushed all the way through her right shoulder in order to extract it, and Nyra was now imbibing one of the healing potions the elvish patrol had come equipped with.
“Ruby, I’m okay,” Nyra said, as her commander came running up. “I used a magical flare of light to blind them long enough so we could get back out of the lower caves safely, but the orcs are trapped down that passage. We can’t go in after them because they’ve got the passage covered by their crossbows. We can’t go down, and they can’t come up.”
“No need to worry. You did a good job sergeant. We can handle this. Their crossbows are no match for my magic, and unless they have silver-tipped arrows none of them can harm Burgis here,” said Ruby indicating the wereboar impatiently waiting behind her. “You and your troops follow us down when we’ve cleared the way.”
Ruby then charged down the passageway casting magical protection over herself, Burgis and Blain again at her heels. Crossbow bolts bounced away harmlessly off her magical wards and as she burst into a larger cavern she gestured towards the orcs and a spray of rainbow colors flashed forth. This time, however, the orcs were prepared and all but one, who quickly passed out cold, looked away and were not blinded or knocked out. Ruby quickly brought forth her longbow as Blain jumped for cover behind a rock and Burgis charged past her with his axe held overhead and tusked maw roaring a fierce battlecry. Orcish crossbow bolts and arrows filled the air, but Ruby stood her ground as they either shot past her or bounced away harmlessly and returned fire with her own longbow. Blain also returned fire, and Ruby could see that Burgis had lost his axe and was now biting and goring a huge orc berserker wielding a greataxe, an axe that was not helping as much as he might wish against the tough bristly hide of the wereboar, who could only be permanently harmed by silver anyway.
Ruby could feel her magical protection beginning to weaken, so she joined Blain behind the cover of nearby stalagmites. At one end of the cavern an underground stream flowed under a rickety wooden bridge, and on the other side more orcs showered crossbows bolts on them. The orcs on their side fled, except for the one being torn into pieces by Burgis, and one enormous orc in blackened plate armor with a powerful longbow that only one of his enormous strength could possibly fire, obviously one of the orc commanders. Even with a dozen of Ruby and Blain's arrows sticking in his armor the orc chieftain continued to return fire until his orcs had crossed the bridge and then he too turned and ran across the bridge into the darkness on the other side. Then the orcs on the other side of the dark stream fled with their commander deeper into the caverns.
“Burgis, are you okay,” Ruby asked.
Burgis, though not mortally wounded, still looeds more than a little worse for wear after the fight with the orc berserker. “I’ve been better,” Burgis grunted.
“Well, you’d better take a healing potion all the same,” says Ruby, “we’re not finished yet.”
“Fair enough, but at least now I have this beauty,” Burgis replied, hefting the greataxe of his fallen foe, and slapping the head of the axe against his palm.
Just then, the only live orc remaining, the one knocked out by Rubys Color Spray spell, began to come to. “What should we do with him?” Blain asked Ruby.
“Have one of the troops bring him outside, and send him on his way,” Ruby replied.
Like the others before him, the orc’s weapons are taken away and broken and he is chased away by the other elves of Ruby’s patrol. The elves shoot arrows after him (though not into him) to speed him on his way home to the Empire of Iuz.
With that another section of the abandoned mine is cleared of orcs and the other members of the patrol come down to join Ruby. “Come on, they went this way,” Ruby says and leads her companions and troops deeper into the mine to route out the other orcs. They soon come to a split in the tunnels.
“Sgt. Alion you and five of your troops come with me. Blain and Burgis, you take the other five and head down that way,” instructed Ruby.
Ruby and her elves pressed on, and came into another cavern split by the underground river where once more they came under fire from orcs with crossbows hiding behind the rocks and stalagmites. The bolts once again bounced harmlessly away from Ruby, but Sgt. Alion is wounded, even as the elves returned fire. In the end another orc is killed and two others jumped into the underground stream to avoid capture and are swiftly swept away. Just then, Rubv hears shouts from another part of the caverns, sounding as though the others had run into an ambush, and then an eerie unearthly howling fills the caverns, sending a shockwave of dread into all who heart it.
“Quick, we have to get back to the others!” Ruby cried, leading her troops onward into the torch lit darkness and towards the awful sounds of combat and supernatural menace.
Ha! Cliffhanger. I'll post a new installment hopefully sooner than later because afterall this action Ruby leaves the military and meets up with a circus of crime, a medusa, zombie infestations, and Count Strahd the Vampire Lord of Barovia!
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
Michael, I've never played D&D, so I don' tknow how you come up with these stories - are they random? Do you roll dice, or pull papers out of a hat, or what?
Enquiring minds want to know...Byrd in LA
Posted by: Byrd in LA at January 22, 2008 12:20 PMHi Byrd,
There are three main rulebooks: the Players Handbook that tells you how to make characters and how they get stronger over time; The Monster Manual that supplies me with statistics for all the monsters; and the Dungeon Master's Guide that supplies me with all the rules and charts and hints that the game master needs to have to create stories.
Basically the game master is like the producer, director, main writer, etc... who comes up with the stories and/or takes them from other books written for the game. The players are like the actors. The player interacts with all the situations and characters (called Non-Player Characters or NPCs for short) and monsters that the game master describes and (to certain degrees) acts out. The player then describes or (to certain degrees) act out their responses. The dice and charts and rules help adjudicate what happens - esp. in situations where one may or may not succeed at a given action like in a duel or a fight or when trying to apply a particular skill to get something done. The most basic process is to roll a twenty sided dice (called a D20) and try to roll equal to or higher than a success number factoring in various modifiers based on the characters skillset, natural abilities, and the given situation. For instance it is harder to pick a lock in the dark when you know a guard is coming around the corner any second than it is to pick a lock on an apartment door in the daytime because you are a locksmith and the dolts who forgot their keys called you in to help (well, that latter is based on a true story and not a game situation). So in the first situation you might have to roll higher than 18 on a D20, in the second situation you might have to only roll 10 or higher (or even less).
Then it is just a matter of recording what happened and turning it into a story.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei