The Dark Lord Bert 2 by Chris Fox (bookstand for reading .TXT) 📕

hypocrisy and decided to do something about it. I gathered a crack team…well, that’s not exactly true. I gathered a team that included Bert, a were-cougar thief, and myself of course.

We snuck back into the tomb and un-petrified Crotchshot. Since Bert had the dark lord trope the monsters obeyed him, including the mummy Ramen Brotep, who was all to happy to free Crotchshot. Well, he was rather upset about it, if I’m being honest.

Our little party ambushed the dwarf Brakestuff while he was sleeping, as we knew there was no way we could convince him that White was evil. After a vicious fight we killed the dwarf, and attacked the Dark Lord White.

White was immensely powerful, and with the aid of the OLP we were no match for him. But then Bert did something very clever. He used the dark lord trope to alter White’s character sheet. Until then his alignment had been lawful good, but Bert changed it to lawful evil.

The OLP, who pride themselves on being “good”, attacked the dark lord, and together we overcame him. I became the new party leader, we divvied up loot, and then ended the session.

We haven’t played again since.

Robert, the guy who plays White, is still pretty pissed about how things went down. We’re supposed to meet at Castle Games today, in the back room, where we’re going to start the next adventure.

I have no idea what Robert will play, but I’m sure it will be even worse than the Dark Lord White.

Prologue - Castle Games

The bell over the door jangled as the glass snapped shut behind Jess, walling her off from Santa Rosa’s summer heat. She paused, inhaling deeply.

Sweat, and milk duds, with undertones of neckbeard. Perfection. She loved this place. So many good memories during the previous four years.

Two long rows of folding tables dominated Castle Games, each battered and barely standing. Bent chairs lined the tables, with many missing casualties that had never been replaced. The same could be said of the gamers who’d once filled them, and the crowd was a thin wispy thing now.

Most of the tables were empty, though there were a couple games of Magic the Gathering being played near the center. That mildly interested Jess, but her obsession with the card game had died the instant she’d learned that magic was real.

“Hey, Jess!” Max enthusiastically shot to his feet where the ten-year-old had been watching one of the card games, his backpack slung over one shoulder.

The fifth grader was a lot shorter than Jess, but every year seemed to erode that difference. She was sixteen and had all but stopped growing, which gave him a lot of time to catch up.

“Hey, Max.” She mussed his sandy hair and gave him a playful punch in the shoulder. “So what kind of character are you rolling? Crotchshot will be a tough act to follow.”

Max hesitated in the doorway that led into the back room where Todd ran the game. He stared up at her, his youthful face suddenly serious. “I’ve given it a lot of thought. The guys will want to head back into the Tomb of Deadly Death first, so I need to make something that will excel in there. I don’t want to roll another ranger. I’m thinking a monk maybe.”

Jess followed Max into the cramped back room, lined with stacks of old roleplaying games anyone was allowed to use, and gave the rest of the guys a little wave as she moved to sit at one corner of the table. The aroma of musty magazines emanated from the haphazard stacks ringing the battered table they huddled around. Most were ancient issues of Drakes or Oubliettes, some dating back to the early 80s.

Max plopped down next to her, then emptied the contents of his bag on the table. Dice, pencils, and a few crumpled sheets of paper accumulated as he shook the bag. “Monks get flurry of blows, and you can basically turn your chi-kick into a charge. You’re super mobile, so I won’t feel the loss of a bow as much. Plus, you can use wisdom for AC so I don’t have to waste gold on armor. And that will give me better bonuses against saves for things like petrification.”

Jess set her pack on the chair next to her, and smoothed the blue nylon as she opened the top. She pushed aside her knitting to remove a water bottle and her binder. She carefully placed the binder on the table, and unclipped her character sheet from inside it.

She’d hand drawn her best rendition of Kit in elven form along the upper left corner, and was quite proud of how it had turned out.

“Monks are OP,” she agreed, unsurprised by Max’s choice. He liked characters that hit hard, and often. “Did you come up with a background?”

“Uh.” Max suddenly looked uncomfortable. “Yeah. But you guys are going to think it’s stupid again.”

“Todd let you play Crotchshot. There’s no way this can be worse.” Kit closed her binder, replaced it in her pack, and slid the pack under her chair. All that remained before her were dice and her character sheet, even if the dice were a formality these days.

“Maybe not worse,” Max allowed. He reached into a side pocket of his backpack and withdrew a carton of chocolate milk. “But just as bad. My character’s name is Nutpuncher. He’s a gnome. The loss of strength sucks, but you get a size bonus to AC and even stealth. I’ll be really hard to catch.”

Kit stifled her initial reaction, an eye roll. She reminded herself that Max was a lot younger than the rest of them, and a lot less interested in roleplaying than he was in making his character do another point of damage.

Still, she had to ask at the very least. “Why are you so obsessed with shooting and or hitting people in the junk? That’s a really strange obsession.”

Max leaned back in his chair, and savored a mouthful of milk like a