We had to wake Amaryllis back up for a look at the loot, because the heirlooms were keyed to her, which meant that she was the one that could activate them or, alternately, use investiture to give them over to us.“Rope first,” I said. “I want to see whether that’s Ropey.”Fenn picked up the rope and dutifully handed it to Amaryllis, who handled it for a moment before it sprang to life in her hands. It dropped down and slithered over to the fireplace, where it rose up and contorted itself into different shapes. If I hadn’t been ready for it, I would have probably missed the first few, but this was Ropey, and so I knew the shapes would be letters. H-E-L-L-O.“It says ‘hello’,” I said. “Come here Ropey, do you want to be friends?” The rope dropped down to the floor in a heap and then slithered toward me, wrapping itself around my leg and then pulling itself up to chest level so I could pat it on the raised end that served as its head. “It’s a sentient length of rope,” I explained.“The
While Fenn and Grak continued magic item testing, I stared at my character sheet and tried to determine how I was going to spend my points.What do you want to be when you grow up?Well, no, that was the wrong question. The real question was the proper way to minmax, given the information I had available to me. Skills had both primary and secondary abilities associated with them, which probably helped to define success and failure in accordance with some hidden rules that I wasn’t privy to. My guess was that chance to Dodge was something like the roll of a die plus skill in Dodge multiplied by the primary stat and also half the secondary stat, but none of that was exposed to me and it seemed like it would be really hard to test, especially if (as I suspected) the rules changed depending on whether I was in combat or not.One of the core concepts of D&D character optimization was avoiding MAD, multiple ability dependence. The general idea was that if your character could be boiled down
It took me some time to collect myself. I ended up putting two points into PHY and another one point into LUK, a balancing of short term survival against long term gains. It was a choice I had made before getting that message from above the game layer, but I was even more certain about it afterward, because I was pretty sure “pseudo-intelligence” was the equivalent of having Tom rolling a Knowledge check because he couldn’t actually be as smart as his 22 INT wizard. PHY was, at present, the more valuable superstat, and it would allow me to reach level 20 on pretty much every skill I cared anything about. LUK was mostly because I had an odd number of points and would probably have to wait until level 20 until I got another odd point, and the time-value of points meant that probably didn't make sense, especially if LUK was properly balanced around not being able to get the 2:3 discount. Besides, there was no way to get a sense of how it actually worked or scaled without spending that fi
After a moment of blinding pain passed by, I blinked and took in my surroundings, looking for witnesses or threats. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw none, and slowly straightened up. The moment of crisis had gone by in an instant, because now if someone found us where we shouldn’t have been, they wouldn’t immediately think that we were in a possession of a billion-dollar piece of equipment that nations would have killed to get their hands on. We’d still be in trouble, but it would be more ‘breaking and entering’ trouble, not ‘stole a nuke’ trouble.Our destination was a fancy restaurant with a private back room where a much younger Amaryllis had eaten with her mother and a number of guests. We had gone in the morning, before the restaurant would be open, on the hope that the only people there (if any) would be kitchen staff doing prep work, and then ideally we could slip past by leaving out the front door. This, we accomplished with relative ease. I again used the hilt of the An
Skill increased: Blood Magic lvl 20! (Skill can no longer be increased by amateur training.)New Virtue: Hypertension!Skill increased: Athletics lvl 20! (Skill can no longer be increased by amateur training.)New Virtue: Long-distance Runner!I stopped using Sanguine Surge with every step once I was down a thousand drops of blood. I’d had a moment of panic when I’d gotten the Hypertension virtue, because the bar tracking blood had seemed to go from almost entirely full to half-full in a matter of an eyeblink. The numbers had changed though, and it was74K/150Know, which seemed to indicate that my body could or would hold twice as much blood as it could before. I was hoping that I had also gained access to more magic, but now wasn’t the time to do tests. I didn’t want to spare the time to look
We teleported into the Aon Adharc Glen fully armored and with weapons drawn. If not for the fact that a murderous unicorn was there, I probably would have found it pleasant. Birch trees stuck up from knee-high grass, with little yellow flowers poking up in small clusters and blue butterflies flapping their wings as they made their way through the forest. We were in a clearing, with the closest tree some sixty feet away.Grak sprang into action while the rest of us stood with our backs together. He was drawing up a ward around us, circling at ten feet out. One of the things that Grak had done with his day was try to find out more information about unicorns, specifically with regard to warding. He was fairly confident that a ward against latent skin magic (i.e. skin) would work on a unicorn, so that was the one
I came to in a warm bed. The last thing I remembered was planting my mouth on a unicorn wound and sucking out its blood. No, there was something after that, Fenn putting her weight on my chest and smiling, that was it. When I looked over, I saw her in bed beside me, curled up and looking content.We were back at Weik Handum; I recognized my room. I was out of my armor, which was piled on the floor beside me, along with the rest of my gear. I couldn’t help but notice that I was in just my boxers, and when I pulled back the covers, I saw that Fenn was topless, which set my heart beating faster. I looked at her, trying to work out what had happened in the gap between drinking the unicorn blood and ending up here, and then just looked at her without thinking too much in particular.When she began to stir, I averted my eyes. I could see through the light in the hallway that it was just barely sundown.“How are you doing?” she asked, slurring her wor
Tiff had taken to driving me home after D&D. She didn’t live anywhere near me, but she’d said she lived so far out in the country that the extra few miles didn’t matter to her, and I naturally accepted the rides, because she was Tiff.“I have a question about the unicorns,” she said.“Unicorns in general?” I asked.“No, your unicorns, the creepy rape monsters,” she said.“They weren’t actually rapists,” I said. “Just, rape adjacent. And that was a long time ago, so I’m not sure that I’m going to remember anything.”“Well, you can make something up for me then,” she said. “The thing was, I kind of didn’t get the time powers.”“Oh,” I said, “So, the unicorn kind of merges alternate realities to put himself in a position --”“No, sorry, I mean I get how it physically works, or at