Lost in Revery Read online

  Lost in Revery

  Tales of the Dungeon Crawlers

  Volume 1

  Matthew Phillion

  Lost in Revery: Tales of the Dungeon Crawlers Volume 1

  Lost Continuity Press

  Contact:

  [email protected]

  Copyright © 2019 Matthew Phillion

  Originally published as:

  The Players Guide to Dungeon Crawling - March 2018

  The Dungeoneer’s Bestiary - June 2018

  The Ghoul Slayer’s Guidebook - October 2018

  Printed in the United States of America

  All rights reserved.

  Cover : Sterling Arts & Design

  To my fellow adventurers of the mind, who survived the real world long enough for dungeon crawling to become socially acceptable. We made it.

  CONTENTS

  Book 1: The Players Guide to Dungeon Crawling

  Chapter 1: Game Night

  Chapter 2: Rude awakenings

  Chapter 3: The High Life

  Chapter 4: Archery lessons and the local flavor

  Chapter 5: The thief and the bard

  Chapter 6: This is what magic feels like

  Chapter 7: Reunited

  Chapter 8: Really specific character descriptions

  Chapter 9: The watcher

  Chapter 10: Into the rain

  Chapter 11: Pursuit

  Chapter 12: The den

  Chapter 13: Not the game I was expecting

  Chapter 14: Now it’s a proper dungeon crawl

  Chapter 15: The kitchen

  Chapter 16: Every party member has a job to do

  Chapter 17: Little victories

  Chapter 18: I wanted a dungeon crawl, not a mystery

  Epilogue: There is always someone watching

  Book 2: The Dungeoneer’s Bestiary

  Chapter 1: Why does everything we fight eat people?

  Chapter 2: Tracking the past

  Chapter 3: Roll a religion check or something

  Chapter 4: The emotional math

  Chapter 5: Religious education

  Chapter 6: Smoke on the horizon

  Chapter 7: One big medieval OSHA violation

  Chapter 8: This is why we check for traps

  Chapter 9: Don’t touch anything

  Chapter 10: The fungus has eyes

  Chapter 11: The men who would rule this world

  Chapter 12: Accidental architects of the earth

  Chapter 13: Like us but more violent

  Chapter 14: A night at the opera

  Chapter 15: Fools make plans

  Chapter 16: Not the first date I had in mind

  Chapter 17: To the death

  Chapter 18: Are we sure we’re the good guys?

  Chapter 19: So much below the surface

  Chapter 20: To the ends of the world

  Epilogue: This town is a graveyard

  Book 3: The Ghoul Slayer’s Guidebook

  Chapter 1: Far from home

  Chapter 2: The eternal hunter

  Chapter 3: A history of trouble

  Chapter 4: Night haunt

  Chapter 5: What we never were

  Chapter 6: Funny story about that

  Chapter 7: Thoughts on the divine

  Chapter 8: We’re a delicacy

  Chapter 9: The hunt master

  Chapter 10: Points in sleight of hand

  Chapter 11: Singing for my supper

  Chapter 12: It would be a mercy

  Chapter 13: A story of hunger

  Chapter 14: One at a time isn’t an option

  Chapter 15: Bait

  Chapter 16: Treasure trove

  Chapter 17: Hungry for five hundred years

  Chapter 18: Con man

  Chapter 19: What I was put here to do

  Chapter 20: I am a ninja

  Chapter 21: I come bearing gifts

  Chapter 22: I wish you well

  Chapter 23: What is dead cannot die

  Chapter 24: The good part about being a hero

  Chapter 25: Dragon country

  Epilogue: Among the dead

  From the Author

  The Dungeon Crawlers started off as a bit of an experiment. Born out of Roll for Initiative, the novella where the heroes of the Indestructibles were trapped in (the then-unnamed land of) Revery, this series was a chance for me to continue exploring a reality I wasn’t quit finished with after the Indestructibles found their way home. So I asked: we know how superheroes would react to finding themselves stuck in a tabletop role playing game. What about people like us?

  I also wanted the world the Dungeon Crawlers would explore to feel like a RPG campaign—start off small, in a village, build up to greater challenges, and, of course, find themselves delving into underground caverns and tunnels where new threats lay in wait, without it feeling like a game module. A lot of writers joke that writing fantasy novels is what happens when you want to DM but can’t find any players, so you create your own.

  That’s sort of what happened here.

  I did not expect to get such a positive response to the new series, but because of that response, it just kept going—one game “session” after another. And that’s how we end up here in Volume 1, collecting the first three novellas in print for the first time.

  So pull up a chair, grab some polyhedral dice, roll up a character, and join us in the land of Revery, where the gang struggles to figure out if they’re heroes of the realm or murder hobos, and try to understand why they feel so much more alive in this life of danger, fighting bogeymen and undead than they ever did in the real world, if they can ever go home again… and if they even want to.

  I need to thank all the usual suspects who helped make this happen: Stephanie Buck, Colin Carlton, Christian Hegg for being test readers; Christine Geiger for her enthusiastic editing skills; and Sterling Arts & Design for another awesome cover.

  And thank you for joining me in this experiment in high fantasy and low humor. And for being part of the big, beautiful tapestry that the gaming world has become. I remember the days when this sort of thing was taboo, and it is a wonder to behold, seeing role playing games bring people together, building bonds through laughter, adventure, and slaying monsters together around the table.

  Matthew Phillion

  Salem, Massachusetts

  May 2019

  Book 1:

  The Players Guide to Dungeon Crawling

  Chapter 1: Game Night

  Cordelia sat in her car, watching rain spatter against the glass, shattering the light reflected from Jack’s house like bulbs on a Christmas tree. She pulled the hood of her canvas jacket up and took a deep breath, regretting the Chuck Taylors she wore on her feet. I am entirely unprepared for this weather, she thought. Bracing herself, she jumped out of her car, slamming the door behind her, and darted across the street. She ran full speed into Jack’s front door, which did not move as she expected it to, hitting it with a heavy thud.

  The door opened. Eriko opened it, looking at her sheepishly from beneath her short, black hair, which she’d aggressively parted to one side today in a sort of toppled-over fauxhawk.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I think I locked it by accident.”

  Cordelia just sort of groaned an indignant response and stepped inside. She made sure to splash Eriko with the runoff from her coat.

  “Thanks, Cordelia,” Eriko said.

  “I had to repay you for the gift of a concussion you just gave me with the door, pumpkin,” Cordelia said. She kicked off her shoes by the front door and stepped inside. She could smell popcorn and what might be one of Tamsin’s vegan monstrosities pretending to be cookies. Before she could investigate fully, her vision went completely black.

  “Wha
t the fuck,” she said, reaching up to feel a heavy towel over her head.

  “Figured you could use it,” Morgan’s deep voice said, hinting at laughter. Cordelia pulled the towel off her head and wiped down her face and shoulders.

  “Great night for this, huh?” she said, seeing Morgan’s shirt and pants were also still showing signs of a wet walk here.

  “It’ll add to the ambiance,” he said.

  Together they walked into the dining room, where everyone else had gathered. Jack at the head of the table, looking giddy and anxious—and Cordelia knew exactly why, too, because after years of cajoling, he, Morgan, and Eriko had finally convinced everyone to try out an actual, honest to goodness role playing game, something they’d been doing for years and wanted their whole, tight friendship circle to join in on. Cordelia used to play, before she’d had to take on a second job to make ends meet after the car accident, and if she were being honest with herself, she was excited to get back into it, too. A chance to hang out with her best friends for some cooperative storytelling and forget about the real world for a while? Sounded like a perfect Friday night to her.

  The twins were the real newbies, though Eriko was convinced Tamsin and Tobias were going to be instantly addicted. Tamsin never met a story about magic she didn’t love, and Tobias, despite talking a big game, was a closet geek of a highly respectable level, though his tastes leaned more toward comics and Star Wars than Dungeons & Dragons or Lord of the Rings. True to character, Tobias was absolutely blistering his sister with jokes about bringing vegan cookies to a game night, and she was giving it right back to him.

  Morgan handed Cordelia a drink and clinked his own beverage against hers automatically. She shot him a huge smile. I love my friends, she thought. I love these people. And she was so looking forward to this, because she knew they all had worries they needed to escape from. Eriko’s mother had passed away recently, though from her playful demeanor, you’d never know it. Morgan was paying off medical bills for his father, and she could always tell when he his mind turned to that when his gaze drifted. Jack, sitting on the back of his chair like a gargoyle, presiding over the table, was on layoff watch at his day job, expecting to be unemployed at any moment. And the twins had some vicious family drama they avoided the details about as much as possible, though whatever was going on there, they’d both been losing weight to an unhealthy degree from worrying, and Tobias always seemed to have something on his mind he couldn’t quite put into words.

  Money and health; family and jobs. Real world stuff. The real world is cruel and unfair. Give me a fight against a goblin horde and rolling some dice any day instead, Cordelia thought.

  “Hey Jack!” Cordelia said. “What game did you decide on? D&D? Pathfinder? Maybe Shadowrun?”

  “Oh man, I should’ve done Shadowrun,” Jack said, hoping off his chair. He winked at her. Very few people can wink without looking creepy, and because of this, Jack and Cordelia had spent their entire lives together—classmates since the second grade, friends the entire time—practicing the non-creepy wink. It became a tradition to try to be the first one to wink at the other when they got together, and when possible to make it as creepy as possible. He failed on the creepy part as he tripped over his own feet jumping off his chair and almost face-planted on the table.

  “Grace and elegance, as always,” Morgan said. “Thank you for not shattering your teeth on the table.”

  Jack bowed dramatically.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said. “That was what we’d call a failed acrobatics check. And to answer your question, Cordie, I’ve got a new game for us.”

  “So, what you’re saying is we’re going to spend the next four hours watching you try to figure out the rules,” Eriko said.

  “What? No. Well. Maybe?” Jack said. “But there’s an upside. No dungeon master. We all get to play.”

  “Instead of you or Morgan trying to kill us with orcs,” Eriko said.

  “I have never tried to kill you with orcs,” Morgan said.

  “No, you prefer things out of forgotten pages of a monster compendium so we don’t have any idea what we’re fighting,” Eriko said.

  “True,” Morgan said.

  “That’s why I usually like dragons. You know what you’re going to fight, but you know you’re going to die anyway,” Jack said. “Anyway. This thing’s got a sort of… it uses cards and dice roles as an AI.”

  Jack slid the box onto the table, a big, dense cube of cardboard emblazoned with stereotypical high fantasy art. Morgan pulled it in front of him.

  “Where’d you pick this up?” he asked.

  “Dragon Forge,” Jack said.

  “I love how you guys basically speak an entire language of your own,” Tobias said, eyeballing the box from opposite Morgan.

  “And yet you understand every word we say,” Eriko said.

  “I am fluent in geek,” Tobias said. “I judge not.”

  “Dragon Forge, huh?” Morgan said.

  “Yeah. Lonnie’s knocking prices down on everything. Trying to clear out stock so he doesn’t have to throw anything out when they close,” Jack said.

  Cordelia picked up on the wistful tone between Jack and Morgan. The game shop downtown had been there since they were kids, but it had been dying a slow death for years. Lack of interest and online sales were killing the small store.

  “Okay, I don’t speak geek,” Tamsin said. “But I’d like a translation. What’s going on with this?”

  “Usually one of us directs the game and everyone else plays a character,” Cordelia said. “Correction – usually Jack or Morgan directs the game, depending on the campaign. And it’s like collaborative storytelling.”

  “You of all people are going to love this,” Tobias said to his sister.

  “And you’re not?” she said back.

  “I am open to the experience,” he said. “God knows I’ve heard you guys talking about it for enough years. Might as well actually participate. I feel like this is some part of your life I’ve never met before. It’s like meeting your Mr. Snuffleupagus.”

  “So, in this case, everyone picks a type of character,” Jack said. “The game sort of tells us how the villains react, so we can all be on the same side. Which is a nice change of pace for us.”

  “And probably a little better for you since we know how much you love confrontation,” Eriko said. The doorbell rang, and she darted off. “Pizza’s here.”

  “I really don’t like competitive games,” Tamsin said.

  “Well, I mean, RPGs really aren’t intended to be competitive. We’re all on the same side to tell the story. But…” Jack said.

  “It’ll be nice for everyone to play a character for once,” Morgan said.

  “You’re not going to miss playing the all-powerful game master?” Cordelia said.

  “You know how much extra work that is!” Morgan said. “No. I’m not going to miss it.”

  Eriko re-entered and slid three boxes of pizza onto the table.

  “Who ordered?” Eriko said.

  “Me,” Jack said.

  “You hungry when you ordered?” Eriko said.

  “Maybe,” Jack said.

  “Because this is overkill,” Eriko said.

  “First rule of ordering pizza. Don’t order when you’re already hungry,” he replied, sliding the box open, revealing map pieces, dice, and little plastic miniatures in the shape of monsters and heroes.

  “Dibs on the rogue,” Eriko said.

  “Always,” Cordelia said. “Have you ever played anything else?”

  “I was that multiclass rogue-sorcerer that one time,” Eriko said.

  “I sometimes wonder how you didn’t end up in a life of crime,” Cordelia said.

  “Who… do I pick who I play?” Tamsin said, gingerly poking through a pile of gray heroic figurines. “Oh, this one’s got a book. This one’s mine.”

  “Least surprising moment of the night, ladies and gentlemen,” Eriko said. “Tamsin wants to play the w
izard.”

  “Ravenclaw for life, babe,” Tamsin said. “You going to try to convince me I shouldn’t play a magician?”

  “I was going to suggest it if you didn’t figure it out for yourself,” Eriko said.

  “I am so being the dude with the guitar,” Tobias said, holding up a figure, vaguely elven in look, with a sword in one hand and a lute in the other.

  “Why are you pretending you don’t know that’s a bard?” Morgan said.

  “Because I keep forgetting I’m in friendly company, among my fellow geeks,” Tobias said. “Bard it is. Tell me this means I’ve got magic songs.”

  “I think you have magic songs,” Jack said, lifting a hand up in the air to catch something Morgan threw at him. His face lit up. “You know me so well, Morgan.”

  “We have had approximately seven hundred conversations about how you miss playing a ranger in the past year,” Morgan said. He picked up another piece and slide it across the table. “Yours even comes with a wolf pet.”

  “Oh, this is so amazingly stereotypical and I love it,” Jack said. “I love playing the stereotypical ranger! It’s my favorite overused archetype!”

  Tobias took his miniature and put it down next to his sister’s.

  “Look, Tam. We’re even twins in the game. Team pointy ears!”

  He held a hand up for a high five. His sister left him hanging there for a full fifteen seconds before begrudgingly slapping his palm with her own.

  “Of course you guys are elves,” Eriko said.

  “What? Why do you say that?” Tamsin said.

  “Because elves are pretty, and the two of you are fucking gorgeous in real life,” Eriko said. “You’re just staying true to form.”

  “I am choosing to take that as a compliment,” Tobias said. “And I will not be persuaded otherwise.”

  Eriko turned her figurine over in her hand, scoping out the design.

  “These are bizarrely nice for a game I’ve never heard of,” she said. “I’m calling my character Rouge, by the way.”

  “Rouge the Rogue,” Morgan deadpanned.

  “Come on, you know that’s funny,” she said. “The internet spells it that way all the time. I’ll be the most famous rogue on the interwebs!”