Get to know the team.

It took me roughly five whole minutes to come to terms with the discovery of my status as the DM, during which time I simply stared off into the middle-distance and thought about things. I tried so desperately to remember how I got here, but to my dismay I couldn’t remember anything recent, just long-term stuff like how old I was and what year I graduated high school. Totally useless in this context. Even trying to remember the last thing I had been doing was fruitless. As though my short-term memory, beyond waking up in this tavern, was completely locked away from me.

After I gave up on that venture, I decided it didn’t do me much good to dwell on why I was in this situation at the moment. I wasn’t even convinced this was a bad thing yet. I was the dungeon master of my very own Dungeons and Dragons campaign. This world was mine to control, mine to manipulate. I could embark on any adventure I wanted here, I could make any adventure here. This was, of course, assuming I could figure out exactly how to manipulate things.

So, with this in mind I sat down back at the table and all eyes were on me again. These were quite lovely party members, I’d never been the DM for a group like this, nor had I ever been a player in one. It was apparent, by virtue of the fact that these individuals had actual character sheets rather than stat blocks, that these four individuals were meant to be “players”. I had no actual idea if they were real people like me or not, but they were the group I was telling my story to, and it seemed like a good idea to get to know them.

There was a lot else I needed to do as far as figuring out how dungeon mastering was going to work in a real-life D&D game; but I was eager and decided that could wait until a little later. I could evidently freeze time, after all. Speaking of which, it was about time I started things up again.

In my head I thought and meant, Resume time, and it did.

“Feeling better?” the elf, Tyvhoran, asked me a soon as everyone started moving again. They all carried on like they had never stopped in the first place. Even the ones who had been frozen mid-stride didn’t seem to wonder why they were just standing still. They just went on walking like it was the most normal thing in the world.

Putting myself in the right mindset to roleplay Setsuka, I replied, “Much, thank you.” I had forgotten, in that moment, that her method of healing had been to grope me, so I also forgot to react to that fact. This would be an important fact later on.

“Good,” she smiled, a truly enchanting and wonderful smile.

“I have to admit, I think the wine hit a little harder than I expected,” I continued, looking around at all of them, “can we just, uh, run through introductions one more time?”

“I suppose that’s fair,” the tiefling, Menhat, replied, “we did only just meet this morning.”

“We all drank to celebrate our party getting formed,” the goth, whose name was Syvana, explained. “You got smashed right away.”

“I’ve never had such delicious wine before, we only have rice wine in the lands of Yoshida” I said, shrugging.

“And what’s more,” Tyvhoran began, folding her arms under her bust to make her hefty breasts bounce a little and even make one of her rosy, pink areolae peek out from her V-neck dress, “we've not actually had a formal introduction yet.”

“That’s true, well, we’re all here, we’re all sober, let’s get it on!” Menhat said, grinning wide and giving me a lusty wink, silently acknowledging the double entendre she made.

“I suppose I shall start us off, then,” Tyvhoran announced, starting to twirl her fingers through her long, wavy golden blonde hair idly as she spoke, “My name is Tyvhoran Caerodell and I am a member of the Solahel elven commune just north-east of here. I am a priestess of Meliel at the temple there, and I am on a pilgrimage to become high priestess.”

I noted, with interest, that she pronounced her name “tiv-or-ann seh-ro-dell". Being able to pronounce their names correctly seemed important.

“Where is your pilgrimage to?” Heian asked, curiosity clearly piqued.

“I wasn’t given a destination; I must simply spend the next ten years traveling and experiencing what the continent has to offer me.”

“Meliel…” the busty tiefling began, tilting her head to the side, “is that the elven name for Melandra?”

“It is, yes,” Tyvhoran replied, smiling.

“I knew I recognized that symbol! You and I are gonna get along great then! I worship Verielle,” Menhat licked her lips and wiggled her eyebrows at the elven cleric. While Melandra was a goddess of celebrations, recreation, hedonism, and lust, Verielle was the goddess of the sun, stars, traveling, and prostitution. The two naturally got along very well, and the goddesses themselves were actually very close friends, so their followers often considered each other allies.

One might be tempted to wonder how exactly I knew so much about this world I was in, and I would be right there with them, wondering. I was beginning to realize that not only was I in a D&D game, not only was I the DM of said game, but the game was actually taking place in the fantasy world I created for my campaigns. I knew basically everything about this world in broad strokes, I even knew secrets about this universe that nobody else knew, not even those who resided within it. I would have to be careful to remain in character here and not reveal any more than Setsuka should know.

Whatever strange and mystical **** that brought me here had put painstaking effort into making sure this was a campaign I would run as a DM, I didn’t know yet what kind of story this campaign would have or if that was even predetermined. It might be the case that the world was waiting for my command, my push in the right direction. I had no idea how to do that, though. Most of how I could actually control this world was obscured from me at the moment. It would have been nice to have some kind of guide or interface. Perhaps there was and I just hadn’t found it yet. Either way, these were questions for another time, I hadn’t gotten to know all of my cute party members yet.

“Guess I’m next then,” Syvana said, probably interpreting my silence as an insistence that I go last. In truth I was just lost in thought. “I’m Syvana Grimmdark and there is frankly not a whole lot to tell. I can’t remember anything. I woke up one day standing in a nearby town butt-naked in the rain with nothing but this book on me.” She lifted up an ominous looking old tome wrapped in black leather and covered in strange, purple arcane symbols. “It’s filled with absolute gibberish that I can only kind of understand if I’m in the right mindset.”

She had pronounced her name “siv-on-uh", Grimmdark was exactly how I expected it to sound, just the words “grim” and “dark” shoved together.

“Well, that’s certainly ominous,” Heian offered, and for a brief moment I thought he was referring to her name, but only because I had been thinking about it.

“Yeah, strangest of all, I have a pact with some otherworldly entity that I don’t know how I got. So, I guess I’m a warlock.”

“Oh,” Tyvhoran said, and a worried expression crossed the faces of everyone around the table.

“Don’t worry, I’m not evil or anything,” Syvana tried to assure us. This was a fact that I actually knew, her listed alignment was chaotic-neutral. Depending on player interpretation, however, that could be even worse.

“Okay,” Heian began, “guess I’ll go next, as we seem to be going clock-wise. I’m Heian Firahel from the woodland realm of Eldyne. Honestly, I’d rather not drudge up my past in front of a group of strangers, so I will just go over the parts that are relevant. I’m a well-trained ranger, I know the lands of Middle-Western Asora like the back of my hand, I hate orcs, and I hate lizardfolk.”

He pronounced his name, “Hay-en fear-uh-hell". He sounded like a pretty typical ranger. Having one in the team was indeed going to be pretty helpful, all things considered. Asora was the name of the continent we were on, where all of these kingdoms resided, so if he really knew that much, we were going to have an easy time traveling this part of the world.

“Also, I am journeyman rank in the adventurer’s guild. If you haven’t become a member yet, you really should. They offer some nice perks that will make things easier for us as we travel, and we can visit their bounty boards if we’re ever short on coin. They have a membership fee, but the basic plan is only ten gold and it’s all we really need.”

That was actually a pretty decent idea. “Sounds like you’ll be a pretty useful guy to have around,” I said, trying my best to be amiable given that Heian seemed to be a little rough around the edges. If he had been a girl, I might have been tempted to go so far as to call him a tsundere.

“Wait!” Menhat suddenly exclaimed and turned a shocked expression on the half-elf. “You’re a guy!?”

Heian suddenly blushed furiously and sputtered, “O-of course I’m a guy, what are you talking about?”

“I thought you were a girl! You are so adorable!” Her elbows were on the table and her hands were in her cheeks as she said this, wide-eyed. “I mean, I was already into you before, but now you have my attention.”

“Sh-shut up!” Heian demanded, furiously. “Anyway, I’m done with my introduction, can we move along now?”

“Okay, okay, I’m next right?” The periwinkle tiefling asked, shrugging and getting comfortable in her chair. “My name is Menhat and I don’t want to take up too much of your time so I’ll give the cliff-notes introduction.” She began listing off facts about herself, counting each one on her fingers as she went along.

Though I might have been tempted to say her name was said “men-hat” it was actually somewhere between “men-ett” and “men-att”. I noted she didn’t give us her last name, which was listed as “Omen” on her sheet.

“I’m a tiefling, my home village in Anshar hated me so I left when I became an adult,” Anshar was a desert kingdom to the south-east of us across the vast central sea and on another continent, and this detail surprised me because the Anshari were well-known for their egalitarian disposition, “I became a traveling prostitute to make ends meet, I joined up with Anshar’s military for a while, but I retired eventually, now I’m an adventurer and I offer my services for free.”

An examination of her character sheet told me all of this was accurate. She was a battle-master fighter, but her background was a custom one titled “Traveling Prostitute”. She was otherwise moderately built for defense and harrying opponents. Her primary weapon seemed to be a halberd.

“Services? Do you mean your adventuring services or combat services?” Heian asked, kicking me out of my thoughts.

“Oh no no, I offer my sexual services for free. To anyone, anytime, all you need to do is ask. I’m not shy.” She then gave the table a wink and a seductive giggle.

Well, that was certainly forward. I felt myself blush at her brazen offer, and I wasn’t alone. Tyvhoran and Heian also had a slight blush and shifted awkwardly but the former did not appear repulsed by the idea, at least.

“Hot,” was Syvanna’s reply, not even a hint of a blush but a slight smile on her lips.

While I could not yet say with absolute certainty that this party consisted of “real” people from Earth like me, they certainly did seem like characters real people would make to play in a campaign. There was a warlock with a mysterious past, an optimistic and nurturing cleric on a pilgrimage, an ill-trusting ranger with a hint of edginess, the exceptionally horny tiefling, and me, of course, the weeb rogue.

One thing was absolutely clear to me, this group was definitely not comprised of the players I normally played with. All of the people I played with were men and never played female characters—I was always the one who did that—and even if they did, they would have never gotten this flirty with each other. I wasn’t exactly complaining, even if these characters were controlled by people like me and were male, they came up with some pretty hot ladies and I didn’t actually have to think about that while I was here in the game itself, unable to see the face behind the character.

“How about you, Setsuka?” Tyvhoran asked, and it took a second to realize she was talking to me. I wasn’t used to that name yet.

“I am Setsuka Yasuhiko from Yoshida, the isle of Yunai,” I said, doing my best to remember the ninja’s backstory. I even had the notes section of my character sheet at the forefront of my mind to help guide me along. “I was born into the Yasuhiko shinobi clan, and for a long time I was a willing minion to their evil schemes. I don’t want to endanger you all any more than I have to by going into the details, but I have fled my clan and am on the run from them.”

“I’d say you made it,” Heian observed, “Yunai is a very long way from here, it's literally on the opposite end of the Asoran continent. You had to pass through three kingdoms to get here from there,” I almost didn’t even comprehend what the ranger had said because I was distracted by a message that popped up in my head at the exact moment he said it.

Heian makes an intelligence (nature) check with a bonus of 4 to determine the general location of Yunai, rolling a 14 and passing the check with 18 (DC 15, medium difficulty).

“Uh,” I stammered, getting back into the groove of the roleplay, “well shinobi are nothing if not tenacious. I was determined enough to make it this far, there’s nothing stopping the rest of the clan from doing the same. I only bring this up as a potential warning and advance apology, as it may be the case that traveling with me may get you caught up in my affairs.”

The others all shared a look between each other.

“You’re cute, so I’m down,” Menhat replied, grinning seductively.

“It’s not as if you won’t make up for it with your skills, I’d hope,” Heian said, noncommittally.

“Whatever,” was Syvana’s reply, accompanied by a shrug.

“We all must travel with our own burdens,” Tyvhoran said, sagely.

Suddenly, the barmaid, whose cleavage I was now intimately familiar with, appeared next to me at the table, “Another round of drinks for you folks?” she asked.

Remembering the note I had added in the GM section, I decided to get a little handsy. I lifted a hand up to her rear and groped it in a way I hoped was subtle and that the other teammates didn’t see. She gave me a knowing glance, but it was not an upset one. Her rear was quite springy and soft, I could feel the outline of her panties through the thin fabric of her skirt.

“Ah, I think we’re done for the day, thank you,” Tyvhoran replied.

While she was doing this, I mentally brought up Katherine’s stat block and quickly added another line to the DM notes, Will kiss women who tip her. Then after a moment of hesitation I also added the next line. I didn’t know if it was strictly necessary, but just in case it was I added, Is bisexual.

“Oh, all right then, just hail me if you change your mind or need anything else.” Katherine said.

“Just one more thing,” I said before she began to walk away. I fished my coin purse from my top and produced three gold coins. Smiling, I dropped them into the pocket on the front of her dress. “You’ve been a great help tonight, thank you.”

Exchange rates for gold coins to US currency were always going to be iffy. Different things had different values not only in a medieval setting, but also a fantasy medieval setting. But my general rule of thumb in campaigns was that one gold coin was roughly comparable to twenty dollars. In essence this meant I just gave her the equivalent of a sixty-dollar tip. And in the kind of economy this town likely had, that was good money.

“Goodness, you adventuring types always spoil me so much,” she replied, and even blushed a little, “only fair that I return the favor.” Then she leaned down and did exactly what I expected her to, and yet it still managed to surprise me. She pressed her lips against mine in not just a peck but in a heated and **** way, like she really wanted it too.

After our shockingly passionate kiss ended, I was a little dazed, but then I said, “I have a favor to ask all of you, and it’s of the utmost importance.”

Each gave their own expressions of curiosity.

“Remind me to tip her again.”