It's a fight!

“Well, I guess I should try and find whoever wanted to turn my face into a pincushion,” Rhia said. “Can I tell what direction I got shot at from?”

“Give me a perception check,” I said.

She rolled, winced at the number, and then checked her character sheet. “Seven,” she said.

“Not enough, sorry,” I said. “You aren’t sure which side of the road it came from, and there are trees all around you.”

“OK,” Rhia said. “Um, then I guess I’m going to try and help Renee with the knife-lady so we can get into cover. I’ll jump and try to tackle the bandit to the ground as I yell, ‘Get to cover, Renee!’”

“Cool. That’s a sort of grapple check, so it’ll be an opposed roll.” We both rolled and I checked the numbers. “Looks like you’re successful,” I said. “So we see Oliva of Parnasus leap to save her friend, barreling heroically into the bandit lady, when her name splashes across the comic panel. What’s your tagline?”

“Party Paladin,” Rhia said with a smirk.

I snorted and the girls chuckled. “OK. I probably should have asked this already, but what deity does your Order of Knights serve?”

“So, as far as I know, you haven’t had this one show up in your world yet,” Rhia said. “But I was thinking Revelry if that’s OK? She would be, like, the patron of Festivals and Parties and Celebrations.”

“Hmmm,” I nodded, thinking. The deities in my world of Firth were all based on Emotions. The core three, Joy, Sorrow and Anger, created all life and filled it with their children, which were more nuanced emotions. My players had explored all sorts of different minor deities over the years - Glee, Guilt, Rage, Grief, Melancholy, Lust. I’d definitely never had a Revelry though. “OK,” I said, deciding to lean into Yes, And. “So Olivia of Parnasus, Party Paladin of Revelry. Are you the defender of the Keg Stand?”

Rhia smirked and rolled her eyes. “No one does keg stands anymore, Shane,” she said.

“We stick vodka-soaked tampons up our butts. Gets us drunk way faster,” Elyse said.

They all started laughing at the look on my face.

“I’m joking!” Elyse guffawed.

“Good God,” I said, wiping a hand over my forehead. “You had me with that one.”

“Technically it would work,” Tori said. “None of us are that crazy though.”

“I heard that Rachel tried it once, and got her boyfriend to do it too,” Elyse said.

“Well, she’s pretty much an alcoholic,” Rhia said. “Did you hear that-”

“Anyways,” I said, cutting the drama talk. “We see Olivia’s name flash across the comic panel, and then she and the bandit woman crash to the ground. Anything else you want to do?”

“Can I stab her with my sword?” Rhia asked.

“Tackling her definitely took up your action. Got a bonus action?”

“Not at this level,” Rhia shook her head. “I’m done.”

“Alright,” I said. “Then you all hear a thwack from the right side of the road, the same thwack that happened right before the bolt hit Olivia’s back.” I rolled a die behind the screen. “It looks like the hidden bandit shot at Jade, and…” I rolled the hit. “Ooh, that’s a seventeen to hit.”

“Agh,” Tori said, scrunching up her nose. “Got me.”

“The bolt thuds into the back of your thigh painfully and you take… five points of damage.”

“Fuck!” Tori exclaimed, dramatically wincing again as if she’d gotten hit.

“Hah, you get shot in the butt,” Rhia snickered.

“It was my thigh, not my butt,” Tori said.

“Won’t stop us from saying it was your butt when you can’t sit down,” Elyse smirked.

“Can I side with the bandits?” Tori asked me.

“Might be a little late for that after you dropkicked one to ****,” I pointed out.

“OK,” Tori sighed. “It’s my turn, right?”

We’d reached the end of the turn order and were starting a new round, so I told her to go ahead. Jade, limping but trying to hide her pain, tried to fight back against the bandit attacking her with the axe but apparently her dice didn’t like the idea of her going to fisticuffs and she rolled low. Renee was next, however, and seeing that Jade was in trouble she followed Olivia’s orders and rushed into the brush on the left side of the road into cover from the crossbow shots, but put her back to a tree and summoned another fiery shadow bolt.

“I’ve got you, Jade!” Renee called, releasing the bolt at the axe-swinging bandit and catching him squarely in the back. The bolt chewed through his leather coat like a hot knife through butter and sent him spinning to the ground and smoking.

“Thanks, babe!” Jade called back.

Meanwhile, the knife-wielding lady bandit was scrambling on the ground with Olivia and tried to shank the Paladin but couldn’t manage to get through her chainmail. That gave Olivia the chance to get her sword around and plunge it into the woman’s side, even rolling at disadvantage and needing to take the lower of two rolls since she was trying to use a sword while lying on the ground. Olivia thought about shoving the body off of her and standing up but realized she would still be stuck in the middle of the road so instead she grabbed the body and rolled slightly to put it between her and the crossbowman.

With all of the close-up bandits dead, that brought the turn order back to the crossbow. I rolled dice behind the screen as the girls all sat on edge, worried about who was going to get shot at next. Olivia and Renee had some cover, but Jade was standing in the open still and had already been shot once. Another one could be deadly.

“As the struggles of the dying diminish, the quiet of the forest descends on the King’s Way,” I said. “Jade, what would you like to do?”

“No one got shot?” Tori asked in confusion.

“Not that you can tell,” I said.

“Well, I guess I dive for the trees on the right side of the road and I’ll take cover from the deeper part of the forest,” she said.

I asked for perception rolls from all of them, and they all rolled mediocre. “After about half a minute, nothing has happened,” I said.

The girls, frustrated, took some time to try and hunt down the crossbow shooter, and after a good Survival roll from Jade, they found the spot where the person was probably shooting from. Other than a single footprint that was leading away into the forest they didn’t find any other sign of them.

“He ran away!?” Rhia exclaimed.

“Well, I mean, we killed three of his friends in, what, twelve seconds in-game?” Elyse asked. “That’s how long two rounds is, right?”

“About that,” I nodded.

The girls, especially Rhia, were still suspicious but decided there was no point in trying to run down a fleeing bandit who had a head start on them. Especially when Jade needed some healing.

The good news was that Olivia, as a Paladin, was able to call upon her deity to do a small amount of healing. “Alright,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “Hands and knees, Jade. I gotta put my hands on that booty if I’m going to heal it.”

“What?” Tori laughed. “Oh, lay on hands. Your ability. Right. But it’s not my butt, it’s just my thigh!”

They bickered a little, making me laugh as all three of the girls were falling into their characters, and in the end, Tori got up and walked around the table to mime how she refused to get down on her hands and knees, but only bent over slightly. Rhia rubbed her hands together again like she was warming them up, then pretended to spit on them before giving Tori a smack on the back of her thigh over her loose pants. The Indian girl jumped slightly, turning as she laughed and slapped Rhia’s hand away.

“Alright,” I chuckled at their antics. “With the bolt pulled from Tori’s thigh and the wound magically healed, the three of you are able to continue your walk to Tremulous Crook. Based on the last waystone you passed, you think you’re about an hour away.”

“Well, let’s get moving then,” Elyse said. “This is fun!”

“Wait, there’s one last thing we need to do here,” Rhia said.

“What’s that?” Elyse asked.

Tori smirked and looked at me. “We loot the bodies!”

I nodded, grinning, knowing that had been coming. “There’s not much on them - they don’t seem like they were particularly successful bandits so far. Between the three of them, you find seven copper coins, two tattered leather jerkins, three sets of worn boots, two hatchets, plus three hunting knives. You do, however, also find that they are each wearing a tin amulet hung on a string around their necks. The soft metal is in a circular shape, and pressed into it is the vague shape of a hound baying at the moon.”

“It must be, like, a bandit club or something,” Tori said, speaking as Jade.

“Or a whole gang, like in Westerns,” Elyse said.

I smiled to myself and scribbled a note in my notebook. The Risen Wolf Gang.

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