A Journey through the Forest

Each of the girls had a beer in front of them, Elyse chugging half of hers and sighing in satisfaction before the game started again.

There was a bit of checking to see if they needed to buy or borrow anything from town - none of the ladies had a proper ranged weapon like a bow or crossbow, and they had to decide whether they would be taking Phil and Seymor the donkeys and hiring on Fergus again. In the end, since they’d purchased the donkeys, they were running pretty low on funds and couldn’t afford a crossbow. They did, however, make sure that Fergus was OK to take care of Phil and Seymour while they were gone and he treated the pelts to get them ready for sale.

“You better keep ‘em safe, you big lug,” Jade said. “And yourself. If the Gang comes back before we do, don’t go getting yourself in trouble.”

“Yes’m, Miss Jade,” Fergus mumbled, nodding his head to her.

Renee passed him a silver coin when she shook his hand goodbye, mentioning that Phil in particular deserved a treat after they’d used him for bait.

Then it was Olivia’s turn. “Fergus, you were a good guide for us,” she said. “And I’m worried about what comes next. Would you allow me to give you the Blessing of Revelry?”

“I don’t right now what’m that’d mean, Miss Olivia,” Fergus said.

Rhia stood up, motioning for me to stand and come around to her side of the game table. I raised an eyebrow and stood, joining her.

“Fergus is a little taller than you, right?” Rhia asked.

“About,” I said. “And maybe a little broader.”

“OK, so this is what Olivia does,” Rhia said.

Olivia took Fergus’s left hand and brought it to her chest, placing it over her heart, and she did the same with hers to him. Then she looked Fergus in the eye. “May your water taste like the finest wine,” she said, adding a gravitas to her voice. “Your laughter boom loud and bright, and your nights be filled with companionship. I bless you in the name of Revelry, who loves all that bring joy to others' lives.” Olivia then reached up with her right hand, scooping it behind Fergus’s neck and pulling him down so she could kiss him on the forehead, and then planted a kiss on his lips. “There,” she said as she let go of him with a smirk. “You’re blessed.”

“Um, uh,” Fergus stammered a little, lifting a couple of fingers to his lips as he processed what had just happened. “Thankee kindly, Miss Olivia.”

“Is that a homebrew blessing mechanic or something you have in the game?” Tori asked me as I went back to my seat. Getting kissed by Rhia again had been strange just like the first time, but a little more comfortable. There hadn’t been any tongue or anything, it had just been a firm kiss, and I was sure she’d done that sort of kiss for different acting scenes in class or performances just like I had when I was in college.

It was still kissing Rhia though.

“No,” I said. “That was definitely all Rhia.”

“I just wanted something that made sense, and I wasn’t about to do the sign of the cross or something,” Rhia smirked as she sat back down in her chair after making sure the towels were in place protecting the chair.

“Well, I thought it looked good,” Elyse said. “And it was believable.”

“Oh, I did too,” Tori said. “I just wondered if she was actually blessing Fergus or not.”

“Mmm, well, mechanically not that you know of,” I said. “But he definitely feels blessed.”

That got some chuckles from the girls, and we got back to the adventure. They left town in the direction the bandit gang had departed town and got a mile out of town before they realised none of them had a good idea of where the hell they were going. Jade was the only one trained in the Survival skill, which was what they would need to use to try and track the path of the bandits since they weren’t following a road or obvious trail, but she had focused her stats on Dexterity and Constitution so she only had a small bonus. After a couple of poor rolls, leading to a couple of hours wandering around the wilderness, it was Renee who said, “Why don’t we just go get Fergus? He’s a tracker, he’s got to be good at this stuff.”

So they tramped back into town, went to Fergus’s place and hired him on again. He got his sister in town to take care of Phil and Seymour, since taking the donkeys into the forest seemed like a bad idea without any roads, and he passed off the pelts to another trapper to get them properly treated and prepared.

They set off again, this time a little after noon, and I rolled for Fergus to do his tracking and they were off.

Instead of rolling on the random encounter tables myself, I had the girls roll for me, each one representing a portion of their travelling day, but they each rolled pretty mediocre and they didn’t run into any strange things or wild animals. They set camp for the night, Fergus the only one who had brought a tent, and the girls teased him about sharing it with them even if it would be a tight squeeze. They let him be however, Rhia rightly deciding it was too early to jump that far into the ‘roleplay’ activity.

The next day they were up bright and early and on the path again. Tori rolled low in the morning and they stumbled on a trio of angry wild boars; there were some bad scratches to Olivia and Jade once the beasts were dealt with, and Fergus bemoaned not being able to properly harvest the plentiful meat on their bones - three adult boars could have fed most of the village for a night and it was a waste to leave them behind. They were on a mission, however, and the girls gave him time to harvest enough from the pigs that they could cook that night on the campfire.

Unfortunately, their afternoon rolls weren’t much better. The raw meat being carried attracted a cockatrice - a carrion lizard-bird creature that wouldn’t have been too deadly except that it had the ability to petrify a person with its poisonous bite. Fergus almost succumbed early in the fight, only saved by Renee leaping into action and doing the ‘suck out the venom’ trick with a really good Medicine roll even though she wasn’t trained in it. That delayed the effect for enough time that Olivia was able to use her Lay on Hands ability on Fergus.

Rhia stood up from her seat for that, putting both hands on my chest and leaning down to look me in the eyes deeply. “I heal you in the name of the Great Party,” she said and then slapped both hands on my chest. I coughed in response, playing up that Fergus was coming out of the paralysing effect.

That wasn’t the end of their troubles, though, because late in the day just as they were looking for a place to camp, Renee stumbled on a patch of strange mushrooms. Now, if I’d been playing The Game with my regular group, the mushrooms probably would have been hallucinogenic aphrodisiacs. Or phallus-shaped things that let out spores that made people horny. Or some equally silly reason for a sex break from the fighting. The girls definitely weren’t there yet though, so the mushrooms ended up being alive and hostile - tiny versions of the Myconids from the official settings. Renee tried talking to them and got pebbles thrown at her in response, followed by toothpick-sized ‘spears’ as they gabbered in their strange language.

It was cute until it wasn’t, and Renee felt a sharp pain in her ankle. When she looked down she saw two of the little creatures trying to cut her Achilles tendon with little stone axes like they were preparing to fell a tree. That finally turned things into a quick combat - the mushrooms didn’t really have a chance, but it was the kind of encounter that if the girls had just left them behind I would have brought them back bigger and more dangerous in the future.

I still could, considering they probably hadn’t been able to kill all the mushrooms.

Nothing happened overnight during camping, and they set out the next day. No encounters in the morning, and Fergus called a halt to their trek at about mid-afternoon. They were a good two days' travel into the wilds, and despite the fights had been rolling well to make good time so were hopeful they might have even been catching up to the bandits.

“What’s wrong?” Jade asked Fergus as he crouched low.

“Somethin’ up ahead,” Fergus muttered. “Somethin’ strange. People.”

“Might be the bandits,” Olivia said.

“I’ll go take a peek,” Fergus said quietly. It had been proven during some of the rolls in the forest that he was fairly stealthy. Jade had a chance of keeping up with him, but Renee and especially Olivia not so much.

He left and came back a minute later, shaking his head.

“Well?” the girls asked.

“It’s strange,” Fergus reported. “It’s like a whole village sprung up in the middle ‘o the woods. Looks like shite, but lots o’ rough lookin’ folks walkin’ around.”

“How many is lots?” Jade asked.

“Maybe fifty, what I saw outside,” he replied.

“Shit,” all three girls said at once.

“What’s strangest is Gal Palach is ‘bout three, maybe four days that way,” he said, nodding to the west. “Can’t see Duke Unger lettin’ an army o’ bandits gather up out ‘ere if anyone knows ‘bout it.”

Olivia blew out a long breath, looking at her friends. “Alright,” she said. “We want vengeance for Pretty and the town, but there might be even more important stuff going on here.”

“Are you suggesting that we need to infiltrate a bandit camp to figure out what their plans are?” Jade asked.

“With only four of us, and fifty-plus of them?” Renne chipped in.

“It’s long odds,” Olivia agreed. “But for the realm, I think we need to.”

“I’m in,” Renee nodded.

“Me too,” Jade agreed.

All three girls looked to Fergus.

“Er…” he said. Part of me wanted to have him scram and head back to Tremulous Crook - one less NPC for me to be tracking. On the other hand, the girls had started to care about him more and more, which made him a good point of leverage to ramp tension. There was also the fun of making him the ‘damsel in distress’ in the future, turning the trope on its head. “Foine,” he said. “But I ain’t killin’ nobody. Or raidin' a town or nothin’.”

The girls all grinned and started to come up with a plan.

Breakthebar erotica is powered by Patreon,. PM if interested in making a Commission.