“Of all the nerve,” Cassandra muttered again. “Trying to set me up for the urchin gambit. I bet he was going to try to arrest me, too, so he could try to extort me. No respect, nobody has any respect nowadays.”
“Dear,” Jason said gently, “you’re monologuing again, and we’re here.”
“Right.” Cassandra blinked a couple of times, coming back to the moment. “And here is…”
“The gate, mom. The gate with the great name that you’d probably spank the shit out of me for saying.”
“You bite your tongue,” the once-again-distracted mother retorted absently. “I’ve never raised a hand to you in anger, sorrow, or any other emotion in your life, and I never will. And no, holding you down while I put rash cream on your vulva when you were three years old doesn’t count.”
“Mom, why would you say that?”
“Well, font of our joys—”
“Shut up, dad,” Harriet sulked. “Because it’s true is practically a dad joke now, I hate both of you forever, you’re the worst.”
“Would you like to be able to see over the crowd? You can ride on my shoulders!”
“… this is going to be mortifying.”
“Up, up! Way up!”
“Can you please not use the same tone of voice you used in the videos where you were bench-pressing me?”
“As delightful as this is,” Harriet’s mother murmured, “we should get through the crowd. I don’t know why they’re massing at the gate to the other compound, and I do not want to get involved. Not this early in the adventure—we’re not ready to get political.”
“Didn’t we—”
“That time, we weren’t just fucked if we didn’t,” Cassandra told her daughter bluntly, “we had non-combat Classes. This System doesn’t seem to even have those.”
Indeed, she’d tried to query for them, and gotten the typical still processing that she’d come to associate with asking about anything that wasn’t in whatever her cheat skill had considered the default content. No Rulers, no Merchants, no Artisans or Scholars or even Commoners; at least, not that she was getting quantified information about, and she absolutely was not thinking too hard about it lest she wind up triggering an ability check—
Ability Checks
An ability check tests a character's or monster's innate talent and training in an effort to overcome a challenge. The situation calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results.
For every ability check, the situation decides which of the six abilities is relevant to the task at hand and the difficulty of the task, represented by a Difficulty Class. The more difficult a task, the higher its DC. The Typical Difficulty Classes table shows the most common DCs.
Typical Difficulty Classes
Very easy—5
Easy—10
Medium—15
Hard—20
Very hard—25
Nearly impossible—30
To make an ability check, roll a d20 and add the relevant ability modifier. As with other d20 rolls, apply bonuses and penalties, and compare the total to the DC. If the total equals or exceeds the DC, the ability check is a success--the creature overcomes the challenge at hand. Otherwise, it's a failure, which means the character or monster makes no progress toward the objective or makes progress combined with a setback determined by the circumstances.
—and yet another infodump from the System, which was turning out to be obnoxiously intrusive.
Even what she’d gotten was very much not what the System was trying to shove into her forebrain in one go. She’d stopped it, and interestingly, it hadn’t resisted or taken umbrage; as far as she could tell, it was entirely affectless even when she was preempting it.
“Take point, dear.” She smiled up at Harriet, who was pretending not to be having a blast from her elevated position. “Dears, that is.”
Nodding at her, Jason started forging his way through the crowd. It wasn’t particularly dense where they were standing; the crowd was mostly milling around the iron-reinforced hardwood gate of what looked like a military-administrative complex, and there was enough space for a hole to nigh-magically open up around the Paladin.
Stolen novel; please report.
The relatively flimsy wooden fence-and-gate to the caravan yard did not, however, open itself at his approach.
“Hold! You three, this is an access-controlled area. Identify yourselves and show your writ of entry!”
Cassandra squinted at the man in their way. He was… more than adequate, she had to admit; tall, broad-shouldered, and well-kempt as far as she could see. Which wasn’t very far; his visor was up, which let her make note of his trimmed and neatened balbo-cut beard—it did a good job firming up his jawline by following it just the right amount, and it didn’t look too offensively bad, as facial hair went. Otherwise, he was in full plate, and decently-fitting plate at that, though his gauntlets were hanging on his belt. Wrists corded with muscle suggested his longsword wasn’t for show, and his shield was emblazoned with the crest of a highly-reputable mercenary group whose nature was, apparently, known to her by backstory fiat.
Plate
Plate consists of shaped, interlocking metal plates to cover the entire body. A suit of plate includes gauntlets, heavy leather boots, a visored helmet, and thick layers of padding underneath the armor. Buckles and straps distribute the weight over the body.
Shields
A shield is made from wood or metal and is carried in one hand. Wielding a shield increases your Armor Class by 2. You can benefit from only one shield at a time.
LONGSWORD
COST: 15 gp
DAMAGE: 1d8 slashing
WEIGHT: 3 lb.
PROPERTIES: Versatile (1d10)
All in all, quite acceptable. If the Two Wolves Mercenary Company was going to be providing the guards inside the caravan, at least they wouldn’t be alone when, inevitably, everything went to shit.
“Scholar Claire and companions.” The answer came immediately; the ingestion of information through her Query never took time on the face of it, just time to go from having effectively read it to actually understanding it. “We’re contracted to Caravan Master Mook as supplementary guards for a trip to Short Drop Falls, leaving today. And you are?”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “First I’ve heard of this shit. And guards? You don’t look it.”
Cassandra sighed. “Dear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” her husband said agreeably.
“Peaceably, if you can,” she added, as if by afterthought.
“Always, ma’am.” He smiled at her, then raised his hands to the waist of the halfling riding on his shoulders. “Down you go, tykebomb.”
Harriet obligingly hopped off, ignoring his offer of a lift downwards—
Rolling 1D20 against Dexterity (Acrobatics) DC 10…
—landing almost smoothly despite the eight-foot drop from the broad platform of her father’s towering shoulders. She staggered, not having expected the unevenness of the here-slick, there-pitted road, but recovered easily enough. “What’s that mean? Tykebomb?”
“We’ll tell you when you’re older,” the two parents chorused, smirking at each other.
Before anyone could remark as to that, the half-orc Paladin straightened, smiling at the gate guard.
Jason Chadwick Claire was an enormous man, as Cassandra was well aware. Back on Earth he’d been six feet and eight inches tall, broad-shouldered and built like a mountain of muscle that loved to eat. He’d rippled with muscles and surged with immense power anytime he moved with purpose, and his wrists were the size of many women’s thighs.
When he was younger, they’d tried to recruit him for any number of sports teams—football, wrestling, boxing, and more, but mostly football. He’d been gracious and polite, as he almost always was, but he’d been very clear that his mother didn’t want him doing anything that involved concussions or joint damage; he swam, instead, and played cricket and tennis with absolutely no apparent self-consciousness.
His apparent lack of awareness was a lie, of course. No man of that size, not one who cares in the slightest about other peoples’ reactions, grows to adulthood without being aware of what reactions he causes in others. And so he learned to be… not small, since that would be impossible, and also unnecessary. But he learned to come off as normal, as someone who was built to a human scale. Someone who could walk without being stared at, who could approach a sales counter without anyone feeling intimidated, who could introduce himself at a party and radiate an affable kindness instead of menace.
That he was able to do so as an eight-and-a-half-foot tall half-orc whose muscles were even more exaggerated than ever said quite a lot about the extent to which he’d mastered the art… and he’d no less mastered the reverse.
Rolling 1D20 against Intimidation (Charisma) DC 15…
He towered over the scene, increasing the distance between the party and the nearest fringe elements of the crowd by a solid five feet. An almost unnatural aura of strength and utterly controlled menace practically radiated from him, like he could flex and break… well, not the world. But certainly peoples’ bones.
Cassandra couldn’t actually see his abdominal muscles through the chainmail, but it really felt in that moment as though she should have been able to.
Chain Mail
Made of interlocking metal rings, chain mail includes a layer of quilted fabric worn underneath the mail to prevent chafing and to cushion the impact of blows. The suit includes gauntlets.
The guardsman at the gate pursed his lips, then nodded almost grudgingly. “You don’t half look shabby,” he allowed. “You know how to use those weapons?”
“I’m Proficient in the javelin and the warhammer, if that’s what you’re asking, guardsman…”
“Gard.” He sighed at the towering half-orc’s confused expression. “G-A-R-D. Lieutenant Merric Gard, here as, yes, a caravan guard, permission granted to laugh.”
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant Gard. Jason Claire, Paladin on contract with my wife and our daughter.” Jason held out a hand to shake, and the lieutenant accepted—neither of them, Claire noted, going for a dominance grip. “I appreciate your permission to laugh, but… I don’t know what I’d be laughing at.” He grinned, suddenly boyish. “Not the first time I’ve missed that, though, so don’t mind my not getting the joke.”
“I am going to either hate your guts more than I will ever be able to express or I’m going to want to hire you for every contract I’m in until the end of time,” Gard muttered. “Alright, the three of you, in you go. Head to the horses, look for the gnome fussing over straps or whatever, that’s Mook.”
“Thank you,” they chorused variously, and then for a moment there was only the tramping of boots and the squealing of the gate as it closed to leaven the chaos and uproar of the street.