Lauren Christ
Stories from the Axe and Thistle is a bi-monthly serialization that details the exploits of a D&D 5e campaign as they troll their way through an open-world wilderness. Often outlandish and good for a laugh, these vignettes are told by the Dungeon Master of said campaign, because sometimes humor is the only way to cope with tragedy!
Click here to see the previous installment.
The bartender tops up your mug and sets it back down in front of you, the froth from the ale spilling over and onto the wooden counter. You take the cold glass between your fingers, pondering everything you’ve just heard.
“Before we talk about the assassin, though, we need to mention some others.”
You look up. The bartender is leafing through a small, leather-bound notebook. You catch a glimpse of a page as she turns it – the white paper is filled with tight, neat handwriting. “What others?” you ask, sipping a bit of foam from the top of your beer.
“Well, for one thing, I have to warm up to that story. I can’t just tell it cold.” She shakes her head, then rifles past a whole section of pages all at once. “Besides, he was here years before he even met Varn.” Her eyes light up, and she grows quiet. She places her index finger on the page, squints at it, and then snaps the book shut. “Here’s a good one. Okay, so, have you ever been to the farm a couple miles south of here?”
You shake your head.
“Lovely little place run by a delightful trio of ladies. We get a lot of our food from there..” She snaps these sentences quickly, her hands playing along the bar. “Anyway, they had a bit of an ogre problem a while back, and they needed it taken care of quick. Starla – sweet little elf lady – her chickens kept getting snapped up by these ogres, right? And the crops were getting destroyed. It was no good. So, they need to hire some adventurers. And since I’m kind of running a hostel for adventurers, I sent a group her way.
Really weird bunch of people, that group. There was this little, country lady with muscles like you wouldn’t believe, a bubble gum witch, a paladin who didn’t say three words the entire time, some kind of bird man, and this grizzled-looking healer who looked more like he’d be at home in a morgue than a church. They didn’t look like much, honestly, but they looked like they could at least take one ogre out, so I told them about the farm’s little problem.
They go traipsing right up to this ogre den, right in the middle of the day, and obviously, with ogres, your best bet is to use logic and reasoning, right? They speak our language, theoretically, so when you have a problem with an ogre who doesn’t understand the moral implications of chicken theft, your best bet is to hash it out with him like reasonable people, of course.
This is sarcasm, my friend. I am being sarcastic. But that’s exactly what the holy man did. He marched right into the mouth of the den and started calling out to the ogre like you would your neighbor, asking him please, wouldn’t he kindly reconsider his nightly attacks on the farm?
It worked about as well as you might expect it to, and the birdman got it the worst. We’re pretty sure the problem was just how much he resembled a giant chicken. The ogre clubbed him to death. Twice, actually, but he didn’t stay down long either time.”
“I’m sorry,” you interrupt, “What?”
The bartender laughs. “Yeah, I know. You get used to it. Adventurers are pretty hard to get rid of, but I’ve still had a few die on me.” She shrugs, and the next words out of her mouth sound somehow clumsy. “Easy come, easy go.”
She takes a deep breath. “So, anyway, they manage to kill this ogre, and then they start looting the place – another endearing adventurer quirk. They’re pocketing coins and chicken bones, and the bubblegum witch managed to get a whole bag full of these weird pottery shards. You know, the good stuff. They get to the last branch of the cave, and instead of finding more great trash to take home with them, they find – surprise! – another ogre. Almost as if it’s an ogre den. This one’s asleep, so they have a better shot at taking it by surprise. Or they would’ve if the cleric hadn’t woken it up by shouting pleasantries in its face. You know, because it had worked so well with the first ogre.”
“Did the bird guy die again?” you ask.
She shakes her head. “Nah, don’t think so. To make a long story short, they killed the second ogre, burned both of the bodies in some kind of mockery of ogrish funeral rites, and then came all the way back here to tell me about it. The bird actually tried to give me one of the ogre’s tongues, like he was some kind of little kid showing his mom some truly choice fingerpainting he’d done.”
“Did you take it? The tongue.”
“Absolutely not.” She wrinkles her nose exaggeratedly. There’s a silence, then, as you absorb the story, sipping at your drink. The bartender palms her notebook, turning it over in her hands a few times. Having finished her story, she looks a little bit tired and more than a little bit anxious, like she’s remembering something that would cost her too much to tell. Then, she says, “It was nice of them to come back and tell me about it, though. I like it when the adventurers come back.”
To be continued…
Stay tuned as we upload a new chapter of the campaign every other week right here on DorkDaily.com!
