| DirtSailor |
"Two days into the journey and we had finally come upon the moutains, peaks so jagged they looked to be the obsidian teeth of some colossal Old God of distruction..." He needed no instrument, no lyre, nor flute to work his magic... if it could be called that. Words dripped from his tongue like honey and the most sinister lie sounded like the affirmed word of the Gods. The Bard had once told his companions a tale of how he had been ambushed by an entire tribe of Orcs, and in a fit of rage and flurry of blows he told them to 'Go to Hell.' The Orcs had immediatly dropped their weapons and began packing their belongings, actually singing as they prepared for the trip.
Did his companions believe him? No... of course not. Singing Orcs? An entire tribe giving up on the fair skinned prey? Just... leaving? No one was THAT convincing, they told themselves as they allowed their attentions to be drawn to the same story they had heard a hundred times in the past week.
The Dwarves, Gorim the Foul and Bornir the Holy sighed as they looked back and forth from each other, to the growing crowd around their Bard in the dimly lit tavern. "I never recall our adventures in quite the same version as that one does...," Gorim grumbled, as he lifted the mug to his liver colored lips. Bornir's laugh drowned out his friend's squabbles, wiping his eyes with the back of one hand as he attempted to flag down the awestruck tavern maiden with his other. "No, no my friend. In your version, your flurry of blows is more offensive to the fiends than your stench!"
"Ettins!" The Bard proclaimed, throwing his hands into the air as the candles and torches around him flared for effect. No doubt he had greased the wicks or used his pyrotechnics... or some other waste of a perfectly good spell as was his style once he had gotten into the groove. The crowd of commoners gasped, women swayed on their feet, more than one old veteran reached for the handle of the swords they no longer carried. A single scream rose from the back of the tavern from the maiden who tipped her tray of mead filled mugs onto Gorim.
"They charged behind a rolling wall of rocks down the mountain side toward our very location. No doubt, they thought that an easy meal had crossed into their wide swath of territory. Two legged lambs ripe for the skinning and boiling... or so they thought..." He tipped a wink that was aimed at no one in particular, though every woman in the room would later claim that it had been for herself alone.
"That blasted Elf spotted them the moment we set foot on that path," Gorim grumbled, wiping the sticky sweet beer from his brow. The maiden had not even noticed that her tray was empty, far to engrossed in the spinning web of the Bard's tale. "Oh shush," Bornir replied, laughing was easy when you were still dry, "He hasn't even gotten to the good part yet."
To be continued...
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So I finally let my buddies talk me into playing with their Pathfinder group, and boy am I glad I took them up on it. The story our GM has put together is... in a group of words... effin coo! Unfortunately, while the wife tolerate's my biweekly, 6-8 hour man date, she only nods with polite disinterest as I recount our harrowing adventures... and so I shall use this as my medium.
Hopefully the readers will get a chuckle or two. Maybe I can even give some ideas to a GM that scans my post. But really, the stories are just too good not to pen in one format or the other. Perhaps that is why I chose to play the Bard of the group.
I had begun to post part of my first session in the Advice column but it didn't really belong there. I'm still new to the site, so if this would be better suited in another tab of the messageboards please let me know.
Long days and pleasant nights, my friends.