Dungeons and Dicks Ch. 01

This series is a mashup of several different genres and narrative styles. I hope you like it. This first chapter is a very slow burn to start with, but I promise it pays off in spades.

Fair warning, the story revolves around Dungeons and Dragons, RPGs, and a dusting of general geek culture to provide its set-up and narrative frame. I try to organically explain a sufficiency of terms, especially in this first chapter, so bear with me if you understand them already. If you don't know what D&D is, or even care, I hope to make sure that you can enjoy the story anyway.

There are four chapters to this one, and they should all post fairly swiftly.

As always, please remember that I am not aiming for deep truth here. I craft my stories to be plausibly ridiculous. Life doesn't work like this, and we all know it. Relax and enjoy the ride.

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Dungeons and Dicks: Chapter One--An Unexpected Role to Play

"I can't believe Mark did that," Tess said, as she rode me idly in our bed. We had both already made each other come shortly after getting home, and this was the kind of relaxed love making that was more about the intimacy and togetherness than about the climax. It was the sort of fuck where maybe we'd come, maybe we wouldn't. Except this time we were definitely both going to come again. That much was quite apparent in how directly we both had wanted to head to bed when we got home.

Sex with my wife is always good. But this night had already been an above average experience. I could tell Tess wanted to scream some more before we fell asleep, and I knew I was eager to make her do so, despite our current languid pace to allow for conversation.

After five years of marriage, I have to admit that the frequency of our sex had begun to fall off a little. Don't get me wrong, the occasional spontaneous screw on the kitchen table in the middle of making dinner still happened, but we had burnt enough sauces over the years that it was no longer exactly frequent. What was, if anything, more frequent and enjoyable these days was the sex we virtually always had the night after our weekly D&D sessions. While I didn't see any real connection between the sex and the gaming, the two had become paired for us in one of those little rituals married couples develop. And honestly, sex was a great way to get the mind right for sleep after four solid hours, give or take, of the frivolity and occasional intensity of committed Role-Play Gaming with a good group of friends.

"Did what? What are you talking about?" I knew exactly what she was talking about, but I found I wanted to make her say it.

"You know," she glared down at me, neither increasing nor stopping her easy rise and fall on my cock as she growled. I just smiled back at her, uncomprehending. "I mean when he had Renault fuck the shopkeeper's wife to get her to sell him the orb," Tess snapped. "What the hell was that?"

I burst out laughing, unable to keep playing it straight. Tess could not help but laugh with me. "I know," I gasped, a little louder than I meant to, in response to the way Tess's insides were clenching along with her giggles. "I set up the whole situation so he'd have to do a little caper to steal the damned thing. His character's a fucking thief for fuck's sake," I said. "But no, he ups and decides to act like he's got a sub-class in gigoloing or whatever!"

I am the DM for our group. That stands for Dungeon Master, the sort of referee of the game. In RPGs, Dungeon (or Game) Masters sort of set up a skeleton of the story that the rest of the group, the Players, will write with their actions.

Mark's character in the game is Renault, a level 11 thief, who has a wealth of laboriously accumulated skills, tools, and abilities that would have allowed him to steal the object that the party needed. Out of the blue, he had decided to short-circuit the whole scenario and seduce the Non-Player Character of the shop lady. It was my fault, I guess. I'd spent one too many sentences describing her good looks for some entertainment value. As DM, I was essentially playing her role in the story, so I could and should have shut him down from the start, making him go through the whole elaborate burglary scenario that I had spent half an hour writing earlier in the week.

But I had already drank my first beer and was well into my second a bit earlier in the evening than usual, and I had just let him roll with his schtick. The point of RPG gaming is to see what the players are going to try to pull, after all.

"Well, it worked, didn't it? You did get the orb," I added, letting my hands idly trace up her belly to cup her soft, swaying boobs.

She snorted, then made an approving noise concerning my current actions. "I guess. But he fucking described the act! In detail!" my wife growled.

"It wasn't that much detail," I said defending Mark... a little. "It was like five sentences."

"It was more than five sentences," Tess replied, simultaneously remembering how scandalized she was and getting a little more serious about our own, current, non-fictional sex.

"Geri was sitting right there next to him. Not to mention that Anne and I were listening too. I thought Geri was going to murder him."

"I was kind of surprised when she didn't," I allowed. "That said," I added musingly, "50 bucks says the two of them are home right at this very moment, playing an extremely vigorous game of Shopgirl and the Thief..."

Tess laughed at that... but she didn't disagree with me about it. "Let's just say, if Mark is still alive to play again next week, then you have probably won that bet," she said slyly.

"Well, either way, I'm not complaining. And since your actions speak louder than your words, I'm thinking you aren't either!" I said, suddenly grabbing her and rolling us over with me on top. Languid discussions about Mark's lurid imagination were fine and all, but it was time for some lurid activity of our own.

*

The next Saturday, I was packing up all my DM stuff--my bag of dice, my big privacy screen that kept nasty players from seeing my maps, notes, and the dice I was rolling, the case of lead miniature figures we used to lay out battles, and my three-ring binder with all the fruits of my creative efforts for the week, all ready to unleash on my wife and friends. Tess was putting aluminum foil over her contribution to dinner for the night, a tray of Caesar Salads, each a single bite, nestled in her home-made, baked Parmesan cheese cups. We headed out the door to the garage for the short drive over to Mark and Geri's, who were hosting that week. As we got in the car, Tess asked, "Well, we have not been questioned by the police about Geri's actions and whereabouts, so I'm guessing Mark has survived. I hope you are going to head off any more of that shit? I'd hate to see him die anyway after such a narrow escape."

"I don't know," I said slyly. "There was this woman who witnessed his act with me, that later not only fucked me like a wildcat, but she blew me... twice." Tess smiled in self-satisfied fashion. "Given that incredible aftermath, I thought, rather than shut him down, I might maybe goad him a little..."

She laughed out loud at that, then stopped and looked at me in semi-genuine horror. "Wait... are you serious?"

"Maybe," I smirked, making the turn just past the Walmart.

"What have you got planned this time?" Tess demanded.

I just smiled, and she hit me. Not terribly hard, though.

Mark and Geri's house is a bit nicer than ours, to be honest. Mark inherited his father's martial arts dojo tragically early, and he makes good money there--mostly teaching little kids about flexibility, self-discipline, and a tiny amount of actual martial arts--at least when he isn't still training himself for occasional competitions. But the real source of their money is Geri. She is a natural salesperson, and absolutely cleans up in the life insurance business. She represents a great firm, and I wish we had anyone in my company's sales department who had as much talent and commitment in every phase of the customer relationship as she has. And to be frank, I am sure that her mop of strawberry-blonde hair, cute nose, and her slender figure that cuts a killer look in a business suit do not hurt her ability to get in the door.

No danger of her wearing a business suit for D&D though. She and Mark both were sporting identical black athletic shorts. Mark had on a Marvel Shang-Chi teeshirt, and Geri wore a white tee with Mark's dojo's logo on it.

I suspected that Geri was not wearing a bra under that thin cotton...

Yes.

I know.

Geri is my friend. She is married to my friend. I am married to a woman with (so far as I could tell) even better, and indisputably bigger, tits than Geri. I'm sorry.

But guys notice these things. Sue me.

Craig and Anne were knocking on the door before we could even get my stuff put down or Tess's salads onto the table. Mark, Geri, Tess, and I were all nearly exactly the same age, 31. Our birthdays are even all in the same month. Craig and Anne are both a bit older, in their mid-thirties. Craig is even taller than my six feet and an inch, and Anne is damned near statuesque, way taller than the other two women. She even towers over Mark.

Craig had his usual golf shirt on, fitted tight to show off his broad shoulders and thick upper arms. Anne, whose wardrobe choices are always interesting, had on loose cargo shorts and a Grover the Monster from Sesame Street teeshirt. She had roughly cut away the neck, leaving a modestly immodest amount of cleavage on display.

I cannot pretend that even Tess's lovely accoutrements are as nice as Anne's rack. Honesty compels and all that. My wife had once caught me looking a bit more closely than usual and had, in a fit of uncharacteristic cattiness, informed me that she knew for a fact that Anne's tits were fake. I, in a fit of possibly unwise honesty, had replied that I did not care.

Pleasantries were exchanged, food was looked over, and first beers were opened. It was our usual routine every game night. I thought that maybe Mark was catching a little extra side-eye, even from his own wife, as if everybody was wary about him repeating his performance from the prior week. It could also have just been that he was, as host, getting a little extra attention. But I was pretty sure it was the new element he'd introduced that was behind the subtle dynamic.

I had my own plans. I admit I was jealous that someone other than me had come up with a New Thing, and also... I had really enjoyed what had happened when Tess and I got home after last Saturday's events. Drawing some more dirty talk out of the group was absolutely on my agenda.

We moved over to the game table and all got ourselves set up. We call it D&D, but we don't actually use the official Dungeons & Dragons brand ruleset any more. We use a commercial alternative that I discovered at New York ComicCon a couple of years back. The combat system seems better, the magic rules are cool, and while the publisher has a pretty lame set of monsters to offer, it is totally simple to convert nasties from the huge existing D&D library to the new system.

Our story that night started back in the same town where Mark's shopwife incident had occurred. Everybody seemed to be wary of him as things unfolded, except Tess, who seemed more wary of me. But I carefully kept things on task, even ensuring that Mark's thief, Renault, encountered no female non-player characters to 'interact with'. Furthermore, I moved things along briskly, as I told everybody that I had finally finished a new dungeon and wanted to get them into it.

Soon, things were going smoothly, just like normal.

"Whoever built and stocked this dungeon had a sense of humor," Craig observed drily. His character, the mighty knight Sir Tyrian, had just been caught in a water trap. The knight had never been in any particular danger, but I made sure he looked ridiculously hapless in his powerful armor, splashing around and failing repeatedly to extricate himself. I had placed the lead statue of his character upside down in a glass of water for the whole ten minutes it took for the others to figure out how to get him free, which irked my friend something fierce.

"Thank you," I grinned.

"I meant the evil figure of malevolent power in the game who put this together," he snarked at me. "You... you are just annoying."

"Hmmm," I murmured, pretending to look at my prepared notes behind my screen. I rolled some dice idly. "Sir Tyrian's armor has developed a squeak due to the long immersion. He can be heard an extra twenty yards further away whenever he moves, until he can have it professionally serviced in town."

Both Tess and Geri laughed out loud at Craig. Anne just patted him on his forearm and said, in her most matronly voice, "Now dear, we mustn't poke Dungeon Masters, they get cranky." She turned to me, sliding her own lead figure of the mysterious priestess Gala next to Sir Tyrian. "Gala prays deeply to her patron deity Feyrth for Hunter's Stealth to counter his noisy armor," she declared.

"Roll three d8s," I said with a sigh. Anne grabbed three eight-sided dice and rolled an 18. "Very well," I went on in a formal voice. "A soft glow appears for a moment around Sir Tyrian. Feyrth hast heard your beseechment and temporarily grants Sir Tyrian the stealth of a hunter. He is now only noisy enough to be heard an extra five yards away," I added in my normal voice.

Craig took it well.

Mark, whose thief was the stealthiest character in the party, looked at Anne. "Renault could use that little blessing every once in a while," he said.

She just winked at him. "Maybe for the right price," she said, in Gala's high, ethereal voice.

Play went on. I was pleased with this dungeon's design. It was indeed funnier than usual, and everybody was in a good mood. Immediately after a long, drawn-out battle, which was extended due to some haggling over tricks Geri and Tess wanted to try, I looked at my map and the time.

There were still two more set pieces I wanted to get them through that night, and we only had about an hour left before our usual quitting time. There remained a short segment of dungeon between the adventurers and the first of those major locations, the one that was designed to satisfy me need to some dirty talk. I was going to get in trouble with my wife about this one... I hoped. I casually scratched out the intervening rooms. I could recycle them later somewhere else. Time for the big scene.

I smiled to myself. This was going to be fun... if I got away with it.

I had needed a seriously nasty challenge for this next chamber, to account for the value of the treasure I was placing there. I settled for a dragon. I was playing things for laughs, so it was a colicky baby dragon, complete with diaper and a bib. Also, it had to be a baby because everybody's characters were all only levels 10 through 12. In this game system, they would have presented a full-grown dragon with no threat beyond a possible case of after-dinner heartburn.

It was a pretty hilarious battle, with the baby doing as much damage to its nursery room furniture as them. Anne's priestess still almost got killed, getting mostly cooked by the baby's fiery breath when she failed three different, easy Savings Throws. Her rising dismay as she rolled low numbers for each in succession was hilarious.

In the end, they were all scuffed up pretty badly by the time they finally put 'Baby' to bed permanently. They looked around, seriously expecting some major treasure for such a hard monster, but at first they found nothing. Their whining was starting to get delicious when Craig started going through the wreckage of the giant diaper changing table. Underneath the shards of broken wood, he found smaller shards from what appeared to be a human-sized wardrobe cabinet, possibly for the dragon's nursemaid?

They all shuddered and wanted to get out of there before any human nurse tough enough to change those diapers returned...

Craig was undeterred, and kept digging, finally finding one shiny object. "What is it?" he asked.

"Sir Tyrian straightens," I said, "and holds up a... shiny chainmail bikini!"

"Oh, you douchebag," my wife groaned.

Geri was looking at me irritably. "Let me guess, I'm the only one who could wear it? I'm the only female combat specialist." Geri's character, Frenoria, was a half-elven ranger, a specialist class of fighter that tended to use lighter armor anyway.

I grinned at her, then at Mark. "Yep," was all I said. I felt Tess kick me under the table, but less hard than I had been bracing for.

"Throw it away," Geri ordered Craig, who openly pouted at the thought, which pissed her off more.

"Are you sure?" I asked her slowly. "It's really, really shiny..."

She looked at me flatly. Then she looked at the other two wives. Mine rolled her eyes, but surprisingly held her tongue. Anne winked broadly at her.

Craig was still openly pouting that she didn't want to play along.

Mark just said in a low voice, "You know you want to at least check it out..." That was Mark talking to Geri, not Renault talking to Frenoria.

"Fine," she said, tossing her head. She turned back to Craig and held out a hand. "All right. This is ridiculous, but I do need some new armor. Mine got beaten up pretty bad by that fucking dragon." She then spoke in the clipped, country accent she affected when speaking as Frenoria the ranger. "Let me evaluate it, Sir Tyrian. Ahem. Ah doubt it would fit yer frame."

Craig bowed his head, pouting no more, and mimed a toss.

"You use your professional skill to evaluate the armor," I said, passing her a note.

Her eyes opened as she read aloud. "You have discovered Mithril Chain Mail Armor. This suit of armor is solid, genuine Mithril, and is of extraordinary craftsmanship. It provides 25 points of protection against all damage types and, due to its light weight and unencumbering design, inflicts zero movement or endurance penalties to the wearer."

A low whistle went around the table.

"With that on, you're a tougher tank than I am," Craig said speculatively.

"Maybe," Geri replied thoughtfully, still looking at the paper. She looked up at me with fresh challenge in her voice. "You knew you'd have to make this extra awesome to have even a chance of getting me to wear it," she accused.

I just shrugged and smiled. "That was a nasty monster. Nasty monsters mean serious treasure."

"Renault mentions that you can't share that," Mark said. Real-life husband or no, Renault was a greedy, grasping, mercenary thief. "So you won't get much of a share of anything else we already have found or will find down here, if you keep that trinket."

Geri wrinkled her nose at him, suddenly possessive. Yes... Oh, yes...

"You could sell it when we get back. It's got to be worth a mint, with all that Mithril," Tess observed.

"Really?" I asked her. "It's really shiny..."

"Exactly," she giggled back at me, rubbing her fingers together like counting money.

"So shiny it almost glows..." I said quietly.

"Wait..." Tess said. In Shanora's haughty, self-important sorceress voice she said to Geri, "Allow me to examine the trinket."

"It's magic too? Really?" griped Anne. "You know, I wear armor as well. Maybe Gala will take it, if Frenoria would prefer a share of the regular treasure."

"Sorry," I said quickly. "It wouldn't work with your ceremonial robes. Priestesses have a dress code." I was kicking myself internally though. I should have thought about Anne's cleric maybe wearing it. But I had this set up for Geri, thinking that she was most likely to be irritated but simultaneously revved up by Mark's shenanigans the prior week, and I was a little target fixated. Anne might have been a better target actually, now that I thought about it... But while Geri had seemed to be about to disappoint me at first, she looked to be coming around to having some fun with it.