Chapter 3

  Matt didn’t bring the email up to Beth when he got home from work on Friday. He was still confused on who it had come from, and how the hell they got his email in the first place. "And what the fuck was Ye Olde Game Room?" He had lived here his whole life and had never heard of the place. “Maybe it was somewhere new?" he thought. Nevertheless, he was intrigued.

  "Clearly, the person who sent it was part of our class since they are planning this for after the reunion. Exactly the kind of thing we would have thought of as an afterparty as the nerdy teenagers we were. Maybe, if I at least make an appearance at the reunion, they’ll make themselves known and I can get some answers" he thought. Then mumbling, "I haven’t truly had a healthy hobby to myself in so long, that maybe finding a new group to play with will actually be good for me.

  After dinner that evening, and spending some time relaxing with Beth, he told her, "You know, maybe it will be good to go tomorrow evening. Seeing some old familiar faces might not be such a bad thing. Worst case scenario, we have a bad night, come home, and then never have to talk to any of them again.

  "That's great," she said. "I didn't want to push the issue, but I think it will be good for you to get out and make some new friends, or get reacquainted with old ones as may be the case.”

  "That was exactly my thought too," he said. "Oh, and John sent me a message on Facebook. He said that there are few people getting together afterward for a DnD session once the reunion itself winds down,” he lied. “I haven't decided yet, but if you 're ok with it, I may end up trying to play. It's been so long, I don't even know if I remember how, but I think it could be fun to rediscover something I loved so much back then”.

  "Of course that's fine," Beth said. “I'll probably have you bring me home after the reunion though, and let you go. That’s never been my scene, and I don’t think once you get busy playing, there will really be much for me to do”.

  "That's fine," he told her. If I do decide to play, I'11 probably need to find a copy of the

  books online, so that I can decide what kind of character I want to play and make up a

  background for them. So, I may be a bit late to bed again tonight.”

  After doing some Googling, Matt found a PDF of the Player's Handbook. “5th Edition?” he thought. “Jeez we were only on 3.5 when we played. Hopefully, the rules haven't changed too much". Matt decided to first look at character races, then he would go to classes, and then finally try to determine what was different.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Looking at the table of contents, Matt saw that race selection started on page 17. So, he scrolled down until he saw “Chapter 2: Races”. He scrolled through, seeing options of dwarves, elves, halflings, dragonborns, tieflings, gnomes, half-elves or half-orcs. He was immediately drawn to the Elf pages. Not knowing the rules anymore, he was pretty sure he wanted to go with a melee based class. He didn’t know that he would be able to keep track of spells and the rules around those.

  So when he was looking at the elf sub-classes, and saw that both High Elves and Drow started off with a cantrip, he immediately landed on Wood Elf. The thought of being able to more easily hide and have increased movement speed seemed perfect for the concept he was thinking.

  “Alright, I’ve got my race figured out. Let’s go take a look at classes. I think I already know what direction I want to head in, but we’ll take a look anyway. He scrolled down until he reached page 45. “Chapter 3: Classes” “This is nice,” he thought looking at the table on the page. A brief description of each class and their proficiencies and primary ability. He could take a look here to narrow down his choices and save himself a lot of more in-depth reading about each specific class.

  Slowly looking at each row in the table, he laughed, “well, Elf doesn’t exactly scream Barbarian.” Bard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard all were immediately eliminated as well. This left Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, and Rogue. His eyes immediately went to rogue. With his increased movement speed, having dexterity as his primary ability seemed a no brainer. Plus the fact that the proficiencies with longswords, shortswords, and bows matched perfectly to the proficiencies Wood Elves also got.

  When he reached the sub-chapter dedicated to rogues, he laughed again. The first thing that caught his eye on the page was the sub-heading of “A Shady Living”. “If I can’t roleplay that archetype, I should just stop now,” he said aloud. He saw that at some point rogues could learn magic, but this was just a oneshot. You couldn’t learn that until level three anyway. Even if whoever this DM was started them at a higher level, he could pick the thief or assassin archetype. This was clearly the class he needed to play.

  Well, I guess all I have left is to come up with some sort of backstory. After taking about half an hour, he re-read what he had typed out. It had come to him easier than he had expected it to. Once he got started, the story just spilled out. Before he knew it, he was wrapping up having made it all the way to a 3rd page of backstory.

  The Vel-Aelari were my family. A circus of outcasts, performers, dreamers. Elves with wandering souls and quick fingers. We dazzled by day, lifted purses by night. Not out of malice—we had our code. Take from the corrupt. Trick the greedy. Never draw blood.

  He gave it an approving nod, and thought “not too fucking bad,” and hit print. Once the pages had fed through the printer, he picked them up, gave the story a quick look just to make sure no ink had run, and set the papers down on the keyboard. He yawned, turned the monitor off, and went to bed.

  No sooner had the door to Matt and Beth’s door shut, the pages gave a quick almost indiscernible ruffle, almost as if a soft breeze had caught the corners of the pages. There were no open windows. The desk wasn’t close enough to the bedroom to have caught the breeze of the door shutting. Then the pages were still again.