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Black Temple Chapter 1

Winny let out a low but appreciative whistle as the treeline gave way the clearing that played host to the dark stone structure. This part of the forest was old, overgrown, and seem very keen on retaking this spot, and the temple along with it. However, here the temple stood, in defiance of the vines crawling up the side and clear sense of foreboding it radiated. She scratched her temple under the band of her loose fitting cap

“You’d think they were trying to make it deliberately evil looking on purpose, Winny sneered, scrunching her little nose up indignantly.

Winny, even though her sister insisted on calling her Winnifred, was always good for letting others know what she was thinking. Being a bard by trade, the gnome had enough personality for two drunk northern trappers with patchwork clothing to match. Winny pushed the tip of her crossbow into the ground and loaded it with a grunt. Then, with the usual self-important flourish, pulled her trusty helmet off her pack and plopped it loosely on her head.

“You know that pot doesn’t really protect you from anything, right?” Wilhelmina resignedly asked.

“Well I haven’t gotten any career ending head injuries right?” Winny retorted

“That’s like saying my pants are orc repellent since one hasn’t chopped my legs off!” Wilhelmina snapped back. Wilhelmina prided herself usually maintaining her composure, but her sister had a tendency to cut through that composure like a rusty machete. A sorceress of budding talent, Wilhelmina kept her hair in a tight and braided style indicative of the restraint she tried to instill in herself. While she never needed them to harness her inborn magical talent, Wilhelmina’s pack was always laden with books penned by well-regarded wizards so she could constantly learn how to better keep her powers in check. Wilhelmina wore a looser fitting dark blue robe on top of her tunic, breeches, and boots. The hood was not pulled up today, the breeze was not particularly cold. She clenched and unclenched her hands at her sides, feeling the slight creak of her leather gauntlets.

“Even if orcs ate both our legs, it’s not like either of us could get any shorter” Winny continued, though she directed her words more at the walls of the temple than back at her sister. Wilhemina took a steadying breath and defused her own frustration. Winny took a few confident strides up to the front of the party and knocked on the faulds of Roland’s armor with the back of her knuckles. “What do you think big guy?”

Roland looked at the temple with a grim wariness. Roland’s hair was short and trimmed, though a bit unkempt from the time recently spent on the road. He was blonde, though his hair was starting to gray a bit prematurely for a paladin his age. Roland had a rather muted personality, and was at times rather inscrutable. He frequently had a far-away look to him as though he was always concerned with events that transpired leagues away from where he was. This is not to say that Roland was devoid of emotion, but rather to not venture to far off from center. The one thing that would incense him, however, was the deviation from what his clearly developed sense of morality being brought up all his life to serve Danica, Matron of Justice.

His armor bore the markings of having once been a true piece of artwork, but no longer showed the splendor it clearly once held. All of the functional components of the armor were very well maintained. It bore no signs of rust, the straps and rivets holding everything in place were in pristine condition, and the whole armor moved and contoured with Roland’s body as though it was forged yesterday. However, the ornamentation was left to fall into disrepair. The filigree along the pauldrons was all but flaked off and the Firendanian crest that emblazoned his shield was in dire need of being repainted.

“Temples like this are part functional, part ceremonial.” Roland gave Winny a small sidelong glance and the hint of a smirk. “So yes Winny, they did it on purpose. But by the looks of it, there haven’t been any worshippers here in a good long while.”

“That’s good,” Winny said, brightening.

“However, this could have been one of I don’t know how many demon worshipping doomsday cults, so there could be any number of other horrible things in there instead.”

“That’s bad,” Winny replied, heaving a small sigh of exasperation.

“Well then it’s a good thing we have a dashing paladin in front of us, isn’t it?” Dresden purred from further back as Roland set his jaw firmly in place. Dresden continued to eye Roland from behind head to toe in his armor, every bit the dashing troubled knight. There were times when Dresden truly loathed herself for getting caught up in some highborne lady’s fantasy, but was inexplicably drawn to Roland nonetheless. It might have been his curious resistance to her advances, though not for lack of trying. Dresden was well traveled, and was truly a woman of numerous talents.Though she stood a full head and shoulders shorter than Roland, she would have fared just as well against him in single combat as anyone else.

She had a much darker complexion than Roland, and hailed from the meaner, dockside portions of Halfast much further south. Dresden had a much more compact physique as well, with legs of an acrobat. In the cutthroat underworld of a port city, many girls were forced into less fortunate professions. Despite this reality, Dresden could justifiably title herself as an accomplished thief, sneak, seductress, and most recently as a part-time heroine. This turned out to have been a decently profitable career move for Dresden as well, considering that people were generally willing to pay out for particularly nasty problems being solved.

Wilhelmina huffed slightly at Dresden’s continued and still fruitless pursuit of Roland, rolling her eyes when she felt another familiar hand on her shoulder. Vioron smiled gently down at her before he moved further up the trail. Vioron was just as much a rarity as Wilhelmina was, elves being small in number the same way all the other nonhuman races were. His long black hair always seemed unnaturally shiny and well-kempt, despite the animal company he always entertained as a druid. Shadow closely followed on Vioron’s heels. Shadow did have a much more elegant name in Vioron’s mother tongue, but it proved beyond Winny’s patience to pronounce so Shadow served the party’s interest just fine.

Vioron was very soft spoken and primarily kept quiet. Not the deliberate hush Dresden was capable of, but something much more akin to serenity. This was not to say he was retiring in battle. In Vioron’s mind, combat was something that nature had already perfected, so why bother trying to improve it? He had a penchant for using the forms of various beasts he had met in his travels, favoring a dire bear more often than others. He continued to glide up the trail to take a position on the other side of Roland from Winny.

“Shall we?” he offered.

“Yeah,” agreed Winny, “let’s get paid.”

“Right,” Roland agreed, shifting his pack to a more comfortable position, shield clanking against the framework.

And with little more circumstance, the company made their way up the trail leading to the foreboding temple’s gate.

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The Black Temple Intro Post

This hopefully series of stories is based off a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that I have been running with my fiancee, two of their cousins and their spouses. What follows is a story built from their characters, those characters’ backstories, the decisions they made during the course of the adventure, with artistic licensing put in by me to expand the narrative beyond the scope of my narration at the table.

A side note, this was played with Ruleset 3.5, the rules are not interpreted verbatim from the books, and official copyrighted names from Wizards of the Coast are being changed in order to continue building the campaign setting into an original work of large scale fiction.

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Welcome to Fiction Forge

This is a tumblr account that I have made for the express purpose of being able to air out my forays into writing fiction to a completely impartial audience that does not have a connection with who I am and will tell me their honest and unabashed opinions on its quality. I welcome any responses and any comments on what I post here.

This is also the first tumblr account I have ever opened, and as such I have no prior experience with how the site works properly, so there will likely be a period where I do things improperly. This will likely manifest in not knowing how long is an appropriate length for posting what I write. From what I understand it is considered polite to have warnings regarding violence and sexual content, there will definitely content both violent and sexual in nature eventually somewhere here, but that depends on how fictions develop if they go on for longer periods of time.