Dice Not Included

Chapter 1: Critical Failure

Marcus Bellweather woke up face-down in mud.

This was unusual for several reasons. First, Marcus lived in a third-floor apartment with excellent drainage. Second, he had very specifically fallen asleep on his leather sectional after a heated argument with his dungeon master, Gerald, about whether a Ring of Spell Storing could theoretically hold a Wish spell if you exploited a loophole in the 1987 errata. Third, and perhaps most pressingly, something was chewing on his left boot.

"Get off," Marcus mumbled, kicking weakly. His head felt like someone had stuffed it with cotton balls soaked in cheap whiskey. "Gerald, if this is some kind of prank—"

He opened his eyes.

The sky above him was purple. Not sunset purple. Not pollution purple. A deep, swirling violet that seemed to pulse with inner light, like a bruise on the face of reality.

"Oh no," Marcus whispered.

He sat up abruptly, dislodging what appeared to be a small, rat-like creature with too many eyes from his boot. It squeaked indignantly and scurried into the underbrush.

Marcus knew that creature. He had designed that creature. It was a Scuttling Glimpse, a low-level nuisance monster he'd invented specifically to annoy players who didn't check their camping gear before sleeping.

"This isn't happening."

But it was happening. As Marcus staggered to his feet, wiping mud from what he now realized was some kind of rough-spun peasant tunic, he recognized everything around him with the horrifying clarity of a man looking at his own reflection in a funhouse mirror.

The twisted trees with bark like frozen screams? Those were Wailing Willows, from the Haunted Grove encounter he'd written for session twelve. The distant mountains shaped like a sleeping dragon? The Slumbering Peaks, backdrop for his never-completed epic campaign finale. And that smell—that particular combination of sulfur, rotting vegetation, and what he could only describe as "magical wrongness"—that was the ambient atmosphere of the Cursed Lowlands, a region he'd created specifically because Gerald had complained that his world-building wasn't "immersive" enough.

"Gerald!" Marcus shouted at the purple sky. "Gerald, I know you can hear me! This isn't funny!"

The sky did not respond.

Marcus patted himself down, taking inventory. Peasant tunic, check. Rough trousers that chafed in unfortunate places, check. Boots that had recently been gnawed on by an extradimensional vermin, check. And absolutely nothing else. No weapons. No spell components. No magic items.

No character sheet.

This last realization hit Marcus like a critical hit to the ego. For fifteen years, he had been playing Aldric Shadowmend, a half-elf wizard/rogue/fighter multiclass that he had spent literally hundreds of hours optimizing. Aldric had an Armor Class of 27, could cast ninth-level spells while dual-wielding enchanted short swords, and had once talked a dragon into giving him its entire hoard through a combination of Expertise in Persuasion and what Gerald had called "the most annoyingly rules-lawyered Charm Monster I've ever witnessed."

But Marcus wasn't Aldric. Marcus was a thirty-four-year-old data analyst with bad knees and a mild allergy to physical exertion. He couldn't cast spells. He couldn't swing a sword. He certainly couldn't do both at the same time while calculating optimal damage output in his head.

"Okay," Marcus said to himself, because talking to himself was preferable to confronting the vast, terrifying silence of the Cursed Lowlands. "Okay. This is fine. This is manageable. I built this world. I know everything about it. I have perfect information."

A howl echoed from somewhere in the Wailing Willows. It was the distinctive sound of a Grief Hound, a pack predator that hunted by sensing negative emotions.

Marcus was currently experiencing quite a lot of negative emotions.

"Perfect information doesn't help if you can't do anything with it," he admitted, and started walking in what he desperately hoped was the direction of civilization.

---

The first sign of civilization Marcus encountered was a wooden sign that read: "MILLBROOK - 2 LEAGUES - VISITORS WELCOME (TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY)."

Marcus remembered Millbrook. He had created Millbrook as a starting town for new adventurers, a quaint little village with a tavern, a blacksmith, a general store, and exactly enough plot hooks to get a party moving in the right direction. It was designed to be welcoming, safe, and utterly forgettable once players moved on to more interesting locations.

As Marcus limped toward the village—his boots had developed a suspicious squishing sound that he was trying very hard not to think about—he began to formulate a plan. Millbrook was full of NPCs he had created. Surely one of them would help him. Surely one of them would recognize that he was their creator, their god, the architect of their very existence.

Surely they would be grateful.

The gates of Millbrook were exactly as Marcus had imagined them: rough wooden palisades with a guard tower on either side. What he hadn't imagined was the large painted sign hanging above the entrance that read: "NO SOLICITING, NO PROSELYTIZING, NO ADVENTURERS LOOKING FOR QUESTS THEY WON'T ACTUALLY COMPLETE."

That last bit was oddly specific.

"Halt!" A guard appeared at the top of the left tower. He was a middle-aged man with a impressive mustache and the weary expression of someone who had seen too much. "State your business!"

Marcus recognized him. This was Sergeant Bartholomew Thatch, the gruff-but-fair guard captain he had created to give players their first exposition dump. According to his character notes, Bartholomew had a wife named Prudence, a daughter named Lily, and a secret gambling addiction that players could exploit if they wanted to take the "morally questionable" route.

"Hello!" Marcus called up, attempting what he hoped was a friendly wave. "I'm a traveler seeking shelter! I seem to have found myself in a bit of a predicament!"

Bartholomew squinted down at him. "What kind of predicament?"

"The kind where I woke up in a swamp with no memory of how I got there and something tried to eat my boot."

"Scuttling Glimpse?"

"I believe so, yes."

Bartholomew nodded slowly. "Aye, they'll do that." He disappeared from view, and a moment later, the gates creaked open. "Come in, then. But I'll warn you now—if you're one of those 'chosen ones' looking to save the world, we've got a strict policy. Fill out the forms in triplicate, submit to a background check, and don't expect any freebies. Last group of heroes left the tavern without paying their tab and knocked over the blacksmith's anvil on their way out. Took us three weeks to get it back upright."

"I'm not a chosen one," Marcus said, which was technically true. He was something far worse.

He was the one who had done the choosing.

---

Millbrook was exactly as Marcus had designed it, which was both comforting and deeply unsettling. The streets were cobblestone, worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic. The buildings were half-timbered in that generic medieval fantasy style that players never questioned. The villagers went about their business with the practiced efficiency of people who existed primarily as background decoration.

Except they weren't background decoration anymore. They were real. They had faces and voices and opinions, and as Marcus walked through the village square, he could feel their eyes on him.

"The Prancing Pig is that way," Bartholomew said, pointing toward a two-story building with a faded sign depicting a dancing swine. "Innkeeper's name is Gertrude. Tell her I sent you, and she'll only overcharge you by half."

"Thank you," Marcus said. "I don't suppose you could tell me—is there anyone in town who might know about... magical transportation? Dimensional travel? That sort of thing?"

Bartholomew's expression soured. "We had a wizard once. Set up shop on the edge of town. Said he was going to bring prosperity and magical innovation to our humble village."

"What happened to him?"

"Turned himself into a newt during an experiment. Died three days later when a hawk ate him." Bartholomew shrugged. "We don't talk about it."

Marcus remembered creating that backstory. He had thought it was funny at the time.

"Right," he said weakly. "The Prancing Pig it is."

The tavern was exactly as Marcus had described it in his world-building documents: "A cozy establishment with low ceilings, a roaring fireplace, and the smell of roasting meat that somehow manages to be both appetizing and slightly concerning." He had written that description at 2 AM during a caffeine-fueled world-building session, and now he was living it.

Gertrude the innkeeper was a stout woman with arms like ham hocks and a face that suggested she had seen every scam, con, and sob story in the known world. She looked up from polishing a mug as Marcus entered, and her eyes immediately narrowed.

"No credit," she said.

"I haven't asked for any."

"You've got that look. The 'I'm definitely going to pay you back once I complete this quest' look." She set down the mug. "We don't do quests here. Not anymore."

Marcus approached the bar carefully, trying to project an aura of respectability. This was difficult given that he was covered in swamp mud and his left boot was making a sound like a dying accordion with every step.

"I'm not looking for a quest," he said. "I'm looking for information. And possibly a bath."

"Information costs money. Baths cost more." Gertrude held out her hand. "Payment first."

"I don't have any money."

"Then you don't have any information or baths."

Marcus slumped onto a bar stool, which creaked ominously under his weight. This was a problem. In his game, money was just numbers on a character sheet. You started with a random amount, and then you accumulated more by killing things and taking their stuff. But Marcus couldn't kill things. Marcus could barely walk without his boots squelching.

"Is there any work available?" he asked desperately. "Something I could do to earn a few coins?"

Gertrude studied him for a long moment. "You any good at washing dishes?"

"I... have washed dishes before, yes."

"Kitchen's through that door. You work the dinner rush, I'll give you a meal and a spot by the fire. You work the whole week, I'll consider letting you have an actual room." She paused. "You break anything, it comes out of your pay."

"I accept," Marcus said, because what choice did he have?

As he trudged toward the kitchen, he couldn't help but reflect on the irony. He had spent fifteen years playing characters who slew dragons, toppled empires, and rewrote the laws of reality through sheer force of optimized statistics. Now he was going to wash dishes for a woman he had created as a two-paragraph NPC description.

The universe, it seemed, had a sense of humor.

It just wasn't a very good one.