Closer, Manny Rizzo mentally urged me. Please get closer. Is this really happening? Am I dreaming?
“There’s magic involved,” I answered. “You’re not dreaming.”
Very cool beans, he replied.
Closer and we got a glimpse of the character sheets. Manny Rizzo imparted that the Delvers and Dragons National Championship used what was called pregen erated characters, ones provided by the company and designed to fit the scenario. The characters changed with each round and were supposed to be secret. Players tended not to divulge them to those yet to compete—no use lessening their own chances for one copy of every product ever published in every language for the Delvers and Dragons game.
Closer!
I raised my goggles so Manny Rizzo and I could better see the sheets.
Very, very cool beans!
We caught a clear glimpse of something called a mundunugu that had a peccary familiar and a talisman of the skeleton king; a swaggerer in full blue plate wielding an eldritch-bane spring-loaded triple dagger; an elven sidromancer with a bag of lucky beans and a flamberge of fiery retaliation; a two-headed hobgoblin psephomancer with a poltergeist henchman riding a six-legged destrier; the ever-present cluricaune gypsy; and a tea-leaf-reading pythoness enchanter with a presence score in the double digits.
Manny Rizzo seemed to think it a great assortment. Silliness, if you ask me.
Definitely heavy on the spell wielders this year—for round one anyway.
I listened to Manny Rizzo’s furious thoughts, beginning to make sense of them.
The swaggerer is the only one who isn’t a spell wielder; he’s likely the “meat shield” of the party that will soak up some damage until the others can let their enchantments fly. That bit of news is good. I always play sorcerers and such in our home campaign, having most of the spells—up to fifteenth level in the seven core rulebooks and two supplements—committed to memory.
Manny Rizzo apparently was tickled a dozen shades of pink that he’d inadvertently gained an edge in the Delvers championship by signing on with the Verminator’s squadron and touching the magical SE 5a counter that channeled me. As I’d told him, there was indeed some magic in the air at this convention.
“Hey, some help, okay? Manny! Rizzo, right? Some help, Manny Rizzo!”
Was that the large-breasted redhead with the rabbit’s foot talking?
“I said, I need some help, Manny.”
No, a woman so beautiful couldn’t have that nasally of a voice. It was someone at the Dogfight Patrol table. I flew back there immediately and I drifted to the background and let Manny Rizzo take over for a few minutes. He shook his head to clear his senses, and the convention room spun—the colors, noise, and the gamer-funk smell of those who forgot to pack soap twisted around him, and his faculties finally returned to the colored pencil-rendered section near the Western Front.
“Wow. Was I really over the Delvers arena? Did I really look at those character sheets?” Manny couldn’t keep the incredulity out of his voice.
“Manny . . . Rizzo . . . you’re up, I say again!” The officiator looked a little perturbed. “It seems your flight leader is in trouble and is asking for your help.”
“Of course the Verminator is in trouble. He overdove, and three Alb DIIIs and one Doctor are taking potshots at his canvas belly.”
From the back of Manny Rizzo’s mind I could almost see the trail of smoke spiraling up from the Verminator’s plane.
“I got hit in the engine,” the Verminator fumed. His dark, beady eyes were fixed on Manny’s—as if his dire predicament were the Flatbush resident’s fault. “Three hits in my engine. So I only got three hit points left. Do something.”
“And he’s smoking.” This came from Plumber’s Crack. “His engine’s leaking oil big time.”
“A strut hit, too,” the Verminator added. He pouted, the line of purple drool running down his chin and disappearing somewhere in the mess of monsters artfully displayed on his Advanced Death Rattle of Cthulhu T-shirt. Everyone heard the crunch of the Tootsie Pop as he reached its center.
“I’ll save you, O Vaunted Flight Leader,” Manny said. “Watch this.”
His eyes brightened when Manny placed the cardboard SE 5a counter between the Verminator’s plane and the threatening Doctor, aiming for a head-on attack to draw off the enemy. It was a risky, daring move that was equally as stupid as the Verminator’s initial overdive.
“Thanks, Manny,” he said. “You’re the best.” He reached into his backpack (apparently every self-respecting gamer carried at least one backpack to the convention) and pulled out two Tootsie Pops, passing one over to Manny.
It was raspberry, my favorite. I would taste it soon.
Plumber’s Crack sputtered and his mouth dropped open. Whaddya doin’? he mouthed.
“Giving myself an opportunity to prep for the Delvers and Dragons National Championship,” Manny whispered so softly only I could hear him. “I want to review the spells.”
Manny rolled his dice, firing his Lewis and Vickers machine guns simultaneously. I edged forward so he could faintly hear the vicious rat-a-tat-tatting noise the bullets made as they ripped into the canvas wings of the enemy tripe.
“Doctor, Doctor,” Manny sang. “Give me the news. I’ve got a bad case of shooting you.”
The Doctor pilot ineffectually returned fire. Manny’s plane was tough and had quite a few hit points; his wings could take more punishment than the Doctor’s. Manny even dodged a bullet that came straight at him. But he didn’t dodge the make-believe bullets from the pilots of the Alb D IIIs that had subsequently surrounded him.
The Verminator nosed up, still trailing smoke—which was represented by a stretched out piece of cotton—engine bucking and struts straining, heading for the clouds oh-so-very-high overhead.
“Too high to hide,” Manny whispered.
The Verminator would escape, though, as the Germans had a better target—Manny Rizzo of Flatbush Avenue.
Manny took only two hits in the engine, but one was a critical strike and was enough to make the Hispano-Suiza V seize up and shut down. He took a dozen more hits along the rear fuselage and another dozen in the tail section . . . essentially shooting it out, the blue, white, and red canvas stripes fluttering down to the cornfield below.
He crashed the counter somewhere near the color pencil-rendered Western Front, and I let him envision my beautiful SE 5a crumpled and burning and adding to the “kill” list of someone’s pilot roster.
“Good game,” Manny announced as he scooped his stuff into his official Delvers and Dragons oversized backpack and shrugged into it.
“Thanks again,” the Verminator said. “You know, thanks for buying me the time to get away.” He had an apologetic look on his zit-riddled mug.
“No worries, flight leader,” Manny returned, standing straight and saluting him.
Manny headed off to the concession stand where a bladder-busting soda had his name on it. I accompanied him, as he’d—accidentally or not—scooped the magical SE 5a counter into his pocket, granting me more than a four-hour slot break from the realm of the dead. They didn’t have any Milk Duds so Manny settled for something that resembled a ham sandwich. He took our fare to a corner of the hallway that ran by the monster exhibit hall wherein he thought he might later purchase that new set of polyhedral dice. Sitting cross-legged to make himself small and relatively inconspicuous, he feasted and pulled out the first Delvers and Dragons magic volume and began to study.
He breezed through the first round of the competition, drawing the two-headed hobgoblin psephomancer to play. Somehow I had gotten him a really good look at those character sheets!
The next morning he signed up for another game of Dogfight Patrol, this time flying for the Germans in a late-war mission—big engine block Fokker D VIIs with tons of torque versus Sopwith Camels with rotary right turns, Snoopy territory. Because he still had my SE 5a counter in his jeans pocket I managed to magically soar him over the Delvers
and Dragons arena at the right time to get a good look at round two’s batch of character sheets, gnomes all of them, and at some of the monsters and traps they were pitted against.
It was easier this time, as he embraced my presence and urged me closer.
Closer, closer, Bogart! Please get closer for a better look!
I indeed got closer to Manny Rizzo.
C’mon, closer!
We flew so low over the table that we could smell the sweat of the participants and the redolent mix of munchies and drinks they imbibed with amazing gusto. I searched for the redhead, but could not find her; Manny said she might not have advanced to the second round.
Pity. I’d only seen her like in France when I visited after the war, before returning to my Los Angeles home where I eventually became a screenwriter. Yes, I had quite the life in the early 1900s.
This isn’t cheating, is it? Manny asked. I mean, my butt’s still in the folding chair at the Western Front. I mean, it’s not my fault some spook . . . err, sorry . . . some heroic specter from the Great War galumphed into my head and took me for a joyride in a cardboard airplane counter. Hey, Bogart . . . Bogey. Bogey at two o’clock!
I didn’t understand his humor.
Bogey at two o’clock! Manny repeated.
“How about bogeyman, Manny Rizzo?”
A shiver passed from his mind into the body we both occupied.
“No, it’s not cheating, I assured him. “During wartime, you do whatever is necessary to win.” Whatever is necessary. I directed Manny Rizzo’s fingers to remove the SE 5a counter from his jeans pocket and place it in the very bottom of a pouch low on his backpack. It would rest there for eternity—or at least until I could find a better permanent place for it. I couldn’t risk the jeans coming off to be washed and the counter getting ruined and separated too far from this body I had come to enjoy.
Not cheating. Great. Well, since I’m not cheating, how about you swoop in behind the Delvers Master’s screen. I want to get a look at the stats on the troll, my friend Mr. Bogeyman.
I was quite happy to oblige him.
Plumber’s Crack was at Manny Rizzo’s table once again.
A likeable fellow. I—in Manny’s uncouth Brooklyn accent—had made arrangements to play yet another Dogfight game with him the following day— coincidentally when the first running of the Delvers and Dragons round three session was scheduled.
“Hey, Manny,” Plumer’s Crack said. “Yous a good guy to have at a Dogfight Patrol table. A standup, yous is. An honorable player, a real hero, yous. It’d be tough to manage the war on this front without yous.”
Actually, it was a war on two fronts Manny was fighting, courtesy of me. A piece of his mind still hovered above a table at the Delvers end of the hall, directly above a scruffy-looking college-aged fellow who was assigned a nineteenth-level gnome thaumaturgist with sandals of gainful levitation. Manny had already committed the stats of the troll and a dozen other monsters to our now-collective memory.
Round three of the Delvers championship was a piece of cake.
Come Sunday afternoon, the convention adjourned. I was loading up the U-Haul I’d rented. It was filled solid with one copy of every product ever published in every language for the Delvers and Dragons game. I’d managed to stuff a few other things in there, too. Slipcases for my reference books; a box of new polyhedral dice in mauve, pumpkin, and chartreuse; a couple of limited edition Delvers T-shirts, signed and numbered by the artist; the first three volumes of The Whole Earth Catalog of Magic for the Advanced Death Rattle of Cthulhu Game; and two hardcover copies of Robby Dobert’s latest fantasy masterpieces, autographed and personalized . . . made out to Captain Bogart Rogers.
I don’t know how to play the Advanced Death Rattle of Cthulhu Game, but I figured I had better learn, and I would have until next summer to do so. I’d already mastered Delvers and Dragons thanks to Manny Rizzo, who was now floating with a plethora of spirits who’d been lost in the Great War and other battles. The program book that I’d thumbed through in the hotel room last night posted an advertisement for next year’s Great Game Convocation. There was going to be a Death Rattle of Cthulhu championship, with the top prize being one copy of every product ever published in every language for both the basic and advanced versions of the game. I had an inkling I should enter, if nothing else just for the heck of it . . . to see if I could win. I might even let Manny Rizzo slip forward from the other side long enough to give me a hand.
So I will indeed return here next year—Captain Bogart Rogers in his Manny Rizzo flesh—with my two pals from Brooklyn and probably the biker fellow who’d been converted into a gamer over the weekend.
I’ll be certain to sign up for a few Dogfight Patrol games, where the officiator will be wearing his Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen scarlet polo. It was unfortunate for Manny that he hadn’t taken a close look at that man; his mug matched the one on his shirt. And that Manny hadn’t realized the cardboard counters were actually canvas-covered plywood—pieces of a real plane from the Great War. Richthofen had come through several years ago and has been channeling his old wingmen and nemeses via that magical game. Edward Mannock made it back from the void last year because an open-minded gamer had walked off with his plane counter.
Just as Manny had allowed me through when he pocketed mine.
If Plumber’s Crack is around next year—and has an open mind—perhaps my old pal Billy Bishop will come back.
“Very, very cool beans,” I said.
AGGRO RADIUS
David D. Levine
Carlos Ramirez sweats under his goggles as his avatar runs down a corridor of Chaos Inc.’s corporate headquarters. His legs aren’t really moving, but his heart is still pounding hard, because even though what he’s seeing now is only a simulation, his pursuer is real.
Five meters behind Carlos’ avatar, a heavily armed and armored battle suit crashes along, its metal feet tearing holes in the carpet. “Hold still, you little fucker!” comes the wearer’s grating amplified voice, followed by another burst of machine-gun fire from the forearm gun.
Distantly, the sound of gunfire comes to Carlos’ real ears. Getting closer.
This day had started out so ordinary . . .
Carlos fluttered his little fairy wings and zipped out from behind a fern in a burst of glowing pixie dust. The two bickering groups of adventurers stopped and stared at the sudden apparition.
He grinned beneath his goggles. This was exactly the reaction he’d hoped for. The fairy avatar had been the right choice.
“Hail travelers and well met,” he said, his voice immediately transformed into a fairy’s piping tones.
YOU A GM OR A BOT?” typed the leader of the larger party, a hulking generic barbarian. The letters appearing above his head were flat and white; the player didn’t have a microphone and hadn’t even customized his colors.
The player’s technical capacities didn’t matter to Carlos; what mattered was keeping him happy. Happy players kept paying their monthly Chaos World subscription fees and that paid Carlos’ salary. But the current situation wasn’t going to make anyone happy: the two parties were about to come to blows over a lavish-looking treasure chest that Carlos knew contained a mere seventy gold. He had to entice one or both toward another goal.
“This paltry treasure is not worth fighting over,” he cooed, flittering around the leader of the smaller party, a female vampire with enormous fangs and even larger breasts. “But I know where lies the fabled hoard of the demon Garthenar.” He darted back to the barbarian. “It is a secret which I alone possess.” Actually it was a secret that every Game Master possessed, but Garthenar’s caverns were an “instance” dungeon—once they entered, a party would seem to be alone no matter how many other players were running the same dungeon at the same time.
The generic barbarian’s static face and preprogrammed body motions didn’t betray the player’s emotions, but the long pause that followed was encouraging. The player was defi
nitely considering Carlos’ offer.
This was the part of Carlos’ job that he liked the best, even though this kind of playacting made his supervisor Jaq roll her eyes. “Shit, Carlos,” she’d say. “We’re just tech support.” But Carlos knew GMs weren’t just tech support drones—they were more like the “cast members” at Disneyland, adding flavor to the environment at the same time they performed practical functions. If he could disarm this situation in-character, the players would have more fun—and be more likely to keep subscribing—than if he just stopped the fight with his GM powers.
On the other hand, sometimes players could be annoying. Why didn’t the barbarian say something?
Suddenly suspicious, Carlos glanced around.
None of the other avatars were moving or speaking, other than the constant programmed loop of breathing and shifting that was intended to make them look alive.
Carlos toggled his microphone off. “Hey,” he called, “anyone else seeing network lag?”
“Yeah, big time,” came Jaq’s voice over the cubicle wall. “I’m totally wedged.”
“Me, too,” said Carlos’ coworker Paul, on the other side. “Zero bytes per second.”
Carlos sighed and pulled off his headset, replacing the vivid three-dimensional view of Chaos World with the anonymous gray cubicles of the Secret Annex.
The only downside of Carlos’s recent promotion to level III GM was that it had come with a move to a new space. The former woolen mill that was Chaos Inc.’s new headquarters was slopping over with character and had plenty of room for “the fastest-growing company in the NetTech 1000,” but the pressure of new hires meant that sometimes people found themselves inhabiting spaces that weren’t quite ready for prime time. Carlos, Jaq, and Paul’s third-floor office was just a plasterboard wall away from a dank attic full of pigeon droppings, dripping water, and rotting wood, and so hard for anyone to find that they’d named it after the hidden space where Anne Frank had sheltered from the Nazis.
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