Hey, do YOU want to play a no-stakes oneshot where your party are all staff working at the Essek Thelyss estate, and the biggest problem you have to face is getting some mail?
Well boy do I have a zip file for you!
Long story short, this is a game I played with some friends, and because it was a lot of fun and I already made it all anyway, I’ve decided to slap it into a PDF and make it available for others!
It’sdownloadable for free at the link below on my Patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/dnd-5e-adventure-82496022
Check it out! And hey, if you like it and think I should do more stuff like this…. tell me maybe! Because this was fun to put together.
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"Wake up- you were hyperventilating, are you okay?" With Caleb and Beau? I love their friendship so much....
((All these requests are for good good platonic relationships and I am MCLOVIN IT.))
If he really tried, he could remember something a little like this.
Usually, when a memory from his schooldays came scratching at his door, he bit down on it, or else bit down on his tongue to let the pain distract him from it. Things slipped through, though, of course--most of them bad, or if not exactly bad in a way that was inherent, then bad by association, corrupted in hindsight. But there were moments that, when he could recall them, brought him something almost like pleasure. Not a few of them came from nights spent in the dorms after lights-out. He remembered that sometimes there would be moonlight coming through the window so that he could see his roommates lying in their beds, but other times it would be entirely dark. He remembered their whispered conversations, their voices making gentle contact with one another like reaching hands. He remembered how it somehow seemed easier to talk about things when one was blind and tucked in bed and still awake hours after sundown. That was how he and Astrid and Eodwulf spent nights talking about their latest assignments, upcoming exams, families, fears.
It wasn't the same now, of course. Couldn't be the same. Part of it was because back in those days, he never woke soaked in his own sweat and with a chest heaving like his heart was trying to punch its way out. There weren't the nightmares then like there were now.
Another part of it was that Astrid and Eodwulf generally hadn't tried to wake him up at all, much less by throwing small rocks at his head.
He'd jolt awake, breathing too quickly or not at all. And then, several moments later, he'd feel Beau's stare on him even without being able to see her eyes through the blackness. She'd be lying some distance away from him on the ground wherever their little group had chosen to make camp that night. "Wake up," she'd grumble, as though he could have possibly slept through a pebble to the temple. "You were hyperventilating. Are you okay?"
The first couple times, he pretended that he couldn't hear her, that he was indeed still asleep or else so far gone that it was useless for her to try. She just kept hissing his name into the dark, then. Eventually, he got out the word "No" in a voice that, even to him, came out sounding like a creaking door.
It then became abundantly clear that she hadn't planned much past the point of asking whether he was okay. Most often, when he responded that way, she blew some air out of her mouth, took several long gulps from her canteen, and then said, "Alright, welp," in a tone somewhere between nonchalance and gruffness.
It would be several more minutes before she spoke up again, only to say, "Just wanted to check that you weren't going to die or whatever. I dunno. You probably don't want to talk about whatever it is, and I probably don't want to hear it, but I mean, your call, I guess."
As she had said of herself in the past, she was not good at this. But it was something. He wasn't even sure if it was something he liked, exactly, but still, a whisper in the dark, a hand reaching and groping through it.
It occurred to him, on one of what had become countless nights, to try to say more. Fresh from his flame-filled dreams, he had to work through the residual terror that threatened to lock up his jaw, but he managed anyway. "Beauregard..."
"Yah?"
"I feel that I should apologize to you...for how often I keep you up at night."
She shrugged. He couldn't quite explain how he knew that she shrugged, because he couldn't see her, but somehow he heard the way in which her blankets shifted and just knew. "I mean," she answered, "I get enough sleep. And I'd wake up cranky either way, so it's not like it makes much of a difference in that regard."
"I know that." He allowed himself a long pause, to gather his thoughts. "I also feel like...I should feel sorry for never telling you what's going on."
"Hey, I mean, fuck that, right? It's not like I'm the most forthcoming with that shit either."
"Don't you make it your business to know about the skeletons in everyone's closets?"
"Okay, listen," she said, with an added dose of roughness. "As far as this...whatever this is...this group we've got here. I'm only interested in knowing what I need to in order to keep us safe. Beyond that, it's whatever. And if this has anything to do with your past shit--"
"Ja."
"Yeah. I feel like I know a fair amount about that already without, like, probing your dreams. If you don't want to tell me any more, I don't need to know."
She wasn't good at this. Being a friend. Inexperienced, to put it charitably. He liked that she wasn't good at it, because he wasn't either. He was, to put it charitably, not so much inexperienced as grotesquely out of practice.
Here was one way he knew that he wasn't good at this: It didn't occur to him to return the favor until one night when he was keeping watch and heard her moaning quietly in her sleep. When he cautiously lIt a small flame from his finger and brought it close to her, he noticed the strain in her expression, the tight squeeze of her eyelids. Her face was scrunched up and uneasy. Not as dramatic as he surely was during a nightmare, but something.
There was then perhaps another hour of him hemming and hawing over whether he should wake her, whether she would want that, whether she would maybe just stop having the bad dream in a few minutes anyway. Then, finally, he poked her shoulder, which was not one of his finer ideas, as the monk immediately startled and stopped just shy of punching him in the face. They stared at each other in mutual shock for far too long, her fist still poised in midair.
"Eh...tut mir leid," he muttered.
"Yeah, sorry also. Got nervous there." She yawned. "What's going on? You see something."
"Not exactly," he answered, and then did not know how to elaborate.
She eyed him. "K...well, can I go back to--"
"I suppose just wanted you to know," he started slowly, "that if you're in any way feeling distressed--"
"Oh, God."
"Then you should feel free to tell me. Even if you have to wake me for it. I doubt I would be much help, especially if it's something to do with how much we've been talking about Kamordah lately. But you can say it anyway, if you need."
There was a remarkably long pause. He didn't look at her and put out his light.
"Hey, Caleb? Fuck you." And she turned over until her back was to him.
He stayed awake with a sense of satisfaction that he wasn't sure he deserved to feel. She would probably give him one of her halting apologies for saying that--maybe not tonight, but likely in the next couple of days.
But he was glad that she'd said it. It meant that she had been redirected from whatever it was that had twisted her face up in the night. She slept peacefully for the rest of time that he stayed up.
Neither of them were good at this. In this case, it was perhaps more important to be there than to be good.
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