Lectern’s New and Used Books wasn’t a game store, though it did sell a few—including shiny new copies of the same well-worn tomes Twilight Sparkle pulled from a bulging shoulder bag on the floor by her seat near the fireplace. “Thanks, girls,” she said with a mix of eagerness and solemnity as she placed the books on the end of the table in front of her. “I thought you should get a chance to try this out and see for yourselves if you like it or not. I know most of you are just humoring me, but I promise this will be just a little one-shot adventure, and I did everything I could to make it as painless as possible to get into the game.” Her nervous grin was as awkward as her jest.
The battered old folding banquet table stood in the store’s front parlor, adjustable trestle legs racheted down to accommodate the low-slung wing chairs around it. At her bashfully mumbled request earlier, an amiable staffer had unearthed the relic from the small garage at the back of the property, dusted it off, and set it up, even going so far as to help rearrange the seating to minimize crowding. A few leaves of large-format gloss inkjet paper already lay in a loose pile on the middle of the scuffed laminate tabletop, uppermost sheet apparently blank other than a notice, hand-scrawled with a wedge-tip black marker, of MAPS: NO SPOILERS! Twilight opened a sizable velour drawstring bag and upended it over them, spilling out a motley collection of polyhedra dice in a wild variety of colors and conditions, before dropping it as well. These were followed by two dice cups and a mismatched pair of dice arenas; at her direction a cup and an arena were placed at each end of the table.
The friends ensconced on the other armchairs wore varied expressions, though none betrayed complete puzzlement. All six of them at least knew the title and basic premise of the game Sci-Twi had persuaded them to try out, minor cultural icon that it had become, if not always much more than that. Even Sunset Shimmer cocked her head with a whimsically curious expression—not because she hadn’t heard of it before, but because she had.
“Anyway, welcome to the latest edition of Ogres and Oubliettes! Before we start, let me give you a quick overview of what the game’s about and how it works.” Twilight proceeded to rattle off a tolerably coherent description of the idea behind a role-playing game and the base mechanics that drove the rules of this particular game—albeit a bit muddled once in a while by backing and filling. Sometimes it was simple forgetfulness; in other cases she suddenly recalled she was talking to newcomers who didn’t have her second-nature familiarity with the concepts and jargon involved. To the occasional baffled expressions, notably Applejack’s, she offered the assurance, “Don’t worry, I’ll explain again if and when it comes up during the adventure.”
Finally she pulled out a sheaf of card stock, jogged it, and fanned it on the scuffed laminate-surfaced particle board. “To speed things up, I generated a dozen characters for you girls to choose from, one of each class. That way, even whoever goes last won’t be left with just one, but there aren’t so many that tyranny of choice gets overwhelming. Each of you, roll a d20—that’s the icosahedron.” When most of the others gave her blank looks, she blinked back at them for a moment. “Oh, right. This kind.” She leaned forward, plucked one of the dice in question from the pile by the bag, and held it out on a palm.
“I win!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed.
“Pinkie, it’s just to decide what order you choose characters, that’s all,” Twilight admonished her.
Completely ignoring the words, Pinkie made grabbing motions in the air. Twilight sighed, gathered up the character sheets, and handed them over. With a pucker of intense concentration Pinkie leafed rapidly through them and, to judge from her squeaky little editorial noises, speed-read each. In far too little time she twitched one out and held it up. “This one!”
Sci-Twi adjusted her glasses and squinted at it. “Uh, Pinkie, that’s the paladin.”
“Yepperoonie!” A bobble-head nod reinforced the affirmation. “I said to myself, ‘What’s this game about?’ Then I answered, ‘Well, Pinkie, it’s about doing something different than you normally would, right?’” Upon noticing the frowny-faces of impatience on her friends, she skipped to the end. “And this one looks like it’s about as different as I can get!”
“O-okay,” Twilight replied. From her tone it wasn’t okay at all, but she cleared her throat as she reclaimed the remaining characters. “Next?”
One by one the others made their selections, and Twilight’s face seemed to melt a little more with each choice.
“Oh! Ooh!” Rarity bounced on her seat as she held up the bard. “I pick this one.” Somehow, even without rising, she managed to strike a pose. “After all, daaaahling, I am all about glamour!” A moment later her face lit up again. “Oh, that gives me an idea! You did say these are characters, after all, and no character is complete without a backstory.” Immediately she pulled out her sketchbook and began scribbling in it, so focused she had to be prompted twice to return the other sheets, which she did without even looking up.
“Oh, look!” Fluttershy’s soft voice rang with delight. “This one has the ‘Speak With Animals’ spell.”
“What’s different about that?” Pinkie asked quizzically. “You do that for real!”
“Um, well, um—mostly the barbarian is about raging and smashing things.”
“Yep, that’ll work.”
Sunset leafed slowly through the remaining characters. “Huh,” she said at length. “So all of them have some kind of spells except this one. That’s pretty different, I guess.” She set down the fighter and handed back the dimishing stack.
Rainbow Dash let loose a manic grin as she waved around the sheet she’d claimed. “Oh yeah. I’ll go with this one. Explosions!”
Twilight caught a glimpse of the generic character portrait providing a scrap of visual interest. “The wizard? Dash, you do know that’s the most, uh, eggheady class in the whole game, right?”
A shrug of nonchalance greeted this observation. “Whatever.”
“Just so long as you can keep up with it.” A distinct note of doubt suffused the remark.
“Lessee.” Applejack’s whole face furrowed. “Kinda hard fer me t’ tell, not knowin’ th’ rules an’ all, but this one don’t look as complicated as th’ rest. Guess I’ll go with that.” She examined it with vague suspicion. “Says here this’s a . . . ranger, right?” When Twilight nodded confirmation, she set down the sheet with a shrug. “Don’t look much like a ‘ranger’ t’ me, but okay. Here ya go, Twi.” She leaned over and extended an arm to hand back the half-dozen unused characters.
Sci-Twi accepted them with some trepidation and leaned over to slip them back into her bag. When she straightened, she spoke with the stilted cadence of someone reading from a script. “Take a few minutes to look over your characters—don’t skip the class descriptions—and get to know them. You can see I didn’t finish them completely, because I wanted you all to have at least a few choices. Go ahead and pick what you want from the lists and cross off everything you don’t choose. If you have any questions or need any help, let me know.”
The girls remained more or less quiet as they concentrated on their picks. Questions and answers floated back and forth, and Sci-Twi shepherded a few of them through the process, especially Applejack. At last the game master looked around at the players and asked, “Is everyone ready?” Murmurs and nods answered her, and she took a breath. “Okay then. Let’s start.”
“My name is Bergud Battlehammer,” Twilight declaimed in a truly terrible burr. “And I—”
“Wait wait wait,” Rainbow Dash interrupted. “Do dwarves really sound like that? Weren’t they supposed to be from, uh . . . somewhere else?” She waved a hand to make up for her uncertain knowledge of mythology and geography, gleaned as much from Daring Do as from her studies . . . for better or worse.
Twi stalled out, mouth open. “These dwarves are different, okay?” she finally managed. “O&O wanders pretty far from the original sagas and legends where elves and dwarves and everything else come from anyway, so don’t worry about it.”
It might be the most hackneyed of O&O adventure openings, but it was new to Twilight’s players, so that was all right. Mysterious patron appears to gather a group of heroes for aid in reclaiming a long-lost clan legacy from the depths of a dwarven stronghold abandoned after the incursion of dark forces generations ago. She breathed a surreptitious sigh of relief when none of her friends seemed to spot the amazing resemblance of the premise to a classic fantasy novel. On the other hand, she was pretty sure none of them had read it or bothered to watch the recent dreadful movie adaptations, which was why she’d lifted the idea in the first place.
The main event, of course, would be the depths of the stronghold itself, but the overland trek to the not-so-distant ruins of the ancient habitation was a golden opportunity. Putting the players through a few toe-dipping preliminaries to shake down the group and to familiarize them with the rules in action would be invaluable. Little did she realize just how necessary those would prove to be.
“. . . So the last bandit takes off running,” Twilight said in a carefully neutral tone. “Seeing all his buddies get turned into mincemeat probably changed his mind about his career choice. Are you going to let him go?”
Rainbow Dash piped up instantly. “Heck no! I’m gonna—”
As she raised her hands, fingers wiggling, Sunset cut her off. “Nuh-uh. That last spell you threw almost cooked me along with those two bandits, RD!”
“Oh yeah.” Dash clasped her hands together and lowered them. “Hey, I said I was sorry.”
“Jus’ let ’im go, girls,” Applejack put in. “We put the fear o’, um, th’ gods inta ’im. He ain’t likely t’ stop runnin’ until he falls down exhausted.”
A remarkably deadpan Pinkie, whose cotton-candy hair somehow resembled her sisters’ waterfall styles a bit more than usual, opened her mouth—only to shut it again when Sunset turned a gimlet eye on her as well.
Fluttershy nodded, then added, “Um, but I’ll yell something after him.”
“Oh? What?” Twilight cocked her head with an interested expression.
“I, uh—maybe something like aaararrrgh?” In Fluttershy’s breathy voice it sounded more like a moan than a bellow.
“Very eloquent of you, darling.” Rarity flicked the fingers of one hand. “I too shall shout after him. Hmm. ‘Let that be a lesson to you, sirrah—crime does not pay! Should you continue your brutal ways, this fate shall befall you as well!’ My bard knows that much from experience, you see.” She drew breath to continue.
“He’s, uh, gone,” Twilight pointed out in this pause. “He’s probably out of earshot by now.”
“Humph.” Rarity deflated, slumping in her seat for a moment, before remembering herself and sitting straight again. “Well, it should be a lesson to him.”
Twilight looked over the tactical map depicting a rutted dirt road wending through forest. The colorful sheet was littered with figures, standing or tipped over, scattered all over it, along with markers of various sorts. Prominent among the latter were small translucent red sculptures depicting flames and, when those had run out, red or yellow pawns placed on a disquieting percentage of the map’s grid squares. She bit her lip and restrained the impulse to shake her head. Only the fact the bandits, though outnumbering the girls’ characters, were of lower level had dragged victory out of the confused, uncoordinated skirmish that had rolled through the woods.
“So . . . are any of you going to do anything about the fire?” she asked.
The girls looked at each other. Dash shrugged. A hurried check of character sheets revealed none of them had any plausible means of dealing with the nascent wildfire, not even Bergud. Twilight looked blank for a moment, then grabbed a d20 and rolled it, out of sight behind the colorful varnished cardstock shield blocking view of her notes. “Uh, okay. So the clouds overhead are looking pretty threatening by now. It’ll probably rain before too much longer.”
“You just made that up,” Dash objected. Applejack glanced first at her, then at Twilight, one eyebrow raised.
Twilight, expression prim, ignored the interjection. “Are you going to keep going, then?”
“It’s past suns—uh, sundown now,” Twilight pointed out. “Do you want to call a halt and set up camp sometime soon, or do you want to push on and get to the watchtower Bergud mentioned?”
After a minute or so of everyone talking at once and not getting anywhere, she halted the discussion with a rap on the table, then pointed at Sunset. “Stop or go on?” After prying an answer out of one player she proceeded to the next until she had what amounted to a vote. “Okay, more of you seem to be in favor of getting out of the rain at the watchtower. What will you do about the darkness? Torches? Spells?” Torches turned out to be the order of the . . . well, not day. Rainbow Dash had neglected utility spells completely in favor of maximum destruction, and what few illumination spells were available to the other casters amounted to roughly torch-level light anyway.
“Okay, now that you’re moving again, you’re using the same marching order, right?” Twilight hinted broadly.
“Ah, yeah,” Sunset said after looking around the table. “I guess so.” Another moment passed before she added, “You’re up, AJ.”
“Huh?” Applejack blinked and looked up.
“Survival roll, Applejack,” Twilight reminded her. “You’re scouting ahead, remember?”
“Oh, right. Uh, what do Ah do agin?”
Twilight recited with a hint of tried patience, “Make a Survival check with advantage. Roll 2d20 and use the higher of the two, add the number next to ‘Survival’ on your character sheet, and tell me the result.”
Applejack followed the same instructions she’d been given more than once over the course of the session and peered down at the dice in the arena near her. “What if both of ’em are the same number?”
“Then it doesn’t matter; the result is the same either way,” Twilight told her. “What did you roll?”
“One,” AJ answered. A chorus of groans arose, to which she said, “What?”
“Oh.” Twilight sighed. “You all get another couple of miles along the road, just long enough for night to fall. Applejack, since you’re scouting a little ways ahead of the rest of the group, you go around a bend in the road before they reach it. There’s no torchlight and no line of sight to you. You rolled a one, so you completely miss the two redcaps hiding in the bushes by the side of the road. They have surprise, so they’ll get one free round before any of you can react. Then everyone rolls initiative.”
The pair of ghastly little manlike creatures burst from the brush and used their gigantic iron hobnail boots quite literally to punt like a football the first intruder they reached. One critical hit later, the hapless ranger flipped through the air, then skidded face-first back up the road, unconscious and reduced to zero hit points. Applejack’s mouth fell open as she was taken out of the fight with naught more than a flurry of kicks. The rest reacted with a babble of voices.
“I just don’t get it!” Dash sat back with a small thump. “I’m stumped.”
The rest of the girls, slouched in one fashion or another, nodded or made small noises of agreement. Their freshly healed but rather battered-looking characters stood before the huge stone doors of the dwarven stronghold’s main entrance, sealed now against all who would enter and still half-covered with vines and foliage. The carvings on the giant panels presented an enigmatic poem that, Bergud assured them, was supposed to grant entry to the supplicant who solved it. Alas, his father had failed to pass on the explanation due to an acute case of death, leaving it up to the player characters to figure out the answer—which, for the last half-hour, they had failed to do. Even Sunset’s brow furrowed in bafflement, though she stared at the map with narrowed eyes in furious thought.
The delay stretching beyond a few minutes had caught Twilight completely by surprise. Now she all but vibrated on her chair, biting her lip and failing to conceal an expression of chagrin. She loved complicated puzzles. She loved solving them. She loved creating them.
She completely forgot not everyone felt the same way about them.
She couldn’t let the impasse go on much longer. At the same time she couldn’t hand over the answer just like that. Either risked shattering the mood and spoiling the game. Maybe she should have made it simpler, a quick couplet instead of a long poem. Maybe she should have—
“Goodness, girls. I appreciate your efforts to keep your voices down in spite of your excitement, but this has been quite the spectacle.” With various manifestations of startlement the whole gaggle broke from their preoccupation to look up at the elderly gentleman who suddenly stood beside Twilight. Leaf-green eyes in a brick-red complexion twinkled behind small round reading glasses; a balding halo of white hair matched spotless button-down shirt. Braces and slacks of charcoal gray contrasted sharply, as did patent-leather closed-lace shoes.
“Mister Lectern!” Twilight was at a loss to proceed beyond that greeting outburst.
“My, my. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a chance to see an Ogres and Oubliettes game.” The bookstore’s proprietor wore a reminiscent expression. “Why, it’s been . . . well, far too long since I sat at such a table myself.”
“You played O&O?” The young game master looked poleaxed. Most of her players simply looked bemused.
“Now, Miss Sparkle, your astonishment is hardly flattering!” The mock severity faded. “Oh yes. I acquired the old wargame rules and the original box set back in university, and I believe they’re still around somewhere.”
Twilight’s eyes were wide and her voice dropped to a reverent hush. “You have the first edition?”
“Almost certainly,” the old man assured her, “though I’m sure I’d have to dig them out of a box in a closet. The game seems to have changed a good deal, I must say—but then, it has been more than forty years.” With a smile he added, “Right now, I’m more interested in how your game is going, my dear.”
“Oh, well, it, um . . .” Twilight trailed off, but fortunately the others took up the slack. It might have been more helpful if they didn’t talk all at once, but after an initial blink of surprise Lectern listened gamely.
When they reached the current standstill and wound down, he cocked his head and, perhaps not quite as gravely as their youthful dignity might prefer, said, “I see. Well, I’m sure a group of such good friends can find the right words to convince that stubborn door to open. At any rate, one thing I do remember quite clearly was how often an adventure went completely awry. Still, all we cared about was having a good time, so as long as the games were memorable and made everyone laugh, it didn’t matter how far off into the weeds they wandered.”
He gave them all another wry smile. “I’ve taken enough of your time, girls, so I’ll leave you to it. Have fun.” With a last polite nod he faded away, as quietly as he’d appeared, to resume his managerial duties. Most of the young women stared after him, expressions ranging from befuddlement to realization.
Only Sunset still gazed at the map, muttering under her breath, “‘good friends—right words—’” Abruptly she sat bolt upright and smacked a palm against the tabletop. “I’ve got it! Girls!”