Short Fiction- Fantasy Action Roleplay System

I recently took a short fiction class and I ended up writing a short piece trying to encapsulate the roleplaying game experience. Or my roleplaying game experience, at the very least. Hopefully I wasn't too far off.

Fantasy Action Roleplay System

“The troll is… Jeff, pay attention…”
A half minute passed before Jeff looked up from his phone. He had tuned out at some point during the group’s thirty minute tangent about which Nightmare on Elm Street sequel was the most tolerable. He had managed to ignore the in depth explanation of the series’ sexual subtexts that forced the group to abruptly turn their attention back to the actual game. Jeff looked over the table, feeling even more regret. Dice, pencils, and sheets were scattered across a table far too small for a group of six. Half of it was covered by a fold out screen, decorated with the images of various fantasy creatures with 80s haircuts painted in earthy tones, unified by an inexplicably green tinge. Beneath a crooked elf and some three armed reptilian was text with a stone-like font, “FARS: THE FANTASY ACTION ROLE SYSTEM.” It left whatever was happening on that side of the table a mystery to all but one out of the five of them.

Dan insisted that was the point of it.

Jeff had known Dan for some time, though admittedly not very well. They had something vaguely resembling a friendship in high school, as they had managed to end up in the same homeroom class three years in a row. They had gotten lunch together a few times and Dan had invited Jeff to join him in the dimly lit Latin classroom full of CRTVs where students played video and card games after school.

Jeff had declined and later felt guilty about it. As far as he could tell, Dan didn’t have that much going on in his life and the smell of the room and its occupants wasn’t that bad.

To Jeff’s surprise, Dan ringed him up a few months after graduation. The latter had essentially disappeared in their senior year, seen only manically scribbling in notebooks far away from any potential disturbances. Jeff told him he had decided to take a gap year.

“Yeah, I’m doing something like that.”

With the formalities out of the way, Dan explained he was hosting a game of “FARS.” After a lengthy explanation of the alleged superiority of the system and his unique take on it, he got around to telling Jeff what it actually was.

“It’s a Roleplaying Game. It’s like a video game but pen and paper. I make a story and you have a character that acts it out. You roll dice when you want to do something complicated to see if you’re successful or not. I do the same for everyone that isn’t your character.”
Jeff hesitantly accepted the offer, even if didn’t actually make sense to him. It was only to finally overcome the longstanding guilt about the Latin classroom affair.

Over the next few days he received a series of emails from Dan. The first had a document titled FARSBACKGROUNDDAN. Jeff let it sit a few hours until opening it to find that Dan had taken it upon himself to rewrite the entirety of FARS elaborate “lore,” which he had felt a need to explain earlier.

Jeff felt like someone had emailed him a severed body part. He got only a few pages into the gargantuan document, stopping after realizing the complex metaphysical dynamics he was trying to parse existed only to explain where goblins came from.

“Yeah, Dan, I read it. Sure, it was cool, I guess.”

After that Dan insisted on meeting with him at their hometown’s library, in order to prepare for the game. The only sort of pre-anything Jeff had ever done before a game involved heavy drinking. Arriving at the agreed upon time, he found Dan seated in the library’s long ignored VHS section, which the fluorescent lights seemingly refused illuminate.

Jeff had never seen Dan outside of his school uniform. Judging from what he wore now, he must have preferred the restrictions imposed by the dress code and didn’t know what to do with this newfound freedom. Dan wore a graphic tee with a character so far from Jeff’s own interests he couldn’t even place what medium it came from.

Admittedly he couldn’t remember the last nonfiction book he had read of his own free will but he suspected that wouldn’t have made a difference.

Dan rushed through their niceties and rushed straight to pulling a hardback book from his satchel. It had never occurred to Jeff to put pins on a bag. Dan’s had so many it looked like some kind of nightmarish neon mushroom patch.

Jeff turned his attention to the book after Dan excitedly smacked it onto the ancient plastic table. It was literally rough around the edges and emblazoned in ancient, exaggerated art. The only thing keeping the book together was so much duct tape that the spine looked mummified. It was much older than Dan but Jeff only wondered what all the pages were for.

“We’re gonna make your character now. Don’t worry, I’ll handle the hard parts.”
Over the course of the next hour, Dan asked him a series of increasingly unclear questions and explaining the consequences of his decisions. Every so often he would roll a dice, briefly explaining the significance and quality of the roll. All the while he filled out a piece of loose leaf in his indecipherable handwriting. Admittedly Jeff knew he wouldn’t understand even if he could read it, so it didn’t really matter.

About halfway through, Jeff entered something akin to a transcendental state, broken only by Dan’s last question.

“Alright, now you’ve got a pretty decent Rhark Skirmisher.”
Rhark? Jeff thought that couldn’t be right and Jeff had misspoken.

“All you need to do is come up with a name and background.”
“Um, yeah.”

Dan promptly packed up his stuff and left the library, leaving a confused Jeff with a scribble covered page. Unable to make the slightest sense of it, he turned back to the “lore,” as Jeff had insisted on calling it.

Rhrark are centaurian sharks, hailing from the under-depths of…

Jeff squinted at the screen. It didn’t matter how antiquated FARS was, there was no way a shark centaur was a major part of the setting. But that meant that Dan had felt the need to add it. That wasn’t a particularly comforting thought.

Eventually Dan sent him the date and time for the actual game, a full three weeks after he had agreed to it. Admittedly, Jeff was excited for it. Regardless of the more questionable details, it seemed fun enough to him. And Dan had obviously put quite a bit of thought into it. Most importantly, if he went to this, he never had to think about the Latin classroom thing ever again.

When Jeff showed up another person waited outside of Dan’s garage. He wore a heavy metal shirt from one of the subgenres that took pride in illegible band logos. He smoked from his vape at regularly intervals, in a motion reminiscent of a “Drinking Bird” in its frequency and manner.

Dan hadn’t mentioned that other people would be involved.

“Jeff, the troll.”
“Yeah.”
Dan gestured to a chunk of lumpy metal placed at the center of a hand drawn floorplan. In the right light it did in fact look like a troll, mainly thanks to the club and loin cloth sculpted directly on to it. Usually it just looked like something you righted a too short table leg with.

“Jeff, you still haven’t used your ‘Hunger Frenzy’ ability yet.”

“Right, that.”
The man he had met at the garage, Ted, chuckled to himself. He seemed to have a grasp on FARS gameplay that Jeff lacked. However he hadn’t said more than two sentences at once and his katana wielding character quietly sulked away from anything that didn’t involve combat. Jeff squinted at his character sheet and picked up one of the twenty sided dice. Higher rolls were better, except when they weren’t. He was certain he’d figure it out eventually, especially considering he’d already been in Dan’s basement for two hours.

“Listen, I mean, realistically what has this troll done to me.”
“He’s guarding the amulet.”
That sounded important to Jeff and he vaguely remembered that it came up a few times. Dan had to speak for every character that wasn’t the players but didn’t feel the need to differentiate his voice in any real way. Jeff quickly lost track of who was clearing out barns and who was shattering the boundaries of reality in the game’s story.

“Alright then I just run up and get it.”
“He’s guarding a room that leads to the one that has the amulet in it. It’s not here.”
“Alright can I just sneak around him then?”

“He’ll follow you.”
Jeff glared at the lead troll. He was fairly certain he’d have to make a bunch of dice rolls if the situations were reversed. Sam piped up

“Trolls are a hivemind, right? And since the hivemind is under the sway of Garroth, they’re irredeemable.”
Dan still faced Jeff, though he made a strange face before mumbling a confirmation. Sam seemed to be the only one who actually understand his elaborate take on FARS. At the very least, she could keep track of the seemingly endless elf variants. However Dan seemed to fear Sam, as if her mere presence posed an unacceptable threat to his role as “gamemaster.” Dan’s younger sister spoke for the first time in the game session. It suddenly occurred to Jeff that despite meeting her several times before, she had managed to avoid actually talking to him.

“Then we don’t have to fight them, we just need to talk one out of it to deal with all of them.”
Jeff was relieved that at least someone was on his side.
“Yeah, exactly. I mean he’s not really hurting anyone, he’s spent like the last decade in a cave.”
Sam interjected

“This specific troll might not have but the other trolls have. They’re basically the same entity stretched across a bunch of different bodies.”
“Yes. Sam is right.”
Jeff had never seen Dan so anguished. Nonetheless, he didn’t see a reason for his cartilaginous centaur not to try something other than whacking things with a sword.
“Alright, I’m going to try talking to it.”
Dan made a dice roll behind the screen.
“Your character takes six damage.”
“I didn’t say what I—uh the Rhark was going to tell the troll.”
“It doesn’t matter, he takes advantage of the opening you gave him.”
“I didn’t even speak yet…”
Jeff scribbled a six next to the other numbers gathered on the left hand corner of the sheet. Dan had never got around to explaining how he was supposed to apply the damage he receiving to his character sheet. For now, he just wrote the amounts down until he could figure it out. Ted finally spoke

“I’m going to slice it with my katana. That stacks with the agility bonuses I get for being an Ice Elf.”

Ted didn’t roll so much as drop the dice. It was a twenty, something Jeff was repeatedly told was good. Ted always seemed to roll it. Dan cleared his throat
“In a spray of dark ichor, the troll falls dead.”

Ted looked very pleased with himself. He was the only one at the table who was. Dan shuffled the stack of papers hidden by the screen. He methodically read off of one of them.

“Your party passes through the chamber, having defeated the troll. Now you proceed to the next chamber, faced with a rune inscribed door.”

Another two hours later, the party had killed another troll and the amulet was apparently missing. Or something like that. Ted left immediately and Dan’s sister returned to her room. Sam spoke at length to Dan about the complexities of his take on FARS. He sighed when she finally left. Jeff hoped he could do the same as Dan started gathering the various game materials.

“So, did you enjoy it?”
“As much of it as I understood.”

Dan looked content with that answer. Jeff finally felt relief. The whole Latin classroom ordeal was finally resolved and he could stop feeling guilty about it.

“So, same time next week?”