What the fuck had he gotten himself into?
Jo rolled her d20 and sighed in relief when it landed on sixteen. “Thank you,” she murmured as she set it down with the rest of her multi-sided dice. With the twenty facing up for good luck, of course. Granted, if no one else showed up to play, she might not be rolling dice tonight at all.
Felix, it seemed, had never met a dice gremlin before. He was staring at her with wide, dark brown eyes, his heavy, black eyebrows raised in what looked a lot like concern. Leaning back in his seat, he folded his arms across his broad chest. The fabric of his plum dress shirt bunched up and parted between his buttons.
Despite her best intentions, Jo glanced down and found herself caught between disappointment and relief that he was wearing an undershirt. She quickly refocused on Felix’s face. His long, oval, deep olive face with dark stubble so thick Jo couldn’t tell if he groomed it that way or if he simply had the most intense five o’clock shadow she’d ever seen. The patch below his lower lip, covering his chin, was gray. Her body ached at the sight, and Jo had never been more keenly aware that she was nearing thirty-five.
“Sorry,” she said as she reigned her thoughts back in. “Some MnM players get really particular about other people rolling their dice.”
“And you’re one of them, I see.” His eyebrows lowered to a more neutral position. “I apologize for my faux pas.”
Jo waved away his weirdly formal apology and pointed her thumb toward the door. “Are you expecting more people tonight?”
“In all honesty, I don’t know what to expect tonight,” he said. “This is the library’s first attempt at this type of program, and hosting it fell into my lap. Our director, Warren, hoped a weekly game night would bring in some new, younger patrons… though he seemed to believe a single flyer in the lobby would suffice for advertising.” He cleared his throat and ran a hand through his hair, lifting his ebony waves and letting them fall. “I apologize again. I spoke out of turn. I’m sure the director knows best.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jo said with a grin. “How smart can he be if he put the guy who knows nothing about MnM in charge of RPG night?”
Felix puffed out a tiny exhale from between his lips, a sound that was almost a laugh. “I don’t think anyone on staff knows much about this game of yours—just that it’s become something of a pop culture phenomenon in recent years. And apparently, my going to a fancy, East Coast grad school was enough for Warren to think I know what ‘kids these days’ are into.”
“Oh my God, please don’t tell me he actually used the phrase ‘kids these days.’”
“It was heavily implied,” he said with the tiniest hint of a smile.
She laughed but couldn’t think of anything else to say. Silence fell, then lingered, then drew out into awkwardness. Felix tapped his phone until it lit up and hummed in displeasure. Jo pulled out her phone too. Six forty-six. Officially late enough that it was safe to assume no one else would show up. It wasn’t like this was Los Angeles, where traffic made everyone thirty minutes late to everything.
“Is it possible to play this game with only the two of us?” Felix asked.
Jo smiled. She loved librarians—always willing to go the extra mile for their patrons. “It’s possible, but not particularly fun. Especially since I brought a warlock. I’m squishy. I’ll die in the first encounter.”
“I see,” he said, although Jo had a feeling he didn’t have a goddamn clue what she was talking about. “Then perhaps we should call it a night and try again next week. I’ll speak to our director about upping our advertising efforts so that you’ll have some people to play with.”
“That would be nice, but...”
She trailed off, unsure if her opinion was wanted. Felix hadn’t asked for it. But when she didn’t say anything further, he gestured encouragingly at her.
“It’s just that, if you don’t know how to play, you won’t be able to GM,” she said quickly. “To run a game, I mean. Roleplaying games like MnM need a storyteller. They guide the narrative, adjudicate rules and dice rolls, and manage combat with monsters. You could have a table full of players, and you still couldn’t play without a GM.”
“And GM means…?”
“Game Master,” she explained. She slid into the chair closer to Felix and removed Monsters & Mythology: Core Rules from his stack of books. She opened to the very first page of the very first chapter and pointed to the “What You Need” heading. The very first bullet point read “Game Master (GM)” in bold, followed by a few sentences summarizing the GM’s role. “It’s literally on page one, dude.”
She meant for it to sound joking, but Felix didn’t smile or laugh. She was about to apologize, but he spoke first.
“Would you be willing to run the game, then, since you know how to play?”
And there it was. Exactly what she’d been worried about, what had kept her rooted to the spot on the corner outside. GMs tended to be in short supply at public games, and organizers were always trying to recruit more volunteers. Saying no wasn’t exactly Jo’s strong suit, especially when it came to MnM. It was too easy for her to dive in headfirst, overcommit herself, and get burned out.
Once, she had loved GMing as much as she loved playing. But over the last couple of years, it had begun to feel more stressful than fun. It wasn’t easy writing adventures and doing prep work for multiple games, week after week. Jeremy, her ex-boyfriend, had never liked how much time she spent on MnM. So she’d quietly pulled back from gaming conventions and public events and limited herself to one game: the longstanding campaign she ran for her closest friends.
She really didn’t want to fall into that old pattern again. All she wanted was to play a casual game of MnM once in a while, and maybe make some new friends in the process.
Jo swallowed her “yes” and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I have run games before, but I think I’d prefer to take a break to play. GMing is a lot of work, and I don’t think I can commit to that while I’m settling in here.”
“Settling in?” Felix asked, cocking his head.
“I just moved here from California. New job, new apartment, all that.”
“I can understand that. I guess it’s up to me then.” He eyed the stack of books warily.
Jo took pity on him.
She nudged Core Rules closer to Felix. “Start with this. Chapters one through three are going to be the most important for you to know. Skim the rest, and don’t bother reading the magic spell descriptions. That’s an entire chapter, and you can look them up as needed.” She pulled Monster Compendium (Volume 1) out of the stack next. “Familiarize yourself with how to interpret the monsters’ game statistics and combat actions. You don’t need to memorize any of them. Like the spells, you’ll look them up when you need them, but you should understand the abbreviations and stuff.” She placed her palm on the stack of supplemental books. “These are all extras. You can ignore them for the time being.”
Felix was wide-eyed again, but this time it looked less like concern and more like… awe. Which wasn’t quite the reaction Jo expected. She was used to MnM outsiders rolling their eyes or getting a glazed-over look when she went too deep in the weeds. But Felix did neither of those things.
“Would you help me?” he blurted, a tiny crack in his composure.
It caught her so off guard, she could only reply with a very eloquent, “Huh?”
He sighed. “I tried to read these after Warren assigned this event to me, but they don’t make any sense. Even the beginning of this Core Rules book went completely over my head.”
“But chapter one is mostly world building,” Jo said. “It’s not even rules heavy.”
“I don’t generally read this kind of thing. I don’t like fantasy.”
“Excuse me?” she cried, forgetting to use her indoor voice. Good thing this room was far away from the quiet book browsers and evening studiers. “But you’re a librarian!”
