Roguelock Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Frontis

  Chapter One - The Game Cave

  Chapter Two - Wayfarer

  Chapter Three - The Daemon

  Chapter Four - Cerissa

  Chapter Five - Adventure Is the Job

  Chapter Six - The Roguelock

  Chapter Seven - Detect Magic

  Chapter Eight - The Opening

  Chapter Nine - Experience

  ROGUELOCK

  by Red Culver

  The Wayfarers, Book 1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 Red Culver

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Franshawn Langley

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Game Cave

  "I'VE GOT NEXT," I said, snapping a quarter down on the black body of the Karate Champ machine. The boy in denim cut-offs controlling the red-clad warrior on the screen waved a hand in acknowledgement. The girl controlling the white warrior didn't seem to notice. Her blue eyes were locked on the arcade screen, her hands working her twin joysticks with furious speed.

  The girl's name was Meghan, but I only knew that from hearing it around. I'd never actually spoken to her. Now, as I waited, I couldn't help but stare. Her blonde hair was slicked back and gelled in place, giving the impression that the thick black shades that sat atop her head were holding it down. Her white Adam Ant T-shirt gleamed in the cavernous gloom of the Game Cave Hobby Shop and Arcade. Her black jeans were so tight that they seemed painted on. Her hands on the joysticks moved in perfect sync with the rumbling synths of Rush's "Subdivisons" blasting on the arcade speakers.

  "Dammit!" Cut-offs slapped one of his joysticks, making it thrum back and forth, then stalked past me in a huff.

  "You're up, slick," said Meghan. She hadn't taken her eyes from the screen, where a blocky girl in blue was calling Meghan's warrior "my hero!" I grabbed my quarter and slotted it into the machine, then hit the red button to enter the game.

  The fight started, and Meghan immediately went to work. I struggled to dodge and block as the white fighter rained blows down on my avatar. A single solid hit would score one point for Meghan, and two points would win her the game. That gave me only seconds to get my shit together.

  "So, you're new in town, right?" I said. Meghan didn't respond, but her fighter kicked mine in the head, scoring her a point. Shit. I tried to hide my frustration, but man, she was really good. "Nice moves!" The second round started, and Meghan immediately went on the offensive. As I dodged around, I tried again to get a conversation going.

  "I'm Alex, by the way. Alex McLeod." I was practically sweating, just keeping up with her. I had no chance to launch my own counterattack. I'd thought I was pretty good on Karate Champ, but she was amazing. How had she gotten so good on a game that had only been out a few months?

  A flying fist slipped past my defense, and the fight was over as Meghan scored her second point. That was it, then; I'd been hanging around all afternoon for my chance to play her, and now I was out of quarters.

  "Hey," I said to Meghan as Cut-offs came up behind me, a fistful of quarters jangling in his hand. "My band's got a show coming up at Pizza Castle this weekend. I could get you in for free, if you're interested."

  She flipped her shades down over her eyes as she finally turned to look at me. Her mouth quirked up in what was almost a smile. "Sorry, slick, I only go with winners. Next!"

  Home was no comfort, I decided as I pulled up on my bike. Now that I was eighteen, graduated, and ready to get a place of my own, Mom was downsizing to something she could afford more easily. The little one-story house I’d grown up in was full of boxes and half-packed junk, and most of the furniture had been sold off. It was a weird combination of empty and overcrowded. Being there was like being at a party where you didn’t know anyone.

  I rolled my bike into the garage and pulled the door closed behind me. All my instruments and gear were right where I’d left them: two guitars, a bass, a cheap drum kit, and a big half-stack guitar amp. I patted the amp as I went by. I’d tried to paint it up like Eddie Van Halen’s guitars, but the paint had bled and smeared, making ugly red-and-white blotches that looked like fresh scars.

  "Mom! I’m home!" I yelled as I came in the door from the garage to the kitchen.

  "Upstairs!" came her muffled voice from above. I headed to the back hallway, where a set of pull-down wooden stairs led up into a small attic storage space. Clomping up them, I was hit by the heat of the attic. I’d tried moving my bedroom up there once as a kid, but the long Texas summers had quickly proven the stupidity of that plan.

  Mom sat surrounded by boxes, an oversized sweatshirt in her hands. She looked like she’d been crying.

  "Everything okay?" I asked. I came over and took the sweatshirt from her gently. It was one of Dad’s, from before he left. She looked up at me, then gestured to the boxes all around her.

  "Just going through your Dad’s old stuff. I don’t know what to do with it all. I can donate the clothes, I guess, but what about all his games? Who wants that stuff?"

  "Somebody will," I said. "Maybe we can have a yard sale. 'Buy a Drug Dealer’s Junk!' That would look great on a sign."

  "Not funny, Alex." She stood up and dusted off her jeans. "You know I hate that rumor. Your Dad may have… left, but he wasn’t a drug dealer."

  "Sorry, mom," I said, handing her back the sweatshirt. I believed her, but I had to admit that there was a reason the rumor had kept its legs in the ten years since Dad disappeared. What memories I had of him involved long business trips, from which he would inevitably come home flush with cash, which he’d spend all over town on fancy dinners, presents for me and mom, even charity. When the money ran out, he’d be off again.

  The truth was that Dad was a traveling salesman, not a fiendish drug lord. As far as his disappearance out of my childhood, there were plenty of wild explanations, most of them ending with him buried in the Texas desert. Mom never talked about it, but my guess was that he’d been keeping a second family somewhere else. He must have decided he liked them better.

  "I’ll take the games," I said. "I think the Game Cave buys that hobby stuff. Might be worth a pizza."

  The Game Cave Hobby Shop and Arcade had been little more than a hole in the wall when my dad took me there as a kid. Back then, it mostly sold little pewter figurines and paints that geeks like my dad used to reenact battles like Waterloo and Cannae in weekend-long wargames. The shop had expanded when Dungeons & Dragons got really big a few years after dad left, though I’d long since stopped going, choosing to spend my free time and money on music instead. I was drawn back in when the Game Cave used their Dungeons & Dragons money to buy the empty storefront next door and put in a big, state-of-the-art arcade.

  I avoided the arcade, the site of my recent embarrassment, and pushed through the door to the hobby shop side of the Game Cave with a big cardboard box in my arms. It was full of dad’s old game stuff, and as I looked around I knew I’d come to the right place. Metal wargame figures lined one wall, and another was given over to colorful Dungeons & Dragons books. They even had a few shelves of home video game systems, decorated with multiple markdown stickers.

  "Alex McLeod!" shouted a jolly voice. I peered around my cardboard box to see a big, bald man waving from behind the counter. "I never thought I’d see you in the hobby shop again!"

  "Hey, Dave," I said. "Got somewhere I can drop this stuff?"

  "Right on the counter, my boy." Dave slapped the glass. Game Cave Dave, as he was known, had been the public face of the shop for as long as I’d been al
ive. He was a good guy. When Dad left, Dave had tried to give me a second home at the Game Cave, inviting me to events and pushing older kids to play with me. It wasn’t his fault I wanted nothing to do with the place where I’d made so many memories with my father.

  "I thought you’d want first crack at this," I said, heaving the box onto the counter. "Dad’s old gaming stuff."

  "That’s right, your mom is moving, isn’t she?" said Dave. "She still single? Ah, never mind. Let’s take a look at what old Will McLeod bought from me over the years." He began to pull things from the box and lay them out on the counter. Multiple shoeboxes held wargaming figurines, all carefully painted in historically-accurate colors. Next came a battered white box with a picture of a wizard blasting some little armored creatures.

  "Original D&D box," said Dave with an appreciative nod. "Outdated now, of course, but might be worth a few bucks to a collector. Your dad couldn’t wait to play this with you, you know." Dave looked at me with an eyebrow raised, but he must have read my feelings on my face, because he dropped his eyes and murmured, "Sorry."

  He went on unpacking, occasionally sharing some bit of trivia or nostalgia about the pieces he pulled out. Finally, from the bottom of the box, came a small stapled-together booklet with a red cardstock cover.

  "What’s this?" said Dave thoughtfully. He read the title off the cover: "Wayfarer? Alex, you know anything about this? Where your dad got it, if he ever played it, anything?"

  "No idea," I said. "I’ve never seen it before." And I didn’t particularly care, though I kept that part to myself. Dave began to flip through the little booklet, muttering to himself as he went.

  "Attack bonus… experience points… look at these spells! Elves, of course… niflung, that’ll be the dwarves. Huh." He fell silent.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "Well, by all indications, this is some homemade D&D rip-off," said Dave. "Looks cheaply published, for one. And all the rules are pretty much variations on D&D. The spells are even worse; they even have the same names in a lot of cases."

  "So it’s not worth anything?" I asked.

  "You really don’t remember your dad getting this?" asked Dave.

  "No, man," I said. It was harder to keep the "and who cares?" to myself this time.

  "Well, here’s what’s weird." Dave had obviously mistaken my lack of interest for rapt attention. "It’s clearly a D&D rip-off. There were lots of those back in the day— Warlock, Arduin, so on. But those all came out in the years after D&D. Which was first published in 1974…"

  "Which was the year Dad left," I finished for him. "Well, is there a date in the book?"

  "Good thinking!" said Dave. He flipped back to the first page, and his brow furrowed. "Huh. Must be a joke or something."

  "What?"

  "Well, you were right, it has a date. 1966. That’s the year you were born, isn’t it?"

  "Yeah," I said. I wasn’t getting it. "So it came out before D&D?"

  "Well, supposedly." Dave closed the book and tossed it back in the empty box. "But D&D was the first of its kind. Whatever joker printed this must have backdated it for a laugh." He scratched his head. "Look, kid, I can give you sixty bucks for the rest of this. Don’t argue, that’s the friends-and-family rate. This Wayfarer book isn’t worth anything, though. I’ll toss it for you if you want."

  I was about to agree when something struck me. Dad had always loved games, puzzles and mysteries. Maybe he’d seen that same 1966 date in the Wayfarer booklet and decided to try to figure out its history. Hell, maybe he’d written it himself and backdated it as some sort of homage to me. Or maybe it actually was older than D&D. That would explain how it was in with Dad’s collection… and might make it worth something.

  "I’ll keep it," I said. "Thanks, Dave."

  "You’re welcome here any time," he said as he handed me a wad of cash. "Tell your mom hi, would you?"

  I made my way out via the arcade, but Meghan was gone. Disappointed, I pushed through the arcade door into the summer heat, Wayfarer booklet in hand. I was about to get back on my bike when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  "Hey, kid," said a nasally voice. I turned to see Karl, Dave’s co-owner in the Game Cave. He was a short, stocky guy with a dirty gray beard that fell over a big potbelly. He wore a leather biker vest over a checkered shirt, bellbottom jeans with a big brass belt buckle in the shape of Texas, and snakeskin boots. If you’d met Karl even once, you knew why Dave was the customer-facing partner. I always figured Karl was the money man, because it sure wasn’t his winning personality that kept the Game Cave in business.

  "You gonna toss that?" He indicated Wayfarer. Without thinking, I put it behind my back.

  "No," I said. "It was my dad’s."

  "So I heard, so I heard." Karl’s voice was a thin whine. He was clearly trying to butter me up. "Sorry about that, by the way. Hard luck. Well, listen, I don’t mind telling you that that little game is worth a few bucks."

  "It is?"

  "Sure. Old game, right? Printed in the sixties?" Karl’s eyes were fixed on my arm that held the game behind my back. He looked like a hungry hyena.

  "Dave said it’s a fake, or a rip-off," I said warily. "Are you saying otherwise?"

  "There were rumors back in the day," said Karl. "Of a game that came out before D&D, that inspired it. Not a lot of copies were printed, and it didn’t have much impact, but Gygax and Arneson were the ones who ripped it off, not vice versa." He licked his lips. "Or so the story goes."

  "And you think this is that game?" It was hard not to get caught up in his obvious enthusiasm, creepy as it was.

  "Yeah, I do." Karl tore his eyes away from my arm and locked them on mine. He had a weird pop-eyed stare, like one eye was a little bigger than the other. "Tell you what, kid. Let me pop open the till. I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it, cash, right now."

  "A hundred bucks?" I was floored. And to think I’d been ready to let Dave chuck it in the trash!

  "Sure, sure. I know a few guys— collectors, like— who I could sell it to. Not worth anything to you, though, is it?"

  I’m not ashamed to admit that I considered it. Like, really considered it. Between Mom moving, my needing to find my own place, and the constant costs of keeping my music gear working, a hundred bucks would go a long way. It could cover my first month’s rent in a decent place, or a new set of speakers for my guitar amp.

  But the very fact that Karl was willing to pay so much for it told me it was worth a lot more. Better to try and find a collector on my own, I figured, and get what— two hundred? Three hundred? More? I’d take that gamble.

  Plus, if I was being perfectly honest, it was the last of dad’s collection that had meant so much to him. It felt wrong to just pawn it off without at least giving it a look.

  "No deal," I said, and turned to hop on my bike.

  "Two hundred," said Karl. Holy shit.

  "I said no deal," I repeated. I flipped up the kickstand and put my feet on the pedals.

  "Two-fifty!" he shouted as I rode away, kicking up dust in his face. "Kid! Hey, kid!"

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wayfarer

  BACK HOME, I sat on a drum stool at the little workbench in the garage. I had a pencil and a piece of scrap paper, and the Wayfarer booklet open in front of me. I was trying to make sense of the rules under the header "Character Creation."

  I’d never played Dungeons & Dragons, but it had been big enough in the last couple years that I knew the basic idea. You made a character with different stats like Strength and Intelligence, outfitted him with weapons and spells, then directed him through monster-filled dungeons and wilderness.

  Wayfarer was similar, but the core concept seemed a bit different. Instead of a fantasy hero, you played a character called a Wayfarer, a cosmic traveler who journeyed between worlds via something called the Silver Ways. These were magic roads that connected different realities. The rulebook included rules for playing in a fantasy reality— like D&D, with goblins and drag
ons and gold coins— but promised that future books would include horror, western, sci-fi, and prehistoric settings, even a wasteland world that reminded me of The Road Warrior.

  I’d decided that even if I didn’t actually play the game, it was worth a read. After all the strangeness at the Game Cave, I knew I had something special in my hands, and reading through the booklet confirmed that. It was impossible to stop my imagination from firing up as I read about world-hopping Wayfarers getting into dangerous adventures with kings and thieves, aliens and monsters. Even the cover art was pretty cool, a black-and-white drawing of a guy with a Han Solo vibe holding a sword in one hand and a blaster pistol in the other.

  I was feeling something deeper, too, a pang of guilt or sadness. I had no doubt that my dad would have been thrilled to play Wayfarer with me. I’d spent my early childhood brushing off his attempts to rope me into his hobby, but now that he’d been gone for more of my life than he’d been around, I found myself wishing I’d let him in at least a bit. Maybe then I would have more happy memories of him.

  I sighed and started the first paragraph of the character creation rules over. The booklet recommended that your first character be similar to you personally, to make it easier to get accustomed to the game. That seemed as good a plan as any.

  The first step was to write down the starting template.

  Hit Points: 4

  Armor Class: 10

  Attack Bonus: 0

  Damage Bonus: 0

  Initiative Bonus: 0

  Proficiencies: Light armor, light melee weapons, light ranged weapons

  Saving Throws: All saving throws (Physical, Mental, Evasion, Luck) begin at +3

  Skills: All skills (Arcana, Athletics, Dexterity, Knowledge, Mechanics, Perception) begin at 0

  Magic: Characters begin with no magical ability

  I copied it all down diligently. Jeez, that was a lot of zeroes. I knew that hit points measured how much hurt you could take from weapons and spells. Armor class was your defense against regular weapons like swords and axes, and saving throws seemed to be used when you had to dodge spells, dragon breath, and other crazy effects. Having a higher attack bonus let you hit more often with your weapons, and a higher damage bonus let you hit harder. Initiative bonus was used to see who went first in a fight. Proficiencies seemed to limit what kinds of weapons and armor you could wield. As for the skills, I wasn’t sure about some of them, but I could at least guess based on their names.