The Companions of Tartiël by Jeff Wilcox Read Free Book Online Page A

its enhancement bonus as normal, but with a high enough Concentration check, he can even add those back in.”
    “I like it,” Dingo said. He kept on eating as I talked, my food growing cold.
    “As for the paladin, blademasters have to be lawful, and they cannot be evil. That part is flavor from my books, where the people who can become blademasters literally are incapable of being evil. Anyway, blademasters serve in much the same role as paladins—as leaders, tanks [16] , and secondary healers. They don’t get lay on hands , like the pally, but they get half-casting with their own spell list, mostly minor buffs and abjurations, with a few cure spells tossed in.” I grinned. “I’d need you to look over it, but I also made a couple spells for the blademaster. In my novel, the one blademaster breathes out fire a couple times during a battle, kind of a ‘stoking his spiritual fires’ deal, so I made it into a spell.”
    Dingo nodded again and kept eating.
    “A lawful neutral blademaster might be cold and merciless, but as long as he doesn’t resort to truly evil measures, he’s good to go. A blademaster could use torture to extract information from an enemy, for example, as long as that enemy proved that he was irredeemable. In a pinch, he could torture an enemy who might have been redeemable if the blademaster’s pressed for time, like if his wards are going to die if the bad guy doesn’t spill the beans.”
    I fell silent after having run my mouth for a solid several minutes. Dingo took that as a cue that I was about out of words. “Want to get dessert?” he asked.
    “If by ‘get dessert’ you mean ‘walk to the dessert table and walk back empty-handed,’ then yes,” I said wryly.
    He chuckled and led the way. To nobody’s surprise, we returned to the table with no dessert after spurning the choices available to us. I might have gone for ice cream if it wasn’t January.
    “The blademaster sounds pretty cool,” Dingo told me on our way out. I pushed open the door to be met with a blast of wintry air, and we proceeded out into the cold and back to Lackhove. “Print me out a copy of the class so I can read over it. Other than that, sure, you can go ahead and make your character. Any idea what Xavier’s playing?”
    “Yeah,” I replied, hunching up my shoulders against the icy claws of January. “He was set on the druid last night.” I chuckled a bit, remembering. “He barely glanced at anything else. How about Matt? Does he have a character yet?”
    We crossed the campus road between Kriner and Lackhove, the asphalt blotchy with white salt that had melted snow and subsequently crystallized again as the snow evaporated and sublimated.
    “Sort of. He says he wants to play a rogue. Said something about pairing that class with the halfling race, so his fingers’ll be extra sticky.”
    Dingo rolled his eyes. “Great.”
    “Heh. Well, we’ve got a balanced, if small, party. If Matt’s playing a rogue, then we’ve got the skill monkey covered. Xavier will be our healer and artillery, and once he hits level five, he’ll be able to hit the front lines with me. I’ll hold down tanking for now and do secondary healing and buffs after level four.” I paused, looking at Dingo. “Have you found another player? We could use an arcane caster. Xavier’s got some big shoes to fill.”
    Dingo just shrugged as we got back to Lackhove. We entered and nodded to the desk assistant on duty on our way back to our respective rooms. “I asked a couple people. Some of them said they could play but couldn’t really commit to being at every session. Oh, that’s something I wanted to say. How are you at being at D&D sessions? Like, you don’t miss them often?”
    “Pff,” I scoffed. “Dude, I’d be more surprised if you could run D&D as often as Xavier and I are willing and wanting to play.”
     

V.
    “All right,” the DM said, after we had assembled in our dorm room and finished warming up our dice,