This is a work of fan fiction, created for entertainment purposes only and with no claim to the characters depicted. Ownership of RWBY characters and concepts belongs to Rooster Teeth. Dungeons and Dragons and the d20 System belong to Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast. The World of Ere setting belongs to Landon Porter and Paradox-Omni Entertainment.

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Chapter 02: Preludes

"Welp," Yang Xiao Long said around the last quarter of the burrito she'd crammed into her mouth upon checking her latest text message. She almost choked, swallowed, then tried again. "That's Blake saying she'll be here in a couple of minutes, so I'm out. Have fun playing your game, dorky sister!"

She threw herself off the couch where she'd been using Jaune's lap as a footrest and stretched dramatically. It was as hard to tell that she and Ruby were sisters by looking at them as it was telling they were merely half-sisters from how they interacted, Ruby being a tiny brunette who died the tips of her hair red and Yang being a giant blonde who'd actually been courted by the football team as a left tackle.

Crossing the room, she paused at the large, plush armchair Ruby had claimed to ruffle her kid sister's hair. Then she turned to Pyrrha who had been sitting on the other side of Jaune. "It's not too late to bail on the dice-party, Spear-ah. Me and Blake are meeting up with Weiss to hit the new all-ages dance club in town."

Pyrrha gave her an affable smile despite the nickname. Yang gave everyone nicknames and 'Spear-ah' wasn't even the worst, based on her top placing in the javelin in track and field where Yang was the queen of the discus and high jump. "No thank you. Give the team my regards though."

Yang gave her a little shrug that said 'your loss' before pounding up the stairs of the Xiao Long household to get ready for her night on the town. She never seemed to get how it was possible her teammate would rather play make believe instead of clubbing, but then again she didn't even understand how her best friend, Blake preferred sitting at home reading. But at least Blake responded properly to peer pressure.

After a ten-count, Ruby craned her neck over the high back of her chair to make sure her sister was really gone. As much as she knew her sister's ribbing was good-natured, she hated running games with her big sister in the house. It felt like Yang's mere existence undercut here authority as GM.

Once she was sure the coast was clear, she clapped her hands together while turning to her friends. "Okay, folks, I declare this game session officially started!" She hopped out of her seat and helped the others clear off the debris of their after-school burrito run from the table.

By now, they worked like a well-oiled machine when it came to game prep: Jaune and Pyrrha disappeared into the kitchen to get sodas, fill bowls with chips, dip and salsa, and grab napkins for the inevitable spills. Ren went to the hall closet and retrieved Ruby's dry-erase battle mat and attendant markers, rolling it out across the dining room table. Nora, exhibiting the freakish strength she was known for, picked up the solid oak coffee table from the living room and brought it to the dining room to serve as a sideboard for the snacks so the whole table could be used for the battle mat and other gaming supplies.

After fifteen minutes, they were all seated at their usual places at the table with Ruby at the head and everyone's dice and sheets at the ready.

Ruby grinned as she set up her DM's screen and opened her laptop. A new campaign where everything else would also be new. She was giddy with anticipation. "Alright. The first order of business is-"

"Minis!" Nora sang out, leaning over in her seat to rummage in her backpack until she came up with an old plastic pencil box. "New campaign means new minis, new minis for everyone!" She sang and hummed to herself as she opened the box and began pulling out little pewter figurines from where they'd been stored on beds of newspaper.

Nora did everyone's minis in every game she played in, even if they weren't played on a battle mat. To argue with her was to invite doom, or at least a sad Nora, so no one argued. The girl had seemingly unlimited amounts of time and a bottomless 'bitz box', from which she could produce the exact perfect accessories to glue onto the miniatures to make them look exactly right.

Earlier in the week, she'd hunted down the other three players and wheedled physical descriptions of their new characters so she could work her magic. How she managed to overcome her nil attention span and turn out such beautiful work was a mystery to everyone.

Naturally, she gave Ren his first; a male elf in a chain hauberk. In one hand, he was raising a jug as if about to drink from it while in the other, he wielded a scimitar. Looking closely, they could make out that Nora had painstakingly drawn a silver holy symbol to the God of Luck and Revelry a=hanging around the character's neck and down to his breast.

Next, she leaned across the table to hand Pyrrha hers. Ruby hadn't given any mandates on appearances having to be all that difference, so Pyrrha had kept up her usual trend of playing a human with red hair, though this one had hers cropped short about her ears with a waterfall of bangs partially obscuring both eyes. She wore a black leather bustier with blue highlights and a midnight blue skirt that fell to her knees and which Nora had somehow managed to give the shimmering appearance of silk. Black knee-high boots with metal plates over the toes and shins completed the look as well as a midnight blue half-cape that partially draped over one arm. Her hand was extended to hold a tiny clear marble Nora had applied smudged of superglue to so it appeared to be some sort of magical effect emanating from her hand.

Finally, Nora turned to Jaune and gave him a sharp look. "You were a pain in the butt, you know that?"

"...buh?" Jaune managed.

"It was easy with everyone else: Elf, human, human. But you... you had to pick a lasconti. What's a lasconti? I had to look it up, and there's no art for this new game yet."

The lasconti were one of the new races in the game they were playing, a kind of were-spider who could shift from human to spider to a hybrid form. Jaune had picked them because he was playing a very complicated build and needed the special abilities that race offered, never thinking of things like what the mini would look like.

"Sorry?"

"You should be." Nora said, even though she was grinning. "Luckily, I found an ettercap that kind of worked for your spider-man form thing. But it was a girl, so I had to do more work on it than I thought." Out of the box came three pewter figures because Nora didn't do things half-way. The first was just a small, brown dire spider figure that had obviously been pried off a larger mini or set piece. Then there was a human in a long, gaudily painted coat, wielding a pair of whips. The figure's skin had been painted gray as per the racial description in the book, it's long, black hair tied back in a tail that looked suspiciously like Ren's did in real life. Finally, there was the heavily modified ettercap, a roughly humanoid spider sporting not only a lot of epoxy work on the chest to erase certain parts of its anatomy, but an extra pair of arms, also wielding whips, and a close approximation of the same coat as the human figure.

Ruby narrowed her eyes at the last figure, then at Jaune. "Four whips?"

He gave her a haughty look. "Lasconti are eligible for multiattack instead of the two-weapon fighting tree."

"Four. Whips."

Jaune looked down at his sheet an began to read off. "Bards start with proficiency with Flexible weapons. Extra Technique grants me the technique: Take Them Down, which lets me trip and do damage with a flexible weapon as an attack, Improved Trip grants me a bonus to the trip roll, and my Background feat of Beast Handler means monsters don't get a bonus for multiple legs and are treated as one size smaller when I try and trip or tie them up. Oh, and my third level feat was Mutli-weapon fighting, which give me the MWF stance, and my fifth level feat was Exotic Training: whip, which lets me grab objects with a whip."

He passed his sheet over to Ruby and grinned. "Basically, nothing gets near me without kissing the floor. Oh, and I also get some spells."

Ruby took a moment to read over the sheet and wasn't sure whether to be horrified or impressed. She'd told him to play something that wasn't a Paladin and he'd complied... by making the most bizarre build she'd ever seen. A Trip... Bard. Yes, he had spells to heal or bolster his friends, but everything else, from his Performances to his feats were oriented toward ruing the day of anything with legs that came into his radius. He could barely kill anything on his own, but given that nothing near him was ever getting up again, it wouldn't be hard for the others to pick up the slack.

She flipped to the next page and read over the back story It seemed that he and Pyrrha had linked up their characters. An 'aww' wanted to escape her at that, but knew form experience that implying either pair of her players were anything remotely resembling romantic would derail everything for a half-hour of frantic denials and citations of other people they had dated or pursued.

The actual back story was simplistic: they had both come from the same city only to be separated when Jaune's character, Darian Kilackis was recognized to have a great talent in the bardic arts and shipped off the the Bardic College. At the College, Darian had picked up the Second Philosophy, a special bardic goal where they sought out a person to aid in becoming a legendary example of heroism to the world. Years later, they'd met again by chance, far from home and teams up to bring down an evil duke, traveling together for at least a year since then.

Jaune had, however, interlaced the sheet with an index card. Among the group, they used index cards to pass secret notes to the GM. Ruby shot him a look, surprised there were going to be secrets so early on, and read it:

Darian knows that Seriphied is evil and had abandoned his Second Philosophy to instead try and turn her from her dark path and redeem her.

It took an effort not to roll her eyes. She'd heard them talking about Pyrrha taking her advice to heart and playing evil and foresaw Jaune trying to turn that into a redemption story You could take the player out of the Paladin, but you couldn't take the Paladin out of the player.

"O...kay." she said, passing the sheets back. "Weird, but that works."

Ren passed his sheet over next. "I hope that's 'different' enough for you, Ruby." She smirked at him. As calm and easy-going as he appeared, Ren liked to win when it came to gaming and he liked to have a degree of control, which usually meant building a character who was so prepared for everything Batman hung his head in shame. It made her cold little GM heart cackle in delight at the idea of taking him off his game.

Surveying the sheet, she felt her smirk grow. Of course he'd take cleric if he was denied his precious skills. But the system they were using didn't really lend itself to Cleric or Druid supremacy or caster supremacy at all. Given a week to go over the system, she imagined he'd have given up on cleric and taken advantage of the creator's mad-on for bards.

Then her eyes landed on the feat list.

Drunken. Master.

Both eyebrows shot up. The feat system for the game was robust, replacing advanced classes and prestige classes from other systems. Almost anyone could take a 'path' of feats to add what was essentially a new class. Which included the drunken master. She looked over his spells and the rest of the feats. He'd done like Jaune and picked the combat-intensive option for his class: the templar cleric, which made him more of a melee tank. Combined with drunken mastery and the fact that being a cleric of Pandemos, god of luck and revelry gave him access to nigh-infinite cheap liquor...

It was like something Nora would build.

The back story, however was something she could sink her teeth into. Gao Faan had been born into a merchant family whose business practices and strictures would have sent them directly into Lawful Evil if the system they were playing actually had alignments. The worst pressure landed on Gao, the eldest son, who was expected to take the reins eventually.

Instead, he renounced his birthright and ran away to join a Pandemian temple at age twenty. Over the next five years, his family had tried time and time again with varying amounts of subterfuge, violence and harm to his new friends to get him back. Recently, Gao had snapped and decided to put an end to his 'old' family by destroying their business and their reputation. Liquor at the ready, he'd set out on a one-man drunken rampage with his name freely given and his scimitar freely swinging to do just that.

Ruby couldn't help but grin behind her screen. She had the perfect way to work that story into the game. She let Ren see that grin and wonder as she passed the sheet back to him.

"My turn?" Pyrrha asked, politely presenting her sheet.

Aside from Nora, this was the character Ruby had been dreading most. In the kind of terms Yang would use, Pyrrha was worse than Ruby herself in her total lack of teenage rebellion. Even Ruby had swiped some of her Uncle Qrow's booze on occasion, but she doubted Pyrrha even ever snuck out at night to go someplace she shouldn't.

What she thought was evil had to be laughable. Maybe there was a 'offer honest criticism without apologizing' feat or something. Ruby was already starting to feel bad for what she expected would be a wholly mockable character as she took the sheets... and discovered another index card.

Her name is not really Seripheid. She is really Zara il Manori, the fifth daughter of the Least House of Chordin. She merely went along with it when Darian acted familiar with her so as to use him to get close to and rob the Duke. She planned to kill him after, but it turns out she likes his company. I can send you her real back story by email if you'd like.

For a moment, Ruby just stared at the card. Then, very slowly, she got out her phone and sent a text to Pyrrha.

Did you talk to Jaune about this?

No, should I have? It's kind of a dark secret. I thought it might be a fun twist.

Well yes, Ruby thought, it certainly would, especially given Jaune's character's secret. She sent a follow-up.

Okay, I guess that works. What would Zara do if the real Seripheid showed up?

I suppose she would have to kill her then, wouldn't she?

Ruby's eyes darted up and took in Pyrrha as she set her phone to the side after that last text. Same placid smile, same general air of serenity. Nothing had changed in the older girl's demeanor and yet Ruby suddenly found it creepy as hell.

Wasn't this the same person who, several months ago, had filibustered the party's plan of action with a heartfelt plea that even if the only people negatively affected would be NPCs, they were still people nonetheless in the context of the game world?

Ruby hoped she hadn't unleashed something dark and horrible and probably worthy of a terrible eighties movie by telling Pyrrha to try playing evil. She hurried along to read the rest of the sheet. It was surprisingly against type even for an evil sorceress: no fire or necromantic spells at all. Instead,s he was focused on wind and force with a few feats that synergized with being a sneaky thief-type.

"L-looks good," Ruby said, handing the sheets back.

And then it was time for the main event; the moment they were all holding their breath over. Ruby's eyes met Nora's and she suddenly realized that Nora had very pointedly not revealed her personal mini. Without breaking eye contact, the bubbly girl did so then, proudly lifting her mini from the box.

It was a female warrior in half plate, holding a zweihander out before her in a guard position. The mini gleamed with the metallic finish Nora had applied to every surface of the armor and weapon. It was the kind of things she usually ended up making for Jaune: a knight in shining armor.

Nora grinned at everyone's stunned silence. It was still a melee character, probably focused on strength like she always played, but she'd become associated with playing big, fun, silly bruisers. Of course, she wasn't done blowing their minds yet, especially not Ruby's. With all the pride in the world, she presented her sheet to the diminutive GM.

Ruby felt her eye twitch just reading the very first line.

Lynn Fallon, Human Rogue 5.

A rogue. Nora Valkyrie was playing a rogue in half plate with a huge sword. And as Ruby read over the sheet, a terrible realization was dawning on her. One, the system did nothing to prevent that. Not being proficient with the half plate only meant it didn't grant as much of a bonus to Armor Class, not that it granted any penalties—nothing in the system actual penalized non-proficiency or the like. Two, Nora had done a good job making it a solid build, somehow making her rogue into a tank that could occasionally annihilate enemies with sneak attack damage under the right conditions and had so many skills and special uses of skills it made the kinds of characters Ren made look like slackers.

Nora had made an effective character.

That wasn't getting someone to play against type, that was convincing the mighty Mississippi to flow east for the day. It was getting cats and dogs to live together. It was total protonic reversal.

Ruby felt herself shiver, wondering if somehow she had broken the Seventh Seal and the apocalypse was about to come down upon them.

It was only then that she noticed the back story, which was only a single sentence:

My character is Ren's character's best friend since forever! :)

Okay, that seemed more like Nora. Crisis averted. Well until Pyrrha started murdering NPCs, Jaune tripped everything and Ren's character got roaring drunk.

This... was going to be a long campaign.

Taking a deep breath, Ruby handed Nora her sheet back. "So that's a thing... what do you guys say we get started?" The others nodded, eager to see what Ruby herself had up her sleeve.

"Great. We start in the late evening. You've all boarded the light passenger airship Bull's Head on its voyage from the city of Rivenport up the coast to Siram Leggate. The sun is just starting to set, casting long shadows in the forest below..."

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AN: Second chapter in the can!

It took me a long while initially to nail down what everyone would be playing specifically, especially Nora. I will say everyone is playing a basic build of a character I've played myself, though in 3e/4e/Pathfinder, though my homebrew here makes lower level characters more effective overall, so Jaune's trip bard is more powerful than you can build in a D&D edition (though they are still stupidly effective. Summon Swarm + Trips = stupid powerful).

Pyrrha's character is sort of based on Zaheer from Legend of Korra, what with the murderous airbending. I added a Suffocate spell to the list just for her.

Ren's character is impossible to build in any regular D&D because drunken master is usually a Monk PrC and Monks have to be Lawful, which never made sense to me in wither direction. Here, I made it so anyone can be a Drunken Master, so Ren is a cleric of drunkness who fights with the power of being drunk. And yes, one option this god gives you is 'Fortify Water', which makes a volume of water touched into cheap booze.

Nora gve me headaches because I love her as a character and knew what she would WANT to play, but wanted to have her still try to obey Ruby's request. So full metal rogue it is. She wasted a ton of money to get no benefit with that armor. I like the idea that Nora interpreted Ruby's request as 'take this seriously this time', and she still can't make a 'normal' character. By the by, I've done a rogue with a bastard sword before in 3e. That's one of my few problems with 4e: rogues were locked into a small set of weapons.

In case anyone is worried, no, Pyrrha is not actually cracked, it's just Ruby being a kid and over-thinking someone playing a really evil character. As to how Jaune takes the twist here... we'll have to wait and see.

Anyway, next chapter, we move into the actual game and get to see everyone playing their new characters. In the future, we'll follow the gang outside of game and get to see the rest of Teams RWBY, CRDL, CVFY and Team CRME too.