Passive Effect: Sludge’s sense of self is enhanced. Sludge thinks, therefore it is.>
“Ale. Good. Me like. Tastes like… darkness.”
Sludge confirmed its statement with a nod.
“You're really getting into that, hey?”
Halbrecht had spent the evening casting stray glances at the Barston folk between sips, but he had a knack for smiling politely every time the lumberjack spoke.
Tub had sat far, far away at the other end of the bar, but Lox, Sammy, and the boys had taken an odd shine to the Lord of Dunden. They hung about him like fireflies. Someone had lit a kettle of heather and briar to waft out the clinging stench of pig grease.
“Damn,” he trailed off. “It must take some real brass balls to commit to the bit in a time like this. Roleplaying your way to hell and back, eh?”
Sludge just nodded. “Not hell. Home.”
Hours later, after the tavern had supped long into the evening and Sammy and Hamish had gotten into a mildly endearing fist-fight, Halbrecht challenged Sludge to a game of Jiggy Palm. The Barston locals knew it well, though Sludge blinked absently at the request.
The familiar words and etchings skittered into Sludge's vision like unfurling spider legs.
[Jiggy Up! New player dealt in. Deck size: 0/52]
“Here,” said Halbrecht. “You can take my spare.”
[Jiggy Up! New player dealt in. Deck size: 38/52]
“I grinded this thing for weeks when we first dropped. Thought there'd be some real loot or something, but nah. The cards themselves are purely cosmetic stuff but there are some gens who are still obsessed. I got a few rares. Shinies. Most of the legendaries are in the deep dungeons but Gronk have got them farmed.”
Halbrecht huffed, a faint, melancholic smile touching his lips.
He reached into his black travel-worn vest and pulled out a leather pouch, spilling a deck of stiff, hand-painted cards onto the scarred wood of the table. “Well, if it's all gonna burn, we might as well see who’s the luckier.”
He fanned the cards out. They hummed with a low, magical resonance—the reverse each etched with an equally intricate yet uniform pattern. Purple and lilac swirls converging into the oddly familiar shape of an eye. If you squinted just right you could see it.
“Ante up, Ser Sludge. It's easier to learn if you just play. We're aiming to be the first to hit 21, but we have to stake a card to win or lose per round. Winner takes it—obviously.”
Sludge’s pudgy fingers fumbled with its own deck, eventually pulling a card entirely at random that shimmered with an oily, iridescent sheen.
It slapped it onto the center of the table.
[Jiggy Up! Sludge gambles The Grim Lodge]
Halbrecht winced. “Well, they're my cards I guess but… fine. I can match.”
He kept the face down deck in his palm, and slid out a shimmering card of a water coloured portrait with a small, blonde boy cradling an iron helmet in his hands.
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[Jiggy Up! Halbrecht69 gambles The Squire’s Devotion].
“Two Fate cards, always best to go big. Winner takes both, Sludge. That's the pot set.”
After a moment, Halbrecht dealt five cards to them each. Sludge glanced down at its own hand—face down—its lumberjack forehead rippling as it splayed the painted pieces and tried to process the numbers.
There were three minor cards painted with numbers; a three, a six, and another six. The other two in its hand were each beautifully painted and unique in their own right.
One of them was a snarling mouth etched into a black night sky. The other was a smiling young maiden beneath a tree.
“I… go?” Sludge drawled. Half question, half statement.
It dropped the landscape of a mushroom speckled meadow, a strange green mist in the air.
[Sludge plays 3 of Spores]
[Sludge’s Palm: 3]
“So, these are minor cards. There are a shitload of suits, but the common ones are Swords, Cups, Coins, Staves. Then there's Spores, Iron, Schema, Greed… yeah. There's a lot. This is a Spores deck.”
He tapped a card to his lip.
“You played the three of Spores, which isn't great, but the goal is to get to twenty-one or bust.”
Halbrecht countered immediately with a number nine carved into the side of a hefty anvil.
“So, I'll play a nine, Sludge. Can’t let you breathe and go too easy just because you're a noob.”
[Halbrecht69 plays 9 of Iron]
[Halbrecht69’s Palm: 9]
After a while, the tavern grew quiet around them.
Even Lox stopped shouting at Sammy and Hanish to watch the two of them play. Tub had slid up to sit beside Sludge, head down, eyes glancing between Sludge’s hand and the cards on the table.
Sludge placed another landscape to the table. Darker this time; a wood of old, gnarled, dead wood, white spots floating in the fore.
[Sludge plays 6 of Spores]
“Twelve,” Sludge grunted with an unexpected confidence. The Barston boys glanced at each other, eyebrows furrowed.
[Sludge’s Palm: 9 (3+6)]
Halbrecht bit his lip. “That's nine total, milord. We're level.”
He played a card of five, curled blades on a hefty oaken table.
[Halbrecht69 plays 5 of Iron]
[Halbrecht69's Palm: 14 (9+5)]
“So, you can play them any time on default, but once your hand exceeds ten on your turn, you can play a single Fate card if you have one in hand. You'll usually get drawn one or two, but sometimes none. Still can't figure out the RNG.”
Halbrecht laughed and slammed down a Fate card. A bronze, weathered looking suit of armour in the rain, resting by a willow tree.
[Halbrecht69 plays The Rusting Knight]
[Effect: Wither—Reduces the value of the opponent's highest total Palm count by half]
It meant that Sludge’s nine had shriveled into a four.
[Sludge’s Palm: 4]
“Annoying, but you round down as a rule.”
“Bad man,” Sludge rumbled, though there was a hint of a wet chuckle in its throat. It reached into its hand and pulled out its own Fate card, the one with the wide, snarling jaws in the blackness.
[Sludge plays The Great Devourer]
[Effect: Consume—Discard the lowest card in your played palm to draw two new cards immediately]
Sludge knocked away the three of Spores and drew again. Lox and the boys grinned as Sludge clicked down a kingly looking figure with bright orange mycelia sprouting from his eyes, furling into a crown. The second card was five, fat, mottled bulbs sprouting from a tree.
[Sludge plays the King of Spores, and 5 of Spores]
[Sludge’s Palm: 21! Winner!]
“What the actual fuck,” whispered the Lord of Dunden, sweat pooled on the top of his lip.
“I’ve heard of beginners luck before but—”
And then a slick, sickening pop burst the hefty wooden door of the Sunny Buckle off its hinges. The wood thudded through the air, landing square into the corner of Lox’s temple in a wet crunch.
It knocked him clean off his feet, his body crumpling over the bar as shards of his skull and jaw clattered to the floor like broken pottery.
Chunks of oak and iron hinges whistled through the air like shrapnel.
One hot, metal splinter sliced right through the flesh of Halbrecht’s hand—still raised mid-bemusement. He screeched in pain, drawing back his palm and clutching it with his good hand as the painted cards scattered to the tavern floor.
In an instant, the warmth of the heather and briar was instantly replaced by the sickly stench of ammonia and rot. Thin, pustulant vines crawled across the floorboards in jagged, creeping lines.
Standing in the ruined frame of the doorway was a figure draped in robes of stitched raven feathers, a staff of white bone pulsing with a sickly, violet light.
“Little Halbrecht,” hissed a voice like grinding ice. “Playing mini-games while your kingdom burns and your silly goon squad begs to join the Gronk?”
Tut, tut, tut.
“Been waiting for this one since alpha,” mused the cloaked figure as he paced through the gap in the wall—pale, green light washing over the rafters.
“F’s in the chat, little boy.”
Sludge glanced down at the trapper's axe firmly in its grip.
Crackling frost crept along the kiss of the steel.
[Conquest Detected]
And then a warmth followed like the currents of a deep well-spring.