Today’s snippet, titled “Chit-Chat”, is a piece I wrote about NPCs in my Pathfinder Campaign (sort of the “King Maker” adventure path). The intention behind this was to illustrate events occurring in the world, but away from the PCs. They’re supposed to be writing their own pieces about actual in-game events. We shall see if any materialize.
      Be forewarned, there are mature themes and naughty language below.
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      Esmerelda missed her husband.
      Jame had not been a very successful man – he made a meagre living as a carpenter’s assistant, doing the heavy lifting and the grunt work even the young apprentices spurned as being beneath them. He had not been particularly handsome and his hands were always rough and calloused. He thought no great thoughts nor was he possessed of any great ambition. Yet he had loved her wholly and without reservation, he had been a capable and considerate lover, and he had always made her feel safe from the horrors of the world.
      Even as those nasty, stinking Hobgoblins had put Greypine to the sword and the flame, Esmerelda had held out hope that some how, some way, Jame would see her safely out of the village.
      She had held his head in her hands and watched as the life left him, blood pouring in a torrent from the grievous axe wound that had exploded his chest. A numbness had settled upon her then and in the days and weeks that followed, Esmerelda was glad for it.
But that spell was broken now and the pain of loss was almost too much to bear.
      “Jame,” she sighed, watching the countryside from the swaying wagon. She could feel the baby growing within her, more strongly with each passing day. I must be three moon cycles gone, she thought, laying her palm upon her belly. What will become of your son, Jame?

      Riva did not miss her husband.
      She mourned her mother and uncle, both murdered in the siege of Greypine, and she wondered if any of her cousins or friends had escaped. But she did not miss her big, brute of a husband. The violence of her marital bed had prepared her well for weeks as a slave in a camp of goblinoid soldiers. Nothing they could do to her – short of death – would be worse than life with Merrov.
      And for all his cruelty, she had come to realize that Merrov and his fists had done her a favor. Her nose, broken and rebroken over these ten years of marriage, was set in a permanent crook. Two days before the attack, she had dropped a platter of roast duck. Her punishment for spoiling his supper? A black eye, a busted lip, and bruises from her clavicle on left to her right breast. He had left her so unattractive that few of the hobgoblins bothered with her at all, and she had not been siphoned off into the cells with the most beautiful ladies, where they existed in a state of constant abuse.
      The road was bumpy but the company was not bad, and Riva quickly decided that she had made the right choice. If she had stayed in Restov with the other survivors of Greypine, she might have found some menial city-work, but it seemed likely to her that most of the ladies would end up working on their backs. Riva scoffed at the very idea. She had experienced enough cocks in her life and though some small part of her longed to be a mother, ten barren, married years had convinced her that a baby wasn’t to be.
      She glanced over at Esmerelda and smiled. There’ll be babies a-plenty on that farm, I imagine. I can be content to raise some sheep and ducks and be Aunt Riva…

      “Do you think there will be boys there?”
      Yetta snorted.
      “What?” Lani frowned. “What?”
      “Men, Lani. We need men. Not boys.”
      Slapping wet material against a rock, Lani rolled her eyes. She was the youngest of the Greypine ladies who had left Restov, just eighteen, and though she had been an old maid before the sack suddenly they treated her as if she were a child.
      “Fine. Fine, men, not boys,” she said. “But – do you think there will be any?”
      Karni cast a glance at the main camp where Gavriil sat puffing on his pipe and sketching in his little folio. Nearby, Lexi and Zehavah were laughing as the druid showed the paladin how to tie special knots in her fishing line while Erin and Rachel finished their supper. Minty was cleaning herself in the shade of a beautiful willow, but her master, Ryven, was no where to be seen. After a long, paranoid moment, Karni leaned forward and whispered.
      “I heard two of them talking the other day – just before we got to New Stetven – and they were talking about recruiting menfolk from the city or nearby villages to come down and help. But the idea got quashed, I guess. Not sure.”
      “So what you’re saying, Karni, is that there ain’t going to be no menfolk?”
      She shook her head. “Just two toothless old buzzards, and a woman old enough to have a daughter the same age as Master Gavriil and Lady Lexi. That’s what I heard.”
      “It’ll be easier to make it our own place, then.”
      “That’s silly, Yetta,” Lani said.
      “Why for? They’s only three in number, we’re eight easy. And if two are real old, then soon it’ll be our place, not theirs. We can run a farm, us ladies can.”
      “We don’t need no men folk anyhow.”
      Lani looked at Aliva, shocked. Her mouth gaped and she just stared.
      “You’ve got to be kidding me,” old Geni said. “Even if you ain’t hoping for love or a good sound fuck, Aliva, you better believe we’ll need a few menfolk at least. Someone to plow the fields-”
      Blushing, Lani had to look away when Karni made a dirty comment about getting plowed herself.
      “…and defend the homestead.”
      “We can learn to shoot and hunt ourselves.”
      “Zehavah isn’t a man and she could teach us to hunt and fish.”
      Lani shook her head and returned to washing her clothes as the other ladies chattered away. She had signed on for a bit of adventure and a life away from the filthy cities. But eighteen, past the prime marriageable age, and a virgin to boot – she hadn’t signed on for a life without men and husbands and babies.
      “Bugger that,” she muttered, and headed off to hang her laundry to dry. “I’ll get meself good and pregnant one way or another.”
      She cast a glance at the handsome blond priest, then at the virile dark-haired warrior, and then at the three Greypine youths who had been hired on as grooms and squires-in-training.
      “One way or another, yes indeed.”

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Note: Image is “teentalk” by melodi2 from SXC.hu