I accomplished a lot in the next few real-time days’ worth of playing. First, the Blade and Grunder tavern was finally ready, and its appearance caused a stir among the inhabitants of Blade’s Rest. Which, in reality, was just me, Hilly, Linc, and the blacksmith family.
I positioned it away from the central grouping of huts, thinking that this could be the residential area of the hamlet, and that the tavern should be a little apart from it. Residents might not like the noise that came from a tavern at night.
It began as an empty shell of a building with just a sign outside and a wide-open space within. I spent some time crafting tables, chairs, a long bar with shelves behind it, and a hearth.
When I invited Hilly and Linc to tour it with me, they walked around the room for a minute or two, before sitting down at a booth by the hearth. This booth was in the corner and had a wooden barrier around it, closing it in and making it cozy. This type of tavern seating was called a snug, and I was glad that they had sat there, since I’d intended it to be our regular spot.
“This looks great,” said Hilly. “Just one problem – there ain’t no beer.”
I nodded. “We need to recruit someone to run the tavern. I looked into it. We can either hire an NPC and pay them wages and keep all the tavern proceeds for ourselves, or we can recruit a live-in manager. We’d have to build them a hut, and they would take care of the tavern and run everything for us. If we do that, we only keep 50% of the profits, since they’re doing most of the work.”
“I don’t like the idea of giving up profits,” said Hilly.
“It might be the best thing to do,” I said. “Otherwise we’d have to order beer ourselves, maintain stock levels, that kind of thing.”
Linc’s eyes bulged. “The game really goes into that kinda detail?”
“Sure does.”
“Let’s vote on it,” said Hilly. “I get the deciding vote if it’s a tie.”
Linc and I didn’t necessarily agree with that but it didn’t matter – we voted to hire a live-in tavern manager.
Later that day I traveled to Westfell, where I paid ten coppers to a recruitment center. They had an office above a poky little haberdashery shop, and I met with a woman named Fiona Smalls, who promised me ‘small fees for big satisfaction.’
“So,” she said. “You need someone to run your tavern.”
I nodded.
“Great. We have lots of people with tavern experience. What kind of place is it?”
“Uh, just a tavern. It sells beer. Maybe pies too.”
She gave the politest smile she could whilst somehow still letting me know that I had given a stupid answer.
“Is it a lively tavern? Will there be music? Games? Is it the kind of tavern where the manager might be expected to break up a fight? Will there be gambling, perhaps? Will you require the service of…ahem…ladies and gentlemen of the night to offer an extra menu to your customers? Will there be a dining restaurant?”
“Alright, I get what you’re saying. I’m picturing a place where folks can get a bit of respite. You know. I want the Blade and Grunder to be like an English pub hidden in the countryside. The kind of place where you’ve been traveling for hours and you see the sign swinging in the breeze, and you suddenly get the urge to sit next to a log fire and order a steak and ale pie and a pint of beer.”
She scribbled something on a notepad. “Okay then. A quiet yet relaxing place. Leave it with me, Mr. Boothe, and we will filter our candidates and supply you with any who are suitable. The fee for a successful candidate placement is fifteen gold, subject to them successfully completing a three-month probationary period.”
“Thanks. I’ll look forward to it.”
After stopping at a carpentry supply store to buy better tools and some wood glue, I headed back out through the gates. I was within sight of Blade’s Rest when I got a notification. It had only taken four game hours.
Three candidates have been found for your vacancy:
Blake ‘Cutter’ Fowl
Sergeant Fowl served with the Empire’s Midnight Regiment for fifteen years, before receiving a medical discharge. Seeking a change of lifestyle, Blake has decided to try managing a tavern. He has carried his militaristic sense of order and organization into his new occupation…as well as rough handling of unruly drunks.
Penny Poppenthwart
An ex-stage singer whose vocal cords are too damaged to sustain her trademark voice, Ms. Poppenthwart seeks employment in a lively environment. With her running your tavern, expect rowdy nights and many sing-songs.
Hercule Mattenblack
Little is known about Hercule Mattenblack.
Hilly, Linc, and I met in the now fully furnished Blade and Grunder to discuss who we’d hire. It was a battle getting Linc to join us, he was so wrapped up in combing the lands around Blade’s Rest to add to his ever-increasing potioneering supplies.
“I don’t know about you guys,” said Hilly, “But I really like the sound of Hercule Mattenblack.”
“The sound of him? It tells us nothing.”
“I know. But here’s what I’m thinking. Hercule is gonna be a tavern owner like you see in lots of fantasy books, right? A mysterious guy with a mysterious past. He probably doesn’t speak much, and he doesn’t do nothin’ except serve beer. Yet at the same time, you get this sense that there’s more to him, and that he’s handy in a fight. There’s a thick air of intrigue around him.”
“Whereas we know for sure that Blake Fowl is tough, because it says so,” I said.
“His name appeals to me, I ain’t gonna lie,” said Hilly. “I wish I had a nickname like Cutter.”
“Linc?”
Linc chewed his bottom lip. He glanced at the empty bar across the room, as if picturing someone standing there serving drinks.
“To me, a tavern is a place you go for a quiet drink, right? You sit in the snug, maybe have a hot meal, and you talk to your friends or whoever you’re there with. Penny Poppenthwart sounds too rowdy for me. Especially for a hamlet like ours. And I reckon that this ‘Cutter’ fella might bring trouble, too.”
“So you’re for Hercule Mattenblack? Even though it doesn’t say anything about him?”
“This is a game, Josh. We aren’t running a real tavern with our own money on the line. Sure, in real life I wouldn’t hire a guy whose CV said that nothing was known about him. But here, it might be fun.”
“Sure. Maybe you’re right. I guess I get sucked into this a little too much at times. Alright. Hercule Mattenblack it is.”
I used my menu system to offer Hercule the job, and I received a notification saying that Hercule would arrive in five days, as he had to make his ‘preparations’ or whatever the hell that meant.
In the meantime, we were busy. We paced out new boundaries for our hamlet, allowing plenty of room for it to grow. We already knew that Sas had selected this part of the game map for us to build on, but it seemed that we had some leeway into how far we could spread.
We had to be careful, though. According to the town planning strategy guide on Sheesh, if you spread your land boundaries too wide at the beginning, then your hamlet would lose a sense of identity and community, and it would be harder to attract new residents and visitors. So, we increased our boundaries a little, while being conservative about it.
After that, I made and sold a bunch of crude spears to the grunders, and Linc used the gold to buy more timber. We built up a hefty surplus, and we stored it in a new clay hut that I made just for keeping materials. Only Linc, Hilly, and I had access to it.
One afternoon, Hilly came to see me. She was heading out to go hunting, and she was wearing dark brown combat leathers and held a well-made bow in her right hand.
She leaned on my doorstep. “I was thinking. Now that we marked out boundaries a little better and you improved your crafting skills, we could use a perimeter wall.”
It was unlikely that grunders would attack again. We had a cordial relationship with the nearest settlement, and Hilly made regular patrols around Blade’s Rest to keep it safe. Moreover, it was unlikely that any mob critters would randomly attack a populated place. Even so, it couldn’t hurt to bolster our defense. Part of growing a town, I read, was making sure residents felt secure.
“Good thinking. I’ll get on it.”
It took me three whole game days to craft a defensive fence around our hamlet. It was ten feet tall and it matched the grunder camp fence in sophistication, which was to say that it wouldn’t repel an army. Still, it gave us some security from the more hostile creatures that prowled Gobbler’s Creek at night, and it satisfied a future level-up requirement. It also made the whole place seem more real, if that was the right way to describe it. Like it was an actual settlement.
In the central residential area of Blade’s Rest I built six more huts. I provided the basic furnishings of a bed and table and chairs in each of them, and then I waited for settlers to arrive in the same way Gorgal and Frenrita had.
Over by Black Salt Lake, Atticus and Argyle’s business was doing so well that he asked me to build a second, larger hut for them. Still stinging from how they’d deceived me about their hut’s purpose the last time, I made sure to charge them proper craftsman rates.
I told them how much I wanted. Atticus shook his head.
“For a simple hut? That’s obscene.”
“Sound like you really need it. If you know any other builders, feel free to ask them,” I said.
He and Argyle conferred for a moment, before Atticus stomped away. Argyle offered me his hand to shake. “Deal.”
For half a day’s work in constructing their hut, I earned 300 gold. Not bad going for something that took me 1 button click, two game hours, and some scrap timber materials.
Hercule Mattenblack was supposed to arrive any time now. Before he did, I wanted to get something done.
“We need a sign,” I told Hilly and Linc.
“For what?”
“The hamlet. You know. Welcome to Blade’s Rest. The kinda sign you see when you go somewhere.”
“Okay. So make one.”
“I just wanted to see what you guys thought we should put on it.”
Linc scratched his chin. “We could have a motto. You know. Like, in Hampton, Virginia. Their motto is ‘First to the sea, first to the stars’ on account of them being the first English speaking settlement in America, and NASA putting their first training ground there.”
“Maybe ours could be ‘First lunatics to open a trade treaty with grunders’,” said Hilly. “But I got a suggestion of my own.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Picture this,” she said, mimicking the sign in front of her with her hands. “Death to all ye who enter here.”
“Right. That’s a nice, friendly welcome sign right there.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have a motto,” I said. “The sign should just say Blade’s Rest.”
“Real imaginative, Josh.”
“What, can I say? I’m a practical guy at heart.”
That afternoon I planted a sign outside the hamlet that said ‘Blade’s Rest.’ Looking at it, I got to thinking that maybe it was time that we built a road that led from the hamlet, and joined it up with the travelers’ roads that led to Westfell and other places. It would make it easier to attract passing traffic.
As I stared at the distance to see how long the road would have to be, I saw a man riding on horseback. He wore a fur coat with a collar that covered his stubbled face. Strapped around his horse was a leather sheath, inside which was a broadsword.
Suddenly, four wolves emerged from the undergrowth and attacked the horse, two on each side.
The man swung off his horse and landed on the ground, and in one fluid motion, he drew his sword.
The wolves surrounded him, heads hunched low, tails ramrod straight.
He made a beckoning motion to them and then leaped.
What followed was a fury of fur and steel, with the man pirouetting this way and that, accompanying every turn with a swing of his sword.
It was just a minute before the beasts lay dead around him. Without missing a second, he sheathed his sword and then produced a dagger from his belt, and he cut the wolves' pelts away and stuffed them into a burlap sack tied to his horse.
He climbed back on the horse and headed toward Blade’s Rest.
“Fuck, he’s cool,” said Hilly.
When Hercule Mattenblack reached the hamlet, he tugged his horse’s reins. He looked around, chewing on a grass stalk.
“This Blade’s Rest?” he said, in a gravelly voice.
“Sure is, stranger,” I said, making my own voice low and gravelly.
He climbed down from his horse and shook my hand. “Name’s Hercule.” Then he patted his horse. “This is Yuri.”
“Names Josh,” I intoned. I patted Hilly on the head. “This here’s Hilly.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” said Hilly, half-smiling.
Polli, the mule belonging to Gorgal and Frenrita, came trotting across the field, where she stood a respectful distance from Yuri and sniffed the air. Yuri sniffed in return, and both horse and mule took a step closer until their snouts touched.
Hanz and Franz came scampering by. “We will look after your horse, mister,” said Hanz. The boys’ English was much better than their mother and father’s. I guessed it was easier to learn a new language when you were younger.
Hercule flipped them a copper coin. It spun twenty times in the air, before he caught it perfectly on the front of his right boot. With one smooth kick he flicked it to the boys.
“Treat Yuri nice,” he said, “If ya don’t, he’s likely to kick ya into the sun. Now. As good as it is to meet you folks, where’s the tavern you need me to run for ya?”
Hilly whispered to me, “One copper to share between them? Cheap bastard.”
It turned out that not much was known about Hercule Mattenblack not because he was mysterious, but because after initially signing up at the recruitment center and telling them he wanted to get a job in a tavern, he neglected to show up for the second interview where they’d learn more about him.
He wasn’t being coy with his biographical information, though. In my hut over an herbal tea, he was happy to tell the three of us a little more of his past.
“So. What do you wanna know?” he asked, reclining back in his chair.
“Just tell us about yourself. What you’ve been up to before now.”
“Alright. Settle on your saddles and listen, because I got a tale for ya.”
Hercule, incredibly, was a bounty hunter who made most of his money rounding up soldiers who deserted from the army. The empire in BaS paid him handsomely for each deserter he captured, and he was damn good at this job.
That was until he was sent to track down a kid named Jucksy Manta, who’d fled from the empire’s Third Eagle regiment, who were beating back a rebel uprising in Kostanowiz, which was in the far south.
Hercule rode for five days and nights, finally finding Jucksy hiding under the lip of a limestone cliff. When he caught him, he couldn’t believe how young he was. The kid was fourteen years old, and he’d somehow tricked recruiters into letting him join up. Now that he was in the army and realized what kind of a life it was, he wanted to leave, but they wouldn’t let him. Not even when he told them his real age.
His sergeant had told Jucksy, “No matter how old you were when you joined, you’re sixteen now, lad. Says so on your forms.”
Hercule decided he wasn’t going to take a kid like Jucksy back to the regiment just to be hanged. So he helped him escape to Blaitwist, where his pa and brothers were going to meet him and smuggle him away.
Only, the fates were conspiring against Hercule and his newfound conscience.
“Jucksy was a plant,” Hercule told us. “Sergeant Briggs was the fella who hired me, and he always hated my guts. Never hid away from saying it, too. Despite my record, he’d look me up and down and tell me that he could smell my conscience from a mile away, and that one day it’d see me betraying the empire. Turns out the bastard was right. And he knew it.”
“So he set all of this up as a test,” I said.
Hercule nodded. “Yup.”
“What happened?”
“Well…”
Hercule’s services were obviously no longer required by the empire, and as punishment for what he did, they sentenced him to lose his hand as a punishment. It should have been a straight hanging, in fairness, but Hercule had banked some credit and spared himself from death.
Linc eyed him. “My arithmetic isn’t the best, but you have two hands.”
“And Sergeant Briggs and the three fellas he got to tie me up are in the ground. But here I am. Ready to run this here place, if you’ll have me.”
The three of us conferred. Linc expressed his doubts as to his experience in running a tavern as well as his trustworthiness, given he’d betrayed his employer. Even if his employer was tasking him with rounding up deserters. Hilly told him, “Who gives a shit? This is a game and the tavern isn’t real.”
“That’s your answer to everything.”
“Well? So what? Live a little! This Hercule guy seems fun.”
I studied Hercule. “Tell me something. Is the empire going to come looking for you?”
He shook his head. “Not likely. Arranged it so they thought I drowned crossing the Perce.”
“Perce?” said Linc.
“A beast of a river down south. And in any case. The Hercule you’re seeing now isn’t how they remember me. I ain’t stupid. I visited an artificer.”
“Let’s just hire him,” I said.
Hilly and Linc agreed. Hilly, especially, seemed enraptured by the strange man.
And so the Blade and Grunder tavern had a manager. Hercule moved into the hut I had made for him. He had a giant stuffed grizzly bear that arrived soon after on a carriage that he’d hired to bring the rest of his stuff. He put his stuffed bear outside his hut, and he told Hanz and Franz that he’d killed it himself.
“His name’s Great George,” he said. “And he’s lucky. Anytime you want some good luck, take a copper outta your ma or pa’s purse, and leave it here by Big George’s feet.”
Hearing this, Hilly said, “I absolutely love this guy.”
It didn’t take long for Hercule to get started with his duties. I assigned him starting funds of ten gold. He ordered a dozen beer barrels from a brewery called Thorpe’s Creek, who were situated five miles away near Tempest Quarry and sold the bulk of their wares to the quarry workers.
“So, I ordered two barrels of pale ale, two golden ale, and something spicy,” said Hercule.
“Spicy?”
“Yup. Two whole barrels of Firecracker Death Whiskey. Don’t worry though. It’s nicer than it sounds.”
As well as organizing the selection of beers, Hercule had grand plans for a food menu.
“When a guy or a girl drinks enough beer, they get hungry. An’ when they get hungry, we need to make money. I learned some recipes from my ma, and I put a menu together.”
Hercule handed me a piece of paper.
Blade and Grunder
Food Menu:
Chicken Pot Pie – 2 silvers
“That it? One item?” I said. “What about if you get a vegetarian visiting? We need to make money of those guys too.”
Hercule chewed on a grass stalk. Though he felt it made him look cool, I had seen him in the fields earlier one morning collecting a bunch of stalks ready for later chewing. This kind of preparation robbed the action of its coolness somewhat.
“Vegetarians?” he said.
“Yup.”
“Gimme that back here.”
I handed him the menu. He was gone for two hours, during which time I worked on the hamlet plan I had been drawing.
Later, when he knocked on my door, he handed me a new menu.
“Here ya go. We’re catering for everyone now.”
Blade and Grunder
Food Menu:
Chicken Pot Pie – 2 silvers
Chicken Pot Pie (without the chicken) – 2 silvers
I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, we’d chosen the wrong guy to run the Blade and Grunder. Then Hercule started laughing, his chiseled and stubble-lined jaw grinding with every hearty guffaw.
“Only yanking yer chain.”
He took the menu back from me and gave me another. This time, it was a proper menu with ten entries. Some were vegetarian and some weren’t, but all of them sounded delicious. There was beef stew, chicken pot pie, mixed bean chili.
“I reckon I’m gonna be spending a lot of time in the tavern,” I told him.
Hercule made some last-minute alterations to the tavern itself, bringing Big George the grizzly inside and propping him next to the bar. In his big, grizzly hand he put a clay bowl, with a sign above that said ‘tips’.
On the long wooden wall on the right side of the tavern he fixed wooden shelves – which showed lower quality craftsmanship than mine, I was glad to see - on which he arranged a bunch of odds, ends, and artifacts that he’d picked up on his travels. There was a bleached skull that belonged to some kind of lizard, an ornamental pipe made from the tusks of a fire-phant, and a strange wicker figurine that looked like a voodoo doll.
Showing me around the tavern and dragging me from spot to spot with the enthusiasm of a kid, he urged me along to the last shelf. There were four books on it.
“Figured we could have a little library here. A person’s gotta read. I always say that. Gotta make time to put your nose in a book. Reading’s like manure for the mind. Lets it grow. Folks can donate books here and take books away to read.”
“What’s to stop them just stealing the books?”
“You ain’t ever heard of an honor system, Josh? Is a community library a foreign concept to you?”
“I’m from the city. No such thing as the trust system. But I reckon this could work.”
Finally, after all of that, the Blade and Grunder was ready for business. Hercule took a sign outside and placed it by the front door. On it he wrote, ‘Soup of the Day – Beer. 5 coppers per glass.’
“Like my sign?” he said, barely containing a laugh.
“It’s a hoot.”
The tavern’s first customers were me, Hilly, Linc, Gorgal, and Frenrita. It was a Sunday so their forge was left cool, and the kids were out back in the stable that I’d made, spending time with Yulf the horse and Polli the mule. In a short space of time Yulf had developed a friendship with Hanz, whereas Polli seemed to be in love with Franz and wanted to follow him everywhere.
I took a moment to appraise the Blade and Grunder.
Standing there, I looked around with a critical eye. The place was small, and my crafting and carpentry low levels showed in the structure itself and the furnishings scattered around. It could have used an extra floor, I reckoned, and the ground floor needed to be bigger.
Negatives aside, the place had a cozy feel to it. From the stone hearth that glowed red as it chewed through the logs Hercule had set on it, to the candles in their brass fittings that flickered along the walls. In this way, its small size was actually a plus, I guessed. It made it seem more like a home than a tavern. A place to come and relax with your friends, drinking nice beer and eating Hercule’s stew while the rain fell outside, and it was okay because you knew that you wouldn’t have to go out in it for a while now.
Yup, I could easily see this place becoming the heart of Blade’s Rest.
From behind the bar, Hercule said, “Right then. Are you folks gonna buy something, or what?”
“Buy? This is our tavern!” said Hilly.
“We’re gonna pay like everyone else,” I said. “No point drinking up our own supply, is there?”
Frenrita ordered a ginger beer while Gorgal bought four mugs of pale ale. When Frenrita questioned why he would buy four, he said that he was going to drink four anyway, so why not just order them all at once?
Hilly, Linc, and I took a table across from theirs, and Hercule brought over three golden ales, followed by three bowls of beef stew sometime later, served with generous chunks of rye bread.
We ate our food and drank our drinks and we talked about plans for the hamlet, and in a weird way it was easy, maybe too easy, to forget that none of this really existed when we took off our VR sets and logged out of the game.
But that didn’t seem to matter because the glow of the fire felt real enough, and the feeling I got when I heard the wind outside but knew it couldn’t tease its way into the tavern felt even more so.