Waiting for the Dice to Roll

Somewhere between your last session and the next one, they are waiting.The paladin sits alone in a frozen tavern, candles that never melt, ale that never warms, while above her, invisible and enormous, the gods who made her have gone quiet. The rogue watches from a gray warehouse as her possessions are divided and her letters thrown away. The dragon in his lair has stopped hoarding gold and started keeping a journal. The world that ended on a Tuesday has forty-eight hours to make something permanent.Waiting for the Dice to Roll is a short story anthology that takes the interior lives of tabletop RPG characters seriously — perhaps more seriously than their players ever did. Across ten stories, minor NPCs develop philosophy, discarded characters wait in canvas bags, and experience-point systems are revealed as the strange little theologies they always were.These are not adventure stories. They are stories about the space between adventure: the farmer with the untriggered quest marker, the die with a spirit inside it, the wizard mourning the spell he no longer has room for. They are stories about what it costs to be a supporting character, and what it means to build a world and then close the notebook.For everyone who ever named a character and then had to leave them behind. For everyone who once played in a campaign that ended too soon. For everyone who knows that the real story was always the one happening off-screen.Discover what your characters do when you're not looking. Read more