I’ll be turning thirty-five soon. That isn’t very old to a lot of people, but for an adventurer it’s a lifetime. I feel like an old man already: the small of my back aches something fierce, I think my hair is starting to go. But more than anything my memory just isn’t what it used to be. Certain people, faces, places that meant so much to me then are all clouded over now, no matter how I try to keep their pictures fresh in my mind. It seems like the things I want to remember grow dimmer by the day. The things I want to forget, well, they stick around.

I remember when I was young I wrote this long letter to a good friend of mine, he and his guild were going to journey up to the Lava Wastes to try and take on a Dragon Den. We’d never see each other again, the two of us knew it well, no one ever came back from a Dragon encounter in one piece. Didn't matter if you were the Hero himself, it was a death sentence. But he was a stubborn old mule, loyal to the bitter end, wherever the guild told him to go he’d damn well go, so I knew there was no arguing with him. We agreed to go out to a tavern the night before he’s set to embark, and before that I decided to write him a nice letter that he could read on the way there. It was a personal one, done up in the best prose a boy from the slums could muster. I wanted to capture everything we experienced together, the hopes and the hardships, the dreams and fears. All the good times and everything I didn’t get to say in the end. I wanted to sum it all up, let him know what he meant to me. So I’m finishing up this letter and I’m dipping the quill so I can write the last sentence, really bring it home. And when I raise it up I tip over the inkwell and black ink goes spilling right over the pages and blots out everything I just wrote. I couldn’t salvage a thing. So there I am scrambling to remember what I put down and formulate it just as pretty as I did the first time, and, well, the copy is never as good as the original. I’ll say that much.

I think that’s what I’m trying to do now with this story, render my past in triplicate before all the ink washes over. I’ll talk about the good and the bad, all the treasures as well as the scars. More than anything I want to tell it like it is: not sugarcoat a thing. ‘Cause there are more adventurers signing up than ever, and someone needs to give them the lay of the land. Lord knows the guild won’t tell them jack, the way they talk about it you’d think dungeons were all just slimes and blue names. But before I go into all that I want to start you off with something academic. A simple entry from the Monster Encyclopedia (paraphrased, of course, I don't have the thing in front of me) that should sum it all up real nicely.

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The whip attack of a tunneling squid lands with enough force to splinter bone. Even a glancing blow possesses the necessary blunt impact to cause dislocation, disintegration, and internal hemorrhaging with disquieting regularity. The osseous, claw-like growths along each tentacle can penetrate surfaces as dense as warrior class plate armor like it was sackcloth. These leave triangular puncture marks which don’t heal easily - just one can put an adventurer out of commission for months. Maybe longer, if infection sets in.

This is, though, to say nothing about its acid attack, which is known colloquially as “hellfire” in dungeon-crawling lingo. (I can tell you first hand that that appellation is misleading. You’ll be wishing you were in hell if any of that shit gets on you).

The body of the tunneling squid is covered head to toe in a hard, chitinous exoskeleton. The textbooks say it evolved to help it dig through the ground without harming its soft inner body, but it helps too as a defense mechanism against swords, polearms, spells, nearly anything an adventurer party can throw at it. The only way to take one down with any regularity is to get it in the eye, which is done best with a bow and arrow so as to not hazard one’s proximity to its crushing tentacle lashes. That is no mean feat in itself - the outer optic organ has an average diameter of about two inches across. It would take an experienced archer, and one able to shoot reliably at a moving target in the heat of battle, to have a chance at striking true.

If the adventurer guild’s census numbers can be trusted (they downplay everything), then there just exceeds the approximate total of 8,000 reported deaths by tunneling squid annually, the amount of injuries easily twice that. Many casualties go unreported; the guild has long since stopped going back for bodies.

Tunneling squids are generally considered to be low-level monsters. They won’t even fill up the quarter bar of a first level adventurer. They only drop copper coins and gray names, if they drop anything at all. You’ll find them filling the corridors of nearly every low-level dungeon.

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I remember well the first time I went up against one of those things. I was with my first party, then, and our team comp was garbage. Three warriors and one ranger, enough said. We hadn’t found a mage in our village yet and thought that we’d manage fine without one, and for a while we did. The overworld encounters at our starting zone did a lot to boost our egos. We had a great time searching the plains, charging at every slime and jackalope that dared show its head, hacking away at it until it was just a red stain on the grass. Our ranger would show us where to go with Track Beast, then us three warriors would run right up to it and go to town. What fun.

Well we get kind of big-headed after a bit of grinding, and we’d been lucky enough to pick up a couple green names by then, even if it was just simple +1 stuff. We figure that we’re more than ready for our first dungeon. A low level one, the Petrified Forest in the foothills of Albion. Of course, if you’ve been around in any adventuring circles you should be intimately familiar with its reputation. The meat grinder, its called. The n00b slayer, if you’re feeling old fashioned. Known for having more loot dropped there by slain adventurers than its chests and monsters combined. Stacks and stacks of gray name, white name, green name loot crowd the entrances.

Well we think that’s all just talk. And we certainly aren’t like any of those noob parties who get slaughtered by a single, randomly encountered Venus Flytrap monster. No, we were big shots, we’d be the ones holding the breach when the Demon King comes back (and he will come back, I’m sure of it, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise), certainly. So we stroll right in. The ranger didn’t even refill her stock of agarics, it slipped her mind and she didn’t feel like backtracking to the village - can you believe it? She was a classic case: a runaway noble from Elsewhere, she wanted to be free like she imagined lowborns to be, but still so quick to anger if you ever treated her as anything less than a princess. The warriors weren’t any better, they all came from nobility or merchant classes. They were already decked out in green-name sets of plate with intricate, priceless trimmings. Their greatswords engraved with their family seals. (Of course, in proper adventuring, those suits of armor and big swords might as well be made of wood and pillow stuffing for all the good they’ll do, but I’ll come back to that).

We pass by all the dropped gear and dead parties at the entrance and make our way down a series of winding halls. We weren’t so stupid - we’d procured a dungeon map at base camp before going in. We knew we were about a third of the way to the dungeon boss, and what luck! Still no encounters. If this pace kept up then we’d be facing off against the Spider Queen basically fresh. No sweat. We knew to attack her legs first, and to destroy her egg sacs before they hatched into Spiderlings. We had pooled our money together to purchase a single bomb arrow for the ranger that we thought would take out of most of the Queen’s health.

Then we round a corner - and I’ll never forget this. An old relief made by the Ancients was looking out on an overgrown stone promenade. And I’ve always had a thing for the Ancients’ architecture, it always looks to me unspeakably sad, it's certainly miles ahead of any art being made today. And I’m looking into the portrait’s eye, since it was a statue of some king decked out in flowing robes, and suddenly this chill runs through me. The armor on my back and the sword in my hand feel so heavy, and I remember my childhood days back in the slums when my dad would come back from the factory covered in soot. The look in his eyes was just the same as the look that Ancient king had. And I’m so caught up looking at this sculpture that it takes a second before I even register the screams of my teammates.

Three tunneling squids had wandered into the hall. The two other warriors had charged at them just the same as if it were a jackalope they were facing, and things went about how you’d expect. Marcus, the big brute with haughty eyes, is repelled immediately by a tentacle attack. I mean sent sprawling! He goes flying into a pillar, the squid’s claws had gone right through his beautiful armor, and he just sort of lays there bleeding, spread out like one of those cloth dolls low born girls play with. The other warrior, a six foot bruiser whose name escapes me now, was lifted off his feet and into the air by a set of tentacles as if he weighed nothing at all. The claws, of course, went right through his armor too, and he was crying out in agony, the crooked things were still stabbing into him, and the squid’s grip was only tightening. Where was his nobleman bravado now?

The ranger started at attacking the eyes with her bow and arrow, but all her practice back at base camp had meant nothing, apparently. She wasted shot after shot on the squids’ chitinous armor, not one landing all the while that squid was putting the squeeze on our poor party tank. She calls to me, “do something, don’t just stand there, you wall-eyed clod!” And she was right to call me that, I was slow on the uptake just then. So I figure I’ll make up for lost time and charge right up to one of the squids. I manage to bat away its tentacles with my longsword without actually cutting into them and decide I’ll go for the eyes like the ranger tried and failed to do.

I ready my sword, flipping it and taking the hilt in both hands like it was an enormous knife, then plunge it in with all the force I could muster. The body under the exoskeleton is usually called the “soft” body but I found it had a surprising amount of resistance. Fortunately, what I lacked in reaction time I made up for with upper body strength. Making the essential connections to join a party without a noble title isn’t easy - I had to train every moment I could manage to make myself worthy in the appraising eyes of a high-status party. I had no plan B to fall back on like some adventurers, who were high-born, just getting into dungeoneering to make their parents mad. I meant it, I lived it, it was the adventurer’s life or working at the machines in Steamtown. And I’d sooner die than go back to that.

I push the sword all the way through the squid, and I feel it strike the chitin at the back side of its head. It makes a terrible squeaking sound before keeling over, and the momentum of its falling body wrenches the sword from my grasp. I run over to retrieve and as I bend down, the other tunneling squid, which I failed to notice, had sidled up behind me and was now bringing down one of its terrible crushing tentacles on my back. I catch it out of the corner of my eye and make to move, and I almost manage to dodge it, but one tentacle gets me in right in the leg. It was the single worst pain I had experienced up till then. Now that moment wouldn't even break the top ten.

So my leg is clipped and I’m crawling, crawling with no destination in mind apart from “away”. I was winded, bloodied, my leg was throbbing with pain. The battle was over for me. Just then, there was a blast of black smoke, and a ear-shattering explosion resounded throughout the cavern. The ranger had used the bomb arrow! And to some effect - both the living squids had sizeable chunks taken out of them, their blood staining the relief and promenade, and me. For a moment they continued to stand and operate their tentacles, then, all of a sudden, they fell against the carved stone, making a dull sound.

I got off easy, I really did. Even if I needed a blood transfusion and several stitches up and down my leg. My brothers in arms weren’t so lucky, after all - the one whose name I forget was blown to shit by that bomb arrow. And Marcus? That collision he’d had with the pillar meant he’d never walk again. His spine was turned into dust. What became of all that beautiful armor, I wonder? Probably sold or tossed out, I bet him and his family never wanted to see it again. Safe to say our party didn’t make it to the Spider Queen, all our gold and good advice was for nothing, and it would be some time before I got to take a swing at her. And it wouldn’t be with that elf princess, certainly, she was long gone by the time I recovered. Probably made up with her folks, married some minor vassal with a big pot belly, if I had to guess.

Those stitches didn’t come easy, it should be mentioned. The doctor-barbers charge a pretty penny for anything more than having your temperature taken, and that ain’t exactly cheap either. I found myself on crutches making my way to the pawn shop all the time, selling off my possessions one by one, until I had just my sword and my good looks (kidding).

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At this point you must be wondering why exactly I took this line of work. Gods know I do. Every morning of my life I wonder why, why, why. Every day there’s a new wound, a new sickness, a new curse.

I read in a book once, back when I still read books, about a tattooed man that wandered from town to town. And whenever he met someone in his travels he would always tell him, “every tattoo on my back is a story” He’d had some shape or animal or scene etched in ink on his body whenever something significant happened in his life, and wouldn’t hesitate to tell strangers all about them. His stories were always twisted things, strange things. I couldn’t put the book down.

I never got a tattoo, but my body still tells many stories. Animal bites, suction cup marks, burns from magical fire, each one has its own tale, its own significance. The gaps that my memory fails to fill my body completes easily.

People always approach adventuring in terms of what it gives. Gear, gold, levels and fame. I can’t blame people, that’s just how they work. What you learn to do with time, though, is to realize what it takes. Because that’s really most of what it does. It takes and takes and takes. Blood, gold, good friends, a decent night’s sleep. Everything.

Don’t just think of this journal as an old man’s ramblings. Think of it as a kind of accounting, a record of everything that adventuring has taken and still owes.

I am a tattooed man.