Dice Shame - 2-108 | 'Downtime: Cast a Long Shadow'

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Imagine your best game of D&D. The shocks, the twists and turns, the moments that can’t be caught because you just had to be there. That’s Dice Shame.Join our DM Jo, her husband Harlan, their brother Alex & their best friends Rob and Alex as they experience those unmissable, gut-wrenching, heart-aching, joy-filled moments.This legendary AP releases a brand new episode every Thursday morning at 1:20 am!Content Warning: animal death, swearing, violence, claustrophobiaPart of the Rusty Quill Network Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's like somewhere in me this crack has formed and the waters of it are slowly, gently seeping into the back of my brain. Why do you keep scratching at our door, Mari? Welcome back to Dice Shame. This is Season 2, Episode 108, Downtime, Cast a Long Shadow. MVP this week is Light for Ghosts, who just joined on Discord. They wanted us to know that they've blasted

through my other shows, malevolent and divisor, and are now almost cut up to Dice Shame. Holy cow, that's a lot of listening hours. Light for ghosts, thank you so much for recommending Dice Shame to all your friends and for hanging out with us.

You're this week's, MVP. Thanks, Slate for Ghosts. All right, shall we do this? Yeah, let's play D&D. Woo! The other members of Reds rovers otherwise occupied this evening. Mari, you find yourself alone in Trolls-Sull Manor. A chill draft finding.

its way through the nailed-down shutters and fights the fire lit in the hearth, making it gutter. Mari's standing there. She hasn't been alone in quite a while. She's mostly been with these guys for like non-stop for, you know, weeks at this point. And there is this point where she just kind of takes in that silence that only comes in cities where you still pick up tiny bits of the world outside of you, there is still the sounds of like a voice in the distance or something creaking in the house, but she reaches into her pocket absent-mindedly and feels the piece of paper that she took while they were in the dragon's lair. And she takes it out and starts to roll the edges again between her fingers and tries to feel like any sort of magic in there, anything.

Like, these things clearly have something about them. There's something in there that's pulling her towards them, and yet it doesn't seem to react. So she decides to try something. And she starts to concentrate in the same way that she did when she brought back Elister. Somewhere in her mind, the feeling of reaching into her pocket

and taking the piece of paper, her out, brings back this wash of memories of finding the finger in her pocket. And she starts to concentrate on the edges that void that she now knows is there and that open door that the breeze whistles through in the back of her mind and tries to feel for the magic that can allow her to walk into that space to see if she can find what makes this paper There's something there. It's almost stronger than you were expecting, more insistent, but not potent yet. If you are going to attempt to reincarnate, as you would have with Elister, you'll still need to assemble all of the components of that spell, perform all of the ritual that is required. in her mind she knows that this thing is too old to technically bring this person back she can't bring them back but death is curious death is not something that's easily understood and this

kind of magic she's not willing to say the word necromancy just yet is unpredictable sometimes and the curiosity begins to win over the part of her brain that starts to say, no, no, no, this is a bad idea. But she's been through a lot lately. She's had a lot of things starting to change her mind and change the way that she's moving forward and picturing stuff and understanding these things. So she slips it back in her pocket and she grabs her bag of holding.

And she goes up to the room with the, exposed roof up on the top floor. Sure, yeah. You find one of the disused places in Trollscull Manor where the roof tiles haven't been replaced yet. Yeah, where she can still see wisps of cloud and bits of stars that are starting to peek into the sky. And she starts to spread the things out. She takes out the oils that she requires the little herbs that she knows are may be optional, but they still kind of make her feel more grounded. The bits and pieces, and she cleans off a bit of the floor and sits down and holds the piece of paper tight in her hand and starts to concentrate and try to feel again for that sensation that she felt downstairs.

You've had to assemble all of the components for this spell, obviously, the rare oils and ointments cost a thousand gold pieces in any marketplace, a high price for Mari's inquisitive step. And yet as you sit here with those components in front of you, they begin to burn and curl in such a way that you know something here and now is happening. It's different though from the last time you cast it from when you were holding Elyster's remains. Minute pinpricks of light begin to peek at you from a vast distance, winking into existence in constellations at once familiar and strange. And then the room starts to spin.

And a searing pain nibbles at your fingertips where you hold the piece of parchment. And it begins to leach and creak. up your hands and arms. And the stars that you were tracking begin to erupt in wild bursts of light, so bright that you are brought to your knees and you lose consciousness. When you begin to regain consciousness, you feel the hard wooden floor under your cheek and your hip. your body is chilled and you don't know how long you've been lying here and then you realize you're not alone anymore

why do you keep scratching at our door Mari? Who? A man materializes from thin air as if dismissing invisibility he's wearing a black cloak with the hood up so long it's touches the ground. He almost looks like the silhouette of a shadow or like you took a pair of

scissors and cut a man-shaped piece out of the room. She sees this man and she leaps back, panicked because obviously who is this? What is this person doing here? And something happens. Her skin, which normally is quite smooth and skin like starts to shimmer and almost Harden like there are scales more visible and her nails length and she lunges forward at him snarling. Mari cast primal savagery. The man holds up a hand. Again, just a silhouette, almost love-like. And you are frozen in place in the room.

Huh. Who are you, and what are you doing here? I am a traveler. A traveler. I am a traveler. You are a trespasser. Get out. Put those claws away. And he drops his hand. And she relaxes a little bit, and the hardened shimmer on her skin drifts away, and her nails start to sort of drift back upwards. back to their normal look, and she does not get any closer to this guy.

Come now. Behind you, a doorway of blackness, yongs, unwavering, and impossible. The portal was definitely not there a moment ago, and you didn't see the man summon it or hear any incantation, but it is here now. And why would I go with you through that? I'm afraid you don't have a choice in the matter. There's hesitation there. There is a moment where she is ready to fight again,

to grab a weapon, to cast another spell, and she can feel the magic starting to crackle in her hands, like deep in her bones. But curiosity continues. It continues to gnaw at her. And she picks up her staff, and Mari takes a deep breath. and casts one look back up to the sky through the roof as clouds move of her head, and she walks through.

You step through the portal and instantly, like flicking a light switch, the room you left is replaced by a grim, misty, featureless landscape. A slick plain of mud stretches as far as you can see, which is not terribly far because of the weather. It's miserable, raining ceaselessly, a foul, gray, icy rain that plasters your hair to your scalp and runs in rivulets down your face. The man at your side seems unaffected. This man, this being, still formless, shapeless, featureless, and featureless, and he says, You haven't fallen as far from your deity as you might believe, Mari. And are you here from Eldath?

Is that it? Are you here to bring me back to the fold, bring me back to the waters? No. Well, okay, you've brought me this far. I don't mean to be rude, but tell me, explain to me what this place is, because I've been through a lot lately, and I like some answers. The crushing blows you have been dealt in your life. Recently, and not, are her doing, have her approval, because death is part of life.

And the water is especially deep and dark where your spirit treads now. She has not abandoned you, and she watches you yet, readying the tide again. When I explained to Red that you carry these pieces of your friends, that Kralath is still there, that the paper doesn't mean anything, that you could let these things go and still have them be a part of you. What I wanted to say was that the memory is like a lodestone that pulls you down in the waters, that the name still lives in you and it drags you deep

and that that is the lasting feeling of these things. But I want to pull this weight from my neck and I want to swim again. This is the depth of the water of Elda. The deeper you dive, the higher the pressure, the more terrible. It's truth. You must understand. You blink and the mud and the rain is gone in an instant, and you now stand in knee-deep water,

numbingly cold whose current sucks and pulls at your legs. Before you knew any of them, your party came to know a man named Kraloth, a member of the Knights of the Eternal Order, an army of holy cleric. and monks, obsessed with eliminating the undead and setting the world to balance. When he was still alive, Kraloth fought a creature made of death and shadow and fell to its power. He was touched by evil, further corrupted by a curse, and his body and mind rotted away in undeath until he finally expired. That creature that killed him is called a night walker and unfortunately for your material plane it is

hardly unique and this thing is still out there many of them are the water level begins to gradually deepen it's starting to climb up your thighs your party set out to free the souls of the knights to liberate the spirit of Kraloth so that it could travel into the afterlife. This is where you came to them, but you are so deeply unprepared for what is coming. The water is seeping through everything. It's starting that kind of cold that leaches every bit of warmth from your body as it touches any sort of skin. And she's almost kind of refusing to start to shiver. I can't speak to Kraloth's fate. I know that it shook the party, that it rocks them deeper than they are sometimes willing to admit. I walked into death and I thought it would

be terrifying and I thought that that I would never want to do it again, but it's like somewhere in me this crack has formed, and the waters of it are slowly, gently, sleeping into the back of my brain. And she stops and she looks, and there's this realization after hearing about what happened to Kraloth where she just goes, I don't want to end up like that. If walking this path or doing any of these things means that's what's going to happen to me, then how am I supposed to head forward? this is the truth of things what can i do then what is this place mean for me for my family for my friends for eldath a god who apparently both wants enough to speak to me but also has taken so much

and set me deep into an ocean where I am just trying to find land. Tell me where it is. You blink again and you leave the rising current, dragging your body down. You now find yourself standing atop a frozen ocean, whipped into waves and crests and held there mid-heave, crusted with salt and ice crystals. It's endless. stretching for hundreds of miles in all directions, the sky amaze of fast-moving dark clouds,

and beneath them, under your feet, frozen in the peaked ice, dozens and hundreds of faces, howling in stationary misery, blue-white with cold and rhymed in salt. Your cloak whips in the terrible wind, and the man is still unchanged by your surroundings. If anything, his face The ice can almost be imagined in that deep well of shadow. She drops down for a second and peers at these faces in the ice and finds one that's close. And she places her hand on the ice just above this face as if trying to melt through it. You just feel the terrible cold of the ice under your hand. And she just keeps pushing, trying to see if there's almost a way to break through it.

Her hand just gets colder and colder and colder until it is numb and she just stops for a minute and just puts her head down and tries to find those connections to the magic that she normally dies, the gossamer threads that join everything that she can feel. And in this moment, there is nothing. Do you have a name? You may call me Lithius. Lithius. When I was young, I went once in the middle of winter with one of my sisters and my father out onto the ocean. Where it had frozen, it was one of the coldest winter we'd had in so long. Even my father had never experienced that kind of depth of.

freezing and the waves froze like this they were everywhere and it was beautiful but he warned us that the ice will look safe it'll look like it can hold your weight it'll look like you can walk as far out as you can see but it is dangerous and you can't trust it because there are weak spots there are moments where the ice will crack and if you go under it is too hard to find your way back. You will drown. You will freeze and you will drown. I did not bring you here for no reason, Mari. I know your past and I divine your future. She stands up. You have the capacity for great power, Mari. Terrible and wonderful.

things in equal measure. But before you can realize this power, you need to fully understand and embrace death. If you do not, you will not survive the darkness that is yet to come. And there will be such a darkness so deep and questing that you may smother underneath its weight. This is coming. As the wind kind of move, around here as she takes in the frozen waves and that feeling that exposure wakes something up in her this moment and she thinks about losing herself back in the dragon's lair and picking up the axe and that feeling of strength of having to make choices that she never thought she would have to make and

still staring out over these crests, goes, I have been pulled down by the weight of my past now for long enough that I am ready to let it drift away without me. My grandmother always told me that even a small amount of water can knock a man over and drag you through the current. I am tired of fighting the current. So tell me this. Why should I trust you? Once again, Mari, this is not about me. This is happening, regardless of how you choose to view it. perhaps your mortal mind needs more time to fully digest the implications here

maybe you are not ready for this path and he begins to recede and she's watching this and standing amongst this in this space and the horror of this moment

starts to wash over the death around her, these faces that almost she feels like she can hear, and panic starts to set in, and she goes, wait, don't leave me here. Don't leave me in this place to stew on these things, to be surrounded by nothing, but death, don't leave me here. You brought me to this place. I have been walking beside you this whole time, trying my. best to not run to not flee to not fight you again because I don't want to run anymore I don't I don't want to be scared anymore it would appear you've caught his attention again because he begins to get larger and larger in your field of

you as he approaches. And he says, Marie, as a druid, you know, that animals have different ways of dealing with their fear. And until now, you have been quite limited in your approach. fear can heighten your senses. Fear can make you run faster. Fear can be an engine. And instead you have been hiding. Ever since I walked into that space in the in-between, something is there.

And I have been trying to ignore but walking into a space surrounded by so much old death keeps it gnawing, and I've followed you. I've followed you, which a younger me would never have done. I would have run. I would have thrown myself out a window to get away. I would have fought more. I would have looked back.

I would have cried out, and yet here I am standing beside you in this place, and I am looking at these faces, and are they the faces? of people that you have brought here and who have failed at this test? Do you know better than that? I do. And I want to know more. I have divined your role, your place in this world. You learn now what is to come next. You tell your party of heroes.

And you stand against it together, for it is also their destiny. Not the ordaining, no. The reordining of the giants is just the beginning, the inciting event. The shadow fell is the ending. In a final disorienting change of scenery, the world should. shifts once more around you. The frozen ocean is replaced by the rocky ledge of a cliff overlooking a massive swath of landscape.

To your right and left, the saw teeth of cold deep mountains snap upwards at an intense sky. The foreground below you is a black forest that shudders with the movement of some huge creature deep inside. and ruins punctuate and soar upwards, headless statues and pillars supporting thin air, gray from the decay of millennia, if time passes at all in this place. A city looking for all the world like it was firebombed or shook apart from its deepest roots with a shifting Gothic castle and far away in the dimness of the distance, unidentifiable monsters pursuing something.

in the sky. The man stands beside you, sharing your view. Your cloaks now both identically affected by gusts of wind from the altitude. His face is finally visible, as are the details of his fine robe. He appears to be mostly human, though the color has drained away from him, his skin, the color of spent ash, his lips like yellowed bone, and his eyes entirely black, from lid to lid. Though his forehead and cheeks are covered in thin tracings or tattoos, he wears a sheathed longsword in a scabbard at his waist. This is the plain of shadow. A plain of existence that overlaps your realm in places. The borders are narrowing every day, stretching thin and breaking through at times.

Your fellow adventurers have some small taste of this evil. It has begun to stalk the north as the hunger, an unrelenting, contagious, feverish insanity, and bloodlust. It passes through into the forests and valleys where the space between is thinner. The lost spirits press themselves through its sieve. Oh, God. The fear is real, the vision of these things, huge and unrelenting as they swoop through. And Murray looks at the figure taking in his deathly face and goes, is this what we're doomed to? Is this what we're supposed to stop?

This coming through? This is your destiny, Mari, to protect Fyroon from its influence, from its invasion. I have seen it. You will stand here again in real flesh and fight side by side with your companions. You must, or all will fail. Four figures against an entire world of shadow. Beware, do not tip so far into the darkness, for it will beckon you with temptation. Only drink enough that you are strong enough to survive, overcome your own fear.

And most of all, the man touches you on the shoulder. Beware of Rael when she finds you. Who will find me? You blink, and the darkness of your attic room in Trollskull Manor is almost bright in comparison to the gloom of the shadow fell. You are home again. The wind that against her skin still like a whisper that's there. As you glance around the room, your eyes fall on the piece of parchment still clutched in your hand. The paper spontaneously erupts into flame and dissolves into nothingness.

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