Shadow Palaces

Shadow Palaces is the eleventh campaign held by the members of Flafa. It is the second campaign DM'ed by Inkunn. The campaign features Chris-tian Mothman as Boris Montesquieu, Deeto as Marcus, FennekinGalaxy as Heinrich, Lord of the World as Benny, Kaiju as Cable Guy, C.D as Maxwell, and will feature Grey as an unknown character. The campaign is loosely based on the Persona franchise. The campaign went on temporary hiatus on March 18, 2024, due to lack of interest. It may return in the future.
== Storyline (Pre-Reboot) ==
=== Session 1: Hitting the Squiddy (1/2/2024) ===
Starting Characters: Boris Montesquieu (Chris), Marcus (Deeto), Benny (Lord)
Boris, Marcus, and Benny all have a dream involving a subway station with a crimson moon, before gravity begins to fluctuate. The guys wake up with cards in their bed (in Boris’ case, a cardboard box), and navigate to the subway station.
Marcus complains to Benny about the bad crack he gave him, with Benny claiming he never gave him any bad crack. The moon suddenly turns red as it did in the dream, with Marcus asking why a homeless guy is there, with Benny explaining that it’s a subway station, of course they’d be there. Marcus asks Boris if he’s Oz, and Boris vehemently denies it. The party gets sucked into the subway, and end up in the Metaverse, with a squid appearing before them. Boris compares the situation to an isekai, before the squid introduces the Metaverse, and gives the party (sans Boris) their weapons, still covered in suction cup slime, to which Marcus has a visceral reaction. Marcus asks if they need to eat in the Metaverse, to which the squid says no. He tells them they are here to fight Shadows and save the Metaverse, to which Marcus lampshades this by asking why they’d choose a drug dealer, a druggie, and a homeless man who he assumed was also a druggie, to which the squid doesn’t answer. Marcus asks if the weapons are magic or god-slaying, to which the squid says they are normal.
Shadows appear, and Boris swiftly terminates one, prompting Marcus to ask if he is going to kill him in his sleep for the bullying Marcus gave him, to which Boris reiterates he won’t kill his party. Boris is asked why his sword is shiny, and says he cleans it. Marcus asks where Boris got it, and the answer of it being a family heirloom causes Marcus to ask why his family left him homeless, to which Boris responds he doesn’t wanna talk about it. After Boris shoots the last shadow, more appear, and they gang up on Marcus. After that wave is dispatched, Marcus comments that they saved the Metaverse, to which the squid makes sure to say they didn’t, and that there is much work to be done, before slapping Marcus, causing him to cry. Boris asks the squid his name, to which he says it’s Bartholomew.
The party comes across another batch of Shadows, and while dispatching this tougher wave, Benny asks why Bartholomew doesn’t help them, asking if he has some healing potions or something, to which Bartholomew only has ink, which doesn’t help against enemies, and has healing properties he refuses to use on the party. After the wave of Shadows is defeated, they come across the hideout Bartholomew was talking about.
== Storyline (Post-Reboot) ==
=== Session 1: The Conga Crusaders (1/16/2024): ===
Starting Characters: Boris Montesquieu, Marcus, Heinrich, Cable Guy
The party opens in the town plaza, entering GonzoMart, seeing Heinrich behind the counter. Boris asks for spare change, being given all the change Heinrich had in his pocket (one quarter), and Marcus, in the line to buy ramen, gave Boris a dollar. After this, Cable Guy asks if Heinrich partakes in Prilosec, being told that Heinrich is more of an Alka-Seltzer guy. He then asks if Cable Guy chews tobacco, saying he smokes cigarettes. The duo have a prolonged argument about ass cancer and the harmful effects of smoking, with Boris corroborating Cable Guy, saying dipping was better, all the while Marcus lit a cigarette. In the store, the party overhears rumors about a “Midnight Channel”, which Cable Guy, Heinrich and Marcus ask about.
Deciding they wanted to watch the channel for themselves, Cable Guy invites the party over to his crack-house apartment, impressing Boris with the idea of what a house is like. Cable Guy warns of rats and roaches in his bathroom, saying the rats would nibble their toes. He also says not to sit on his bed, but he lets them sit on the sofa. Heinrich complains of the sulfury smell, to which Cable Guy explains that he shat multiple days ago, leaving it there to fester, prompting Heinrich to have a coughing fit. Marcus takes note of the smell and wants to drink the smell away.
As the Midnight Channel comes on, Boris and Cable Guy think it’s SpongeBob before Marcus puts his palm up to the TV, watching it sink in as he pulls it back out. It comes out slimy, to which Heinrich diagnoses it as a lethal disease, which no one believes. Marcus falls into the TV, coming out completely covered in slime, after which Heinrich and Cable Guy each get their respective gloves. Marcus comments about seeing a yellow mist before Cable Guy trips and falls into the TV, being pulled out by Marcus. Only Cable Guy’s hand is slimy. He grabs a beer before Marcus somehow takes a picture of Cable Guy stripping, tagging it on social media with “Midnight Channel with Larry”.
After this, Cable Guy volunteers to jump into the TV with a rope tied to him that the others hold onto. Cable Guy is met by a squid with a bowtie who welcomes him. Thinking he’s really drunk, Cable Guy wants to escape. The rope seems to have cut itself off after he went in, and realizing Cable Guy might be trapped, Marcus volunteers to go next. Heinrich ties him up, letting him go in next. He almost hits Cable Guy on the way down, and upon seeing the same thing happen again with the rope, Boris and Heinrich follow suit together, Heinrich not wanting to be left there alone.
Cable Guy asks the squid, who introduces himself as Bartholomew, about the Metaverse, and Bartholomew tells Cable Guy that the Metaverse is made from the hopes and dreams of everyone. Cable Guy promptly grabs Bartholomew and yells at him to let Bartholomew out. Bartholomew inks, and Shadows soon appear around the party. Bartholomew gives the party (sans Boris) weapons to use against them, allowing Boris and Cable Guy to take down the first two shadows, with Heinrich sneak-stabbing the third one. After this, more Shadows appear, prompting Cable Guy to take out another, before Heinrich killed another with a stab to the throat. After they traverse through the hallway, the party finds a big open room crawling with Shadows. Bartholomew points out the exit, prompting Heinrich to speed ahead as Marcus picks up Boris, attempting to carry him, before dropping Boris on his ass. The party forms a conga line to evade the Shadows before Marcus shouts “CONGA!”, alerting every Shadow in the vicinity to their location. After Boris fails to, Cable Guy successfully convinces the Shadows to join them in a conga line to the end, before all of the Shadows later died from conga-ing too hard.
In front of the party now lies six TVs, each exits to the real world. Cable Guy jumps through TV #3, ending up in an apartment that wasn’t his own. After the police were called, he returns to the Metaverse as Marcus fails to enter TV #6, hitting his head, before properly entering and winding up in a restaurant, landing in someone’s food. Boris successfully deduces that TV #2 is the correct one, with him stealing Cable Guy’s bed when back in the apartment. After Cable Guy left as well, Marcus threatened to break the TV and trap Heinrich in the Metaverse for unknown reasons, but not going through with it and letting him through anyway.
After returning to the real world, Marcus calls the police about being “covered in jizz”, prompting a cop to come up and question whether or not Cable Guy was the man that jumped out of the neighbors’ TV earlier. Discarding this question, Cable Guy yells to the cop about the squid in the TV, being dismissed by the cop as crazy after the Midnight Channel ended and the cop could not enter. Marcus and Cable Guy convince the cop to stay a while and party with beer instead of doing public service, hopefully getting their answers later.
=== Session 2: Crazy Hamburger (1/23/2024) ===
Starting Characters: Boris Montesquieu, Marcus, Heinrich, Cable Guy, Benny, Felix
Boris decides to sit and watch anime while Cable Guy, Marcus and Heinrich plan to make a crazy hamburger. Benny soon appears, almost arrested by Felix, until Benny claims that it is his apartment, a statement contested in its validity. Cable Guy gathers horse meat and red hot chili pepper to make the burger with, eventually making a rotten crazy hamburger, which he then forcefeeds to Boris with the help of Marcus restraining him. Heinrich somehow makes an even nastier crazy hamburger that is somehow radioactive, which is also force-fed to Boris by Cable Guy, after which Heinrich gives Boris Pepto-Bismol to help him wash it down before Marcus makes a nasty crazy hamburger, though not as nasty as Heinrich’s. He tries to feed this to Boris anyway, after which Heinrich tries to stand with Boris to prevent it from happening, though is unsuccessful. After the crazy hamburger incident, Benny introduces himself before Boris throws up on Marcus. After this, Heinrich and Cable Guy question why Felix didn’t intervene, to which he states that he was too inebriated to want to do public service.
Soon enough, midnight comes, and Cable Guy eagerly jumps into the TV like a reverse of Fat Albert, followed swiftly by Boris. Heinrich takes Felix’s hand, forcing him to come with, followed shortly after by Marcus and Benny. Boris soon exclaims that Bartholomew likes touching people as Felix has his hand shook by the squid. Cable Guy, having had multiple beers by this point, oddly sees Bartholomew as a “lady squid with huge honkers”, and desired to mate with him. Heinrich and Marcus try to restrain him, with Marcus successfully able to stand his ground. Unfortunately, Heinrich lost his grip, and this caused Cable Guy to be able to break free, remarking that he was about to cum before Cable Guy and Bartholomew both ejaculated on everyone, Heinrich being the only one able to avoid the aftershock. After this, a drunken Cable Guy and Felix cuddle in a very heterosexual way, and Marcus asks Boris if he would join the pair in bed. Boris remarks that he refuses to lose his virginity until he finds his big titty anime GF, before Bartholomew informs the party about training trials they can go under to increase their combat prowess against the Shadows.
The first of these trials is a room with a spiked door, during which Marcus repeatedly tries to paint Felix as an extreme racist. After the first Shadow is killed, the door begins to move towards the party, and after a few more Shadow deaths, Marcus hits Soulja Boy’s signature dance, using it to convince multiple of the Shadows to do the same, allowing the party to swiftly deal with them. After this, Marcus got his nuts destroyed by a hit from Benny.
The next room was equipped with two cannons and several towers with Shadows on top. Marcus was an ace sharpshooter, able to knock down several of them and kill them. After this room was dealt with, a room with many vents was the next trial, each one leading to a random other. After many Among Us jokes, Felix accidentally cuffs himself, needing to be broken free before Bartholomew opened new portals back to the real world. After returning home, Boris collapses on Cable Guy’s floor.
=== Session 3: Marcus’ Marvelous Mess of Mommy Issues (2/6/2024) ===
Starting Characters: Boris Montesquieu, Marcus, Heinrich, Benny, Maxwell, Felix
Felix soon gets a call about a missing persons report, but this goes nowhere as a loud banging erupts from Cable Guy’s door. At the door is Maxwell, someone who is running from the cops, apparently being accused of a murder he did not commit, and that he needed a place to stay. Marcus accuses Maxwell of being on drugs, which he is not, before Marcus picked up Maxwell and threw him into the portal to the Midnight Channel. Bartholomew offers Maxwell some weapons to fight off the Shadows with before he explains a strange tower that appeared in the Metaverse not long prior. Bartholomew then grows a humanoid body for as-of-yet unknown reasons before him and the party make their way to the tower. Upon seeing a woman at the top of the tower, Marcus asks how hot the woman is, to which he is scolded by Heinrich for objectifying women. Marcus, in response, brings up Heinrich’s dead wife, who he logistically would not know about, much to Heinrich’s dismay and sadness.
Inside the tower, the party finds a large dungeon area, littered with Shadows of multiple types. Bartholomew soon pulls out a gun, using it to shoot himself in the head while shouting “PERSONA!”. When questioned, Bartholomew told the party that they would learn about it later. He later shoots himself in the head again during the same fight, and shortly after the battle is won, Benny manifests by the party’s side for unknown reasons. The next room only contains one Shadow, but a large one that is very strong. Felix attempts to use the power of police brutality to save the party, but fails. Everyone makes a break for the exit while Heinrich inspects the walls, finding them to be breakable with enough force. Bartholomew uses his Persona to buy the party some time before Felix charges through a wall, the Shadow following suit, in an effort to buy his friends some time. Boris and Marcus team up to break two of the walls, using it as a new exit to escape the room. Heinrich leaves with them while Maxwell joins Felix and Bartholomew in fending off the Shadow, being the one to kill it.
At the top of the tower, Marcus found out that the woman he questioned the hotness of prior looked a lot like his mother. His “mother” exclaims that it is all Marcus’ fault that she has the virus she has. Marcus tells the woman that he’s been working hard to pay her medical bills, and his “mother” claims that he spends it on booze and hookers. Marcus denies this claim, prompting the Shadow to transform into a giant woman in a hospital bed, surrounded by IV-drip minions. Bart reassures Marcus not to buy into the lies, as he knows what is going on.
Heinrich tries to pop one of the IV drips, failing to pop it with his hands. Marcus asks why his mom is attacking them, and she states that Marcus needs to be punished for being a naughty boy. Soon, Marcus hears a voice in his head, stating “I am thou, and thou art I”. After the voice in his head gives its spiel, a mask of Thanatos appears on Marcus’ face, which he promptly tears off. The party soon realizes that the monster made from Marcus’ mother was invulnerable, being maintained by the IV drips. After this discovery, Marcus uses his persona, Thanatos, to aid the party in destroying the IV drips, kill his Shadow mother, and confront his demons.
=== Session 4: Mean Streak (3/5/2024) ===
Starting Characters: Boris Montesquieu, Marcus, Heinrich, Maxwell, Felix
Marcus opens by asking a hallucination of Bartholomew about what the Personas do when they are not used, and if they are “fucking behind the scenes”, to which the hallucination responds that the Persona is in him. Disgusted, Marcus yells at Bartholomew, only for him to clarify that the Persona is within his soul. For unknown reasons, Marcus then asks Boris about his sexuality, to which Boris replies that he only watches hentai with women in them. When trying to figure out where Cable Guy has disappeared to, Marcus claims that he overdosed while playing Overwatch 2, then proceeding to attempt to gaslight Boris into saying he watched Overwatch pornography.
After this, Marcus has a sudden realization: that Heinrich had been missing work for days on end, even though they had not been meeting every day. Marcus then runs to GonzoMart and tells the manager that Heinrich had been missing work repeatedly, which somehow works and somehow gets Heinrich fired. When Marcus went to go get milk, Heinrich had not known the milk was bad, and unknowingly had put curdled milk into his cereal that morning. With no clerk at the desk, Marcus decided to shoplift nearly $1000 worth of goods, with Heinrich reporting to his former manager about the incident out of spite. Marcus runs out of the building, with Boris admonishing his shoplifting nature, then being handed what was supposedly a hentai magazine to get him to be quiet. Boris opened it and found that it was a sports magazine, much to his dismay. Marcus blames this mean streak on his Persona making him careless, before police soon arrive to fight Marcus. Marcus then ponders if he may have killed Heinrich’s son in an alternate universe, before somehow evading the police.
Later that evening, the party prepared to enter the Midnight Channel once again, with Maxwell initially being reluctant before Heinrich reminded him of the Personas’ power. Maxwell and Boris then rotate the TV so that they can cannonball into it. Heinrich did not know they did this, and soon trips over the TV, falling into it as well. Upon returning to Bart, he gives Marcus an Evoker, as well as giving everyone in the party a yellow armband to determine them from potential impostors. After this, Bart reveals his age of 100 to the party before Boris becomes suddenly more rank than usual.
Re-entering the Tower, Heinrich used his machine pistol to do heavy damage to multiple Shadows before Marcus activated his Persona with the Evoker. Boris and Marcus teamed up on one of the Shadows before Heinrich made a critical blow on another of them. After the battle was won, they exited the Midnight Channel for the day.
== Notable Memes ==
* Hitting the Squiddy
* Boris being a massive weeb
* Cable Guy
* Conga
* Slime
* Atlas Earth
* Ambatukam
* Squizz
* Soulja Boy
* Idubbbz
* Twomad
== Trivia ==
* Shadow Palaces was the first campaign of 2024.
* Shadow Palaces is the second campaign to be rebooted after the first session, the first being Bitter Creek, but is the only one of the two to have an extensive archive of its happenings.
* Shadow Palaces is the first campaign to be directly based on a pre-established franchise with little in the way of copyright dilution.
Category:Shadow Palaces
Category:Campaigns