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, and will feature Grey and C.D as unknown characters. The campaign is loosely based on the *Persona* franchise.

## 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.

## Notable Memes

* Hitting the Squiddy
* Cable Guy
* Conga
* Slime
* Atlas Earth

## 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.