Scale & Shadow: Part 24, The Corruption of the Innocent

The golden age is long over. 

Whether by cruel kings, savage beasts, or unwise wizards wielding forgotten magics too great to be contained–dark times are upon us. The only hope for a comfortable life is to delve into what ruins remain to plunder the treasures of your ancestors to sell to the greedy and the foolish. 

Be warned, as if flies to a candle, the worst monsters are drawn to the brightest lights and no one is left to save you in the darkness. 

The heroes of legend have died long ago. All that remains is:

Scale & Shadow

Previously:

Our coin-hunters are faced with an impossible decision and the difficult consequences that echo the traumas of their pasts.

The village of Orlane is dying.

Once a small and thriving community, Orlane has become a maze of locked doors and frightened faces. Strangers are shunned, trade has withered. Rumors flourish, growing wilder with each retelling. Terrified peasants flee their homes, abandoning their farms with no explanation. Others simply disappear. . .

No one seems to know the cause of the decay -- why are there no clues? Who skulks through the twisted shadows of the night? Who or what is behind the doom that has overtaken the village of Orlane?

Art by Jaime Jones and Wizards of the Coast.
All rights reserved by their respective owners.

The cast of Scale & Shadow is:

Austin as Kastr the fighter

Brandon as Silmigar the wizard

Oscar as Kuan the Monk (a playbook from the Lore & Lords pack by Peter Johansen)

Jacob as Kuvair the swashbuckler (a playbook from Awful Good Games)

David as the Game Master

Inspiration:

(Spoiler alert) That final scene lived in my head for more than a decade. The two big inspriations were Jaime Jones’s Cold-Eyed Selkie art (above) and Fever Ray’s original music video for If I Had A Heart. When I first read the Against the Cult of the Reptile God module, much later, I knew I had to run it and figure out a way to get to this scene.

The music you heard was:

Mass Extinction, Cult of the Skull, and Infection by Karl Casey at White Bat Audio,
and Hopeless by Jimena Contreras and (usually but not this time) Eleven by Kaupe

Additional voices for the show include:

Scott as the narrator

Our cover art was created with MidJourney

Scale & Shadow is an actual play of Dungeon World, a game by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel with some of the suppliamental material from Perilous Wilds by Lampblack & Brimstone and Flags by Rob Donoghue. For this episode, we used a modified version of “the labyrinth move” from the Gauntlet. Read about it here.
We drew inspiration from Against the Cult of the Reptile God (1982) by Douglas Niles and The Village of Hommlet (1979) by Gary Gygax