From The Jackals To The Shepherds 05: Two of Hearts

The Woods: The Map:   Dave – Taylor Help The Show On Patreon Riverhouse Games Website Twitter Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe via RSS! Riverhouse Games Thanks You! Thank you for listening to this Riverhouse podcast. You can find more podcasts at RiverhouseGames.com as well as games and resources about queer & LGBT+ tabletop gaming. Thank you … Continue reading From The Jackals To The Shepherds 05: Two of Hearts

The Woods:

The Map:

Dave – Taylor

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Riverhouse Games Website

Twitter

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Thank you for listening to this Riverhouse podcast. You can find more podcasts at RiverhouseGames.com as well as games and resources about queer & LGBT+ tabletop gaming. Thank you to the people backing the Riverhouse Games Patreon:

Nyssa MacKinnon, Jalyn Euteneier, Rohit Sodhia & GamersPlane.com, Alec Walker, VJ Brown, Paul Bennett, Amanda Coyle, Rob Abrazado, Tobie Abad, Patrick ‘The Tyrant of Boredom’ West, and Emmeline Duplois, THANK YOU! If you want to see your name in upcoming Riverhouse games or podcasts, you can set a small monthly subscription at Patreon.com/RiverhouseGames

Battlebards Tracks used:

Elven Dirge – Farewell – Score Music – Philippe Payet

Dark Elf City – Black Towers Of The Spider Queen – Score Music – Marc Cholette

Gnome Village – Tinkertown (Short Loop) – Score Music by Kevin MacLeod

Transcription:

For a long time, we were at war with The Jackals. But now, we’ve driven them off, and we have this – a year of relative peace. One quiet year, with which to build our community up and learn once again how to work together. Come Winter, the Frost Shepherds will arrive and we might not survive the encounter. This is when the show will end. But we don’t know about that yet. What we know is that right now, in this moment, there is an opportunity to build something.

A week has passed. We buried personal affects of Gerrard and Jules, deciding as a community that an excursion to recover their bodies would be fruitless and dangerous. Their graves rest on the large hill overlooking the town, the hill that serves as the mouth to the abandoned mines around which this camp was built.

Still scarred from the run in with the Beast, Ezekiel hides in Eileen’s crumbling shack. Yuen visits every morning, knowing that fear has trapped him within the walls of the shack. Precarious as those walls may be, they offer the only protection from the world outside. She brings him berries picked from the spring ground, tart with their earliness. Every day, Yuen asks Ezekiel to explore with her, as he used to before. He is scared to leave, but she reassures him that being afraid while exploring with a friend is much better than being afraid alone doing nothing. After a week of these requests, Ezekiel agrees. The two leave Eileen’s shack holding hands, sneaking past their guardian, and heading towards the hill and the great oak doors of the mines.

Ezekiel & Yuen stand in front of the doors. Rotting and unhinged, the doors serve as little more than a symbolic barrier. Those who abandoned the camp long ago barred the doors shut from the outside, but the bars have rusted over the years and lean up against the mouth of the mines. Yuen pulls one aside, the heavy steel dragging in the grass as she pulls it away from the entrance. Ezekiel looks to the woods. They are still. Yuen pushes the door of the mine open slowly and the wood drags in the dry gravel within as it slides open just enough for them both to squeeze. She enters the mines and holds a hand out to Ezekiel to join her. Hand in hand they walk into the darkness.

As the meager light from the mine doors fades, their eyes readjust to the caverns that stretch before them, the sunlight supplanted and even overtaken in some areas by a blue bioluminescence. The mines are dry and drafty, a cool relief from the humid spring air above the surface. Yuen and Ezekiel walk, amazed, deeper into the mines. Following the tracks of a minecart, now overgrown with glowing fungus, Ezekiel squeezes Yuen’s hand happily, the terror of the Beast melting away at the wonder of this new world. Sitting here under their noses for these past weeks, this playground of sights offers a wonderland of adventure. They both vow to spend more time exploring here, to celebrate Ezekiel’s rebirth as an explorer and Yuen’s enterprising curiosity. As they walk the path back to the surface, they hear earth shift behind them, and they peer down a passageway in the earth they had not seen while walking in.

The blue glow from the fungus is strongest in this room, and converges on a central point. As the children’s eyes land on the sight, they stop in their tracks and their knuckles turn white as their hands lock together.

A nest of gravel, mud, and fungus lies in the center of the room. The owner of the nest, a scaled creature the size of a small horse, sleeps, curled around several glowing blue eggs. It stirs quietly in gentle but fitful starts. Every twitch from the reptile shifts dirt from the edge of the nest, causing gravel and pebbles to clatter quietly down the sloping sides. One shift dislodges a cracked bowl shaped item, and as it falls to the ground, Ezekiel and Yuen see that it is not a bowl, but a shattered fragment of a skull.

Without a word, they sprint out of the mines. Yuen makes Ezekiel agree not to tell anyone they went into the mines without permission, but as Ezekiel looks to the oaken doors not slid shut he can’t help but hear the growl of the Beast of the woods fresh in his memory.

Back in the community center, Drach the mechanic finishes work on the abandoned generator. With fuel it can be used to power many of the machines we brought with us. And if we as a community are resourceful and can work together, we may even be able to build new machines to help our lives here.

Idle hands breed idle minds and idle minds dwell on matters best forgotten for Drach, and so with his current project finished, he sets about repairing the shacks in the camp. The damage done by time is not insignificant and there are no small amount of shacks that need repairing, so he sets about planning for a long project. As he pours over blueprints and supply lists, he scrawls in his leather-bound journal, an item few in the community have seen him without. This work will ease his mind and occupy it for a time, and what the work cannot do, he puts to the page.

A week passes.

Thank you for joining us for the fifth episode of From The Jackals To The Shepherds. If you like this show please give us a rating on iTunes, tell a friend, or share us on social media. As always the intro for the show was read by Dave Lapru, who is also our mapkeeper. You can find Dave on twitter at plantbird, and I’m at leviathan files. Please consider supporting the show on Patreon at patreon dot com slash Riverhouse Games. Music for this episode was provided by Battlebards dot com. Until next week, I hope your week goes well.