Depression is a strange companion to have. It lingers with you and leans on you, filling your thoughts with a pressure until they are pushed out of the way, and all that’s left is the sense of loss and apathy associated with the depression. It becomes difficult to do anything; to break the spell and break free. Nothing feels like it matters any more.
Why try anything? Just submit to the cold dark of depression that wraps around you, pulls you in close.
And suffocates you.
It can be really difficult to get out from under myself when I’m feeling this way. There’s this physical weight to depression that makes functioning in any way feel almost impossible. It’s like…being in a lake with a heavy stone tied around your waist, pulling you down and you’re fighting to keep your head out of the water but the entire time there’s this nagging feeling like “What’s the point?”
But you don’t really want to succumb to it because succumbing actually takes effort so you just sort of stay in this endless malaise and you can’t see a way of getting out from under it.
Something has to change. I can’t keep going like this, uncertain of myself or my purpose in life. I’ve got to make an effort to change this apathy. For my own sake, for the sake of my kids, and for my wife. She’s going through a lot of stuff right now as well (her Mom is very ill in the hospital) and my depression is just an extra burden on her for no reason.
Artwork by D.L. Johnson. Copyright © 2018.
Wallowing Wall
Size: Large
AC: as Chainmail
HD: 7 (42 hp)
No. App: 1
Attacks: special
Dmg: see below
Special: Apathy Field
XP: 625
The Wallowing Wall is a grey slab of lifeless stone, generally smooth and sometimes slightly curved inward. It looks, for the mist part, like any other wall in the dungeon. The Wallowing Wall is different because, if one draws too close to the Wall, they must save vs. Paralysis or Wisdom or find themselves suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of apathy towards the world and their place in it. This is followed by a sensation of wanting to be closer to the Wall, and no amount of effort can break the affected person’s desire to be close to the Wall.
Drawing too close to the Wall will have the wall become a viscous material, pulling the person inside itself, where the stone like substance suffocates the victim.
A strength roll is required to pull someone from the Wall; a person being suffocated may save once more to try to break the wall’s spell-like hold over them. It takes three rounds of being submerged in the wall to suffocate to death.