Now far ahead the road has gone and I must follow if I can

She sent her mind a-travelling
To the world of Middle-Earth
With friends and dice and other things
Gathered round to bring them mirth

Her halfling thief with light footsteps
Met others in a tavern
They hatched a plan to plumb the depths
Of orc-infested caverns

So down they went and orcs they fought
In battle after battle
But lack of treasure that they sought
Had begun to leave them rattled

“Just for the experience”
Said her wizardly companion
But that did not make too much sense
Of the blood and death around them

One corpse had a sword like Sting
Which glowed when orcs were near
But why would it have had a thing
That its own kind hate and fear?

She picked some locks and disarmed traps
To display her thiefly powers
The course they charted on their map
To levels further downward

In darkest depths a creature-type
They didn't know the name of
Its riddle skills had been much hyped
But her backstab? More effective

Many items had been placed
In its hidden treasure stash
She cinched a belt around her waist
And suddenly she vanished

Invisibly she spoke to them
And expressed her worried thoughts
“Do we have to take my item
To the fires where it was wrought?”

The rest said they were not too keen
To give up magic power
But how attractive would it be
To storm a dark lord's tower?

They tossed aside the fruitless quest
For the promise of much more loot
The value that had been assessed
Was the prize for which they'd shoot

But then they saw the great dismay
In the master of this masque
At work that would be thrown away
From his preparatory tasks

What value, then, to rail against
The road that lay before them?
Just go the way that they had sensed
The story's logic bore them?

Thus they returned to real time
To resolve it between sessions
How to square a storyline
With self-directed missions

---

The above is my entry in the Poetry Dice Challenge: Week 30, which involves writing a poem that incorporates inspiration from these nine dice and a chosen theme:

I chose the theme “Invisible” and the added challenge of making the poem a story which featured the phrase “And suddenly she vanished”. Since roleplaying games are frequently on my mind, seeing the image of the die made me think of going down that path. The line “And suddenly she vanished” made me think of that scene in The Lord of the Rings where Frodo puts the ring on and vanishes in the middle of the crowded bar, which also touches on the invisibility element, so I figured I could incorporate some Tolkien-inspired stuff. One of my long-standing issues in the RPG world is how so many people seem to think there's a lot of Tolkien influence in D&D, but playing a D&D-style game in a Middle-Earth setting would never give you something that looks like a story Tolkien wrote. I decided to play with that theme in the story of the poem, with the added complication that the GM for the session has prepared the game with a lot of barely-disguised elements from The Hobbit and doesn't realize that he'd need to do some heavy railroading to get The Lord of the Rings to happen if the players are running their characters in the “murder hobo” style. Obviously this is a somewhat light and silly story, but incorporates the elements and is also fractally a story about someone involving themselves in a story and the issue of whether their own agency should be invisible within it.

Here's how the dice appeared in the poem:

Die	Where it appeared
	the fruitless quest
	The various things said by characters/players in the story
	But how attractive would it be
	the prize for which they'd shoot (the direction they'd go)
	a dark lord's tower
	She picked some locks
	her worried thoughts
	With friends and dice and other things
	a sword like Sting ( bee → sting → Bilbo Baggins' sword was named Sting