The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Haldrin the Lich – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 42 Lazy GM Prep
Fri, 13 Sep 2024
Mike prepares for his Shadowdark RPG campaign, the Gloaming! Join the City of Arches Kickstarter! Shadowdark RPG Campaign Notebook available to Sly Flourish patrons Visit the Sly Flourish Blog Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books Shadowdark RPG Cursed Scroll 1 Dyson Maps
hey friends it's your pal mike shea from sly flourish here with another episode of sly flourish's lazy gm prep in this weekly show we go through steps from return of the lazy dungeon master while preparing for my sunday role-playing game in this case i am running shadow dark the rpg the four-time award a gold any award-winning rpg shadow dark with cursed scroll one the one of the three cursed scroll books that includes a setting known as the gloaming
This is session like 41 or 40. I think it's session 42 of Shadow Dark. So anybody who's been like, ah, Shadow Dark's fine, but it's really only good for one shots or short campaigns. I beg to differ because I have run 42 sessions, which is about as long as I've run for any campaign. So Shadow Dark has been working very well for a long campaign.
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in my little sly flourish empire to the patrons of sly flourish thank you so much for your outstanding support last week our heroes were on a hill after having wiped out a group of the knights of saint yidris corrupted knights of saint yidris who have now gone full evil and had like a cesspit filled with dead bodies which was like a hot tub for three rocks along with a bunch of corrupted knights
The characters dealt with these knights, wiping them out, and they had three guards remaining. And there was going to be, like, an interrogation of the guards. And I'm always a little worried about interrogations, because I never really want characters to do, like, tortury kind of stuff on guards, even though... And there was a lot of talk about, like, these guards are...
You know, they've now burned a bunch of villagers like these are bad guys. Right. And should we just and there's no justice here anywhere. There's no you know, the realm around this whole place is so corrupted that nobody's going to like take them to trial. So should we just kill them all?
Well, I decided to push it a little bit and remove that problem, that ethical dilemma from the character's hands by having two of them explode and turn into marrow wolves, marrow marrow fiends. So now the characters are fighting two marrow fiends who I think ate the third. I can't remember. Did they eat the third or did the third get away?
One of the new characters who was a new character from the formerly killed character was one of the prisoners of these guys who is still remaining. And they saved him and now have him in their group while they fought the Marrow Wolves. The Marrow Wolves were pretty tough.
The Marrow Wolves had like a crazy thing where they could breathe on a bunch of people and it caused a bunch of damage and it pinned them in place. It kind of stuck them in place. So the characters really got stuck. That was really good, challenging fight. This is my like trying to see like, especially when you have like seventh, I think we have like six to ninth level characters.
We have a couple of characters that are now hitting ninth level. And then we have others whose experience points have been restricted so much that they have not yet hit higher levels, which is kind of a bummer. Like one of the players I think is on seventh character and keeps losing all his experience points because he dies before he uses it all. That's kind of a bummer.
So after slaying, after dealing with those guys, they made their way to Fenmere Lake. Let's see. Where's our little map? They made their way to Fenmere Lake only to find that Fenmere Lake had been completely drained. And now the bottom of it was, was this crazy sludge of weird bees.
biological nastiness and they could see things writhing around in the primordial soup at the bottom of this drained lake the lake had drained because they had manipulated an artifact in one of the dungeons very early on and it cracked the world and when it did so it actually you know drained the lake and and caused the world to be even more because it was this there was a what was it it was i don't know if it was an hourglass
They had some object or an orrery or something, but they had some object that sort of represented the world and they tried to force it. And when they forced it, it actually manipulated the world and they drain and they realize later. But then like, well, the character who did that dead. So it's nobody's fault. I think, no, the character who did it is still around, but everyone else is swapped out.
So nobody knows. Nobody knows that they were the one who caused the problem in the first place, which was pretty funny. But now there's this primordial sludge at the bottom. They never saw this until after they had gone down into the depths beneath the realm and then done a bunch of stuff there and then came back and then they started to see, wow, this place is really changing.
The sky is now a battleground between the two demigods of Mugdalblub, the god of primordial ooze, and Almazats, the world devourer. And Almazats is trying to devour the world. Mugdalblub is forcing him back. And obviously, neither of those gods are particularly good. And the people of the realm are just trying to figure things out. So the characters found Haldrin's Tower.
I have a map for Haldrin's Tower right here. This is the side view. I think they used a... What is it called? A magic broom, a flying broom, to fly across and shuttle everybody into the first chamber. I had some trouble... and last time we spent some time on this figuring out how the, how this whole place works.
Like I wanted to have like a magical lift that would go up and down the tower, but I wanted it to be limited. So they'd have to kind of go down to go back up and they'd have to get keys from different places. And so the first one that the first key that they needed was the apprentice key. And, And the apprentice key was all the way down here in this refuse pit.
And I had an arcane Atiug that lived off of the arcane residue. And my players really loved it. They were like, oh, that's a really cool idea. An Atiug who's been eating arcane runoff and is now throwing lightning bolts and stuff like that. And I think they got blasted with some lightning bolts and things while they were doing that.
So what I did is I created three keys, the apprentice key, the librarian's key, or the key of the advisors, and then Haldren's key. And you needed each of these keys in order to be able to get to different levels of the dungeon. Like it sort of created glyphs and the glyphs would let the lift go up and down. And so at first they realized, ah, we can't actually go up. We can only go down.
So they went down to the apprentice level saw that this is where apprentices hang out, then saw the fact that there was a key that had fallen down into the refuse pit. So they had to go down and pick up the refuse pit. And that's when the Arcane Atiug popped up. They dealt with the Arcane Atiug, but now they had the apprentice key. And then they went up to level.
So let's see, they start on level five. Then they went down to level six, the apprentice level, then down to level seven, the refuse level, got the key, then went back to six, back to five. now five actually has this other, the summoning chamber as well. Then they went up to level four, which is the outer library. That's this, this one on the right.
And in the outer library was a halfling who was busy, like sorting books on shelves, kind of acting nervous. And they gave him a bunch of grief without realizing. I think at one point said like, You know, he said, they said, they made some joke about, you know, not them being bigger than he was. And he said, like, you know, you're not bigger than me.
And they're like, you know, I don't know what you, you know, they're like, is that like a metaphor? Is he like talking about that symbolically or whatever? And then they gave him some more grief and he like got more and more angry. And finally he said, and then he turned into an Oni, which is in fact quite a bit bigger than they are.
So the beginning of today's session is actually them dealing with the, battling an Oni, right? Like the Oni is very angry. So I think we are going to just start right with that. And then we'll talk more about where this game is going to go. So I'm going to generate a new session planning template. I am using Notion to do my campaign planning.
If you want to learn more about Notion, you can learn about it in the show notes. Get my date. And let's see. All these characters are gone. Morgan is dead. Irina is dead. Uralta is still around. Bram Apples is dead. Dazder is around. So three of the characters are around. And I think... I don't remember who the other characters are.
I think I put them in the last notes, or at least have some of them in the last notes. So let me go back to my other Shadow Dark previous week. We have Squee. I think, so Squee's player is not going to be there today. Hera is dead. Oh no, is Hera still alive or is Hera dead? I think Hera's there. So we still have Hera. It's very hard for me to remember who's alive and who's dead.
They die very frequently. And I forget my other player's character, which is unfortunate. I don't know that there's a lot of ties between the characters directly to what's going on. Like, the group is doing stuff and they know what they need to do. But in the whole, like, focus on the characters and bring their stories into the game, when they die as frequently as they die in this, it's...
A little harder to tie them to it, but it's always worth having in the mind, right? So we have the elf. And so Kalem is going to be super excited because there's a, there's a library and a forbidden library and the forbidden library is going to have some like fun spells and stuff like that. The human witch frog shaman Dazdar probably could find some interesting stuff in those libraries as well.
You're all at the former Knight of St. Yudras, who I think is now a Knight of St. Taragnus. I think he changed. I think now is a Knight of St. Taragnus. Might find some interesting stuff there too. So yeah, Jim says, where's the, you know, it's in my notes, but my notes are all in my notebook upstairs. They're not, I didn't put them in my digital notes, which I really should have done.
So the strong start is an Oni. Let's see, did I name this Oni? And we're actually going to grab a bunch of secrets, but I'm curious if there's, so I no longer, the monsters of the gloaming, I'll probably hang on to this, but it was an Oni. It was on page 239. So that's handy. We can just say Oni. And we'll give a name. I don't know that I gave a name to this.
I'm going to put a name there, but I bet you if my players might remember a name before I do. And I think names are in the back of the book. Let's see. What's a good name? Riga? Orgo sounds pretty good. I'll call him Orgo. The Oni Librarian. Who is probably is very angry. He's upset about Haldren's new form. Is he worried? So I think like maybe Haldron had trapped him.
So we'll have a secret and clue. Like Haldron had trapped Orgo into service as his librarian after Orgo attempted to trap him in another world many years ago. Now, Orgo, so he was bound to Haldrin as long as Haldrin lived. As long as Haldrin lived. But now it looks like Haldrin could live forever, which is a problem for Orgo.
Kind of a long secret, but that basically that like, that's, that's, you know, that's his motivation. Hey, my mom is here. Hi mom. That's his motivation is that Orgo serves Haldren and probably served him for a while. And it probably hasn't been so bad, but his service is because he had tried to trap Haldren one time when Haldren was exploring other worlds. And now Haldren has become a lich.
And now Orgo is really worried about what that means for him. And apparently it's not enough. Like his bond isn't broken. So that's still there. The three keys of Haldren's Tower, we're going to put that secret, right? So the three keys to Haldren's Tower, the Apprentice Key, the Advisor Key, and Haldren's Key. The Apprentice Key, six or seven, can take its possessor up to level four.
The Advisor Key, located in the Summoning Chamber, Laboratory, or Forbidden Library, I get to choose where it is, can take them to level two. Haldren's Key carried by Haldren can open up the Chamber of Worlds on Area 2. So we'll think about that in a minute. We'll come back to that. What did I just do? I did not mean to do that. There we go. So scenes, Orgo the Oni is a scene.
Then navigating Haldren's Tower, facing Haldren, gathering, acquiring the Well of Worlds. Traveling to Bittermold Keep, return to Bittermold Keep, right? Well, I'll say traveling. Facing Mugdalblub, convincing the gods to leave the gloaming alone. So that's the campaign, right? I think that that's all of the scenes that we have for the remainder of this campaign. So I think that should be fine.
Let's see. Aldrin lost his sense of humanity. He wonders whether it's better to just leave the gloaming and go explore the worlds like Katheros did. Yes. That's a good secret. Those seeking passage to the realm of the Fae have become more frantic and more violent as Titania's cost to enter the fairy realm has gone way up. Yes.
Most of the artifacts of the gloaming have recovered or handed over to Titania. Yep. That's good. Only two of the Knights of Magdalblub remain, but they will not stop until they have destroyed the characters and recovered the well of worlds. Yep.
In order to save the gloaming, not only must they have to destroy Magdalblub's influence, but convince Underlook, Almazots, and Kytheros that they have done so. Yep. A small contingent of refugees. These are all good. Saint Yidris walks the land, surrounded by a small army of demons. I like this. I like all these. And they didn't know all of these.
So I can steal almost all of my secrets this week from secrets from last week. Because these are all solid. I think one of these they learned. They learned about Lake Phenomere's completely drained outfield with a growing sentient primordial ooze conglomerate and twisted horrors who come out of it. So we'll see if we need any more secrets as we think this through. But I think that's pretty solid.
Fantastic locations. We only need Haldron's Tower. And we can... I don't even need to list it. Any other locations. If they finish... They're not likely to finish... They're not likely to go much further beyond Haldrin's Tower today. I have a feeling Haldrin's Tower is the bulk of today's stuff. So we have Orlo the Oni.
Then I think we want to have a demon that's the demonic advisor who's probably an Aranese called what? Rokara. I like that name. There's some great names in this list, right? That there was a demonic advisor loyal to Haldrin. And then we have Haldrin. Haldrin the Lich. That's cool.
I'm going to grab this Monsters of Haldron's Tower list, but I don't think I'm going to need it much, but I'll put it in here. That's pretty cool. Treasure we're going to roll at the time, so I don't need that. Oh, wow. Boy, did I rip through the eight steps, right? We're done in like 10 minutes, but I've got some more thoughts. that I need to work through.
So let me, let me, let's, let's look at the, let's look at the map here and make sure that I've got this straight about the kind of how this whole thing navigates. And then we're going to talk about Haldron and his motivations and stuff like that. So we have some, a little bit of time to kind of dive deeper into this. So they go up to the outer library. That's, that's chamber four, right?
They went from, they started on level five, went down to six, down to seven, got the key back to six, back to five. Then they go up to four and there's, what was that? What's that called? The empty feasting hall, which might have some fun, like automated unseen servants and stuff like that, that are kind of keeping track of that. So that would be fun.
And then there's this doorway that leads outside of the tower. There could be some like weird horrors if we wanted to. And we can improvise this. We can roll like a random encounter as they go outside. Maybe something has come out of the primordial soup, weird twisted things, giant sting bats could have come out of there. Then they make their way around. They make their way around the outer edge.
to the forbidden library. So they don't have a key in here. Where's the, where's the, so, so this can still go up, right? This goes up to level three, four goes to three, three has the advisors and the artifacts of Kytheros are there. And then that goes up to two. Then, you know, so one, so he's up at the roof and,
Sitting like in his throne in the open air... Looking out over... What's going on... But only... So he doesn't have the well of worlds with him... He has, you know, probably another one of those weird gloves that can actually pick up the Well of Worlds, and only he's got that. So you need to face Haldren and get the glove from Haldren. So we can make this a secret, right?
Haldren possesses a glove required to lift up the Well of Worlds. So they have to get to him. I think we're going to like this, this, you know, like little trap thing, I think is just going to be another, another lift. And probably that lift is in the guardian chamber. So maybe that's it. This doorway is locked by, yeah, let's see. I think like this doorway is locked by, And he has the key.
So you need to go up the lift all the way to his area. And let's see. So the lift will stop. That's area two. Area three is the advisors. So who's got the advisor key? Probably the advisor key exists down in the summoning chamber, which is a level below four. So they can go to the forbidden library. They go down to the summoning chamber. There they find the advisor. They find the advisor key.
Then they can take that back up to the outer library, which goes to the key of advisors, which is area three. They can then, if they want, they can find the artifacts of Kytheros and stuff like that. They could also get up to the laboratory because they'll have the key, the apprentice key. Let's see. So they only have the apprentice key. The apprentice key took them to the outer library.
So I bet you that Orlo has the advisor key. But if he has the advisor key... This is confusing. That doesn't work. So can the apprentice key... I guess we have to have another key, a library key. So the apprentice key, the library key... The advisor key and Haldron's key. The apprentice key can take its possessor to level four. That right. The library key. No, this doesn't work. Let's see.
No, it's right. Apprentice key, advisor key. I'm so confused. So let me think here. Apprentice key got them to the library. If they get the Library key, that can open up the Forbidden Library and let them get down to the Summoning Chamber. The Summoning Chamber has the Advisor key, which takes them to the Advisors, which is on Area 3. And can that take them all the way up to Haldren? Probably.
Okay. So with the library key, the forbidden library key, they can get this. It's like the outer tower, right? The outer tower becomes visible to them. They can go to the forbidden library, they can go to the summoning chamber, and they can go to the laboratory. We'll call that the southern tower key. Apprentice key, southern tower key, the advisor key, and we're going to call it the world key.
And the world key. We're going to have sub-secrets here. So the apprentice key takes the character, unlocks, well, let's see, allows entry to the outer library. The southern tower key allows access to all the chambers of the southern tower. The southern tower key held by Orlo allows access to all the chambers of the southern tower.
the the advisor key held by or or lost let's see left behind in the summoning chamber in the southern tower grants access to the advisors so that gets access to the advisors but also to i don't know what i wrote i don't know i can't read my own writing Oh, portrait to the Hall of Advisors, the Chamber of Portraits, and the roof.
Haldron's Key, held by Haldron, allows access to, oh, the World Key, right? We're calling this the World Key. The World Key is held by Haldron and allows access to the Well of Worlds. So I think that makes sense. That way they, you know, they have to kind of navigate different places in order to get to different spots. They can't get up to the advisor chamber without the advisor key.
The advisor key is in the summoning chamber. They go down to the summoning chamber, talk to the Aaronese who's down there and they, they get the advisor key. Then that can take them all the way up to talk to Haldron and then Haldron can give them the world key. So yeah. So I think that that, I think that that can work. Yeah.
So, Haldron, I have the secret here, lost his sense of humanity after becoming a lich. He wonders whether it's better to just let the gloaming go and go explore other worlds as Kytheros did. He remembers the pain, the love and pain he had for Gwendolyn and Morrigan, but doesn't feel it now.
So, there's going to be a negotiation with them and it may end up like they're going to, you know, I don't know if it's going to go good or bad or whatever. Like, we're going to have to find out.
And I guess I'll just, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to build like a procedure of like, they have to do X, Y, or Z. I'm going to just see what they say and then, you know, roll checks and see how things go. You know, if they, if he's willing to give up all this stuff for them or not, like, well, we'll see what they offer to him.
I don't think I'm going to worry too much about Haldrin's attitude. I think we're just going to roleplay it. I think it's really fun. I even wore my Lich shirt today for... I bumped it again. I wore my Lich shirt today to celebrate roleplaying Lich. So that's fun. But really, I think we're just going to play it out.
And I give it probably a two-thirds chance that they're going to negotiate with him and he's going to give them the well of worlds and they can move on. Or one-third chance things go badly and they're going to have to fight a lich. And we'll see what fighting a lich inside, you know, what fighting a lich in Shadow Dark is like. Let's take a look. Let's have a gander at the lich.
Go here and go to table contents. And we'll go to monsters. Cause I kind of like to have him in a guardian going with my never have a single monster fight alone. Cause it's just too easy to gank them. There's so many like, Oh, we wrap them with wall force. So let's see. 62 hit points, two touch attacks and two spells, two touch and two spells. Whoa. And he's plus seven on his checks for spells.
He's immune to morale checks. Can't be killed while a spirit vessel is intact. What is his spirit vessel? Could it be the dagger? It's probably one of the three items. It could be the dagger. It could be prophecy. It could be the sphere of annihilation. I don't know. I'm not sure what that's going to be. So he has paralysis. That's rough. Flight, he can fly. Null.
Hostile spells targeting the Lich are DC 18 to cast. Oh, he cast that. Shadow Leap, he can teleport up to 100 miles. That's nice. Sigil of Doom, one target level 9 or less within near DC con or goes to 0 hit points. He's rough. Wither, 48 damage to enemies within near size cube centered on the Lich. He's probably pretty tough on his own. Maybe a couple of animated armors.
Like I was going to put like an iron golem with him, but like, that's just, you know, that's too much, right? I think an iron golem would be, would be too hard. Let's take a look at the golems. Iron golems are level 10. The flesh golems are level seven. They're not quite so bad. They make three slam attacks. Iron golem is AC 19. Stone golems are AC 18. Three slam attacks.
uh stone golem's not out of hand he might have a stone golem it's not a lot of characters i think i think we only have four today so i think maybe i'll just be him that sounds that sounds probably right he's got so many like he can teleport out of their stuff i think i think he's yeah i think that would be a deadly fight anyway so i think we're gonna stick with that
So I feel like I have everything and just thinking about like, where's next? I think we're just going to do some travel. If we do some travel, I'm going to keep that list of like what random encounters could occur while they're traveling across the countryside, heading back to Mugdalblub's, heading back to Bittermold Keep.
Then I'll assume they'll take the back way into Bittermold Keep and then face Mugdalblub and we'll go from there. But I think we're mostly going to worry about that in the next session. I expect maybe three sessions remain. Two to three. I'm hoping they'll negotiate with Haldren today.
My goal would be negotiate with Haldren today, get to Muggleblub next week, and then the week after have our final thing. So I think about three sessions is what I am looking at. I thought it would be fun. Let me export this so I can print it out nicely. Export. I get that and we will, I'm going to print it using my fancy script here. I got my output. There we go. And print out that goes.
So I have have it for my notebook. So now Now I thought I'd talk a little bit about my plans for the next campaign. I have been talking with my players about what we want to do, gave a few different options, but I've got a couple of people who are definitely excited about one of them. So I think I know where we're going to go for our next campaign.
And our next campaign is going to be Midgard in the Dragon Empire. and we are going to be using tales of the valiant as our system and midgard as our setting i was going to pull up my cobalt press and midgard midgard world book we got a table of contents bang and we go to chapter five the dragon empire So my theme for this campaign is going to be Lawrence of Arabia.
I want to Lawrence of Arabia is my primary motivator, but I'm probably going to add some other stuff in there too. And my, the, so the, the, the story, and I'm still studying this. Like I want to really dive into this chapter of, of the Midgard world book. And I want to read, there's a lot of material that exists in various warlock books.
issues of Warlock Magazine that Kobo Press had put out and other sources. So I am going to dive into the whole Dragon Empire sort of stuff and then reshape it a little bit the way I want to reshape it in order for the campaign. So what I dig about the Dragon Empire, Dragon Empire is going to feel a little bit like Dark Sun and
And I don't know if there's another, I mean, I guess like Al-Kadim from Forgotten Realms maybe, but I never played it. So I don't really know anything about it, but I think Wolfgang Bauer wrote stuff for Al-Kadim. So I'm not, I wouldn't be surprised if that stuff is there. So definitely like a Middle Eastern flavor to the setting itself.
The main fantastic elements are that there's a bunch of dragons that actually rule over the whole land. Real big, nasty dragons. But nobody ever really deals with the dragons directly. The dragons don't want to deal with people directly. So they have a puppet governor who... a puppet emperor who rules over it. And it used to be a human who ruled over.
Humans are generally treated less than what are known as the dragon kin. The dragon kin are basically any of the scaled folk. So dragonborns and kobolds and lizard folk and other kind of groups are generally of a higher station than humans and other non-scaled folk. And however, a human was put in charge, the dragons through their manipulation of the people put a human in charge of the empire.
And they were a what do they call what do they call them? So let's see. They have a. A sultan, I think it was a sultana, a woman, a human woman who used to rule over the empire, but has been deposed. So sultana Kazmara Azarbahir used to rule over, but has been deposed. by a new self-proclaimed dread sultan, Azmir al-Sragul, who is a powerful dragonborn who now rules over it.
So there's a shift in the political drive of the area from this one sultana to this new sultan. And everyone kind of wonders, well, how did the dragons, everyone knows the dragons are in charge. How do the dragons feel about it? And the reality is the dragons kind of don't care. But they're probably keeping an eye on it.
And there's this question of, so the fun politics here is there's a question of like, you know, how much of a civil strife does there need to be before the dragons actually get involved or not? Like how long until they do what they do?
Um, meanwhile, you have all of these different sort of city states with their own different governors who are all subordinate to the dread Sultan, but like, you know, they still rule over their own area and there's trade routes and there's conscription for big wars where they go and gather resources from other neighbors, um,
There are, of course, dread cults, secret cults that operate in the area, worshiping weird, strange gods, a lot of dark gods. There's one area that I want to hang on to is the Plateau of Ling, which I think is in this area. I want to sort of draw the Plateau of Ling in there. So you have this sort of Cthulhu-ian spider empire that exists that reaches to the outside.
And my thought for the characters, and, you know, I haven't, I mean, in my head, I haven't built it out much more than this, is the characters begin at a oasis that them and their allies control. And we can among the players and I, we can decide sort of like what's their main drive. Are they a rebellion group? Are they just helping to maintain a way station for travelers that are coming by?
Are they adventurers who dive into the desert to go find treasures? Are they kind of like figuring out how to sift off the top of these empire of the empire so that they can make their own way around?
sort of what's their motivation is something that we can we can toy with i think i already have the first adventure which is going to be the well that they've built it around is starting to get corrupted there's something going on down there in the well and they have to go down into the well and figure out what the corruption is and maybe it's a gas maybe there's a gas that lives down there that tells them stuff but the gas has corrupted the well and they have to you know they're all going to die if they don't corrupt the end this corruption so a nice fun first level adventure
And then we'll build it out from there. I think it could be really fun as sort of a rebellion game where the characters are sort of rebelling against the authoritarian nature of the Dread Sultan and the Dragon Empires. And they're always like have to worry about like, don't wake the dragons. Or maybe we want to wake the dragons, but we want to wake them in a certain way.
And of course, old temples and lost ruins and everything else that makes our D&D games fun, I think will be there. So I think there could be a lot of fun Throwing some Dark Sun in here, throwing some Lords of Arabia sort of stuff in here, throwing some fun political strife among the governors could be here.
One thing about Midgard is Midgard is just, talk about a well, Midgard is just an absolute deep well of lore that you can use to plan all of your games. So I think that that's what we're going to do. From a sourcebook standpoint, I think we're just going to use Tales of the Valiant. Let's see. I wanted to take a look at the player's guide and see if... So let's see. No, that's not what I want.
I'm going to do vertical scrolling, but I want no spreads. There we go. So I wanted to take a look at the lineage and heritage and say, is there enough options that we don't need to include any more? Like, are there Midgardian options? And the big one is, are kobolds a thing? Like, I'd be surprised if kobolds are not a thing. So you can be a kobold. So I think that there's probably enough...
Lineages, so we have beast, yeah, beast kin would definitely help, because you can beast kin into lots of different things. Dwarves, elves, humans, kobolds, orcs, those are all good. Sidrians, mystical beings sighted by creatures of power from different plane of existence, that could be good, star born or plane touched. Small folk, so is that their equivalent of like a halfling?
And then we have heritage, let's look at the various heritages that they have. So we have anointed, cloud heritage, cosmopolitan, cottage, diaspora, fire forged, grove, nomadic, salvager, slayer, stone, supplicant, vexed, and wild lands. So when I think about it, is there any lineage or heritage that For that would make sense for the dragon empire.
That's not really included in here that I really feel like we need to include. But I think my answer is no. I think that there is enough. Oh, that's right. Yeah, there is a lineage. Thank you. There is a lineage and heritage PDF. Let's just take a quick look at it. a supplement of lineage and heritages for, for this that came out. And I think came out right around the same time.
And that has damp here, dryad, eonic, gnoll, goblin, and lizard folk. So I think like, I would be willing to add gnoll and goblin and lizard folk. And, and then I think there's a couple of these other, you know, wastelander and, So, I don't know. I mean, you know, I think having these as additional options is not bad. I don't know that I need them, though.
Because the question is, are these adding to that area or not? Like, a damp here doesn't really, you know... It doesn't really add to it. The dryad doesn't really add to it. The eonic certainly doesn't add to it. The gnoll does. The gnolls, goblins, and lizard folk would work because those specific lineages matter in that setting. And then some of the heritages. It's only 13 pages.
I could print this sucker out and I could just bring it with me and say, hey, these are some other possible options. I think I'd have to look through these to really decide which ones of these lineages and heritages really complement the Dragon Empire setting and which ones do we not bother with. And then I could include those.
But there'd also be something nice of just saying, no, we're only going to play with the stuff that exists inside those books. You don't need anything else. So I would probably say only if you really felt like you didn't have enough from here and you wanted to add some stuff, we can add some stuff from that lineage and heritage book.
But I would say it's probably easier for them to just pick the stuff that exists inside Tales of the Valiant. One of the reasons why we're picking Tales of the Valiant is that I think most of the players own it. A lot of my friends in my Wednesday game back the Kickstarter. So I think there's three or four copies of it already floating around.
And for those that did not, we can share the PDF so that they'll be able to get a hold of the PDF or we can share the book around the table and that can work too. There's also, so Shard, I bought it for Shard. And I also have it, I have it for a few systems, I think. I also have it for Demiplane. I have the book for Demiplane, so I could share that too.
And the Black Flag book is available, so people can certainly pick up Black Flag. And I think people could make a, so I have a game for Tales of the Valiant and we can make characters. So like I made a Tales of the Valiant character. So if people want to build a character with a digital builder, they can do so. I can share this through Shard and they can build their characters out through Shard.
So that's nice that we do actually have a digital character builder for Tales of the Valiant for the people that want it. I will probably still recommend that they use, look, there's a little luck roll. Ooh, that was loud. Oh, that's if you're rerolling your luck. Oh, look, and it auto-filled it in. Really cool, man. Shard's cool.
So yeah, so we'll have that available for us as well, which is nice. But yeah, I think that that is what we're probably going to do. I'm going to talk to my players again about it and we're going to start that in a few weeks. So that gives me a few weeks of time to kind of get my head around it. I'm going to follow my own advice, right?
I'm going to start with the characters and what's around the characters and what's going on there. You know, they were sitting around a well, what's going on with the well, some politics, definitely going to have like the politics of the thing, but I'm not thinking about like, what's the arc of the campaign? Where is it going? What's the whole big thing?
It's like, well, I sort of like the idea of like, okay, on one side, We have, you know, a big factor that's changing the world. And the book has stuff. Like if we look at the Midgard book, I haven't read it yet, but there's a whole section about the kinds of adventures that you can run, right?
Adventures against the dragon empire, assassinated dragon Lord or one of his generals, PCs lead a company in Alpine or open planes combat to repel a Maharadi army. So there's lots of hooks that we can use here. And I'll figure that out, right? I'm going to kind of piece this together, but I'm going to let it grow over time. I don't think my plan is like, here's the whole arc of the adventure.
It's one big story and I already know it. I feel like we're going to start off small and then build up around what's going on here. But it looks like a really fun setting. It's very different than anything that we've run so far. It's very different than other Midgard stuff that I've run. So I'm pretty excited for it. And I like the idea.
I sort of like the idea that it's like all the Kobo Press stuff. It's Midgard on one side and Tales of Valiant on the other. One of my problems, though, is that it seems like Kobo Press has been steering away from Midgard as sort of their default setting and trying to make everything sort of system neutral.
or setting neutral and i really kind of wish they would keep focusing because like man like the southlands book was fantastic i would love to see more of a focus stuff that has direct lore around their stuff but there's plenty of it so like i don't need too much because holy cow you know there's a ton of it in in just the midgard bit a book the midgard book itself is so packed with lore i don't think i'm gonna have any trouble uh finding enough information to fill out a campaign
And I have no idea how long we'll go, right? I'm not even going to fathom a guess. Mostly be how long do we feel? How do we feel about it? Are we enjoying it? You know, all that sort of stuff. But given that it's all Tales of the Valiant, it's brand new, you know, brand new take on 5e, brand new system, brand new classes, subclasses, features, you know, new setting.
I think it's going to have legs for a good while. So I think we're all set. So that is what I'm probably going to run after we are done with our Shadow Dark game. Some people are like, oh, why not do another Shadow Dark game? It's like, oh, I like it, but I'd like to try some other stuff too. And we all bought Tales of Valiant and we want to try it. And I think we all are excited for it.
So I think that's what we're going to do next.
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