The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Haldrin's Tower – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 41 Lazy GM Prep
Fri, 06 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, I go through steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master while preparing for my Sunday role-playing game. In this case, I am running a Shadow Dark campaign set in the Gloaming from Cursed Scroll 1.
Shadow Dark and Cursed Scroll 1 is available by the Arcane Library. It's a fantastic role-playing game. I love it a whole lot. It's a four-time gold Annie award-winning campaign.
rpg and we have been playing it this is i think session 41 so we've been playing it for some time i really dig it and today we are going to prep my session for later later this afternoon if you like the work that i do please check out the city of arches kickstarter we are in the final hours of the city of arches kickstarter by the time you see this video it's only going to be around for a little while longer please consider checking out the sly flourish
city of arches kickstarter you can find a link to it in the show notes you can check out the 42 page sample preview that includes an introduction scenario to the city of arches includes an adventure to run and a and a whole good sample of all the kind of stuff you're going to get in this high fantasy city source book built for your fantasy role-playing games the city of arches is designed so that you can drop it into any existing campaign setting whether it's your own homebrew campaign setting or a published campaign setting it is a city of
Fantasy and adventure and where, what do I say? Marker. A city of high adventure where you can delve deep under the ruins of the city, travel to worlds beyond and fight forces that are trying to take over the city itself. It's a fantastic setting. I've been working on it for two years. Patrons of Sly Flourish have been watching it develop over time and I can't wait to get into your hands.
Please check out the Kickstarter. Again, there's only about nine hours left by the time you're seeing this video, depending on when you're seeing this video. You can check out a link in the show notes below. Last week, our characters made their way back into the gloaming. We started off their last session as they had made it out of the old temple of St.
Taragnus and are now on their way to Haldrin's Tower to recover the third artifact that they need to stop Mugdalblub from destroying the world. That artifact being the Well of Worlds. who they had, they didn't rescue him exactly. They released him and he became a lich. His daughter was killed in front of them, which in front of him, which like nearly destroyed him, probably did destroy him.
And they set him free. And he said, I will return to my tower, meet me there. But he also said some kind of creepy stuff. And we're going to get into the creepy stuff. Like I know that I loved her, but I can't feel it anymore. And like stuff, because now he's a lich, his personality has changed quite a bit.
So they started off, and I knew where we were going to begin, and that was that the Knights of Mugdoblub, these five knights, were going to pursue the characters. And I decided that I was going to roll, I was going to have the players roll for a few different aspects. This is a very old school approach, and I kind of enjoyed it, which was how far away are they?
Roll a d6, and the number on the die is how close or far they are. How aggressive are they currently? Again, 1 to 6, 1 being not very aggressive, 6 being super aggressive.
and then i was going to roll to see which members of the knights of mugdablub were there and i think we only chose i think we rolled a number between two and three that would be there i didn't want to have like all five show up so i think we chose between two and three we rolled on that and then we rolled on which ones showed up and they they did so of the knights of mugdablub that showed up let's take a look at our notes from last time ah where are my knights of mugdablub
Yeah, so the ones that showed up, King Kalash the Reaver showed up, Garavod of Vol showed up, and Windwhisper showed up. So those three, and they were defeated. So only Azshara the Mage and Clovella of Set, the druid, still remain of the five knights of Muggleblub who had been hunting the characters. The characters at this point, they're hitting like seventh, eighth, and ninth level.
They're pretty high level. And their new go-to is they have a wall of force. And so they've been using the wall of force to like entrap one of them so they don't have to face everybody at the same time. And then doing shenanigans like flying over the top of the wall of force and throwing like poison clouds and stuff inside the wall of force.
Which is like cool, but it's beginning to be like a strategy instead of like a fun thing we did one time. So shaking up encounter types so that they can't always just, hey, well, another bad guy, wrap him in a wall of force, throw in a poison cloud and let it go. You know, so, but the way these spells work is that nobody rolls saving throws.
So it's just whether they managed to pull off the spell or not. And a lot of times these characters have pretty good ability scores, so they tend to pull off the spells. But sometimes they lose them and they don't get them at all. So what are you going to do?
It generally means, and it's funny because it's the same lazy trick for dealing with shenanigans like that, is the same trick that we would use in a 5e game, which is more monsters. If you find that the players are coming up with techniques that lock down monsters so they never actually have to face a threat, And you feel like it's starting to wear down the thread of the story.
Like the story, like now it's not dangerous anymore because I can just wall force and poison cloud anything. The way to deal with it is put more monsters in. And in this case, they actually fought five monsters, even though they're facing three. Garavita Vol, they blew him away. They hit him with a fireball and then something else, two big damage spells. And that dropped him really quickly.
He never actually got an attack in. which was funny because he almost wiped an entire group last time. And the players remember that the players are like, you remember that time we only phased him and he almost wiped us all out. He killed, he killed a character, almost killed everybody else. We had to flee.
One of the characters, one of the players is like, didn't we have to fly away on like a flying mattress to get away from that guy? So there was talk about running, but they were kind of trapped on a cliff edge with the guys coming in from all sides. Cause they rolled like a one on the, how close they are and like a six on the aggressive meter, which meant the Knights were right on top of them.
But then they blasted, they had, because I think we had five or six players. We had almost everybody. And they blew away Garavata Vol. They trapped King Kalish and then fought Windwhisper. It was her and they have their wolves too. Then another player managed to charm one of the wolves. And that meant they could sick the wolf on King Kalish, even though he was trapped inside of a wall of force.
Oh, and the wolf was digging a tunnel underneath. I said, like, it'd be three rounds before they dig a tunnel underneath. Then they face King Kalashin here. So it was still a good fight. It was still a hard fight, even though they wiped out, they wiped things out pretty quickly.
But it did bring up a lesson that even at high levels in Shadow Dark, there's still shenanigans that basically trap monsters. So if you have really powerful monsters that you don't want to have trapped, you have to think about the fact that they're going to do a bunch of shenanigans, which they did. Like they did it last time, too, when they fought the dragon. They like hit him in a, you know.
trapped him in a web and then put a poison cloud on him and then did something else they basically just held him in a negative area for the whole battle and you know you got to think about that right because even in even in a lightweight game like shadow dark there's still shenanigans that are going to completely debilitate powerful monsters which is a 5e problem overall right and it's not even a 5e problem that has been a problem
For all of D&D, I think it's very common in many role-playing games that if you have these sort of in-world asymmetric powers like Wall of Force, where it's infinite hit points, then you're going to be able to debilitate certain monsters very easily. So something to consider, especially if you have an arc of the strength.
And again, it's an old-school game, so we don't really worry about having arcs and threat levels and stuff like that. It's like, yeah, but how soon until the game becomes boring because nothing is a threat? Right. And I think eventually, like, you know, even in Shadow Dark, which has this grimdark feeling, when you get to certain higher levels, nothing is a threat.
And you really want that to be the case. Well, then how do you deal with that so that there is still a threat and the threat might be lots of monsters because you can't ball force everything. So that's a consideration. Anyway, so they did that. Then they found a, I did some random rolling of places that they found along the way. I can't remember if I put a list here somewhere.
I have my list of monsters, but I thought I made a list of the potential places that they might find along the way. I guess I didn't have it in my notes last week. And it ended up being a town. I guess I rolled on the list that was inside the Shadow Dark book. And it ended up being a village. So I said there was they found a village where the Knights of Yidris, the Knights of St.
Yidris had basically just burned everybody. They killed everybody in the town. And now the Knights of St. Yidris are fully in league with demons. And it's very clear that they are. They're walking around with rocks like that's a bunch of knights and a bunch of rocks. And they're just pillaging the countryside, right? So they're really bad. So they found the village.
They saw that it had been wiped out. Then they saw that there was a camp of the St. Yidris knights up above. And then they did a, and that was really fun, where they had to decide, how are we going to get into the camp? And like, let's wipe these guys out. And there were like eight or 10 guards and four knights and three vroks that they had to deal with. So it was a good amount of people.
And it was like, you know, let's sneak into the tent and kill the knights while they're sleeping. That'll get rid of a couple of them. And let's deal with the, you know, again, we can wall of force the Vroks so we don't have to face the Vroks right away. And there was lots of different sort of ways to manage what was going on. And they fought them. But one of the characters was, in fact, killed.
I think it was Bild that died.
I think it might have been Bild who was killed. Now we have a new character showing up.
So, yeah, killed by the knights. The knights knocked him down to zero and then one of the knights was getting ready to cut his throat and nobody could get to him in time. And so his throat was cut and that was the end of that. So we begin the session today. Let's go back to our thing here and generate a new session planning template.
I'm using Notion to do my campaign planning as I have for a long time. Notion is very cool. Obsidian is very cool too. I'll probably switch to Obsidian at some point. And we have our 1 September 2024 game. I still love that I have Bram Apples in here. Bram Apples is dead. Morgan is dead. Instead, we have Squee, who is a goblin. No, a kobold wizard. Irina is dead.
I should really update my template. And instead of Irena, we have Hera, half-orc fighter of St. Taragnus. Uralt, the former knight of St. Yidris. And Dazdur, the human witch frog shaman. And Caelum, the wizard. So Uralt, Dazdur, and Caelum have lasted a long time. They've been around for some bit. So our game begins today on the bloody hill of the campsite of the Knights of St. Idris.
Three prisoners who gave up after the night's end were killed. One of them, I was thinking about this last night. I was like, I'm going to do it, right? I'm going to take a scene right out of the thing. One of them begins to convulse, falls down. He bursts open and a marrow fiend bursts out. A marrow fiend, I think, is in Curse Scroll 1 here as a monster, right? Marrow Fiend.
The Marrow Fiend is a level 8, 39 hit points, 2 claw attacks, and sap gout in a near line. Wolfish hulk of razor bone and sinewy muscle. Black marrow tree sap drips from its jaws and gaps in its bony plating. That sounds cool. So we're going to have a marrow fiend burst out. And this is, let's see, marrow fiend is on page 47. Put the page number in our notes so that we can look it up easily.
And I think, again, I just mentioned that they will probably wall, like, oh, wall of force. We'll put a wall of force around that guy. And then it will pace back and forth and it will say terrible things to them. So, and the terrible things might be secrets and clues that we will drop in. So maybe they will, you know, maybe they will speak to this thing and it will tell them dark secrets.
They don't have to necessarily fight it. So, Marrow Fiend. Hey, my mom is here. Hi, mom. Marrow Fiend bursts out of a dude. Ah, dealing with the camp. The journey... To Haldren's Tower. Navigating Haldren's Tower. Haldren the Lich. Recovery of the Well of Worlds. Journey to Bittermold Keep. Facing Mugdlblub.
Finn, or I think we're going to probably have like one scene, like the gods of the gloaming and then the finish. So that is, those bullets right there are not just scenes for today. Those are scenes for the whole rest of the campaign. Like I'm the narrow, we're hitting the narrow part of the campaign where there's not much left for them to do. And that is where I kind of see things.
I see things heading. So Secrets and Clues, a vicious... War between Mugdalblub and Undeluk. Undeluk rages across the Galuming. The two struggle against one another. What else? Haldren has lost his sense of humanity after becoming a Lich. He wonders whether it's better to just let the... and go explore other worlds as Kytheros did.
Haldren standing in as a symbol of Kytheros, I think is a pretty good idea. because that fits the whole Shun the Vile, Kytheros love affair, which is similar to the Gwendolyn-Haldren love affair that created Morrigan. So I think Haldren kind of staying on the side of Kytheros and sort of thinking more of things like how Kytheros thinks of things could be pretty interesting.
Those seeking passage to the realm of the fae have become more frantic and more violent as the cost to make it into, as Titania's cost to enter the realm of the faerie has gone way up. So it's no longer like, hey, bring us a magic item and you can make your way there. It's like, well, which magic items did you bring and how powerful are they and how cool are they?
And so everybody's kind of scrambling about. Most of the artifacts of the gloaming have been recovered and handed over to Titania. She specifically...
seeks i mean the characters have some you know very powerful magic items prophecy the uh the obsidian witch knife the artifacts of memnon and and the artifacts of memnon they got prophecy back by the way they found prophecy stuck in the leg of garavada vol and so they recovered prophecy which they said oh that's great hey we got our magic and back
Only two knights, two of the knights of Mugdoblub remain, but they will not stop until they have destroyed the characters and recovered the Well of Worlds. That's a good secret. Let's look at our last week and see if there's any secrets from there we want to port over. So this is a good one.
In order to save the Gloaming, not only do the characters have to destroy Mugdablub's influence, but convince Undeluk, Almazots, Kytheros that they have done so. We'll keep that one. That one's good. Cosmic battle going on above the Gloaming between Almazots and Mugdablub. We saw that. A small contingent of refugees from Wardenwood have survived and now protect CRISPR. So, well, that's a good one.
I forget why I did that. I don't know if I need that. Okay. I like that. Saint Yidris is out there surrounded by demons. Saint Yidris walks the land surrounded by a small army of demons. That's kind of cool. Oops, I lost track. Mad scramble for the artifacts. We did that.
Lake Fenomir is completely drained now, filled with a growing sentient primordial ooze conglomerate and twisted horrors who come out. So I like that. That's pretty cool. We'll do that. Fenomir Lake. Goblins of Aklaklik left the land and were granted passage to the realm of the fairies. That sounds fun. Hey, our guys made it. Victoria, the werewolf Lord resides in the bone cave along with her pack.
She has been enjoying no longer being hunted and eating the fairy folk who wandered to seek her treasures. That's a good one too. These are good secrets. Let's see. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, plenty of secrets. That's lots of stuff. Lots of things we got going on there.
So we've got our, oh, so do we, yeah, we walked through the characters, except a missing one, but I think we have a new one showing up today. So I'll add that one. Got our strong start. We got our secrets. We've got our scenes. Scenes are well established. We have our secrets and clues. So I think, okay, so for fantastic locations, instead of, we know, we know Holdren's Tower is a big one.
And that's something that we're going to spend some time on today is filling out Holdren's Tower. Okay. I also, I think, I thought I made a random list of, so I have these, this, this random list of monsters. We're going to, we're going to grab that list from last week and we're going to put that in here. And those are monsters they might run into. The werewolves of Victoria, beholder of the.
What's it called? This soupy lake. A Fenmir Beholder. Fenmir. So we've got some random folks that they might run into. We'll just keep that list handy in case we want to roll a random encounter. I think it'll be kind of interesting for them to run into signs of stuff on the way. But after... I don't think I want to have a full encounter. on their journey.
I mean, I can roll for it like we roll normally, but I think it's always interesting when they see the stuff that they've got. NPCs, who would be some interesting NPC? I don't know that I'm going to fill out too many. We obviously have Haldren. But I don't know that I need to build out any other NPCs. I could just roll that. The book's got lots of stuff in it.
So I'm going to kill the NPC section because I don't think we need it. Treasure is the same way. We always roll on the treasure tables. So I don't really need treasure. That's a couple nice quick steps. The idea of like, oh, I can just always do that. Tor Ochie says, do you use 1d8 for monster or another distribution of monster that makes chances of some higher than others? I don't really bother.
So yeah, there's an obvious way you can do that. Like you could do 2d8 and roll 2d4. That's really interesting, but I don't really worry about that for this. I'm happy with just a regular even distribution of any of these monsters. I don't really need to say like, oh, the refugees of Wardenwood and the Mugdalfolk are more likely than the Fenomir Beholder. Sometimes I just pick them anyway.
Like, I don't even roll. I just like, I think, oh, this one sounds like it'll be an interesting encounter and I'll just grab it. So for like these quick random tables that I'm building, I'm happy with an even distribution, just a D8.
But yeah, you can do like between two and 12, like roll two D6 and then your seven eights and was it six, seven and eight are evenly distributed with a bell curve in the middle. I think, is that, no, oh, no, not six, seven, eight. So your seven is your most likely. The interesting ones are when you mix two dice of two different types, you get a flat top curve. This is really interesting.
If you roll a 2D6, well, let's just do this down here. If you do a D6 and a D8, your... seven eight and nine are evenly flat like you're just as likely to hit seven eight or nine as you are you're just as likely to hit either seven or eight or nine so you actually get a flat topped bell curve when you mix dice of two different types which i think is pretty interesting
It's a weird, it's a weird characteristic of rolling two dice of two different numbers that you don't get is if you roll just two D six, the seven is the, you know, the seven is at the peak. When you roll two dice of two different types, you actually shave off that peak. And what you have is a, what, what they, what I call a flat topped bell curve.
pretty interesting the same with a d4 and a d6 if you're a 1d4 plus 1d6 then i think it is is it 4 5 and 6 or is it 5 6 and 7 there is i don't know offhand but i think it's either 4 5 or 6 or 5 6 or 7 is your flat top of a d4 and a d6 i think it's 5 6 and 7 that sounds right i think it's 5 6 and 7 are your flat top your flat top curve if you roll a d4 and a d6 together
That's an interesting characteristic of that. I don't worry about that for this. Cause it's like, Hey, this is just like, I'm only going to roll on it like one time. Right. I don't really, I'm not building a list for other people and I don't worry too much about like the likelihood that one thing happens over another. It's like, nah, they're all, they're all fine. So let's see.
What else do I need? We're going to do Haldron's Tower. So I have a map that I picked out for Haldron's Tower, and that's this guy. So the characters are going to make their way. If we look at the map here, they had come from 1403, and they made their way over the road. And so they're only about a half a day from the lake.
And when they get to the lake, that's when they're going to find Haldron's Tower. And I'm using this Dyson map for Haldren's Tower. And I need to fill in, so there's a couple things, like who are the creatures? So I have like monsters, let's see, we have monsters of, and then we're gonna have monsters of Haldren's Tower. And we'll make a list for this too. And it'll be things like animated armor.
We could do like animated veterans. I don't know if they have animated armor in Shadow Dark. Let's find out what kind of constructs they have. Oops. So angels, yeah, they do have animated armor. Okay. So animated armor are level twos. Those are on page 196. Azirs would be fun. Like Azir followers of Haldoran. And they are on page 197. And what other are these?
199.
222.
227.
237.
The Ten-Eyed Oracle. There's only one of these. We could have some hellhounds. I think I've used them before. I don't know if I have used them before actually. And these are 226. I'd like one more just so I can fill out my D10 list. I don't think he'd have a ton of undead. I don't think he started summoning undead. He could have an oni. An oni might be fun. Page 239.
So I've got some potential inhabitants for Haldren's Tower in my list of monsters. let's talk about what's in the tower so he resides in a throne room in one so that's easy so what i'm going to do is i'm going to write it directly on my i have a paper version of the map and i'm going to write it in pen and then i will take a picture and show it but for now my spectacles For now, let's see.
So one is Haldrin's Throne Room. So there's a couple of chambers. So where is the well? If you notice, there is a central shaft in this map that goes all the way from the bottom all the way to the top. And I'm wondering if that's the well. Like at the bottom in chamber seven is the Well of Worlds.
And then there is a central shaft that they can look through that goes all the way down, but they need to pluck the well of worlds. And, and I like, they can't, they, I think they're going to have to, you know, imagine it's like a, you know, a crepe, a big crepe thing, and you need something to flip it and flop it around that you can't just go grab it.
If you grab it, you'll just be pulled into another world. So I kind of like the idea that there's a central shaft in this chamber where you, you know, when they enter it, they can immediately see that the well goes all the way down. Well, I guess one problem is that's, that that's the way to traverse each of these levels. There's no staircase here, right?
This whole place is you're, you're in, you're, you're expected to travel up this central shaft, right? So it wouldn't make sense that that's where the Well of Worlds is. It could be in this little side chute though, which you would only be able to reach on level four. You can walk around and see it. Three would also, that's how you reach that area in level three. This is really interesting.
I don't know where this thing would be. Then two is where all of these floating earth motes are. And then one is his throne room, which has a little trap door, it looks like, to reach that. So this is tricky. This is a tricky one to figure out. You know, tricky to figure out how to navigate it. And is there any limitations for somebody to say, well, we're just going to skip everything.
Why delve into all of these different places? Let's just get straight to his chamber. That's, you know, that's a consideration. But okay, let's fill out some of these other chambers and we'll figure it out. So I started with Haldron's Tower, Haldron's Throne Room, which is number one. That's way up here. So then over in number two, we have a few things.
So we could have like earth motes of the worlds, earth motes of other worlds. So like each of these earth motes might have like a little floating portal on it that could reach another world. And then that big one, right? There's seven of those things. And then there's that eighth big circle And that could be where the Well of Worlds is, right?
It's sitting there on the ground, like outside and exposed. And then we have a guardian chamber that guards the Well of Worlds, which is also probably protected by like a force barrier. Like you can't just go fly and go grab it. You can see it, but you know, there's like a protective dome. The guard room probably has a way to float up into Holdren's Tower.
So that's how you can get up into Holdren's Tower. The room outside of the guardian room is probably like portraits. Probably shows Gwendolyn and Morgan. That'd be sad. That'll get everybody emotional. Then in area four, we have like the empty feast hall, which probably he hasn't used in a long, long time. That other chamber could be the outer library.
Then we have the secret library or the forbidden library. That'll be that area underneath four. The forbidden library leads to three. What else? So I think he'll have like a, yeah, okay. So this will be a summoning chamber. This will be a laboratory. So he has a laboratory. And that's its own little shaft that is kind of separated from everything else. I think, let's see. So I've got that.
I've got that. I've got that. So let's see. That's four. Let's go back to three. So this will be like the artifacts of Kytheros. Kytheros, because he's a follower of Kytheros. We could have a chamber of the advisors. This sounds kind of cool, which are like heads in jars of former wizards who speak to him. That could be kind of cool, right? They sort of collect the souls of other previous mages.
That could be pretty neat. I think seven, all the way, I'm jumping around a little bit, but seven, all the way at the bottom, I think would be the refuse pit. That could have like an arcane Atiug in it. That might be kind of neat. I'm going to write that down. Arcane Atiug. Imagine an Atiug that eats all of the garbage that comes off of magical experiments.
And so it does like weird spellcasting stuff. So that's pretty cool. What else do I need? I got three more chambers to fill out here. So six is below the, I think this will be his, the study apprentice study. I have a feeling he killed all of his apprentices when he came back. Then an area five over here will be the, like a Mugdalblub war zone.
So what happened here is, this is probably like an entry hall, and muggedleblub creatures tried to break in here and were killed by, probably by like an iron, by golems or something like that, big protective golems. We'll have a kitchen here. Magical kitchen. So, guys gotta eat. So I think that that covers it. I think that that gives me a good map. So here is my scratchy notes for this dungeon.
Starting in the lower, in area seven, we'll go from seven and work our way up. So at the very bottom of this tower is a refuse pit with an arcane atiug. Then we have the apprentice study. The apprentice are probably all dead. Then area five, we have a mugdleblub war zone and a kitchen.
And this is like where some people have broken in and it's got a floaty chamber that can take you down to the other ones. There is a summoning chamber that is offside. You can't actually reach this without going up and then back down again. That's kind of interesting. Four, we have the outer library. There is a walkway to go reach the forbidden library, probably keyed.
And what was that thing there? That was the empty feast hall on the right-hand side. Three, we have a laboratory that goes down to the summoning chamber in the forbidden library. That's sort of his like little secret study. We have the artifacts of Kytheros, sort of like a museum that's going on there. We have the chamber of the advisors that he speaks to.
Then two is the guardian chamber that protects the well of worlds. There's probably, you know, probably powerful creatures in there. Then that was portraits, portraits of his loved ones in the chamber to the left there. And then one is his actual throne room. So I think that that is pretty cool. One thing.
So thinking about navigation and like how you get up and down these places, we could limit it that there were like keys, you know, that there are keys that you had to pick up. So you have his key, which could get anywhere.
The idea would be like you get on a floating, if you go into like one of the floating things, if you're holding the right key, you can go to the right floors, but you couldn't necessarily go to any floor with a given key. So for example, they might have to go down to the refuse pit in order to get the key to be able to go all the way up to the library, right?
And like to get up to, so they're going to enter on five. Then they'll see that there's like a shaft going upwards, but they can't go up it, but they can go down. So they go down and they can pick up an apprentice key. And the apprentice key could take them from five to, can it take them all the way up to the advisor's? So like they have to go down to go back up.
It could be kind of interesting, but we want to think this through because we don't want it to suck. So it's a little, it's a little complicated. I think only Haldren has a, that, that Haldren has the, the key to, to, he has both a key to get past the guardian and the key to get to the chamber of the well of worlds. And it's going to be super well protected.
And you see, you have to talk to Haldren to get that. And that's all the way at the top. The key is, the thing to consider is do we want people to be able to go to any level of this place or they have to go to some levels to get to another one?
One idea is like they have to go down the shaft to the apprentice area, find an apprentice key, and then that can take them up from five to four, the outer library. Is there another key? Can they get all the way up to the advisors? Can they go all the way up from the outer library or from the mug to the outer library, to the advisors, to the portrait room, and then the guardian chamber?
Because they would skip a whole lot otherwise. So I think there might be a fun thing of saying like, no, there is a key. I guess they could have the advisor's key, right? And the advisor's key might be down in the summoning chamber now, right?
they could learn this from, you know, spirits or other things that, that, you know, there, there are, they could, they could figure this out in a few different ways. I think like that, but there are, there are probably three keys. There's a, and this sounds like it's something we need to put in our secrets and clues and probably want to put it right up front.
There are three keys to Haldron's Tower. The apprentice key, the advisor key, and Haldron's key. The apprentice key can take its possessor to levels, to the library. So to four, five to four, up to level four. The advisor key, the advisor key can take them to level two. The, and then Haldren's key can open the chamber of worlds. So let's see the apprentice key.
And then we can put that in location six or seven can take its predecessor up to level four. The advisor key, which can be located in four or five in the summoning chamber or forbidden library in the summoning chamber. So five, the can take the load to Haldron's key carried by Haldron, right? Can open the chamber of worlds. And that's on area two. Okay. Okay. I think that works, right?
So that there's like, it's a little bit like a puzzle, but they want to know that upfront. They want to know that like, oh, there's multiple keys to get around inside Haldron's Tower. And you have to find the right key to be able to get the shaft to take you to the right floor. I think that that's, you know, and that's something that we're going to want to tell the players pretty quickly.
So I think that that makes sense. But I've got my map. So we're all good there. We've got this map is ready to go. I've got my secrets and clues. I'm going to dump the fantastic location section because I don't really need it. I've got monsters of the gloaming. I've got monsters of Holden's tower and I've got my scenes. So we are all set friends.
I want to thank all of you for hanging out with me today while we prepared for my shadow dark role playing game. If you enjoyed this show, please check out the city of arches Kickstarter for a high fantasy city source book for your fantasy RPG. You can find a link down in the show notes. You can download a 42 page sample chapter for it. Please tell your friends all about it.
And with that, we are going to, what do I want to say at the end of this? Thank you so much. Have a great day and get out there and play an RPG.