The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Return to the Gloaming – Shadowdark Gloaming Session 40 Lazy GM Prep
Fri, 30 Aug 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 the game Shadow Dark by Kelsey Dion, the four-time gold Annie Award-winning RPG Shadow Dark.
I am running a campaign set in the Gloaming.
which is the setting from cursed scroll one all of those books are available from arcane library and you can find links to those in the show notes below if you like the work that i do you can check out the city of arches kickstarter the city of arches kickstarter is going on right now it's in its last few days for the kickstarter you can find a link to it in the show notes below you can check out a
42-page sample of the City of Arches, which includes playable scenarios you can run at your table tonight, plus a really awesome sample of all of the awesome stuff you can find in this book. I've been working on this book for two years. It is a high fantasy city source book for your fantasy role-playing games. Very agnostic system.
It can be used with all the various flavors of 5th edition, plus systems like Shadow Dark and others. It is intended to really do a lot of the heavy lifting for you to give you a really fun setting that you can use for. Please check it out. Again, there is a link in the show notes. If you've already backed it, please tell your friends. Please share it on your favorite social media sites.
Let people know that they can get the free sample. Let them go and take a look at it. Take a look at the art. Take a look at the design. Take a look at the incredible cartography we have going on in here. It is a really awesome book. I'm super proud of it. I'm super excited to bring it to you. Please check it out. I missed two games over these past two weeks. It was summer. People were busy.
People had things going on. Kids going to school. All kinds of things happening. So it meant that we did not have enough players. I think we were down. So I was willing to run with three. And we have six. I don't have any on-call players for my Sunday game. We have six regular players. But I'm willing to run with as few as three, which meant it takes four cancellations before we don't have a game.
And for two weeks in a row, I had four cancellations. So that was kind of a bummer. But I'm excited to get back into the game now. I just have to remember what happened. But I kind of do remember what happened. So in our last session of Shadow Dark, the characters had made their way on the Great Lift from the hidden shrine of the Lost, one of the gods of the Lost, whose name I already forgot.
Because the name was forgotten. So it's probably important that I forget it too. So they were in this lower temple. They actually met the god who they had willed into existence by using her name. Talked to her. She mentioned the fact that her sister had killed her. And it was actually two twin temples that were connected by a great big lift. So they took the big lift.
They went up to the upper temple. They wandered around the upper temple. I don't know if they I can't remember if they met anybody important or anything else kind of happened there. But then they made their way outside of the temple, which they knew was the lair of a great big dragon. That was a named a named dragon. And this is over in area 1403 in our in our hex map, which is the mud pit.
And it was the swamp dragon Ixodane slithers in the dark morass. And I thought, you know, in one of those shows of like, hey, the world has changed while you've been off doing your stuff down in the in the caverns below. I said that Ixodain was actually killed. Ixodain fought with Varosbane, the Mugdalblub ooze dragon.
This is a dragon that the characters had actually cursed with Mugdalblub's curse because one of the player, one of the characters, Vayne, had been cursed by Mugdalblub and was slowly turning into Mugdalblub stuff. His bones were getting bendy. His skin was getting kind of translucent. He was in a bad state. And the characters were all, this is a long time ago, very early in the campaign.
And the characters were all very eager to kind of get a cure for him, plus the cure for other people. But then he back talked a dragon who gave him mouth to mouth with chlorine gas and completely liquidated his insides with chlorine gas and then came back and had a big sore on his lip. And they went, Hey, what's that? He goes, Oh man, what's that from?
And they go, Oh, you, you should have known that before you gave him mouth to mouth with the chlorine gas, because he was cursed with muggle blob stuff. And he's like, Oh man. And then he, then they said like, yeah, we were on our way to get a cure. He's like, how can I help? And they're like, can we, you know, fly us there? He's like, sure. And so they had like the never ending story.
This is long ago, right? This is many months ago. So they had the never ending, Hey, we're riding on a big dragon. And the dragon's like, I got to get you guys in that cure. So they went down and then they got involved in a bunch of stuff. I was getting the cure. They found the cure. which is a sentient ooze named CRISPR.
And if you send somebody through CRISPR, when they come out the other side, they are cured of Mugdal stuff. And then they came outside and they saw all of the dragon scales had been shed and the dragon was gone. And there was big piles of like oozy stuff. And they're like, uh-oh. We don't think we made it in time. I rolled a die. This is in the, hey, roll a die and see how things are going.
My diceless, this is my, here's your trick for the day. You ready for your trick today? I like, I think I've talked about this before, but I'm going to talk about it again, which is the table-less oracle die. Okay. The table is Oracle die. I like this because it's kind of a nice, fun, lazy trick. Take a die and roll, roll it.
And depending on how high it is, the more extreme the result, the lower it is, the less extreme the result. And you can use it for all kinds of things. So you can use it for attitudes, for people. You can use it for distance, obviously, like the lower you roll, the closer they are, the further you roll, the further away they are.
attitude i think i already mentioned extreme of weather conditions like how extreme of the weather conditions you can roll a die so you can use it for all different kinds like how hard an encounter is going to be like you know roll a die and if it rolls low it's a pretty easy encounter if it's high it's a harder encounter and in this case it was like well how far has mugdle blub's curse spread on varro's bane he's called varro's bane now because he killed varro with the mouth the mouth of the chlorine gas and i rolled a die it was like an 18 out of 20 and i'm like wow it progressed super quick in this dragon
So when they came out, the dragon had already been turned into Mugdal stuff and flew away. They later ran into him flying over an area where there was a big battle going on between the forces of, what is it called? The other people that are taking over the world, whose name I forget. The Marrow, the Marrow Folk, right? So there's Marrow Folk and Mugdal Blub Folk.
The Marrow Folk are all kind of weird and spiny and the Mugdal Blub Folk are all kind of oozy. And they were dealing with a bunch of marrow folk, but then the Varosbane flew over and breathed on them this weird ooze breath that liquidated them. And they were like, wow, that was great. They actually baited him to go do so, which worked. Then they went and they did all their other stuff.
Then they came out and they came to the mud pit and Ixodain was dead already because it had been in a battle with Varosbane. And then when they came up expecting to face Ixodain, they instead faced Varosbane and And they defeated him and they defeated him with a bunch of trickery.
They managed to like pin him down inside of a like a big gas cloud of I think it was like a poison gas cloud and it like ate him away and they're very worried like is this even going to work and it did and he managed to get a few swipes on them. And I did some very non-OSR style. You know what? I'm going to give him an extra action or two because he's gotten totally pinned down.
He can't do anything. So I'm going to let him breathe sooner than he normally can. And I think he did like a claw and a breath. I think they use like a series of things like web and they managed to pin him down in a poison cloud and then stay the hell away from him. And it worked. He did get the breath weapon on a couple of people, but he didn't knock anybody. He didn't knock anybody down.
I think it was both cool that they use really cool techniques to do so. But also you're like, did that really feel like a dragon fight or not? but they were happy with it. So I'm happy with it. And again, the OSR way is like, if you come up with some trickery to defeat a boss, that's how you defeated the boss, right? Cause if you're facing these things head on, they're going to kill you.
Like, that's one thing about like a shadow dark dragon. I think I was just, you know, I was just pulling up a regular dragon stat block and re-skinning it with the, with the ooze stuff. But I think the reality is like, it doesn't matter what level you are. Like these, these dragons are going to kill you, right? If you don't have trickery, they're going to kill you. Let's see, where's our dragons?
dragons so i don't remember which one of these i used which one of the dragon stat blocks i used but like you know a fire dragon 80 hit points four attacks plus 11 2d 12 so he's doing an average of 11 damage per hit 11 to hit and can or or can breathe fire and it's 60 10 damage for fire Right. So, you know, these guys are really hard. And like, if you don't, I mean, you know, level 17, right.
That's, you know, seven levels higher than the maximum level of characters. And recall, they only ever get one attack. The players do not scale. Characters don't scale the same way. They only really ever get one attack. So they need their trickery if they're ever going to defeat some of these big guys. So the fact that they did work fine.
So we ended with them on or nearby the cleft where they had defeated. Now they had two dead dragons. I think they got some loot from it. Or they got some experience, certainly, for defeating Varro's Bane. And now they're kind of on the next path. And so the journey right now, the storyline of the adventure from here on out is pretty narrow.
We're getting to the pointy end of the yam-shaped adventure. I'm going to create a new session here. I'm using Notion to do my campaign planning. If you want to learn more about Notion, you can find a link in the show notes. And wow, these characters are way off. I'll tell you that. Morgan's been dead for a while now. I think Irina is dead too. Uralt is still around. Bram Apples is dead.
So three of those six characters are dead. We've lost a lot of characters, by the way. So, but so, so we, I'm going to jump into scenes because scenes is like, okay, what's the outline of the rest of the campaign and the, so facing the first wave of the writers of Mugdoblub. I think we have a link here. Are they the Knights? Yeah, the Knights of Mugdalblub.
We'll change that to the Knights of Mugdalblub. Then journey to Haldron's Tower. Recover the Well of Worlds. I guess we're going to have Traverse Haldron's Tower. Recover the Well of Worlds. Journey to Bittermold Keep. Face Mugdalblub. Use the three artifacts. Save the Gloaming.
They're probably, so there's little, probably like little sub bits into this general, this general thing, which is they still need to convince, you know, in order to save, I guess this is like a secret, right? In order to save the gloaming, not only do they have to destroy Mugdoblub's influence, but convince Undeluk, Almazots, and Kytheros that they have done so.
Now, that could just be like an epilogue, right? But like, if they want to stop Almazots from destroying the entire planet, they're going to have to convince... Maybe. I mean... I don't know. We're going to say there is a cosmic battle going on above the gloaming between Almazats and Magdalblub. And I think they can see it in the sky. People can see it in the sky.
A small, I'm going right into the secrets, contingent of refugees. And what's the name of that? What's the name of the town? warden would have survived and brought and now and now protect crisper the anti mugdle blob cure what else is going on up above? So, so I've got my, I've got the general scenes. Oh, let's see. Underlook. Elizabeth asks if this is a big battle going on in the sky.
It is a big battle going on in the sky. My idea, I think I already described it last session that when they came out of the cave and they looked up, they saw that the teeth of Mugdalblub are now like 45 degrees up in the sky. So it's like mountains have surrounded everything and you can see them in the sky.
Every direction you look, you see teeth that are closing in and they're about halfway up Mugdalblub. So 50% of the sky is overtaken with these giant teeth. But the other 50% is this swirling violet scape of weird slimy tentacles and big eyes that are peering down. And the tentacles are wrapping around some of the teeth and pushing it.
So there's a celestial battle between... Imagine an enormous sky-shaped gibbering mouther. The sky is filled with a giant gibbering mouther. Which is a little advanced for a creature that wants to... You know, like Mugdoblub doesn't evolve, right? It devolves down to ooze. But like, so why? So gibbering mouth would actually be a pretty complicated creature for Mugdoblub.
But maybe Mugdoblub's experimenting with some like half states. I think that could be fun. Mugdoblub is experimenting with half state creatures born of the void and of mortality. And I think, for example, beholders. I kind of want to run a beholder in my game. I think we're going to have a beholder somewhere in the future. I want to see what that does. What else do we have?
What other information could they learn about while they're wandering the countryside of the gloaming desert? What's happened to the knights? So the knights, let's see, what were they called? The knights of St. St. What? It wasn't St. Taragnas. St. Yidris. The knights of St. Yidris have given up all pretense that they're not in league with demons and now march alongside demons in the countryside.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
As is always, the last three secrets are the hard ones, but they usually come up with the most interesting stuff. Is there any other... So we know that the lake, Lake Fenomir, what's it called, Fenomir, is completely drained. Now filled with a growing, sentient...
ooze conglomerate i can't spell and twisted horrors come out of it so it's like an abyssal terrible like abyssal you know like when we talk about how demons kind of rise out of the abyssal ooze a primordial ooze that is that's where that's what's happening like anything else that we have let's see a hag was killed twice so she's certainly gone
Anything going on with any of the other major factions? We already know that the other village is completely destroyed. Do we want Morrigan and Gwendolyn to be walking along? I don't know. We'll probably keep them in our back pocket. They were both killed, but they could still be around. Any other places that they've been? I think the goblins of Aklaklik.
1003.
What is 1003? Cave. Oh, the werewolf named Victoria resides in the cave. It stinks of wet fur, rancid meat. So there's a, this could be a fun one. Victoria, the werewolf lord, resides in Bone Cave along with her pack. She's been enjoying eating. She's been enjoying no longer being hunted and eating the fairy folk who wander around. Seeking, cool.
So we got a good pile of secrets and clues here for today's game. Now, one thing I want to do, so we have our monster section. What I'm actually going to do is build a little bit of a random encounter table here that's sort of based now on, that's based on the, you know, some of the secrets and based on what's changed in the gloaming.
We have, I definitely want to put a beholder on there because I want them to like wander around and face a beholder. That sounds fun. Knights. Plus Demons of St. Yidris. That's a good one. Refugees of Bitter... What's it called? Wardenwood. Mugdalfolk. And they could be either passive or aggressive. Knights of Mugdalfolk. Very dangerous.
We have werewolves, frantic fairy folk, marrow wolves, and knights. That feels pretty good. Let's see. Let's just go through our secrets and see if there's any other. And then this is one as well where we can kind of roll a die to see like how powerful the group is. So it might be a smaller group. It might be a larger group. We'll just roll a die and it'll kind of lead us in that direction or not.
treasure we do randomly so we're not going to worry about treasure npcs i know i want crisper on there we will eventually have haldren but there was some npcs from way back that i'd like to take a look at see if i have them here in my npc list Matilda Bower is somebody they knew. That's the Wardenwood Elder. We're going to have her still around. Any other important NPCs?
Danelle Corent would be fun to bring back. He's the guy they first met. The wayward bandit of the tower. I think that's good. So that's fine for NPCs. Fantastic locations.
So we could roll some up between, so because they're doing a fair bit of travel here, and if we look at it, it'd be kind of fun to have like, I don't know, a handful of fantastic locations they might run into while they're traveling. This is actually not far. Like they should be, like I want them to be able to get to Haldrin's Tower today.
So I'd like to maybe have a couple of encounters along the way. you know, a couple of monuments that they could find. And we'll say like the traveling is a little harder, staying out of the way of stuff is a little harder, but I think it would be fun to have some other monuments. Let's take a look at the book and see what kind of materials it's got available for us to build kind of fun monuments.
So we have site types and cataclysms. Here we go, points of interest. Let me get my dice. Oh, I have a big die. I'm getting my die, it's a D20. So points of interest, we'll roll a couple. One is 19, a barbarian camp. So we can, and we can kind of decide like what happened there. Could be fun. Whoops. Roll another one. One, a small tower.
And what we can do is sort of like we can roll like the small tower and then roll, you know, do a couple of rolls like on that monster table and stuff like that. I think we have a faction list though. Let's take a look. I'm pretty sure I wrote a faction list that I could roll on. Random list of factions. Five. The Knights of St. Yidris. So we could have the camp of the Knights of St. Yidris.
And then the tower could be Aklaklik. Eh. Aklaklik's too far away. Five. I already rewrote Knights of St. Yidris. I'm going to do that again. Twenty. The Lost. We just did The Lost. I'm going to do that again. Thirteen. St. Taragnus. We just did St. Taragnus as well. Let's do somebody else, man. The Green Knights. So Tower of the Green. Small Tower of the Green Knights. Let's roll a couple more.
We'll do like four sites just so I have some handy. 10 is a town. Small village. We'll have a small village because it would have been on the map otherwise. A small village of 14 of Gidi. And let's roll another. Two, a fortified keep connected to a large tomb. I like that. That sounds fun. Dungeons. I love dungeons. Who's that connected to? Nine. Almazots. Perhaps it came from another world.
So I've got that. I've got that. I don't have a strong start. I'm doing like everything in reverse order. Isn't that crazy? Snack Daniel says, I played in Shadow Dark. Much needed reminder that giving the players more information than you probably think is a really benefit, especially at the outset of the answer.
There's nothing worse than the players stopping in the middle of the game and asking each other, why are we doing this? That's not the worst thing. The worst is not having an answer to that question. I think it's totally fine if the players say, why are we doing this again? And then one of the other players is, because we need to get the skull.
If we don't get the skull, we're not going to be able to use the podium. We can't use the podium. We're not going to get the thing. As long as there's an answer to that question, you're okay. Because sometimes the players are going to forget. But it's when there is no answer to that, that's bad. Yeah, goals are important. Goals are one of the things that are really important.
I wanted to get my notes because I want to see if I had the character names on here. So Irina is dead. So we have Hera. Hera is a new half-orc fighter of Saint Taragnus. We also have Squee, who is a kobold wizard. And let's see. Irina's dead. Uralt, Dazdar, and Caelum. Uralt, Dazdar, Caelum. We're missing somebody. Somebody died. And I don't know who. And I don't have it in my notes. That's bad.
I don't even know all the characters, much less have, like, background of all the characters.
so i don't know past mike shea not doing his job i wrote it like on an index card and threw it away so you're all former knight of saint yidris heavy in arms and now is a follower of the goddess who is i'm trying to remember the name of the goddess it's been too long and i don't have it in my old notes oh well
So I think the coming of the Knights of Magna bub So let's see how many nights could there be I think up to potentially three nights So we will roll. Let's see probably between two and three So that's what a d4 plus one one d2 plus one and it is three nights You know what, I might have people roll this at the game, because I think that'd be more fun.
Like, I'm gonna make them, they can, you know, and I'll tell them. So, one, how many knights And it's 1D2 plus one. So between two and three. How far away? 1D6. How aggressive? 1D6. Which ones? And for that, I need a list. So let's go get my Knights of Muggleblub. They're all still around. So we will roll to see which ones are around.
And that will be our, the Knights of Muggleblub heard the call, heard Varos Bane's call. They ride on Direwolves. And let's take a look at the Direwolves. Monsters, Direwolf, Wolf, Dire. Page 264. Except for Garavad of Val. rides a, do they have hellhounds? We might do a winter wolf. I think we're gonna do a winter wolf, because they're huge. But it's a fire, a flamey winter wolf. Cool, all right.
So that's my strong start. I know the characters, except for one of them, because he died. Got a strong start. I've got scenes, I got secrets, I got locations, I got NPCs, and I've got monsters. I think I am all set. Friends, I want to thank all of you for hanging out with me today while I prepared for my Shadow Dark game.
If you enjoyed this show, again, please check out the City of Arches Kickstarter. It's going on right now. It's ending very soon. It is an awesome book. I think you're really going to like it. And if you want to find out if you like it, check out the 42-page sample. There's no reason not to check that out. It's one single click. You don't have to sign up. All you have to do is check it out.
But I think you're going to love it, and I really hope you'll support this project of mine. It's really, really going to be great. Thank you all so much. Have a great day, and get out there and play an RPG.