The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Shadowdark Gloaming Conclusion
Fri, 18 Oct 2024
Mike prepares for his Shadowdark RPG campaign, the Gloaming! Visit the Sly Flourish Blog Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books Shadowdark RPG
Hey friends, it's your pal Mike Shea from Sly Flourish. Today, we are going to talk about the end of my Shadow Dark Gloaming campaign. For about the last year, over about 47, 46 or 47 sessions, something like that, I have run a long campaign using the Shadow Dark RPG
produced by Kelsey Dion over at Arcane Library using the Gloaming, which is a setting from Cursed Scroll 1, one of the three cursed scrolls that exist for Shadow Dark that are sort of like mini zines that include new character options and new monsters and, more importantly for me, a new mini setting to use.
So today, we're going to dive into what the last session of my game was like and talk about the campaign itself. In another video, I'm going to talk about my one-year experience as having run Shadow Dark RPG itself. So this video, we're going to talk about the campaign itself. We're going to talk about the gloaming.
We're going to talk about how that whole campaign sort of came about and evolved over time. And then in another video, if you are interested in specifically, hey, what did I learn? What are my experiences having run the Shadow Dark RPG for basically an entire year? I'm going to put that together in a separate video.
This show, like all of the work of Sly Flourish, is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish. Patrons get access to all kinds of tips, tools, tricks, campaign books, adventures, and other things to help them run their tabletop role-playing games. They also have access to the awesome Sly Flourish lazy DM community over on Discord. And they help me put on shows like this.
To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your support. It's done! Our campaign is over, and miraculously, I managed to get all six players to the table for our final game. It took some work. I don't normally have to do a lot of scheduling for my games because I generally will run with whoever happens to be there up to about three players. So we have six regular players.
I don't actually have any. I often talk about the six plus two. You have six regular players and two on-call players. I don't actually have any on-call players for my Sunday game. But that's mostly because the six players are very consistent. It's very rare when we're not able to make it.
If it was more rare, if more people weren't going to be there, I would probably add a couple of on-call players. But I haven't gotten around to it. And now we have completed it. So... But for the finale, I wanted to try to get as many people there as I could. And I, you know, times are hard with getting everybody to the table. So I set up like a big Google calendar thing.
And it looked like for a while there that in two months we weren't going to get everybody there. And I was like, well, then we're going with whoever we can get. Sorry, somebody's going to miss out. And I wanted to reach out to the people that weren't going to be there and say, hey, I know this kind of sucks. You know, are you OK if we don't have it there?
And then what they did, it said, you know what, I'll change my schedule around. So I had two people that changed their schedules around in order to be able to make it for our final game. And so therefore, huzzah, we were able to get all six players to the game and had our finale for the Shadow Dark Gloaming campaign. So I'm going to take a look.
We're going to talk about the final session and what happened. And then we're going to kind of stretch back and talk a bit about the campaign itself and how it evolved and things that occurred and all that sort of stuff. So it's going to be kind of a fun retrospective look at it. So we had all six players. And actually, we'll go back to the actual characters here.
And the final six characters were Dazdar, Caelum, Uralt, Squee, Scroin, and Hera. Those were the six characters who made it. Nobody died in the final session of the game, which was good. And actually, they had kind of an easy time with it. And that'll be something that I talk about when I talk about my Shadow Dark retrospective. We're going to talk about, like...
Even at high levels, it turns out that the characters, even in Shadow Dark, it turns out that high-level characters have so much capability that even when you throw the kitchen sink at them, they can still get through pretty easily. So we had those characters, and in the last session of the game, and I was pretty happy with how I set this up.
I knew that we were just going to start with a great big fight, and then there was going to be some decisions and choices about Mugdoblub, and then some conclusions. That was really what I wanted to do. And so when I talk about yam-shaped...
adventures yam shaped campaigns where they start with a clear focus at the beginning of a campaign you know exactly what the first session is going to be like you know what they're what's going to be in front of them and then it expands outwards and now you start to get into like i don't know what choices are they going to make i don't know where they're going to go i don't know what's going to happen and then you narrow back down to that the bottom pointy bit of the yam at the end where you have like they are going to face the knights of mugdle blood
One of the things I struggled with a little bit was the idea, and I talked about this over on the Shadow Dark Discord server, was I was really setting up this big final battle the same way that I would have set up a more heroic fantasy 5e style big boss fight. Because I wanted to kind of have that conclusion. So there wasn't really an opportunity, like they're not wandering in.
They're not, you know, one of the kind of old school style things is all fights are dangerous, right? And the characters, therefore, might have multiple ways that they can deal with it because fighting is a failure state in most OSR games.
If you end up fighting something, that's kind of the failure state for it, which is not the case, in my opinion, with 5e and more heroic fantasy RPGs where fighting is a big core pillar of the game. And if you're not doing that, you're probably going to be bored because you kind of want to have fights from time to time.
And I knew like, okay, well, in this case, they're going to be facing off against the final Knights of Mugdalblub. And I was, you know, so I was trying to think like, is there a way that they could like negotiate their way out of this or ways that they could get around this and not have to fight the Knights?
And maybe there could have been something where like they could have come up with crafty ways to approach Mugdalblub without dealing with the Knights. But I was also like, you know, they want to fight the Knights. Like deep down, they want to do it. And deep down, we kind of want that to be the conclusion. We want to have that sort of big dramatic arc.
And I know that it's sort of not of the same style as the rest of the game, but you still want to have that moment for a campaign. At least I've still wanted to have that moment for a campaign. And in the end, it worked out fine. They had their great big fight, and everything worked out. The interesting bit was how easily they were able to deal with that big fight.
Like, when I set it up, I was like, you know what I'm going to have? Is I'm going to have two really high-level monsters. Koavila of Set and Azshara the Archmage. And Azshara was a true Archmage, and Koavila of Set was a Marilith. So I think the Marilith is, like, you know, pretty high-level monsters. And the Archmage is pretty high level. And then I threw 18 other monsters at them.
Six characters, 18 monsters. 6 Mugna Blub Ooze Knights, which are regular knights, and 12 Grey Oozes. And I did this because, and then again, this is following 5e style stuff. I know there's a bunch of Shadow Dark people who are probably raising their fist and shaking it at the sky.
And it was because I know that the characters can handle lots of guys, and they have lots of crowd control that they can do. So if I throw 18 monsters, that's lots of opportunities for them to use crowd control and deal with it. And they did. So I set it up. I kind of drew out a map. I used zones in the map to kind of say, here's a zone, here's a zone, here's a zone, and here's a zone.
It was kind of four big zones. And that way I could say, like, each zone is like a near distance to themselves, but two zones across is sort of a double near. So, you know, that way we knew, like, hey, whatever effect you're going to do is really only if it's a near-sized area, it's really only going to affect people that are inside that one near-sized area.
And that worked out pretty well, using that sort of zone-based approach of, like, what are the near-sized areas, particularly when we had 20 monsters and six characters. It's 26 different actors on a map, using the idea of drawing out big zones. And I gave—I fell back to my old tricks of, like, giving each zone a name.
So we had, like, the four zones were, like, the Cliffs of Mugdoblub was to the north, and— And we had like the melting monolith was to the west. The field of bones was to the east. And I forget what the, you know, tree of woe or something. I don't remember what it was. It wasn't the tree of woe, but it could have been a tree of woe. It was where the character started.
So you had sort of these four adjacent near sized areas. And then a double near could take you to one. You can move anywhere inside a near. A double near would take two and so on. That way it was a little bit of a bigger area. And there was more opportunity to make it clear what you're going to be able to affect when you're doing these big areas of effect and stuff like that.
So, and we, you know, I started off where like the, you know, an interesting fun bit was the two remaining Knights of Mugdalblub. And then we had the Squires of Mugdalblub, which are, you know, are Ooze Knights, but they were considered Squires. One of the interesting things was the Knights of Mugdalblub kind of told the players, told the characters, Mugdalblub doesn't understand deception.
But we do. And we know you're not out for his best benefit. We followed you across the lands. We know you're up to no good. And we're going to stop you here. Mugnallblub still thinks you're doing Mugnallblub's work. We know that that's wrong. And that's why we're going to stop you here right now. We're going to take your artifacts. We're going to give Mugnallblub what he wants.
And we're going to fight. So that was kind of a fun, interesting bit. And then the battle happened, and even with 20 monsters on the table, the characters really had an easy time. And they had an easy time because of two specific things that they were able to do.
One was that they had a sort of a swarm, I don't even know exactly what the power was, but some kind of insect swarm sort of ability that did a bunch of damage to creatures within an area and blinded them. And they were able to continually get that on top of Clovilla of Set, the Marilith, which meant the Marilith has six attacks, but all of them are a disadvantage.
And the characters had pretty high armor class, which means I think she rolled about 18 attack rolls and hit three times for 1d8. So she was very ineffective with the swarming ability that was on her. And part of that was like how I was playing it, too. I figured that if you are blinded by a swarm initially, that you would at least be blinded on your turn.
So because I thought it would be a little cheesy if she could just walk out of the swarm and not be blinded anymore, which kind of makes sense. Because it is sort of an area of effect.
If I was doing that again and I had the opportunity to talk to the player about it before we started doing it, I would probably say, hey, at least certain creatures when they leave the area are not going to be blinded when they're outside of the area. So they don't get the blind effect the whole time. But they got the blind effect.
But I had ruled... This is one of those where I had ruled it one way earlier, so I was going to stick with that. But that meant that that ability in particular is really powerful because it meant you could blind them. But it was only for one round, except they kept doing it over and over again. And they kept succeeding on their checks.
One of the things I found is with all of the different kind of character abilities they had and spell specializations and things, they almost... And luck points. They never missed any of their spell rolls. They managed to nail all their spell rolls.
and that was pretty interesting so the example is as characters level up they have an easier time casting their spells which means they're effective against the monsters but it doesn't matter if the monsters are big or small they're always going to be affected because there's no saving throws monsters don't roll saving throws which means monsters don't get benefits Only certain monsters.
There are particular monsters that have the equivalent of magic resistance, where you have to roll the equivalent of a hard check in order to get a spell to land on them. Those are not common. There are not a lot of those kinds of monsters. And in fact, the two big monsters that I decided to use didn't have that. I could have given that to them.
And if I go back, if I'd known what was going to happen, I might have given them those abilities. The other one is that monster spellcasters... can fail their checks to make their own spells. And that's because that is the only check that actually can affect a character. So the example is the Archmage.
If we look at the Archmage here... So the Archmage is a level 10 creature, 44 hit points, everything else. But all of their spell effects have checks, right? Deathbolt, DC 15. Enravate, DC 14. I failed every check. So she got four rolls. And I think now one thing I screwed up on was that I used her intelligence bonus and I didn't see the spell bonus of seven.
But I think only one of those spells might have worked because I rolled like threes and fours on everything. And it meant that she was completely ineffective. She did nothing. Right. She was kind of the main boss there. for this whole fight, and because I rolled poorly, she didn't manage to do anything at all.
And you take that, that's kind of different than a boss fight might be in traditional 5e, where even if they're ineffective, like people are saving for half damage, and they usually have other, they have enough action economy to be able to hold their own. Now, you might not say, well, an Archmage is not really intended to be kind of a boss monster in Shadow Dark. I just kind of picked a stat block.
And also, by the way, she was one of 20 other monsters that are on the table. But she was kind of a big one. And I, as a GM, was disappointed that this creature who I'd been talking about for months and who they had been worried about pulled four spell attacks and missed every one of her spell attacks. I did give her the Mithril Skin automatically.
Like, I had her automatically have some of these things so that she could do it. I could have had her. And if I, if I was, again, if I was going back in time, one of the things I would do is some of her abilities, like I had her, I gave her some of these abilities inherently. She could fly automatically.
She had mithril skin was gave her a high AC and I could have used void step and it would have been pretty fun for her to be able to pull void steps and do stuff. But I tried like fireblasting. Oh, and the other one was I assumed that when she tried it and failed that she lost it. And I don't know if that's exactly how it's intended, but I don't know that it describes it any differently.
And I was like, well, I don't know that for them, they wouldn't lose it the otherwise. And then I said it out loud. And once you say it out loud, well, now it's true. So I said, like, she tried to do an enrivate on somebody. Or she tried to do a Fire Blast first, because I think having her do Fire Blast would have worked better. And she lost it, and then she didn't have anything.
So then I'm like, well, I guess I'm going to pull some of these other things off. But it didn't matter, because she never actually got any of the roles anyway. So that was disappointing for me. And again, sort of like a struggle of monster design in Shadow Dark, just crazy.
clashing up against and crashing up against my own perceptions of 5e monster design where i want bosses to be effective regardless of their good or bad roles right like even if a boss rolls like all terrible roles i still want them to be doing something on their on their turn But it's happened to me in 5e.
I have a bad, you know, I have bad experiences with boss fights almost exclusively for 30 years, right? Like the number of times I've had boss battles work really, really well seem less to me than the number of boss battles that I always have some kind of disappointing thing or it didn't go exactly like I wanted. So that's not exactly there. The players I don't think minded.
I didn't have anybody say, well, that was anticlimactic. Now, a lot of it was the complications of the battle was tactically interesting for them. So how do we manage to make sure that the 12 gray oozes aren't going to swarm us and beat the crap out of us? So there was a lot of crafty wall of force work. There was a lot of crafty like other spells that they had.
The ooze knights could be mind-controlled. So the player who really loves mind-controlling stuff, I made it clear to him, you're not going to be able to mind-control Shara or Clovilla, but you can almost certainly hit the knights. And he was like, ah, okay, and I just told him that, right?
So that way he wasn't wasting spells and that he wasn't disappointed and that we're in the final battle of the game and he's not doing anything effectively because he thought, because, you know, like many players, and this is a thing that's true with all the players I've played with, whenever they have a save or suck, they always want to put the save or suck on the biggest guy on the table.
And it's better to say, you're not going to be able to do it on him. You can do it in these other guys, but you can't do it on him. Then it is to have them fail and then they feel bad or let them succeed or give them like, oh, it's disadvantage. Oh, you still did it. Now you mind control the archmage and now they're fireballing their own people.
And then that's like, well, that battle was even more anticlimactic. So that worked well, that throwing a lot of monsters and using these monsters as lightning rods so that the characters could use all of the capabilities that they had been building up on for the past year. That part worked well. The battle took a while.
It was, I think, more than an hour for a Shadow Dark battle, which is a really long time for a Shadow Dark battle. But the players came out. I wouldn't say unscathed. They got hit. But I don't know that anybody was really hurt. Nobody dropped. And I don't know that anybody really lost a lot. Now, one thing is, like, I did give them, like, 30 experience points.
for facing off against the two Knights of Magdalblub and seeing what happened with Magdalblub themselves. I gave them a bunch of experience points. So they leveled right beforehand because I was like, this is our last chance to level. And a couple people leveled right away and then rolled and rolled a one on their hit points. So they got one hit point for their level. And they had that big battle.
So the things that worked well, if we're going to take any experiences from this, the things that worked really well for the battle was using zones so that the players knew what areas of effect their stuff could use and separating out this big area into four zones and clarifying what they could do in those four zones mechanically. That part of it worked really well.
A little different than like, again, the sort of typical Shadow Dark style, but I thought it worked very well. And by the way, that can work well in lots of your 5e games. It doesn't just have to be a game like Shadow Dark that uses abstract maps. You can do the same thing. You can do that sort of zone-based idea when you're doing boss fights for your 5e area.
Think about the big areas and then say you're only going to be able to affect the creatures that are inside that area. There's always that tricky bit of like, well, that guy's right on the edge of the area. Can I just make a new area that combines these two? And you kind of want to say no.
Or I'll just shove them into the one that... I'll just move the monster into the one that you want so that we can still stick to the borders of the zones. There's always this... All the battle... They always say that every battle takes place on the edge of a map. Well, when you do zone-based combat, every battle's on the edge of a zone.
And then there's arguments about whether or not that... Can I... But he's right on the edge! Can't I just move it one foot over? No, you can't. But generally speaking, the zone-based stuff worked well.
The other thing that worked well is hurling the kitchen sink of monsters at them gave the players lots of opportunity to have to separate out and charm and crowd control lots of dudes around them, and then blast them with big stuff where they could kill a whole bunch at once. That worked really well. It would have sucked if I'd only had, like, the two Ashara and Clovilla and, like, four knights.
which would have been a more reasonable fight, would have been far faster and they would have just steamrolled through it. So having so many monsters, you know, six Grey Oozes in one zone, six Grey Oozes in another, two Knights in two zones and two Knights in another zone and then the two bosses, and then they could drop their areas of effect.
That sort of tactically, doing like tactical combat in Shadow Dark is sort of not the style, but it did give players, like the players were very interested and they were talking about it together and they were figuring out their tactics and they were worried. And then they pulled off their stuff and it worked really well. So in the end, like, it was fine, right?
And I don't think that anybody was upset about it. I probably would have wanted to spend a little bit more time on the two bosses and just making them slightly more effective than they were. At least getting some of the spells. Like, for Azshara, she shouldn't, you know...
I mean, I don't know how to do fire blasts, but like, you know, somehow making it so she does something, even if the roles are poor. Because she just rolled, you know, she got four rolls. She was killed quickly. So she got four rolls and she failed all four rolls. And that was that. So that was kind of how the boss fight went. And I was happy with it.
So then after the boss fight was done, it's like, OK, now big fight is over. Combat is over. All that stuff can go away, and now we're just diving into the decisions that the characters are making and the actions. And I think it was... By the time the battle was starting to wane, and they'd already clearly had control of the situation, was when they started to do stuff with Mugnallblub.
And there was a bit of discussion... about, you know, what are we trying to do here with the Well of Worlds and Mugdalblub? And what they did is, oh, I think at one point, one of the characters who had the Well of Worlds said, I'm going to use it right now, and used it in the fight, threw it on the ground, and now there's this hole.
And I rolled randomly to see what world the Well of Worlds opened up into. And I rolled on my world generator from the Lazy DM's Companion, which by the way, the world generator that's in the Lazy DM's Companion is a random set of tables that I have used over and over and over again in many games.
It turns out that having a way to generally randomly roll alternative worlds is a super useful table to have. And I used it here. And I rolled on it, and the descriptions of what it was made it sound exactly like the world of Marrow. It was old ruins buried in desert sands with a red sun over the side and bones sticking out. I was like, that's pretty much what the world of Marrow was like.
So I said, they've opened up a portal to Marrow. And at that point, the oozes and the ooze knights started hurling themselves into it. And they're like, what's going on? And then they realized, wait, that's the world of Marrow. And they looked up and realized like, oh, but they know, and I described it to them and they, I think they rolled, I don't know if they rolled check.
So I just said, because you're, you know, you know, this, that it's the unfiltered version of marrow. And so what I tried to describe is the way that the whole process of Almazotz devouring a world works is he filters out the organic material before the remains are left in Marrow.
That the way Almazotz works, Almazotz is a creature created by Kytheros, the Lord of Time, to devour worlds that have been possessed by Mughal blood. And so Almazotz is this world eating entity and it eats worlds and in its digestive processes destroys all organic matter.
And then all of the remains of the world are then hurled into this dimension of marrow, this world of marrow, which is all just dead constructs and dead trees and deserts and everything else because all life has been removed from it. But they opened a portal where there was no filter. There was no Almazots between this world and the world of Marrow.
And the Oozes love that because they're like, we can go there and take that world over. And so they start hurling themselves in. And at that point, the Avatar of Marrow showed up and was like, what have you done? And they're like, what? And he's like, you opened up a portal to Marrow. And now it's already, Magda Blub's already in there. That means there is no safe world anymore.
There is no place where Almazotz can't save any more worlds because the world he deposits the ruins on is now also infected. You've infected the other side. What have you done? And they're like, well, we're just going to destroy him. And they're like, you can't, you can't destroy him. Like we have this. And they had like the sphere of annihilation and stuff like that.
And they go, meanwhile, Mugdalblub sensing the open portal to Marrow starts oozing out of his big crater and a big, like, you know, tendril of Mugdalblub goes into it and starts filtering. millions of gallons of Mughal stuff into the world of Marrow while they're talking to Underlook. And Underlook's like, you're going to die here, and you can't do this.
Because Underlook, as an avatar of Almazots, cannot believe that mortals would be able to stop Mughal blood. The number of worlds we've destroyed by devouring the whole thing is so great, we can't believe six dumbass people are going to be able to stop this, right? And they said, no, we've got an idea.
So there was a lot of discussion about whether or not to try to get Mugdoblub to go into the world or not. And there was some inter-party discussion about this. Not heated, a little touch heated. Of like, are we doing the right thing? Are we doing it the right way? And what's the process and what's the plan? And then one of them was like, no, I'm pretty sure this is exactly what we need to do.
And they realized the other thing they need to do is pierce the Well of Worlds with the Obsidian Witchblade so that it actually goes to all... It connects all the worlds, including all the Mughal worlds. And they did. And one thing I had them is they looked. So they saw Morrigan in her world at a different time and, you know, who was kind of like reaching out through this portal.
And I kind of like left it up to the players to decide if they wanted to do something. I didn't want to kind of push that too much. And I also wasn't even sure if the player who played... really wanted Morrigan to be resurrected or not. The player had talked about how Morrigan appeared in another game of hers and was trying to wish herself back into existence.
And I was like, well, this might be an opportunity for them to do that. But I didn't want to push that too heavily, and I don't know if the players really grabbed onto it or not. So they ended up saying, well, we got enough going on, we're not going to worry about Morrigan. So they didn't do anything with Morrigan, which is fine.
I think we still had an idea that Morrigan now existed in this other world, that Morrigan had somehow traversed from when she was about to be killed by the demon... to get to the world that she was at. So that way, there's some nice headcanon for the player so that she can continue to play Morgan in another game.
But we didn't have any, like, magical reach into the portal and try to rescue her sort of moment. And instead, they watched Mugdalblub pouring into the Well of Worlds. They pierced it with the Obsidian Witchblade, which immediately spread it out to all worlds. And Underlook again is like, oh, my God, you're going to destroy everything. And I said, no, we got this.
And then they pulled out the Sphere of Annihilation and they hurled the Sphere of Annihilation. And that was one where we had a roll. And I said, we're going to roll off because Mugdalblub, as a super powerful entity, is going to try to take control of the Sphere of Annihilation as well. So you can have a roll off between Mugdalblub and the character, Kalem, who is going to use the Sphere.
And they rolled a Mugna Blub, rolled a four, and the player rolled an 18. And I was like, well, that's bad, right? So there wasn't any big struggle. Mugna Blub was like, what is that? What are you doing? And then they hit it with the Sphere of Annihilation. The Sphere of Annihilation hit Mugna Blub.
Mugna Blub had connected to all of the other Mugna Blub versions and all of the other universes that exist all over the multiverse. Destroyed it all. Mugna Blub disappeared. The portal slammed shut. The Well of Worlds devoured itself. And the Sphere of Annihilation was gone. So I think they still have the Obsidian Witch Knife, but the other two artifacts were destroyed in this entire process.
And Mugna Blub was saved. And so then they're like, you know, they're standing around like, oh, my God, we did it. Like we saved the world. And Undelukka is like, holy shit, you did it. Right. Like, oh, my God, I can't believe you pulled it off. Like, right. And looks up at this guy and the big jaws open back up again as the jaws of Almazots kind of kind of go back.
And then I had Gwendolyn and Haldren show up. Only they weren't talking like Gwendolyn and Haldren. They were talking like Kytheros and Shun. And I think I told them outright that, you know, what they realized is that Shun and Kytheros always were like the avatars of Gwendolyn and Haldren were always the Lord of Time.
They were the avatars of the Lord of Time and the avatar of the Witch Queen, that they always had been these things, even though they were mortal presences. And the two of them kind of looked at each other and Haldren wept in front of Gwendolyn and said, like, I'm sorry. I can't, you know. Oh, no, that was the different group that wept. They didn't have everybody crying.
But they said, like, you know, can you forgive me for my own stuff? And Gwendolyn said yes. And they took hands and walked away as spirit entities off into whatever worlds they're going to go explore now that Mugnablub has been stopped. I then had St. Taragnus and St. Miranol. So I had St.
Taragnus show up, who said, like, you've done good work here today, but the fight is always going to be better than that fight. And then St. Miranol showed up and just approached St. Taragnus, who looked at her. These are two twin sisters in my version of the game. They're two twin sisters. St. Taragnus had murdered St.
Miranol to sacrifice her, knowing that that sacrifice would have to be this requirement in order to stop devils from long ago. And St. Miranel just looked at her with her kind of shattered porcelain face. And St. Taragnus just dropped down and wept in front of her and said, you know, please forgive me. And St. Miranel kind of put a hand on her shoulder as though, you know, we'll work this out.
Then I had like twisted trees grew out of the ground. Oh, two like satyrs came up and planted acorns. And the acorns turned into like a twisted tree.
archway and then and then the titania the queen of the fae came out and said like oh hey you know if you still got if you guys want to come over to the fae riled you know limited time off you have to give some magic items up and they're like well we saved the world and she's like you did and she looks around and goes huh Oh, well.
And meanwhile, all of her people have all the magic items that they looted from all the other places. She's like, well, you can still come over here if you want or you can stay over there. And they're like, we're going to stay over here. She's like, all right. And she salutes and leaves.
And they thought that was fun that like, oh, yeah, all this time Titania has been raiding every dungeon, taking every magic item to save it from the destruction of Almazots. But she's still happy to keep them. So we had that. CRISPR never showed up. I didn't have Matilda Bauer or Danelle Courant.
Whenever you're in these things and you're like, I'm not going to bring every single character in there. But nobody seemed to mind and nobody brought them up. And then we went to our one year laters. And so always my favorite part of a campaign is asking the players, one year later, where are your characters now? And we had some really fun ones.
Dazdur, who had recovered from his lost memories, which had been stolen from Druzilla. Dazdur had lasted a really long time. Dazdur, I think, Dazdur and Uralt, I think, were two of the longest living characters. But Dazdar, Calum, and Uralt all lived a very long time for a Shadow Dark campaign.
So Dazdar recovered his lost memories, which had been taken by the witch Drusilla so long ago, and now seeks to help the land recover. He figured out through a plane-traveling frog companion named Wash, which was his mascot, how to bring electricity and lightning to the gloaming. So now the gloaming now isn't quite so gloamy because it's got electrical lights.
that he figured out by traveling from one world to another to learn about electricity. So that was fun. Kalem built a tower over the Vile Well that's sort of like the Yawning Portal. He delved into necromancy and reanimated many of our old companions to serve as commanders of an ever-growing group of undead. So he kind of delved deep into necromancy and sort of hung on to that.
So a bit of a fun, sinister ending for Calum. But in the meantime, he has this tower that's right at the junction point between the gloaming up above, the vile well, and the underworld below. So that was kind of neat.
rebuilt the order of the two sisters, Miranol and Taragnas, kind of started a church to both of them and set up a pilgrimage that involves delving below the surface to the two temples, the Taragnas temple up above, the lost temple of Miranol now below, and works with Hera to bring a new order of St. Miranol.
So now there's both a Taragnas and a Miranol, but then there's also sort of like a joint group. Squee retired from adventuring, this is the kobold Squee, retired from adventuring, went home to rebuild the kobold village that had been destroyed by the teeth of Almazots. So went back down into the underworld.
Squee's whole reason for being around was my whole town got destroyed from the initial giant teeth of Almazots on the outskirts and wanted to bring it back. Scroin built the Stumble In, where you stumble out. Kept the Blade of Prophecy, so this magical super artifact blade called Prophecy hangs above the bar.
And if you're playing your dice games in the bar and you roll six sixes on the dice, you get to ask Prophecy a question. He has a drink called the Mughal Blub that's mostly made of animal fat, gin, whiskey, and rainwater. So Scrooge has a bar. And Hera returned to Last Watch, the village that's underneath the area, and rebuilt the new Temple of St.
Miranol and formed a pilgrimage for those who want to worship the two goddesses along with Uralt and had a connection between those two. So that was really cool, really fun one year later. Nice ties back. The whole Miranol slash Taragnas thing worked out really well, Miranol being this lost god who turned out to be murdered by Taragnas. But now they're going to learn from this.
Rather than bury this dark history, they're going to learn from it and bring back these two temples of Taragnas and Miranol. And it was a really good time. So, yeah, so fantastic campaign.
Looking back over the whole thing and the idea that it all started at this watchtower where they fought some bandits and, you know, traveling across the land and the way that the story evolved and the Ooze Dragon and Druzilla and Druzilla coming back, the whole... Diving into the depths beneath the land and walking along these passageways.
There were so many fun scenes, so much stuff that came from it. And it's easy to look and say that, well, there's only 12 pages of material inside Curse Scroll 1. But when you have those 12 pages of material that let your mind grab onto it and just run with them... Having that loose structure, I found, was a really fantastic way for me to be able to run a campaign like this. I really love that.
It's something I'm trying to capture in the City of Arches as well. I'm hoping that when people read the City of Arches, they can grab onto these one-paragraph descriptions and then blow that out into a whole series of adventures. I don't know, maybe a whole campaign would be great.
But that idea of giving GMs the framework to let their imaginations run wild is something that the Curse Scrolls have done a fantastic job at. And, you know, I had a whole year out of it. My players had a whole year out of it. And you can still look at it and you can still tie back the connections.
Mugna Blub being there and Saint Aragnas being there and the Knights of Yidris being there and all these other elements that are inside it. You can see how you could grab onto each one of these little elements, these one sentence descriptions and blow them out into entire plot lines and story threads. So I really, really, I really enjoyed that.
We will end with a reading of the Glorious Dead, the how many different 19 different characters that died along the journey, including Thalos, who was killed by ooze folk under the town, but then became a cheerful zombie. Bug Juice Buckminster Bohannon, who was dragged through a fire trap while unconscious to be rescued, only to be killed by the fire trap itself.
Finnel, who died in an acidic sand pit. Daisy, who lost the will to live in the depths of Bittermold Keep. Ari, who was killed by a gelatinous cube. Varro, who was killed by Raridin Varro Slayer, the forest dragon, after talking smack, but says he was just singing. Of course, that ended up getting... Raritan got cursed by Mugdalblood because of devouring Varro, so that was a problem.
Gim, who became petrified during a grey ooze... got petrified and then turned into a grey ooze by a trap. Lickmack, who was torn apart by marrow wolves in the Shrine of Shroon. Yakspick, who was likewise torn apart by marrow wolves in the Shrine of Shroon... Shrine of Shoon. Vom, who was thrown into a 150-foot gorge into boiling mud after being punched in the face by a mummy.
Sirwin, who peacefully departed after being life-drained by a mummy. Skull, who was curb-stomped by a different mummy of Kytheros and had the quote, "...at least I died in this bitchin' armor." Dart, who darted into and was turned to ash by a lightning hallway trap in Kytheros' shrine. Tribble, who was cut in half by a Draelich after leaping in front of Caelum.
Loren, a goblin scout leader who was killed trying to open a door of chaos wearing the laws of the universe like a cloak. Bram Apples, a halfling fighter champion of Memnon who was smashed into applesauce by Garavod of Vol, a champion of the Knights of Muggleblub. Morrigan, who was impaled and disintegrated upon Memnon's discordant blade.
Lared, who stabbed a palanier rock with an obsidian witchblade to disastrous effect. And finally, Irena, who was drained by a wraith in the library of St. Taragnas. Those were the 19 dead characters out of 25 that we had over the past year. So a good time. Friends, I hope you enjoyed hearing descriptions of my gloaming campaign over this past year. It has been great fun to do.
Of course, we are going to continue on delving into the Dragon Empire as we switch over to running Tales of the Valiant by Kobold Press. and a Dragon Empire campaign. I already have a couple of videos where I've been talking about that campaign and what we're going to do so you can see more of that.
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