Greetings to you all, good readers, and welcome to Autumn’s Rainswept Tower. This is my first blog ever, and I am excited to meet you all. I would also like to introduce you all to the Castle of Silvered Lightning. The Castle is my attempt to take part in the Dungeon23 game jam. I am doing this to challenge myself and build a habit of writing every day. Secondarily, I am also excited to create something I hope will inspire others. I am looking forward to sharing it with you all in weekly (though they may need to be biweekly until tax season ends; we shall see!) posts here detailing my progress.
But enough of that context stuff. You are here to see a castle!
The Castle of Silvered Lightning
The Castle of Silvered Lightning is my attempt to create a labyrinthine wizard college, drawing inspiration from Harry Potter and GrimGrimoire, mixed with ideas from many other games, books, films, and manga. Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom books are also a major influence. As an aside, I do not endorse every view portrayed in those works. My inspirations were important parts of my childhood, but I do not hold them above criticism. Also, this project is system-neutral. I hope someday to publish my own game systems, but have not done so yet. Perhaps someday there will be a complete game to go along with this.
The Castle is an ancient structure, erected long ago by a coterie of powerful sorcerers known as the Order of the Sagacious Masters upon a rocky promontory by the sea. Rumors persist of structures even older now buried within the foundations. Some are said to even be pre-human. Over the centuries, the original castle has been expanded, dismantled, razed, rebuilt, spatio-temporally displaced, fortified, and renovated so many times that it is hardly recognizable. It is a crooked jumble of towers, halls, workshops, ramparts, and sprawling subterranean vaults. Some say that a full half the rooms or more are forgotten, forbidden, lost, or otherwise obscured.
As a center of research and learning, the Castle is a true university. Only the brightest of young magicians from the various youth programs are accepted. Apprentices are rare, as hedge witches tend towards rivalry with university mages. Graduates are expected to face little difficulty in finding gainful employment. Yet, not all who attend the Castle of the Silvered Lightning survive to the end of their studies. Monsters and dangerous secrets lurk throughout, from the pinnacle of the Stargazer’s Tower to the depths of the Deeproot Vaults. For their own protection, each student carries an ensorcelled key capable of opening only those locks they are permitted to open. However, many students realize that to truly succeed, they must take matters into their own hands and find other ways of opening doors.
The key permissions are as follows:
- Green: Non-academic Staff, though there are not many of them in modern times.
- Grey: Freshmen, restricted only to the safest regions of the grounds.
- Blue: Undergraduates, with expanded access to school resources, including the library stacks.
- Purple: Graduate students and visiting researchers, able to access several of the forbidden chambers.
- Black: Teachers, capable of going everywhere save for the rooms of other teachers or graduates.
- Colorless: The Headmaster alone. In truth the key is actually jale, but unaugmented eyes can only perceive it as colorless.
Additionally, certain ribbons on keys designate further privileges. There are many of these, but a few that are important to keep in mind are the following:
- Bronze Ribbon: Resident advisor, senior students acting as caretakers over a hall.
- Copper Ribbon: Research assistants, with access to relevant rooms.
- Silver Ribbon: Student teachers, given expanded access to relevant chambers if necessary.
- Gold Ribbon: Deans and the provost, more a sign of authority than a useful function.
I hope that this opening post gives enough context for the beginning of the project. Please keep in mind, this is all subject to change as the project grows. I hoped to have this post up a week ago, but life got slightly in the way. Tomorrow I will post the progress of my first week. After that, expect a post on Sundays covering each week’s progress. As for where to begin, I can think of no better location than the great Hall.