Ul-Vir's Vault

Ul-Vir’s Vault

Deep beneath the clockworks of the City of Shells is a secret vault of the mad mage Ul-Vir. There are two ways to descend to this vault. The first is a secret stairwell in the upper machineries that run the waterworks and great clock of the city that leads down to the stairs on the southern edge of this map. Alternately (and much more likely to result in being mashed between massive gears), one can work their way through the clockworks above, dropping from tier to tier until they reach the main shaft here. Then it is an 80-foot drop down to the gears in this section of the main shaft.

Like most of Ul-Vir’s old structures, this was once a combination of a workshop, storage area for old experiments, and some sort of outlet for his insanity. This particular vault has a ‘Jester’ theme, with a massive inlaid jester face in the audience chamber floor, a room where the floor spins as the clockworks advance, and a number of false doors that do nothing when not engaged, but when activated they trigger annoying ‘traps’ that provide jump scares, explosions of bees, bright flashes, loud noises, or huge clouds of flour…

The central chamber is connected to the clockworks above and below by metal shafts that run through the centre of the chamber and the gears therein. The gears rotate at a steady pace (although if you want to make it difficult, have them rotate in a series of “clicks” where each element moves forward rapidly one step and then pauses before advancing again, making the footing exceptionally awkward). The upper left gears are set ten feet higher than the ones below, requiring some well-timed climbing, or hopping onto the crescent ramp passage that links them.

While Ul-Vir is long gone from this (and his many other) workshops, his old inventions remain as caretakers, guardians, and pests. These clockwork-looking mechanisms don’t actually operate by clockwork but are animated magically. While most of Ul-Vir’s golems were humanoid in shape, within this vault the only humanoid construct is the “jester” that wanders the whole vault – the rest are built in the forms of animals of various sizes and purposes. The jester itself is mischievous and has several enchantments to make it evasive and difficult – the ability to dimension door (only within the complex), turn invisible, and trigger mirror images around itself.

*The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 9,600 x 14,400 pixels (32 x 48 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 100 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 200 pixels (for the 10‘ foot squares that work with the furnishings as shown) – so resizing the image to 3,200 x 4,800 pixels or 6,400 x 9,600 pixels, respectively.*

[https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/08/07/ul-virs-vault/](https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/08/07/ul-virs-vault/)