This guide is a walkthrough of a very well hidden quest in Grim Dawn, which grants access to the fight against Lokarr, Master of the Crucible. It is only available if you own the Ashes of Malmouth expansion. There is another secret quest in the base game revolving around Daila Thornsbury and her brother Dravis. While doing that one is not a prerequisite, I'd highly suggest it:

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=639283370

The quest is only available on Ultimate difficulty. You will not have a quest log entry for most of it. When not following a guide, the player has to follow various vague hints and clues, given by lore notes to be found around the areas of Gloomwald, Ugdenbog and the city of Malmouth.

The quest rewards you with access to an additional Devotion Shrine and a unique legendary item set.

All map pictures in this guide are rotated to default view for easy comparison (north = straight up). Click on any picture to see a bigger version of it.

If you find this guide not helpful for any reason, please let me know why (write a comment) and give me a chance to improve before giving it a thumbs down. Thanks. ;)

This first step is optional and not secret, so feel free to skip it. Daila and Dravis aren't directly involved in the new secret quest, but if you already did the secret quest in the base game, meeting Daila again will probably ring a bell. Also one of the items acquired during this step seems to point into the direction towards step 2.

Exploring Mourndale, you will meet Daila Thornsbury again and learn that she's still trying to follow the steps of her brother Dravis. She will ask you to find signs of him, and while she's looking around Mourndale, you are supposed to look around the Malmouth Outskirts. In the Burning Cellar you will find Dravis' Letter.


Take the letter back to Daila. She now asks you to follow Dravis through the only chthonic rift in Mourndale, into the Cinder Wastes. Inside you will meet Bandragos, who after a fight will drop Dravis' Offering, a thorny flower.


Head back to Daila. The flower and letter will leave her puzzled about Dravis' intentions. She will however reward you with a legendary sword, Blazeheart. And this time, it's just a nice sword and doesn't play any further role in the following steps.

!! Important !!
Due to a bug it is advised to do step 5 first (you might not be able to get Sahdina's Memento if you do other parts of the quest first).

The flower note from Dravis reads "A thorned flower for a thorned woman". Wondering where that flower might come from, an area with thorny plants should come to your mind: Exploring Gloomwald, you will eventually stumble across a chest in a house containing a lore note about Nane's Stash. Picking up this lore note will start a quest to track down said stash.


On your search for the stash, you'll find a detonation site, which you can blast open with dynamite. This will open up a path to Nane's Stash begging to be looted. Feel free to do so, but that's actually not why you're here: There's a hidden passage leading to another area with a cursed smith called Arcturus and a lore note on the ground ("Turn Back!").

(Sidenote: Up to version 1.0.2.1 of the game, this quest was bugged in a way that you could only start it once per character. So if you did it in Normal or Elite already, there was no way for you to get to Arcturus in Ultimate. This was fixed in patch 1.0.3.0.)

Pick up the note and read it. It says "Do not be so Blue in the face. When Flame meets Flame, so shall the way forward be opened, ...". Noticing some weird capitalization, some of this seems to be important (-> step 4).

Then talk to the smith, craft a Heart of Darkness and keep it in your inventory.

Crafting the heart requires:
- 1x Ancient Heart
- 1x Black Tallow
- 1x Consecrated Wrappings
- 50,000 iron


The description of the Heart of Darkness says "Teeming with vile energies that hunger for an ashen altar", so you should probably try to find such an ashen altar next (-> step 3).

The search for the ashen altar mentioned in the description of the Heart of Darkness will take you to Udgenbog and further into the Desolate wastes.

The altar is located at the northern edge of the map. Infront of it, you'll find an Ancient Urn. It contains the Mythical Stormheart sword. Pick it up and keep it in your inventory.

The note you found next to the smith in Gloomwald talks about the color blue and "when Flame meets Flame". Exploring the Malmouth Outskirts area, you might have noticed a ritual circle with a blue flame beneath it, right next to the devotion shrine. That's one of the flames.

A bit harder to find is a special enemy NPC in the same area called Flameond Bleu. Not only his name contains "flame" and the color blue, he also looks really blue. Suspicious, isn't it? You should try to bring him to the other flame, and for that he must be lured to the ritual circle.


He will randomly spawn at one of the three locations marked in the picture. He only digs out of the ground when you get close and will follow you around the whole map as long as you don't kill him. I'd suggest clearing the area around the shrine and ritual circle first and search the spawn points from there, so you always have a path without any enemies when you find him. When you get closer to one of his spawn points, don't rush in but let the enemies around it come to you. That way you can kill them before luring Flameond out of the ground.

As soon as Flameond Bleu touches the ritual circle, an aetherial portal will open up, teleporting you to a small hidden area. There you'll find another lore note ("Your Last Chance!") and a Bound Spirit. Talking to the spirit, he demands three gifts to open the way to the master's sanctum: "First, I desire a witch's pendant. Second, a source of great darkness. And last, a weapon forged by the dead master."

You already have the source of great darkness (Heart of Darkness) and the weapon (Mythical Stormheart), the last thing you still need is a witch's pendant.

For the witch's pendant you have to go where Sahdina died: to Devil's Crossing. Next to the main gate lies the corpse of the aetherial titan. Stand right between its legs. You'll get a message on your screen and Sahdina's Memento will be automatically placed into your inventory.

(You can get her memento as soon as you start act 5, so you don't have to take the extra tour from the spirit to Devil's Crossing and back. It's only mentioned this late in the guide because nothing obviously points to the memento being relevant before meeting the spirit.)



If you accidentally sold the amulet or just can't find it for whatever reason, you can simply create it via GD Stash[www.grimdawn.com] and its crafting feature. Please note that I am not the author of GD Stash (it's created an maintained by mamba[www.grimdawn.com]) and any question concerning the tool should be asked directly in the linked discussion thread.

With all three gifts now in your possession, you should go back to the Bound Spirit and turn in the gifts. The heart and pendant will be consumed, but not the sword.

The spirit will vanish and open up an aetherial portal to the Sanctum of the Chosen, where you'll find a last lore note ("You Are Not Welcome!") and a devotion shrine (requiring a Skeleton Key to restore). Directly behind the shrine is a hidden Stone Door. Open it and proceed to the Edge of Reality.

Inside the Edge of Reality, you should fully explore the area to meet someone familiar. There's also a few chests at the end. It's not the real end though, so head back about halfways to find a hidden passage where the bloody stream is. You'll get the chance to fight the Root of All Evil and - behind another aetherial portal - Lokarr, the final boss of this secret quest chain.

Lokarr is once again a very though boss. If you manage to beat him, he drops one out of four set pieces of a unique legendary set. The set only requires level 1, so it's pretty nice for new characters. Lokarr can be farmed for all the set pieces. Also his two chests are very rewarding and contain at least one legendary most of the time.

1. Get Sahdina's Memento from the dead titan in Devil's Crossing.
2. Forge a Heart of Darkness at Arcturus in Gloomwald following a secret passage near Nane's Stash.
3. Get Mythical Stormheart from the ancient urn infront of the ashen altar in the Desolate Wastes.

Keep all three items in your inventory!

4. Go to the Malmouth Outskirts, find Flameond Bleu and lure him into the ritual circle next to the devotion shrine.
5. Step through the portal on the ritual circle, let the spirit in the follwing secret area open another portal and in the next room, open the stone door behind the devotion shrine to enter the Edge of Reality.
6. Find the hidden passage near the bloody stream around halfway through the Edge of Reality, fight the Root of All Evil to open the portal to Lokarr's arena.
7. Good luck!

There's another entry point instead of follwing Dravis' flower note. This is also considered to be the real beginning of this secret quest (according to Zantai[www.grimdawn.com]). It's an out-of-game hint though, and since it requires unpacking the game files and at least a minimum amount of technical knowledge, I consider it a lot harder to find than Dravis' flower note. That's why I chose to not put it in the beginning of the guide. It's also more of an easter egg and nothing you have to do ingame.

Inspecting the dead titan in Devil's Crossing, you might have noticed a texture saying "tagGDX1w not found".


Now you have to look for that missing tag. After extracting the game files with the Asset Manager executable in the Grim Dawn game directory, you'll find an entry for that tag in the file \mods\gdx1\resources\text_en\tagsgdx1_skills.txt. The respective line is:

tagGDX1w=GrimDawn/images/evil

The second part of that line (behind the equal sign) looks like a path or part of an URL.

There's another clue hidden in the engraving of Sahdina's Memento. It reads: "The Web we weave carries with it the portents of Evil imagery. - Jay Peggins". As cryptic as that sounds, there's plenty to get from it, especially considering the weird capitalization:

• "portents of Evil imagery": This creates a connection to the URL type thingy behind the missing tag ("Evil") and it hints at an image file ("imagery"). "portents" means there's more to it than just a simple image.
  
• "The Web we weave": It's on the Grim Dawn website ("web" -> website, "we" -> the developers).
  
• "Jay Peggins": Seriously, jay peg? .jpg!

Now just piece these things together to get http://www.grimdawn.com/images/evil.jpg. Which shows a picture of Nane's Stash and hints at the location of Arcturus, the cursed smith in step 2.