The schemas weren’t the only rewards I’d gotten from the Milestones and the Achievement. I still had four Trait Points to deal with. “Dungeons for Dummies” actually had some useful information here. To paraphrase it, Dungeons don’t get the same cool things like classes or special abilities that other races or monsters got. Instead, we get powerful passives, the combination of which shaped and defined the dungeon. Trait Points are used to buy and upgrade the passives. The list included stuff like:
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Trait: Skyborn Dungeon
Normally relegated to an eternity underground, you have broken the shackles of gravity and have torn free of your earthly bonds. You are free to take your place among the clouds and wander the skies for an eternity.
Requirements: Wind Magic, Gravity Magic, Achievement: Head in the Clouds
Cost: 1,000 Points
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Trait: Witching Hour
Legends say strange things happen around midnight near the fey. Of lasting parties days but only an hour having passed, or travelers spending hours lost only to find days have passed. Why not tap into this power yourself? Gain an hour at the end of each day.
Requirements: Time Magic, Achievement: Wibbly Wobbly, Monster Type: Fey
Cost: 1,000 Points
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Trait: Instancing
Only so many delvers a day can challenge even the largest of dungeons. Wouldn’t I be great if you could double that amount? Triple or more it?
Requirements: Space Magic, Achievement: Two places at Once
Cost: 1,000 Points
Of course, I didn’t have access to any of those yet.
The Traits I could acquire were far more basic. Stuff like Monster Mastery, Global Illumination, or my first purchase: Essence Gathering.
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Trait: Monster Mastery - [Type]
Reduce the summoning cost of [Type] by 10%
Requirements: [Type] type Monster
Cost: 1 Point
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Trait: Global Illumination
Completely and evenly illuminate your entire dungeon without other light sources.
Requirements: None
Cost: 1 Point
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Trait: Essence Gathering
Increase Essence gathered passively or through kills by +100%
Requirements: None
Cost: 2 Points
Unfortunately, nothing else screamed “Pick Me!” There were certainty Traits that could be useful. Summoning cost reductions were tempting, and I found a Trait that gave a handful of Essence every time a delver gathered anything from a Gathering Spot, but nothing I felt I genuinely needed. I found a Trait that made expanding my Domain cheaper, but I of course can’t afford it.
Alright Marc, what are our options here? Nothing else that’s immediately useful. Reducing the cost of summoning spiders is good, but I don’t know how often I’m gonna use them after the first couple of floors. They are also my cheapest monster at the moment, but that’s not saying much. I could see myself using undead more than a few times, though. Traps resetting themselves and monsters re-summoning themselves will be useful once I have a bunch of those and a steady supply of essence to support it. Randomized containers are a thing for later as well. Monster Designer sounds interesting but ten points is rather expensive right now. I suppose I’ll pick up Monster Mastery: Undead for the summoning cost reduction and save the last one for now.
I took a glance at my stats
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Unnamed Dungeon
Floors: 1
Bosses: 0
Essence: 7 (+2/hour)
Traits: 3 (1)
Milestones: 2
Achievements: 1
I hoped that defeating the spider would earn me another Milestone, but I suppose that’s asking a bit too much. At least my Essence was improving. Gaining two an hour gives me a bit more flexibility. The question was where to put it all. Using both for expansion was a tempting idea. The sooner I claimed the mine, the sooner I could begin working on my plan for my first floor, and the more secure I would be. The downside being I wouldn’t have any Essence for experiments or emergencies. Saving both would build my stockpile faster, but then I’d be wasting time that could have been put towards expanding.
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I think I’ll let my stock pile build to twenty, then split it. One for expansion and the other for the stockpile. That way, I’m making at least slow progress towards both.
With a bunch of free time on my hands, I gave my memories a tour. Turns out keeping all my memories related to DMing and dungeons, and being able to recall them perfectly, has the interesting side effect of providing me with what is likely thousands of hours of entertainment. Reliving my adventures throughout the years without being able to remember anything about the players or remember any of the table talk was weird. The adventures themselves, though, and the worlds I had created, they were crystal clear.
Like this one time, when I had a party exploring a vault in a long lost dwarven city. The party had come across a door with an inscription in an elemental language above it. Reading the inscription caused it to glow for a few moments and would deactivate a trap that dispelled any enchantments on someone walking through the door. They spent almost an hour trying to figure out how to get through the door before I had to force one of the character to check the door to see if it was unlocked. It was. The party then went through the door and had all of their active magical effects stripped from them because they didn’t say the password.
The reminiscing turned out to be more painful than I was expecting. I think not being able to remember the other people involved made it worse. Instead, I choose one of many dungeon core stories I’d read to pass the time. In the one I picked, the main character was trying to find the slender line between making the core as inaccessible as possible while still gaining mana. One attempt involved making the access tunnel large enough that it was technically traversable, while making it small enough that most people would have had to leave most of their equipment behind to even have a chance at squeezing through. Their mana gain was greatly restricted, but it gradually improved as the access tunnel got larger. I paused my reading and looked over at the small hole connecting the core to the rest of the mine.
Did I really not think of that?
Carefully, I reached out and enlarged the hole, monitoring my Essence gain as I did. The moment it ticked up to three per hour, I stopped. I stared at the slightly larger hole for a while. If I could frown, I would definitely be doing that. On one hand, the tight squeeze had helped immensely against the spider and the larger wall of rock just felt safe. On the other hand, more Essence would let me expand faster, summon more monsters, and experiment a bit with traps. All of which would also keep me safe. Probably more so than a wall of rock would. With a mental sigh, I finished excavating the cave in. I felt better immediately once I looked at my Essence.
Essence: 12 (+10/hour)
That was quite the Improvement. My plan was still the same, though. Bank until I had twenty Essence, then split it in half between expansion and stockpiling. I sent Pete and Not-Pete to the edge of my domain with orders to attack anything that came near, then returned to my reading. Unfortunately, all the new Essence I was gaining didn’t change the fact that I wouldn’t have anything to do for the next couple of hours at least.
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As soon as my Essence hit one hundred, I summoned a Cave Spider. I could have summoned one much sooner, they only cost thirty Essence, but I wanted to make sure I had some for emergencies before doing anything else. Unlike when Pete and Not-Pete were summoned, the Cave spider just popped into existence, fully formed and ready to go.
I wonder if it would be different if I had spider eggs?
Similar to the skeletons, without any orders, the spider just stood around doing nothing. I sent the spider off to go spin webs across the mineshaft between me and the unclaimed territory. Over the past day or so, I’d come up with the plan to see how thick of a defense of normal spider webs I could get away with before my Essence gain decreased again.
The Cave Spider wasn’t the only new thing to come along during the last day. While I hadn’t expanded all that far, it was far enough to come across my first junction. The place turned out to be an absolute treasure trove of new stuff. I gained an assortment of tools, crates and barrels, buckles, nails, a pipe (the smoking kind), and access to some new materials in the way of bronze, brass, steel, lead, and a new type of wood, Ebony. The big things, however, were the mine carts and associated tracks. I didn‘t have any specific plan for them yet, but I really wanted to use them.
The junction also presented me with a dilemma. Which direction do I claim first? I could do both at once, but what I really wanted to do was find the mine’s entrance. Claiming both directions at once would ensure that would happen regardless, but could take much longer. So could picking the wrong direction. Examining the junction yielded no clues I could recognize, nor did having the spider let out a bit of silk to catch a breeze. After some thought I summoned a new skeleton, a normal one not a miner, and had it and Not-Pete both walk in a straight line in different directions down the shaft until they reached an obstacle. Once they did, they were to pick something up and then return. With luck, one of them would bring back something from outside. Hopefully, they could both operate outside my Domain for a short bit and understand the instructions I gave them. In the meantime, I was gonna try a little experimenting.
I only had a bit over twenty Essence left at the moment. I wanted to save up a bit more for another spider or skeleton, but I had Pete and the cave spider and I would hopefully be able to hear the other two skeletons fighting something well before it got to me. Experimenting a bit should be fine.
The reason I wanted to do some experimenting was because of the Randomized Containers Trait. It’d been bouncing around my head since I saw it. Its description said that it randomizes the loot within a container so that no two groups found exactly the same loot in exactly the same container every single time. It also mentioned that higher ranks could randomize the type of containers themselves and their position. I was hoping to use this as a trap.
See, in spider infested caves, you might expect to find the remains of past victims bound up in cocoons of web. Maybe some of these victims had useful items or valuables on them when they got caught. These items would still be there if you cut open the web and searched for them. My plan was to scatter these fake victims around the mine for delvers to find. Except that they wouldn’t just be an alternative to a normal chest. My actual plan was to stick a skeleton or a swarm of spiderlings inside some of the web cocoons. If a delver cut the cocoon open, the monsters would jump out and attack the person who opened it. The reason I wanted Randomized Containers was so I wouldn’t need to micro-manage the placement and contents of the containers to avoid delvers from just skipping the empty or trapped ones.
There were a couple of issues with this plan. The first one I needed to solve was whether I could even make something out of spider silk that both counted as a container and looked like a something a large spider might keep a person-size snack in.
To start with, I needed a reference. I could call over the spider and have them wrap up Pete, but I didn‘t want one of my very few defenders incapable of acting if I need them to. So a needed a stand-in. Or a mannequin. I am not the most artistic individual and absolutely not an expert in anatomy. If I had to imagine it all, I probably would have created some deformed monstrosity. Thankfully, I had Pete, who was eager to be used as a reference. Carefully, I studied Pete and memorized his form. Then I changed my mental Pete to be made of wood, not bone. I fused all the limbed together and thickened them to approximate a body that still had a bit of flesh on them. Finally, I willed the vaguely humanoid shape into the world and watched as it just appeared. It wasn’t quite right, but it was close enough to serve its intended purpose. I called over the spider and watched as it wrapped up the dummy.
This isn’t gonna work.
The cave spider did a great wrapping up the mannequin. Which was kind of the problem. If I had a skeleton wrapped up like that, they wouldn‘t be able to attack. I also don’t think that many delvers would want to dig through a bunch of webbing for loot unless it was especially valuable. Also, when I removed the mannequin, the webbing just collapsed in a heap. I’d been hoping for more of an ovoid shape with a hollow inside that was sturdy enough to hold that shape. Obviously that wouldn’t normally work, But I hoped that dungeon shenanigans would help with that. I shouldn’t give up yet though.
The cocoons need some sort of structure to hold open a cavity. Like its own skeleton. … I’m an idiot. The cocoons are all supposed to have the skeleton of a victim inside them. Why not just use that as the internal support? And if it’s just supposed to be a trap, the undead skeletons only really need an arm or something free to attack with. How to make the cavity inside? Well, if the victim wasn’t dead when they were wrapped up, they probably would have struggled a bunch. That struggle could have caused an open space within the cocoon and when they died, maybe their body stayed in a position that kept the space open.
I summoned several non-animated skeletons in various positions and fused the joints together to keep them there. Then I had the cave spider wrap them up. Some worked close to how I wanted. Some not so much. I still absorbed all of them, though. None of them gave a schema or any other sign that I’d be able to use them how I planned.
How much did doing all of this cost me?
Essence: 13 (+10/hour)
Twelve Essence. I suppose that’s fair if the minimum cost for anything is one Essence.
I had enough for a few more experiments. Unfortunately, further experiments would have to wait, however. Not-Pete had returned. And they brought a friend.