A two vs one wresting match was currently going on in the core room. On one side were the newly summoned twins, while on the other was a normal Cave Spider. I was not having them fight for my entertainment. I was trying to gauge how much weaker the pair was, when compared to a normal Cave Spider. One-on-one, the larger Cave Spider trounced its smaller kin. The small spider’s size made it more maneuverable, but the difference in strength and mass proved to be the deciding factor. Things got more interesting when the pair fought together. While their strength together was enough to overpower the larger spider, if only barely, it was their coordination that caught my eye. The two moved in perfect sync, never getting in each other’s way or attacking the same target. Sometimes there would both attack, another time only one might attack while the other waited for that attack to create an opening.
Do they have something like twin telepathy? Is it because they came from a split pattern? If I could make these two stronger and more intelligent, they would be a terror.
When I was done, I sent the larger spider back to its hole and sent the pair to the pit trap. The small spiders were interesting, but it wasn’t what I was going for. I got a schema for them, though.
Dungeon Management System
Monster: Cave Spider, Small
A smaller variant of the larger Cave Spider. Summons 2.
Cost: 34 Essence
I hoping that splitting them further would continue to generate new schema so I didn‘t have to go through the splitting process each time I wanted one. My goal for the next split was four spiders. I can’t say I was looking forward to it, but two is not what I would call a swarm. I wanted the spiders small enough that they could crawl over the average delver.
What if I split the skeletons? Would I get child skeletons? what If I did it further? Would they just keep getting smaller or would I get things like skeletal crawling claws or skeletal feet that just hop around? Another thing to play with when I have the Essence to spare. As for the spiders, for the size I want, I’ll probably need to split the pattern into eight or more. That’s gonna hurt. I also don’t know if I’ll be able to do that by the time someone shows up. If I can get four, that’ll be enough for now. The smaller size will make them harder to hit. Coupled with their numbers, even if they lack power, they should make for a decent distraction.
I waited until I had over forty Essence save up before attempting to another summoning. If this went like the last one, the final summoning cost was gonna more expensive. Again, I took my time to make sure I was in the right state of mind and had a strong mental image. That set, I started a summoning with my new Cave Spider, Small schema.
I started the summoning and tried to attempt the split. It was immediately clear that this was going to be more difficult. First, trying to split two patterns at once was a lot more difficult than I’d expected. To be clear, I didn’t think it would be easy. But I thought it was gonna be more of a “rubbing you stomach my patting you head” difficulty. Not a “paint with one hand while fencing with the other” difficulty. Second, the summoning was actually faster. My Essence flowed into both patterns at the same time at the same rate as the normal Cave Spider. With the patterns being smaller, they filled up more quickly. With the shorter timeframe to work with, splitting one pattern at a time wouldn’t be fast enough. I had to split both at the same time for it to work. Far too soon, I had two more small spiders. The spiders scurried off to find a place to hide in the dungeon.
My second attempt went much better, though I still failed. I got over halfway through before running out of time. The third attempt only saw marginal improvement. I took a break after the third attempt. My mind hurt from all the abuse I’d put it through, and I really just wanted to do anything else. So instead of summoning more monsters, I worked on some traps.
The Sticky Webs trap would be useful in hindering delvers and was very flavorful, that why I had chosen it, but I needed more than that. I could do things like pit traps or a rolling boulder trap, but they didn‘t belong in a mine. A rock fall was definitely closer, but cave-ins as traps felt a bit much for a first floor. That gave me an idea, though.
In a normal mine, they prevented cave-ins by putting up supports. As a dungeon, I’m not at risk of a cave-in, so why not use the supports as a trap? It’s an old mine, so the supports being rotten and weak is believable, and a large wooden beam would hurt if it hit you. I’ll need an appropriate trigger. A tripwire could work, but why would you put a tripwire that could case a collapse in an active mine? Maybe I could have the spider webs being the only thing holding the supports together? Burn the web and the support come crashing down? Maybe the miners had to add extra bracing to a section? The bracing would impede easy movement. Delvers would either have to squeeze past or clear the bracing, triggering the trap. Something restricting movement wouldn’t be in the main shaft, though, so that one would need to be in a closed side tunnel. I could use that one for the tunnel to the core room. What about supports that are strong enough that they wouldn’t collapse on their own, but weak enough that would collapse if a strong enough external force hit them? Like someone being shoved into one or a strong enough shockwave? Those could be good for a boss room or the main tunnel.
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I started with the extra bracing idea, since I felt it would be the easiest to implement. I summoned up some wood and shaped it into a pair of rough boards and loosely nailed them over the passage leading towards the core room. These weren’t part of the trap, they were just set dressing. The trap itself was maybe a dozen feet further in. I’d chosen a pre-existing set that looked decently rotted and weakened them further by boring imitation worm or insect holes through them and chipping a bit of the wood away. I nudged one vertical so that it was leaning in enough to look dangerous and wedged in another couple boards against the leaning beam. When it was all set, I ordered a skeleton to remove a board and nothing. The skeleton continued to prod at it until it something happened. It did eventually collapse, but it took knocking out at the leaning vertical support to do it. I spent over an hour making adjustments to get it to work the way I wanted, but when it did...
Dungeon Management System
Schema: Trap - Crushing Supports
A trap made of weakened supports that will fall on top of anyone that disturbs them
Cost: 8 Essence
So I can make my own traps. That makes me wonder why I didn’t get anything for making the pit trap. Does the system not consider it a proper trap? Something to investigate later than. For now, let’s focus on the other support traps first.
The support beams held together by spider webs didn‘t work. Not the way I wanted them to, anyway. The biggest problem, to me anyway, was they looked unnatural. It looked like the webbing around the beams was purposeful, not incidental. There was also the problem that the spider webs I had access to weren’t strong enough to hold what had to be a couple hundred pounds of old wood. I experimented with it for another hour, but I just didn’t like how it looked or worked, so I scrapped it. My last idea with the weakened posts did work, though. I used the same trick of boring imitation insect tunnels through the wood to weaken it. Every so often, I had a skeleton test it by hitting it with their pick. I didn’t get a new schema from it, but there was an update to the last one.
Dungeon Management System
Schema: Trap - Crushing Supports
Variants: 1
A trap made of weakened supports that will fall on top of anyone that disturbs them
Cost: 8 Essence
They do both do the same thing, if by only slightly different means. I guess the only major difference between them is their looks. How similar does something have to be, to become a variant rather than its own thing? The list of schema has all the different pit traps as their own listing, but maybe if I got them, they’d just come up as pit trap variants? Or would I have different entries for pit traps and spiked pit traps, with all the different materials the spikes could be made of listed as variants? Wait, didn’t the new Cave Spider schema say something about being a variant?
Dungeon Management System
Monster: Cave Spider
Variants: 1
A species of large spider adapted to living in shallow surface caves or large subterranean caverns. These Spiders are non-venomous but are relatively strong for their size. Their vision is excellent in the dark but degrades rapidly in the presence of bright light.
Cost: 30
I focused on the new Variants part of the description.
Dungeon Management System
Monster: Cave Spider, Small
A smaller variant of the larger Cave Spider. Summons 2.
Cost: 34 Essence
Interesting. When I split the Cave Spider schema again, will there be two variants of the Cave Spider or will Cave Spider, Small gain a variant? Guess I’ll have to wait until I split the schema again to find out.
I added another two Crushing Supports traps to the main tunnel while thinking about what makes something a variant versus its own thing. With the traps in place, I went around sprucing up the dungeon and trying to unify the design of the whole thing. I have no idea how large the mine is, but I’d claimed enough I felt comfortable starting some of the finishing work. Sure, I’d likely change it later, but just because it was unfinished didn’t mean it had to feel that way.
First up were the spider holes. While great for them to hide in, the holes themselves still stood out. The easiest way to fix that was to take their currently rather regular shape and make it look a bit more natural. The ceilings were easy. I’d elongated them and roughed up the edges to make them look like fractures in the roof. There were already a couple in mine, so I just copied some of the larger ones.
The spider holes in the walls were trickier. I could’ve just turned those into fissures as well, but horizontal fissures felt odd, and I don’t know how sitting in a vertical fissure would affect the spider’s ability to ambush delvers. Plus, just doing fissures is boring. Variety is the spice of life and all that. I came up with a couple of ideas. The first one was involved copying already existing parts of the mine, namely the sections that had boards along the walls. I took that idea and positioned the boards so that the view of the spider’s hole was at least mostly blocked, but the spider could still exit quickly. This would only work for the smaller spiders, though.
For the larger spiders, I expanded further into the rock and dug out side passages, making to look like they were following an ore vein or trying to find one and that they were just wide enough for the spiders to fit. I completely boarded these up, leaving just enough room for the normal Cave Spiders to get out. I wanted to do more, but I saw a light coming from around the bend further up the mineshaft.