Rearrangements

Chapter 52

After a night of stargazing, I took some time to talk with the skeletons. None were particularly interested in getting rooms with views, but they liked having access to the surface. Knowing they might not get that chance once people arrived to challenge the dungeon, I started thinking up a workaround.

The answer I came up with was cutting a chamber inside the mountain. Then, I used paired teleportation circles to connect it to the necropolis. It, in turn, led to some hidden terraces where the skeletons could safely pop out for some sunbathing or stargazing as the mood struck them.

I used a second set of teleporters to connect to my own little viewing spot, but that one wasn’t public. So I’d stashed the teleporter for it in my chamber of machinations. It wasn’t hard to add and remove a ramp to reach it, but this was easier and couldn’t be blocked if adventures showed up.

“Whaaatcha doin?” Chris drawled as he sauntered into my chamber. He looked significantly more singed than usual.

“What happened to you?” I asked, head tilted.

“Nothing,” Chris said casually. I doubted that and checked the security feed. To my chagrin, nothing actually had happened. Chris had just gotten a little too close to the new pyroclastic flows I’d added to heat up the hound's environment to a more comfortable level. It was easy to forget sometimes that temperature was a thing since I didn’t really experience it.

“I’ll fix the entrance,” I said, rubbing my temples. I pushed my chamber back and made a formal entrance where I placed a teleportation circle. Its mate went into the necropolis near the ones for the terraces. I colored mine green and drew a little cartoon of myself into the wall above it. The terrace one was blue with a star.

“Whatever waters- I mean, suit yourself,” Chris said. I raised an eyebrow at that. It wasn’t like him to hesitate with a nasty comment. However, my curiosity instantly abated when he flopped down with a sickening crack of bones on my stone couch.

“Fucking hell Chris! I know it doesn’t hurt, but that sound,” I said, not sure how he could do it. If my body made that kind of noise, I’d be thoroughly uncomfortable. Chris just shrugged, looking up at the wall I was standing in front of curiously, then back to me. He clearly hadn’t forgotten his question.

“I’m working on the dungeon. You know, like a dungeon master,” I said flatly but chuckled in the end.

“Right, but what part? You know, since you don’t want to make it awesome like I suggested,” Chris said. He’d been a bit of an ass since I’d decided not to turn the blue level into a giant episode of ‘will it blend’ as per his suggestion.

Despite that, I took a moment and decided to try and be cool about it. Chris was a drama queen about a lot of things, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t hurt his feelings or possibly his professional pride.

“Okay, seriously, you had good ideas, and I’ve already used some and will use more. The thing is, I want some people to survive and get cool stuff. You know, so they’ll convince other people to come and do the same,” I explained, not for the first time.

“Sounds like a good way to end up dead,” Chris said, shrugging again. At some point, he’d stolen a can of chaos soda and now cracked it open to drink. I tilted my head at his lack of understanding, then remembered he hadn’t really talked with other dungeon masters.

“Yeah, it's a risk, but I need to pay a yearly tithe. If people stop coming because the dungeon is too dangerous to even attempt, then I’ll end up screwed anyway,” I explained. That gave Chris pause, and when he didn’t comment, I felt like I’d finally gotten through to him on the point.

“Look, that's why I’m dividing everything up and raising the difficulty as it goes,” I said, gesturing to the maps. This time Chris nodded, looking up briefly before returning to his drink. He’d produced a book from somewhere and was opening it to read.

I recognized the book as one of the illustrated alphabet books I’d made for him. The rogue-themed one specifically, it blended weapons, traps, and poisons to fill out the letters. He’d cackled happily when I’d given it to him though he still liked “good night moon” better from what I could tell.

Since my side projects were done for the moment, I got back to my primary task. Agony was due in several days, so I’d been going through my setup with a fine-tooth comb. An act that brought to my attention how difficult it was to keep track of everything going on with it.

Only being able to look at one layer at a time in the interface without some serious copy-pasting in my art editor had severe drawbacks. To combat that, I’d started drawing on the wall of my chamber of machinations to help organize everything. At the end closest to the door was a simple diagram of the layers color-coded by stack.

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Next to that was where I’d drawn out the maps for the individual layers. They were arranged in columns according to stack to keep things simple. Beside them was a legend for what all the little icons I used meant.

The new idea board was helping me organize my thoughts. I’d already found some opportunities that I’d missed the first time. For example, through no particular plan of my own, I had overlapping dead space on the second and third floors of the green stack.

The spots lined up nicely to add a slide trap. It would throw the unwary straight into the boss fight on the third floor. I chuckled, knowing Chris would disapprove of it not leading to a spike pit full of poison gas.

Looking things over, I knew objectively that the design wasn’t good. The layers were strong, but the layout of the overall dungeon was weak. There was a design rule called the rule of three. Anything with a pattern needed to pay off or change by the third repetition. Right now, my dungeon wasn’t doing that.

Chalk in hand, I looked at my drawings and considered how to approach the issue. Ideally, instead of a flat progression, the dungeon would follow an intensity map that would keep people invested.

Since this was hardly a new problem, I’d been stashing tiles in the red stack layers to be used later. A choice that had led to a pretty fucked up layout in that section. I ignored it, knowing I’d be moving them around once I figured out where I wanted them.

The blue layers at least were complete outside of some planned expansion. Nothing complex, just larger layouts and some more diverse gathering options that didn’t need to be sorted out soon. At least not before Agony’s visit anyway.

The green stack only being three layers in total was bugging me pretty badly. It wasn’t supposed to be hard, but that didn’t mean I had to make it simple. So I started sketching and pretty quickly had a total of nine layers drawn out. Too many for the tiles I had at the moment.

Despite the tile shortage, I took some and roughed in the basics. The result was small layers, more like showcase models than a finished setup. Of course, it went against my instincts to leave them like that, but I needed to plan things. Expanding them to look finished for finishing's sake wouldn't be productive.

I wanted to impress Agony, but that didn’t mean I could waste time and resources. Besides, I felt like he’d understand. I doubted any dungeon was fully completed after only a couple weeks. How little time I’d actually been a dungeon master caught up with me at that moment, and I let out a laugh.

“What?” Chris called from the couch.

“Nothing, just… an inside joke,” I said. It earned me an eye-roll I could practically hear though I hadn’t turned to look.

I opened up my shop and found a non-venomous giant millipede. It became the first mini-boss for the green stacks. Not too challenging but more interesting than the mobs already in place.

I downgraded the bats from final boss to mid-boss. They were an intellectual challenge but not strong enough on review. I felt better about my design when they took up residence on the sixth layer of the green stack.

All that was left now was a new final boss for the stack. I looked for something cave-appropriate to continue the theme. While they didn't leap off the shop page at me, I quickly read up on large and giant moles.

The moles were pretty cute, in my opinion. I supposed that would be a matter of taste, though, since the giant one was the size of a grizzly bear. They did moderate damage but were more tank-oriented, designed to take punishment.

I made a note to buy a set of them after refresh instead of immediately. With the rule of three in mind, I knew that something about the final boss encounter needed to be different. With the monsters decided, I felt like it was better to reserve my mana for tinkering until I figured out what I'd do.

This was where it was critical to avoid a straightforward escalation of power. That would be boring and expected. Instead, the final boss fight should incorporate things from the prior layers.

The idea was to build established elements to make the encounter a multifaceted challenge. Half an hour into my pondering, I was distracted by a theatrical amount of shifting and general noise-making from Chris.

“Whaaat?” I asked, having a pretty good idea what the problem was.

“I’m bored,” Chris replied, psychic voice heavily laden with false sorrow. I sighed. This wasn’t the first time we’d discussed this topic.

“What would you like to do?” I asked. I’d been doing my best to supply entertainment but even producing books and games from memory wasn’t something I could do quickly enough to keep up with his fast-waning interest. The same went for trying to make his obstacle course fun.

“Kill adventures… I get that it's just not an option, but doing that walk-through put me in the mood,” Chris said. I was about to say something soothing when I felt a sudden jab of inspiration.

“What about making teams and fighting the other skeletons?” I offered.

“Explain,” Chris said, getting up from the couch to bound over to me.

“Like mock raids where you try to get through the dungeon-like an adventurer would. One team descends, the other defends the mirror encounter,” I explained.

“You could even treat it like a sport and score it,” I added. The skeletons seemed to love to gamble, so I figured that would be a selling point.

“Yes. Yes, we should do that,” Chris said, voice even but jewels ablaze. By the intensity of his reaction, I knew that I’d come up with a good idea. Unfortunately, I'd probably also created a new complication to dungeon management for myself. I didn't regret it. How could I when Chris was literally lighting up over the idea.

“I’ll text the others with the idea, and we can have a meeting to talk about it later,” I suggested. I wasn’t sure how the others would respond, but I hoped it would interest some of them.

“I’M GOING TO GO TELL THEM!” Chris shouted. He dashed straight for the necropolis teleportation pad. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I watched him go.