Aide had set up Prime with the Mental Office Perk for their Role as N’kieran, and rolled it over to their dungeon core Role. Now that it was time to get to designing their dungeon, Prime had a reason to use the Perk again. It was a mostly meta Perk, giving her access to a purely mental world-appropriate office space. The key benefits came down to recording and retrieving important notes in a completely secure situation and being able to work through problems in the manner that fit her mentality while appearing to just be able to do all the thinking without physical crutches — like paper and pen.
What was appropriate for this world was a fairly spacious room in a hexagonal shape with a massive desk filled with fancy work drawers and paper cubbies taking center stage. Two walls were taken up with filing cabinets and two more with bookshelves. Where before the last two walls had been floor to ceiling windows with a soothing mountain vista, now in front of one of those window walls sat a drafting table with all sorts of stencils, condensed charcoal sticks, and ink pots with precision inking pens washed and ready to be filled to the side.
Prime sat down to the desk first, pulling a piece of fine grass pulp paper from one of the cubbies and picking up a charcoal stick already set into a holder that looked very similar to a pencil extender. She began by listing out all of the most pertinent points Aide had gone over with her.
The dungeon cores of this world were tied into the world’s Class System. It was an experience based System where the “XP” was earned by using class skills, defeating monsters (spawned by dungeon cores), and completing System moderated quests. Dungeon cores received a slight bit of XP when their monsters were defeated or when those same monsters defeated non-spawned beings outside of the core’s dungeon, none from other dungeon cores’ monsters unless they were on the same “floor” as their own core, and massive amounts when the world’s sapients died within their dungeons. They were also able to create passive XP generators with the reusable traps and challenges in their dungeons. On the flip side, it took a lot more XP for a dungeon core to reach a new class level than for a non-spawned being. Prime didn’t care about the specifics, but Aide did, and it was weird math stuff that simplified down to about ten times the XP requirements for each class level under 20, then twelve times for levels 20 to 29, and then fifteen times for levels 30 to 39.
Basically, dungeon cores quickly caught on to the idea that every XP counted, hence why they sent out monsters for even the dregs of XP they got from roaming monster kills.
Prime wanted to focus on skill XP, however. The roaming monsters did prevent the sapients from over taking a lot of wild land and gave the sapient races a common enough foe to mostly keep the from waging genocidal wars against each other, which was great, but Prime really wasn’t that into the whole murder hole scene.
“Dungeon Core” was treated as every core’s class, which put them in the “monster” category of species. Their starting skills were Absorb and Construct. Absorb had a chance to unlock patterns for the Construct skill, which was how Prime was supposed to generate their defenders and resources, things she gathered from Aide the Narrative bits commonly called “dungeon loot”. As part of the hack that Aide slipped in, they got a skill called Layout, which worked with the Construct skill to build out the layout of their dungeon within the pocket dimension. The hack wasn’t perfect, hence why Prime had had to deal with the mathematics gnosis dump.
In addition to their chosen defender monster, the shadow kraits, and the mana and elemental stones they picked for their resources, the Construct skill came with patterns for air, water, a kind of stone very similar to fine grained granite called “dungeon stone”, a generic kind of wood-like something called “dungeon wood”, “basic puzzle doors”, “pit traps”, and “rune wire”.
“Basis puzzle doors” meant simple keyed locks, and the pit traps were four meters deep by anywhere from one to three meters in diameter with fake coverings that almost looked like the surrounding floor. The rune wire, on the other hand, was a mana dense material that could be twisted into three dimensional sigils, or runes as they were called on this world. Connect the correct end to a mana or elemental stone and you can remote spell casting abilities. The rune wire was integrated with the pit traps in sigils to make the cover reform after it was broken through.
«Did you see this?» Prime asked Aide when she figured that out.
Aide spared some attention, and then said, «Oh, that. Yeah. It’s pretty simplistic.»
«Mana maestro mine, can we use this wire and the heat and chill stones to make traps and trigger plates?» Prime asked.
Aide considered for a moment. «I’ll have to figure it out for specific dimensions, but probably.»
Prime mused to her companion, «On the entry level, I don’t think our tunnels should be wider than one meter, and I want the encounter rooms to be more like a 3 by 3 meter room, something that lets duos work together, but makes it hard to fit more fighters into a room. Sound good?»
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«Workable. After the spatial maths, are you ready to try your hand at making a 4D sigil?» Aide challenged.
«No.» Prime’s response was a quick, flat denial.
Aide laughed and went about their way.
With her toolbox figured out, Prime moved to the drafting table and began planning out the first “floor”. She caught her sardonic response to the nomenclature and decided she wasn’t being fair to the Role. So what if the Narratives around dungeon cores were a bit strange to her? She wouldn’t get any more familiar with the Role without embracing it.
So, a floor to challenge people’s Adventuring skills. Prime pondered for a moment on the skills that were most important to an Adventurer and decided that perception and reactive defense were the big two. The first floor wasn’t supposed to be a deep dive into troubled waters, but she could build in rewards for greater perceptions. With that thought in mind, Prime set to sketching.
To her horror, the act of sketching out the floor layout partly triggered her Layout skill. Each stroke of the charcoal stick involved gobs of mathematical formula fuzzy up the back of her mind. Originally, Prime had wanted circular rooms, places that lacked corners to for Adventurers to make use of, but the math was distracting that she quickly decided to stick to more linear — and less distractingly curvaceous — designs.
As she had told Aide, she made the encounter rooms 3 meter by 3 meter squares. She tucked in secret doors to nearly every room, most leading to small reward chests she had to design off to the side. A couple led to hidden encounter rooms, and others to secret passages. Just for fun, she hid a few of the secret passages behind the hidden reward chests. To keep people on their toes, she marked down places for traps, and designated a few of the secret doors to be trapped doors.
For the first room, it was four meters in diameter and had four puzzle doors leading to different branching routes. Three of those routes joined up and led to the Floor Boss room and the room that would become the portal to the second floor after they leveled up enough to support a second floor. In the meantime, that would be their Core Room. The fourth route led to an optional mini boss encounter. The puzzle to the room was that there was only one key and four doors, so the explorers would have to choose one of the four routes.
As she sketched out her thoughts on the floor plan, Prime decided that the aesthetic of this first floor should match the ship, meaning the walls, floors, and ceiling needed to be wood. That required designing a repeating pattern for the dungeon wood that would sheath the actual space. While they could provide lights, Prime thought being prepared was another good skill to require for an Adventurer, so instead she added mage light receptacles formed from dungeon stone in the shape of the ones embedded into the walls of the Hip Shot, but she put them on the obvious doors, front and back, instead of the walls. She didn’t have any more of a reason for that than whimsy.
With a bit of tinkering, she managed to add more than simple key and locks to her puzzle door repertoire. Among those were sliding picture puzzles; combination tumblers, switches, buttons, and levers; and atypically keyed locks. The last was similar to needing to find a gear in the room to put into the right place on the door for the handle to be able to turn.
Aide got back to her fairly quickly with a prototype for an elemental trap. «It can take up to five elemental stones for effect sources, and mana stones to increase the sting. The trap can also be disassembled, but the rune wire is a dungeon-restricted material, so anyone who does disassemble one of these traps will only get the stones charging it.»
«That’s perfect!» Prime declared. «Does it have to have all five stone slots filled?»
«No, but at just one chill stone, there won’t even be ice. The heat stones are more dangerous. A single one should be about as hot as scalding water, maybe 55 or 60° Celsius. The chill stones require more energy to work; they only get down to about 5° with a single stone. One mana stone should double the effect. The chill and heat stones will cancel each other out, and putting in two heat stone will give only about half again as much effect. We will need to test it to be sure, but it shouldn’t require a different footprint size. Adding more stones has a diminishing return. Two elemental and one mana would be a 2.6 multiplier, not a 3 times, and two mana with one elemental is only going to be a 3.2 effect multiplier.»
«Testing shall be done then, but if you’re sure about the footprint size, I can work these into my design now. By the by, any concerns or thoughts to share?»
Aide took a moment to peruse the design Prime shared through their bond. Thoughtfully, he opined, «We will probably want to expand this when we have more capacity, but for getting started, I like it. The ship theme isn’t the best for our snakes, but there are already wharf rats on the ship. We could create a few sneks to go hunt them down and work on getting their pattern, then experiment until we get some ratlings. I’m not so confident about getting arms and legs on a snek body, but we can also see if we can get some giant snekkies for bosses. You did good on making sure that we can shuffle closing off passages up until the floor boss room without closing off access to the core.»
«That is such a stupid requirement,» Prime grumbled.
Aide sent back the feeling of a shrug. «It’s a key Narrative element, and in a pocket dimension, it does make sense that it’s as damaging as a human trying to pinch their windpipe closed. I’m not sure what mechanics had to be applied for the physically located cores, but who ever promised that Story Worlds would make sense?»
Prime laughed at that. Who indeed?
She turned back to her drafting board and put the finishing touches on the floor plan. Next up was actually building the thing.
DCV Floor 1 [https://i.imgur.com/hzj85z9.jpg]