"As you stealthily approach the door, you hear a faint conversation. It sounds gruff, and what few words you can pick up are horribly mispronounced," Jared narrated as he frantically took notes. He didn’t expect his players to come this way, although he didn’t show it. He had been playing this popular game about dragons and dungeons for countless years and had a knack for improvisation.
“Gram don’t like sneaking. Gram want fight!” Elias, aka Gram, said in his best orc voice. He was the only player out of the four who actually got into character. The party had only been able to get this far unnoticed by having the Paladin smother Gram with his shield.
The orcish barbarian had finally been able to break free. To the dismay of the rogue and wizard, Gram decided the first thing to do with his newfound freedom was to charge through them and break down the door.
Jared chuckled. The orc had led to all sorts of trouble before, and he both annoyed and amused everyone at the table. “Roll a strength check to push past everyone… with advantage,” Jared said with a smirk.
Elias smiled in return before eagerly picking his lucky die and throwing it on the table. It spun around for a few seconds before finally settling down.
A natural 1.
In that moment, while everyone at the table was having a good laugh, a semi-truck plowed through the wall, aimed directly at the table.
In the moment before Jared’s death, he calmly pondered how the truck had gotten there. He lived on the floor above a game shop which he proudly owned, and he found it quite odd that a truck had somehow jumped a floor to smash the wall of his house.
His mind drifted off as 17 tons of truck hit his and all his players' bodies. Jared regretted all the adventures he wouldn’t have, all the ideas that would never be brought to fruition. In his last unnaturally long seconds of life, Jared simply wished that he could’ve brought more fun to his players, told more stories, and made more adventures to experience. Then everything went dark.
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Jared felt stretched, as if his mind was being forced to perceive much more than it usually should. He had an awful headache, or at least he thought he did. Everything was a blur and he was feeling things he never felt before and not feeling things he had always felt.
It lasted for what seemed like an eternity. Ever so slowly, the pain of his mind being stretched faded, and he could think clearly again. He was in the center of a circular room, exactly 25 feet wide, and in front of him was a pathway leading to an upward-going set of stairs.
Everything was made of stones fitted together roughly, with the space in between filled with everything from dirt to moss. Lots of moss, actually; it made the place look ancient. A blue light, seemingly coming from him, filled the room.
Jared tried to stand up, before realizing that he couldn’t feel, much less move, any of his limbs. He briefly panicked, hoping that the truck didn’t leave him paralyzed.
Truck? What truck? Jared thought for a moment. He couldn’t remember much of what happened before he woke up here, other than it felt like it took a long time. He delved into his memory, searching for what happened. In an instant, it all flooded back to him.
He had died.
He didn’t know where he was, but he doubted it was Earth. By all laws of fantasy, when you get killed by a truck it means you’ve been isekai’d. And considering he hadn’t awoken in the middle of a summoning circle with wizards and cute girls surrounding him, he presumed that he wasn’t the hero.
Lifting his thoughts out of his memories and back to the situation at hand, Jared observed his surroundings as closely as he could before coming to a realization.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
He was in a dungeon. He was giving off a strange light. He was the dungeon.
Looking back, it seemed rather obvious. He died and was reincarnated as the Dungeon Core. He thought it was rather ironic, a Dungeon Master being reincarnated as a Dungeon Core, but he couldn’t be happier.
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Some hours had passed. Or was it days? All Jared knew is that it broke the trend and didn’t feel like an eternity. In that time, he went wild with experimenting. One thing he noticed immediately was just how similar everything was to D&D. It wasn’t an exact copy, but it was too close to deny the resemblance.
While he couldn’t see outside the dungeon, he could see everything inside of it. After he realized that he was a dungeon, Jared quickly put all of his knowledge about dungeons and dungeon cores to use and was able to expand his perception throughout the entire structure. At first, he had the familiar stretching feeling, but throughout the course of his experiments, that had faded entirely and seeing everything in his dungeon became second nature.
Contrary to what he assumed based on the crippling amount of light novels he read, Jared didn’t start out as a tiny dungeon. In fact, he already had three floors, about 17 rooms in total. Several monsters wandered around.
The first floor is cave-like and there are exclusively goblins and hobgoblins. They have various huts and campfires around the place, but they are still goblins. They aren’t building a real civilization anytime soon. Although they do seem to have a leader of sorts. He’s a much larger hobgoblin, maybe 20% bigger than the rest, and he guards the tunnel leading to the second floor. A boss in more ways than one
The second floor is still cave-like but a much deeper variety. All the rock is darker, and there are some ores here and there. There is the occasional tough hobgoblin living it rough here, but it’s mostly populated by giant spiders and bears, with a bugbear as the boss.
The third floor differs dramatically from the other two as it quickly transitions into an ancient ruin type, with cracked stone, moss, traps and all. It’s got snakes, skeletons, and traps. You cannot understate the number of traps it has. But for every trap, there’s a treasure as well. Whereas the only reward you’re getting from the first two floors is what you can scavenge off of what you kill, here there are chests full of gold, jewels, everything. He observed that the boss on this floor is a larger, heavily armored skeleton. He wears a crown of steel encrusted with jewels of all sorts and he’s accompanied by six other, smaller, but still well-armored skeletons. Jared decided to call the boss the “Marrow King.” Rather than a tunnel leading to a fourth floor, a small staircase leads to his core room.
Jared, observing all of this in an instant, immediately drew the conclusion that this is totally D&D. Whereas before it was a curious theory, now it’s pretty cemented. The bugbear is proof, at least all the proof Jared needed. He was intimately familiar with D&D and could recognize it anywhere. It didn’t change much though. Jared is still a dungeon core; he just has more knowledge from his previous life to work with.
Then came the fun part; actually changing the dungeon. Jared was quite pleased with how the dungeon is currently, but some changes are in order. Jared, gathering all his weebish knowledge, willed the dungeon to change. He tried to will the dungeon to dig deeper, to make a fourth floor, but to no avail. He tried looking for some menu, some system, but found none.
After trying a plethora of other methods, some weirder than others, Jared would’ve sat down and slouched if he could’ve, but that too didn’t work. What was the point of being a dungeon if you couldn’t evolve, if you couldn’t change? Ever since landing here, Jared had been thinking on overdrive. He had so many ideas; and he wanted to use them all.
In a strange flash of inspiration, Jared just started narrating. Not to anyone, but to the dungeon itself. “After defeating the Marrow King and his servants, you see a doorway in the far wall. Getting closer to it, you see stairs leading down. As you wander along them, you suddenly come upon an underground river. The cave appears to be roughly 200 feet tall, too long to see the end“ Jared continued narrating, but as he did all his words came true. With a smirk on his nonexistent face, he created the fourth floor. His core was moved, by some magic, to the end of said floor. Similar to his previous position just below the third floor
A massive underwater river, populated with all sorts of mermen and water monsters. Almost pitch black except for some mystical blue light coming from under the running water.
A river, being a river, has no typical dungeon structure. Jared wanted to change that. He made the river slowly feed off into different holes in the dungeon, too small to crawl into, until the river became more of a stream. This stream flowed through several caverns and caves, forming the typical dungeon structure, just with water guiding your way.
There were mermen in the river; Jared had decided to do that without thinking twice, but he couldn’t quite decide what to put in the cavernous areas of the stream.
But it didn’t matter, at least for the moment.
Jared felt an itch, like a bug crawling on his skin. Focusing his vision on the area, he saw what would only bring him joy beyond compare: adventurers.