The First Floor was clearly a cave. Barely inhabited, filled with goblins and now some loot.
The Second descended deeper into the dungeon. Darker, more populated, more dangerous. Spiders and bears roamed it freely, allied by the Core’s magic.
Further down, Jared’s labyrinth opened up into a much larger cavern, a ruin and its gate built into the far end marking the Third Floor. Past the gate, a maze-like ruin of aged stone and older skeletons.
The first creation since Jared’s reincarnation, Floor Four held a special place in his heart. A deep river filled with mermen and various types of tropical fish flowed through cavernous tunnels where it thins out to a stream and flowed to the soon-to-be Fifth Floor, armored crabs defending it along the way.
Everything was, quite obviously, cave-themed. With the exception of the undead-infested ruin, it was all bare rock and stone with monsters you would expect to live underground.
One thing that really interested Jared was that ruin. Not only did it have some interesting systems around it, but it was also very different from the rest in almost every aspect. Although the transition between the grey wall and the moss-infested brick was smooth, it did stand out a lot. It was the bottom and most advanced floor before Jared added anything, and perhaps he should have continued to build more mazes instead of another cave, but there was no point in regretting the past.
He could make it work.
When building dungeons, theme is key. Sticking to a particular theme is always a good idea rather than adding whatever cool ideas you have into a single location and making a chaotic mess where players are confused and have no idea what’s going on. Although that doesn’t mean you can’t have cool ideas, that would be very annoying for Jared considering he had one.
Between the several days Jared had been playing around, contemplating life and observing adventurers, he had also been imagining potential lore for his dungeon. Just like a lack of loot, a lack of lore is a war crime of D&D, although much worse. The only reason he hadn’t added any yet was because writing lore takes time and a lot of thought.
But now he felt like he had a good enough idea to start implementing it.
His idea at a basic level was that many centuries ago there was a cave-dwelling civilization that had built a city in what is now the Third Floor, and they were quite successful.
But sometime after the founding and construction of that city, Jared decided to call it Delga, an apocalypse of sorts occurred. Monsters appeared at levels never before seen and stormed Delga mercilessly, forcing the population to flee deeper into the cave complex without even enough time to properly move their gold.
The apocalypse was more than just monsters though. Whenever a person was killed, their corpse would be utilized to create undead, which would join the monsters and defend the place they died protecting.
The civilization fled farther and farther down, seeking refuge behind the walls of larger and larger cities. Each time they would fail in stopping the apocalypse, and more undead would join their ranks, the great cities and strongholds they built falling into ruin.
This was all incredibly surface level, but the sooner he could add it, the better.
This way Jared could explain the style of the dungeon so far, the system of turning dead adventurers into skeleton knights for the Third Floor, all while building massive ruins, plenty of loot and monsters, undead mini-dungeons, etc. staying consistent with the lore and theme the whole time.
Jared had an idea for the Fifth Floor that he was very excited to build, but he thought it necessary to first refine the previous floors in accordance with his newfound history. Nothing much would need to be changed, he had been building his story around the floors which were already there, but some writings here or style changes there couldn’t hurt.
The first two floors wouldn’t need to be changed much. Besides adding a few signs of camping and a carving or two, the first floor was left untouched. On the second, Jared made a small mine. The Second Floor was rich in ores, so it made sense to Jared that people would take advantage of it.
Delga was definitely the floor that he changed the most. Jared added text along the walls, sculptures, fallen gear, as many pieces of civilization past as he could place.
Jared decided that the Marrow King, the boss of the floor, was actually a literal king before the apocalypse killed and corrupted him and wrote inscriptions into his armor accordingly.
The Fourth Floor was… interesting.
The mermen Jared had created were not sentient, at least not in the way Finnel or Bartender was, but they had managed to create a city of their own.
It wasn’t complex by any stretch of the imagination, closer to an underwater hunter-gatherer tribe than the village outside, but still impressive considering they didn’t have souls. Jared would keep an eye on them.
Like the first, Jared didn’t change much.
Jared hadn’t been doing much the past couple of days. Since the last delve, adventurers hadn’t come into his dungeon, so he didn’t spend his energy replacing any fallen monsters. He had quite the store built up that he wanted to spend, and he thought he had the perfect thing to throw it at.
His Fifth Floor would be the largest yet, and probably for a few levels in the future too.
The stream of the floor above would flow into a lake surrounded by hills and mountainous terrain completely shrouded in darkness. In the center of the lake would be a castle, one of its towers piercing the ceiling and leading to the Sixth Floor, whenever Jared made it.
The mini-dungeon on the lake would be the only part of the floor that would be lit, and even then only slightly. It would be manned by ghosts of the people which the apocalypse killed.
In the darkness outside the fortress, Shadows and other creatures of darkness would lurk, ambushing any unlucky adventurers who didn’t come with torches to light the area.
With his energy stores, he could carve out the majority of the floor, although it would take a while to finish it completely.
He had gotten through about half of it when, for the first time in a few days, he felt a tingle.
----------------------------------------
“This tunnel, right?” Valecor asked, peeking his head around the corner.
“Yes, a few hundred feet down is the tavern,” Karius replied.
Valecor signaled for the copper adventurers to stay behind and hold a defensible position while he, Karius, Farris, and Marike crept down the entrance.
“You weren’t lying, eh…” Farris said. “Me and my crew came down here a few days ago, didn’t see this.”
Before them stood the wood structure Karius had seen before. The same monsters laughed the same way. Everything was exactly as it was before, concerningly so.
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Karius looked over to the wizard in the group, but Marike’s eyes were already glowing faintly as his hands formed complex shapes and he chanted in whispers. “It’s not an illusion or magical in any way my spell can detect.”
“Are you sure? Nothing mind-affecting?” Valecor sternly asked.
“Nothing abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment,” Marike continued to list every school of magic. “Why mind specifically? There haven’t been any reports of psionic monsters.”
“You’re just out of school, kid, even if it is a prestigious one,” Valecor lectured him. “When you adventure as long as me or Karius here, you develop an intuition of things. How strong a monster is, whether a smith is giving you a good deal or not, if a fellow adventurer plans on shanking you or not, whatever the situation is. But I ain’t getting a bad feeling from this, which is, quite obviously, odd.”
“Interesting…” Marike said, pulling out a small notebook and writing. “Do you know how you could efficiently develop intuition?”
Marike dropped his pen and paper after he was smacked by Farris. “You’ll have plenty of time to learn after this, lad. We have bigger problems ahead of us.”
“That hurt, you know. You’re wearing a metal gauntlet,” he complained while picking up his stuff.
Karius sighed. “Alright Valecor, I trust your gut. Everyone, lower your weapons. I’ll go first, then Valecor, Marike, and Farris as our rearguard.”
Valecor nodded and got into position. “Alright. Marike, I want you to cast Shield on yourself. If this is an ambush they will target the weak link first. Farris, I want you to prepare Detect Good And Evil.”
Nods of agreement all around, then they started the short march to the tavern. Their eyes going dry while they refused to even blink, watching each and every shadow for even a hint of movement.
A few agonizing seconds later, they arrived. They had seen nothing in the shadows, no traps could be viewed, no magic detected. Karius was only a few dozen feet away from the bar now, and he could see clearly inside. Monsters, all at least vaguely humanoid. All monsters he had killed dozens of times before. Goblins, orcs, kobolds, all defining his experience with them and acting human in nature. If they looked like people, even if only visually, he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Marike’s eyes were wider than Karius thought possible. Karius could even see him holding back the temptation to take out his notebook.
Everyone was holding their breaths when they all stepped through the door.
No traps were triggered, no ambush was enacted, no monsters even looked at them angrily. They looked… curious, but only for a moment. The party had only been standing there for a few seconds, scanning the room both visually and magically, when the creatures one by one looked away and went back to drinking and playing unfamiliar games. Only one figure still observed them, that being an orc behind the bar.
“By the Heavens…” Farris stared in disbelief, having triggered his spell. “Valecor, they’re all good. Not a single one of them has fiendish intentions…”
“I can see why you needed to report this immediately, Karius. The entire town will be on lockdown once they find this,” Valecor said, just as wide-eyed as the mage had been.
“Can I get you a round of drinks? The first one is on the house,” the bartender orc asked them with a completely calm tone, none of the typical monster accent audible, as if he had been expecting them for days.
Even with how many dungeons they had under their belts, with how many hours they had spent killing foes, Valecor and Karius couldn’t seem to speak.
“I underestimated just how surprised you would be. Although I do suppose you don’t encounter people like us often, tis reasonable under further thought,” the orc said to them, picking up a tankard and polishing it.
People… that’s what they were? Everything Karius knew about monsters was just turned on its head. In action, they were indistinguishable from people. They moved like them, they sounded like them. Karius almost expected that this was all a weird dream that he would wake up from at any moment.
“Who—what—how even are you!?” Karius blurted out, stunned.
“Who am I? I am thoughtful, I am curious, I am logical, I am helpful, I am fulfilled. What am I? I am an orc, born in full form with the soul of a man. I am a bartender, made to run the tavern. I am a creation of the dungeon. How am I? That I cannot fully figure out,” the orc put down his tankard and stroked his bearded chin. “If it is a name you seek, I am Bartender.”
“Are you some kind of riddle-giver?” Vale asked, calming his surprised emotions.
“Do I seem to speak in riddles? I must apologize. When you are left only with your thoughts, you tend to think deeply. And when you think deeply, everything becomes like a riddle.”
Farris put his hands together and quietly prayed, then a faint golden magic circle encompassed all of the adventurers and the bartender.
“A truth spell? I do not mind. I have never spoken a lie, nor did I ever plan to.” The barkeep picked up the tankard once more and began polishing it further.
“He didn’t resist. He cannot lie while in the circle,” Farris told the two warriors.
Marike, finally succumbing to the desire, pulled out his dirty notebook and began frantically taking notes.
Valecor took a deep breath and let it go in a sigh.
“Do you, or any other creature here, harbor any ill intentions toward us?”
“Not currently.”
“Who made you?”
“The Dungeon.”
“Why did it make you?”
“To assist adventurers with the enemies of the Second Floor by providing alcohol and antidotes to the spiders' poison.”
“Are your products harmful?”
“No.”
“How much is a beer?”
“4 copper pieces.”
“I’ll take 4.”
----------------------------------------
There would never really be a reason to bring coin into a dungeon. It would clink around, take up space and weight, and just be an all around inconvenience. So Karius was quite surprised when Valecor produced enough cash for an antidote and a round of beer. Even though he was cautious, if only because Karius forced him to be, he trusted his gut more than anything and had a “feeling” he’d need cash.
Valecor was, of course, the first one to taste test the beer. And so far, a few hours later, he wasn’t dead. So that was a good sign to Karius.
Everyone except Marike had sat down and talked with Bartender for a while. Marike had been going around the room pretty much interviewing each person in the inn. Although he reported that they basically all had the same story, that being none at all. They had woken up one day in a tavern and decided to stay.
It was all fascinating. Sentient monsters… unprecedented. Karius vaguely knew of the larger dungeons being intelligent, but unlike Valecor he had never been to one. But even the guildmaster was stunned by genuinely friendly and helpful monsters. According to him, the only logical reason a dungeon would spend the extra energy to make a sentient monster would be to make it a floor boss or just a really strong enemy. Although even then most stayed away from it because they could rebel if they decided to.
The inn had a calming effect. Karius hadn’t worked all that hard to get here, the new adventurers he was training cleared out the first floor. But even then he could feel whatever minor aches and pains fading away. If he wasn’t as cautious as he was he’d find it funny that it actually had the opposite effect mentally. The idea of a dungeon going out of its way to make friendly monsters and assist adventurers seemed like a trap, yet it didn’t seem to be.
Perhaps he would make his mind up on the intentions of the dungeon later, but right now he was gathering ask much information from Bartender as he could, or try to anyways.
“So, this dungeon is only a few months old, and yet it acts and thinks on a level of one that’s a few hundred years old. And you, a creation of said young dungeon, don’t know how?” Valecor asking the orc in a much more friendly tone than he did a few hours ago.
“I was created here, and I haven’t left this spot. I presume it’s because he made me that way, content to do nothing but serve fellow monsters and adventurers alike. He did appear to us once, however he asked us not to share with you any detail of that, and I fully intend to follow his wishes.”
“Can’t blame you for that, eh?” Farris chimed in, not having touched the beer Valecor ordered for him. Not to Valecor’s disappointment though, he seemed quite happy to drink another. “I tend to think following your creators wishes isn’t a bad idea” Farris said with a chuckle, inspecting the amulet he wore over his shining armor.
“So, to rephrase all the information you’ve given us. You just suddenly became conscious a few days ago with no memories and a sense that you owned this bar, you just… accepted that and served alchohol to the the patrons who never get full or just simply die from drinking too much of your drink. In fact, the whole place is magical. It heals wounds and tiredness, the alchohol magically refills every 24 hours, same thing with the antidotes. Then after a day or two like that, your creator shows up in some way you can’t tell me and informs you of your purpose, then we show up?” Valecor gasped for air as he insisted on saying the whole thing with just one breath.
“Correct. Now, you have queried me for a few hours now, and I do believe I should ask some questions of you as well” bartender replied, still polishing the same tankard he had been polishing for the entire conversation “what is your town named, how many people live there, how long has it been there, what country does it rest in, who owns and/or runs it, and how many adventurers are there.”
“Woah there, that’s a lot of questions” the guildmaster said, likely buying time to think Karius thought. Valecor took another large breath “Duton. 3 months. The Ebonreach Empire. it is run by the Adventurers Guild, but since I’m the local guildmaster I act as the mayor. around 10, 14 including us, but we are more like teachers for the new adventurers. Although I doubt this will be a training dungeon for copper level adventurers much longer…”
“I presume you imply that our existence will cause unrest in the ‘Adventurers Guild?’ Bartender put the tankard down and looked directly at Valecor for the first time since their arrival
“very well. Let them come.”