Breathing hard, Vee hit the block of blue ectoplasm on his anvil with his hammer and watched the corner budge ever so slightly. He swore and hit it again, a mixture of frustration and panic setting in when it barely moved again. His hands ached and there was sweat running down his back, hot and sticky and all he could focus on.
Another swing, another smidgen of movement. Vee growled, swore under his breath. How in Gawain’s beard did [Smiths] do this any sort of proper duration? This wasn’t like working his machines to make ghosts which was soothing and somewhat interesting, it was like trying to climb stairs for fun.
Heck, the [Ghost Smith] thought as he paused to catch his breath and wipe the sweat away with his coat – which he’d long since discarded in an attempt to cool himself – he might actually have to start climbing stairs for fun to make this work a bit easier.
Stretching his hands nearly brought tears to his eyes, and for just a moment Vee allowed himself to wonder if he’d made the wrong choice becoming a [Ghost Smith]. Physical work was most certainly not what he’d had in mind. This wasn’t fun at all.
He glared down at the ectoplasm: it was still out of shape, too thick on one end and too thin on the other. He didn’t know why, but that bothered him more than it had any right too. Brushing a lock of hair away from his eye – making a mental note to get a headband for future smithing sessions – Vee pushed the doubtful thoughts away and picked up his hammer once more.
His swings were inefficient and erratic, propelled by stubborn desperation, but bit by bit the plate took the shape he held in his mind’s eye. He set the blue ectoplasm aside and drew a glob of red ectoplasm from his furnace. He’d not noticed it before, but there was a subtle difference in the two kinds of material. Blue ectoplasm felt stiff, like cold butter, while red ectoplasm felt more like stirring a spoon through a thick stew. The two were close, but Vee definitely had a much easier time working the red than the blue.
Setting the red plate down atop the blue, Vee used [Weld Ectoplasm] to fuse them together.
“At least that one isn’t hard on my hands,” he muttered, setting the welded plate down and rolling out a rod of orange ectoplasm as quickly as he could. He’d used red ectoplasm with Soleir during his tutorial, but now that he was free to do as he wished he wanted to see how different colors of ectoplasm worked for applying modifiers. Experimentation was at the heart of [Smith] work, he thought, or at the very least was probably somewhere close.
Knowing that his time was limited, Vee worked quickly to cut and shape the nodules that would eventually become :thorns:. As such they were unevenly sized, which Vee would have to remember when he started testing the plates on his ghosts.
For what felt like the hundredth time, Vee wished that he could simply work on the parts for the plates in batches. What he was doing right now, making each piece start to finish, was most certainly inefficient. Alas, his first attempt at batch production had rendered half a dozen red and blue plates oddly brittle and incompatible with [Weld Ectoplasm] for reasons unknown. That was part of the learning process too, Vee supposed.
There had to be a way – a skill, no doubt, but perhaps tied to his furnace? – that would let him keep projects “workable” for some amount of time while he was away. He’d have to go and do some digging later, but for now he wanted to get at least one more plate made.
The door to the forge opened, and Cog walked inside with another stack of folded ghosts in its arms. Vee smiled sheepishly at the fiend, gesturing to the large pile near his feet and returning his attention to the thorn nodule in his hands.
“Put those down over here, would you? Don’t worry about bringing more in afterwards though,” he said, fusing the thorn to the plate and grabbing the next piece. “I think I vastly overestimated my ability to put these things together.”
Cog nodded and did as directed, then stood watching Vee work. The [Ghost Smith] did his best to keep up his pace, but adding the :thorns: was oddly draining – especially while being watched – and he was moving like a slug by the time he finished.
“I think…I’m going to take a little break,” Vee said. He set down his hammer and winced, dismissing the notification that he’d just gotten another point of Might. “Or maybe just call it for the day.”
The fiend walked over to the haphazard pile of :thorn: plates next to the anvil picked one up.
“Surprising. Is light,” it said after a momentary examination. “Expected heavier.”
It paused, setting down the plates gently and then turned to face Vee. “Master? May help?”
Vee thought it over, then shrugged and handed the fiend his hammer. He drew some blue ectoplasm out of the furnace and set it on the anvil. “Go for it, knock yourself out.”
Cog was an enthusiastic worker, mimicking Vee’s motions near-perfectly and approaching the taskwith the same tireless intensity all of the orchestra members did to their given tasks. Its blows were steady, even, and powerful enough to shape a plate of blue ectoplasm in a half dozen hits. The red went even faster, and Vee’s assistant stacked the two atop each other for the [Ghost Smith] to fuse together.
In this way they made another batch of :thorn: plates, and Vee was relieved to find that attaching the plates to the ghosts was easier than he’d feared. While he wasn’t exactly looking forward to the new repeating task of making additional plates, he was intrigued by the possibility of giving some of his ghosts :thorns:.
When they were done, Vee went out to the stairwell and listened for any sound of Alforde’s approach. No sign of his friend reached his ears, but since Vee was thoroughly done being a [Ghost Smith] for the day, he decided that now was as good a time as any to go and do some [Dungeon Master] work while he waited.
***
The union’s list of purchasable monsters and minions was much heavier than Vee remembered. When he’d first got it, it had been a hefty book but still quite manageable and easy to lift. Now it was nearly the size of his waist and picking it up was a chore.
At first Vee thought that this might simply be his fatigue from making so many :thorns: plates, but a quick skim of the later chapters revealed monsters he most definitely had not seen before – Spheres of Flame, Eternal Night Bats, Skeletons Without Bones, Thwockers, Argent Blades, and many others – and took a look at the back cover.
There, on a strange, leathery stamp were the words “A Living Book prepared at the behest of the Union of [Dungeon Masters]”.
Vee had heard of such things before – books that could have bits added to or removed from them by the [Author] long after they were published – but had not seen one himself. His feelings on it were mixed: the ability to change the contents of a book after it was printed was interesting, but also philosophically concerning depending on how the identity of the [Author] was decided.
To ease the strain on his arms, Vee set the book down and opened it from the front. He skimmed past the tier-one monsters he’d long ago decided not to buy – insects, small statues, and other such beasts – and opened the section of tier-two minions. Here too there’d been additions, the [Dungeon Master] didn’t remember nearly so many different types of snailmeras or crowlems.
Over the past few days, Vee had spent a decent amount of time thinking about what type of minions he wanted to add to the dungeon next, but hadn’t yet come to any hard conclusions.
In theory, he could simply “reinvest in what was working and reduce what wasn’t”, but like far too many ideas in business, this was surprisingly hard to measure. After all, what constituted “working” and “failure”? Was success defined by the number of minions that ended the most adventurer runs or was it tied to the ones that got destroyed the least? There was an argument to be made for both, especially when taking into account the way minions interacted with adventurers; a minion that sacrificed itself to critically weaken a challenger was probably more valuable than a minion that never actually fought but didn’t get destroyed.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Similarly, was it better to measure and compare performance on absolute or relative terms? Did the starting number of minions play into the calculation? If so, how much?
Ugh. These were the types of decisions Vee hated making. There were a million different tiny details that could change the best way to approach a problem like this, and giving them anything more than a cursory consideration was probably a fool’s errand.
Heck, maybe any sort of serious thought was a fool’s errand. Maybe true wisdom in situations like this was to simply just make it up as he went along.
Vee frowned. That was deeply unsatisfying too, and with a sigh he decided that it was time to get serious and start actually making progress. Thinking for its own sake for too long was bad too.
He decided to start with the easiest choices to make and set the harder ones aside in the hopes that doing the former would aid in the latter.
The easiest decision to make as far as Crestheart’s minions went was adding a few new types of skeletons: no matter what metric one chose they were definitely the dungeon’s stars. Especially since the strange arrangement they’d made with the skeleton shaman in his menagerie kept them from getting destroyed so long as he was smart about their deployment.
He flipped through the pages until he found the skeleton offerings and navigated to the tier threes. There were, of course, stronger versions of the ones he already had – Heavy Skeleton Knights, Double Archers, and Boosted Mages – but Vee wasn’t particularly interested in them.
Instead, his eye was drawn to skeleton sappers, which were distinctly barrel shaped creatures with four arms. He read their description:
Skeleton Sappers:
These little guys will really explode if you give them a chance. They work in pairs: a tunneler and an erupter. As the names indicate, the tunneler has the ability to summon a temporary tunnel beneath the ground that its partner can use. Erupters burst out of the ground beneath their targets’ feet and use [Bonesplosion] or [Shatterbone Burst], which apply different types of damage. For further details, please consult the minion skill appendix.
Sighing once more, Vee tucked his finger into the book’s spine to hold his place and hunted down the appropriate appendix. The two skills were similar in that they both caused a skeleton to blow up but [Bonesplosion] did impact damage while [Shatterbone Burst] did piercing damage with a 15% chance of inflicting a Minor Bleeding status and a 2% chance of inflicting Major Bleeding.
Vee shook his head. Not those then, unless he could arrange for them to only use [Bonseplosion]. Bleeding was one of those statuses that was potent but also nearly as annoying to the inflicter as the inflicted; he didn’t much relish the idea of having to clean up a dungeon’s room between runs because the “lucky” 2% chance had hit.
He returned to the monster listings and continued reading. In addition to the sappers, there were also skeleton ground-bursters, which made tunnels like the sappers did but were focused around grappling challengers after popping out of the ground instead of blowing up on them. Vee liked that more, and decided to go ahead and buy some when he saw that they were made by the same supplier he’d bought his current skeletons from.
A pack of twelve cost two gold fleurs, which he jotted down on a spare bit of notebook paper.
Now that was another question Vee had to think about too: how much exactly did he want to spend? Ten gold fleurs? Twenty? A hundred?
After a moment, Vee decided to set that aside and go ahead making a preliminary list first. Then, once that was done he could go through and whittle down his choices to only the most interesting or best fits.
In addition to the ground-bursters, Vee also liked the idea of adding a few trapskeletons – who waited disassembled on the ground until an adventurer stepped on one of their bones before recombining and attacking – and some skeleton smashers to his mix too. This latter minion was big and slow, but carried a hefty mace that could probably overpower the average Crestheart challenger if they were foolish enough to fight head on and could also serve as the centerpiece of some new custom packs.
Vee drew a circle around the smashers: Crestheart definitely lacked strong defensive minions and getting some would certainly open up new pack crafting options.
Maybe that was the criteria he should be using, Vee thought while he flipped over to the ghosts and other ectoplasmic beings section. What new strategies and tactics could he employ with his purchases? Right now all of the dungeon’s packs operated under a very simple framework of attacking straight on…surely there were minions that would let him do other things too.
He found an interesting option a few minutes later in a section titled “Mimics and Mimic-mimics”. It was a Spitting Armoire-y – or possibly ‘armory’, if the description was to be believed instead.
Spitting Armoire-y:
An eight foot tall monstrosity of wood and malice, this innocuous-looking monster is the perfect fit for any dungeon. Powered by a [Chained Spirit], the armory attacks adventurers by “spitting out” (summoning) tier-one animated weapons. These weapons will persist for up to five minutes and can be wielded by other minions in the room if they’re capable of doing so. Made by skilled [Craftsmen] (min level 30). Modular design makes for easy replacement and repair. Available in blood-cedar, Mahowlgany, and teak.
The price was ten gold fleurs, and while Vee balked at such a cost he thought the concept was interesting too. He’d always had a soft-spot for mimics of all kinds, and this one sounded like it’d fit Crestheart well. Especially if he could rig up something that would let his ghosts use weapons.
The discovery propelled his searches further, and Vee spent the next hour or so looking through the rest of the tier three minions and also going back to the tier twos, in case he’d missed promising candidates.
By the time Alforde came up to find him -- crowing about some progress he'd made with his training down in the dungeon -- Vee had trimmed his choices down to six new types minions in total and how many of each he wanted to buy. Writing all the names down carefully on an order form provided to him by Dheart, the [Dungeon Master] sent the purchasing request off to the union, earned himself another [Dungeon Master] level, and decided to call it a day.
Main Character Sheets:
Vee Vales
Primary Class: Ghost Smith (Self), Level 9
Secondary Class: Dungeon Master (Oar’s Crest), Level 25 (+1)
Tertiary Class: Guy-Who-Takes-Things-WAY-Too-Far (Self), Level 7
Might: 16 (+1)
Wit: 42
Faith: 25
Adventurousness: 7
Ambition: 16
Plotting: 21 (+1)
Charisma: 18
Devious Mind: 30 (+1)
Leadership: 22
Guts: 16
Intimidating Presence: 11
Citizenship: 24
Public Relations: 8
Determination: 7
Persuasiveness: 6
Bargaining: 4
Patience: 3
Competitive Spirit: 1
Pragmatism: 1
<3<3 Infatuation <3<3
Alforde Armorsoul:
Primary Class: Hammer Specialist (Self), Level 6
Secondary Class: Right-hand man (Vee Vales), Level 19
Tertiary Class: Dungeon Champion (Oar’s Crest), Level 18
Additional Class: Glaciernaut (Sacha Silverblade), Level 13 (+1)
Might: 60 (+1)
Wit: 16
Faith: 28
Adventurousness (Bound – Vee Vales): 9
Endurance: 34 (+1)
Intimidating Presence: 15
Heart of a Champion: 15 (+1)
Citizenship (Bound – Vee Vales): 9
Vigilance: 11
Vanity: 2
Single-Mindedness: 1
Reginald (Unchanged):
Primary Class: Core Spirit (Unknown), Level ???
#$&Q#$)(@#$#@#$%!@#$##%#%()@#$**@@##
Secondary Class: Loudmouth (Self), Level 43
Tertiary Class: Majordomo (Vee Vales), Level 21
Additional Class: Announcer (Vee Vales), Level 14
Additional Class: Hyperthymesiac (Self), Level 5
Might: 2
Wit: 37
Faith: 17
Ambition: 29
Greed: 24
Deceptiveness: 27
Manipulativeness: 42
$#&*!@!!: !!!
Loyalty: 47
Patience: 10
Irritability: 25
Remorsefulness: 17
Expository Prowess: 23
#%$Pragmatism*#$: @#61$5
Hop@#!! @#$@!@#
@#$@%%^
#4^5#*&_!+++#(@$#
Citizenship (Bound – Vee Vales): 9