Doyle leans back after reading the strange dungeon stone’s description. ‘Well, the description goes a bit farther than Ally explained. I don’t think she hid anything, but it does seem I can’t trust her information to be all knowing. Not that I particularly did? I figured with basic things like this, her tutorial info would be more complete. Anyway, let’s set up the wolves loot list now.’
Doyle spends a few moments tweaking things and ends up with a display to visually play around with the loot layout. The copper plate is easy enough and for the herbs he throws in everything he currently has. But for the potions? He didn’t want too many potential choices there, and they should all somehow tie into the wolf theme.
This takes a while, but eventually Doyle winnows it down to six potions. Invisibility to animals was basically required. Cut, stab, and blunt resistance came next. The blunt one was almost skipped, but in the end he shrugged and added the potion. After all, the stone wolves can deal out a decent amount of blunt force trauma. Finally, to top the list off, he goes for the regular coagulant and flesh mending potions. Regeneration had been on the list until the end. A wolf can bite something off after all. But Doyle kept it off for now. And with that he was left with a nice little window containing all the loot any of his wolves would be dropping from now on.
{Wolf loot:
1 copper plate
5 (sage, aloe, pepper, mint, rosemary, lavender, peppermint, or tea)
1 (coagulant, flesh mending, blunt trauma resistance, stab resistance, cut resistance, or invisibility to animals)}
Doyle sighs, ‘I don’t know if a potential for five herbs dropping is overpowered or just right. I’ll have to keep an eye on it to start. While giving people without harvesting skills a way to get the herbs is nice. I don’t want them to ignore harvest type skills either. [System, set a loot rule for wolves that has them drop all the things listed on this window.]’
‘Okay, with that done, I guess I still have to figure out the kobolds. Kind of sad I don’t have a spear. Then again, a spear is basically just a sharp staff.’ With that in mind, Doyle creates one of his staves. A quick flex of his deconstruct skill sharpens the one end.
{Spear created at lv8}
Doyle dims for a moment, ‘Why only level eight? If the staff was at level ten, it should have stayed at about that place. I don’t think I did that bad at sharpening it. Meh, at least I have spears as an option now. Going to have a lot of the kobolds ride stone wolves so a spear will be perfect for them.’
‘Besides that, though, I guess upper body armor. The legs and such can be protected by the stone wolves and their plates. Though while that will take care of most of the kobolds, there is still some I want going down a different path. And of course what I mean is healers.’
‘The wolves aren’t the beefiest boys, so healers are a must to keep the later encounters going. I’m thinking any place with more kobolds than stone wolves can have the extras pick up a wand. Though looking over the map again, I only have one spot like that and it has two free kobolds at that. Those two healers will make things quite tough in the boss room. Still, so far the healers I’ve used were not much help, so why not. If it is too much, I can just dial it back.’
‘Besides that, I guess I can just make the kobold riders drop their spears as loot. Though kobold riders sound odd. They don’t quite live up to it, but I’m going to refer to them as kobold knights from now on. Now that everything is in place, let’s take a look at it. Though I guess I should get Ally in on this.’
Doyle turns his attention back to Ally and notices that she is onto a new book. Knowing that his tendency to lose time when focused has been multiplied by his species, he checks outside. As he guessed, time had passed and not just a little. At least a day had gone by.
He turns back to Ally, ‘Heyo, how much time has passed?’
Ally looks up, ‘Well it has been a few days. I was worried you might end up missing whenever the other town returns. Anyway, since you’re talking again, does that mean you’re finished with the floor? What does it look like?’
Doyle nods, ‘Just finished up. Here let me show you the floor.’ And he pulls up an overview to show her. Though he does add red Xs to all the ambush locations.
Fourth Floor Map [https://i.imgur.com/LPE7Ztq.png]
Doyle’s core glimmers, ‘Well, there you go! The 14 red Xs are the randomized ambush locations, and those separate cells on the bottom are the ambushes. There are only 11 groups there, though. I want to have a few ambush locations to be empty so people stay on their toes. Maybe if I get a stealth wolf of an appropriate level, I will sub out one of the empty slots for that. As it is, though, I am happy. What do you think now that you’ve seen it?’
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Ally scrolls around the map and nods. ‘You’ve done a good job of bringing your concept into reality. How are your skills doing after that?’
Doyle takes a while to respond as her use of the word concept had reminded him of something. Ally snaps her fingers a couple times to snap him out of it. Still, he takes a moment to respond, ‘Well, I guess I’m not completely done with the floor. I forgot to do some carving around the place and I even have a few perfect locations to do it.’
‘Anyway, you asked about my skill growth? Territory control and dungeon rules grew by a few each. Rules one point more, likely because of my use of that to deal with the ambushes. Deconstruction grew by a couple. But I suspect that comes from absorbing those items I got from my constitution hitting 30.’
‘The biggest winner this time however was creation. That leveled up like crazy. Went all the way from 21 to 32. It grew by 11 levels! Some of that comes from me creating a spear pattern and a box with the preservation enchantment on it. Though now that I mention it, I forgot to place them as well. That and I didn’t put in the chest thing either. Meh, besides that, what I think did a decent amount was applying the room pattern all over the place and those things are decently leveled.’
Ally laughs, ‘At least you remembered all of that before people got to the floor. You’re only going to be getting more things to use on a floor as time goes on. This won’t be the last time you let something slip by. Now what do you want to do with that box?’
Doyle bobs up and down, ‘Eh, I just have the wolves dropping all the herbs right now. My plan was to have the chest include one if there are over ten herbs dropped. That and one when they make it through the floor for the first time in a day. They only work for a year, but I figure that if I’m not careful, they can build up.’
Ally shrugs, ‘I would up the amount of herbs for the first to 50 and increase the time limit of the other to once a week. For the first it is because most of the cost is going to come from the enchantment which scales slower than it grows. The second is because you don’t want to make people feel obligated to run the early floors every day. Once a week is often enough to keep people coming back, while long enough that the higher leveled adventurers won’t skip out on it. Give them a chance to head away for a little as well without feeling guilty or some such.’
Doyle brings up the box’s description and shows it to her before asking what she thought of the box itself. A quick read later and she nods, ‘A decent product that will in and of itself attract people. While a dungeon rarely has to worry about trading caravans stopping by. These boxes alone might be enough to put us on the map. Being able to preserve products when on a long trip is very important to merchants and traders.’
Doyle rolls back, ‘Yeah, these boxes will be important to the settlement. Even right now, when they don’t get any visitors, the ability to preserve all the meat they are pulling out of the dungeon would be a boon. Now if you don’t mind, I want to finish those last two things.’
Ally nods, ‘Every little bit counts, and it isn’t like I’m going to run out of books anytime soon.’ And she turns back to reading.
Doyle rolls his core but turns to the first ambush point. Nothing he can do will stop people from mapping out the entire floor. It might take a hot second, but once people are on the floor, the surprise element will be gone. With that in mind, he starts by removing the lighting from the ambush room.
Room now dark, he carves into the entrance, removing large chunks of stone to use the shadows being cast by what is left behind to make his art. Odd squiggles create images of swirls. Deep cuts allow light to almost enter the room before the stone juts out and blocks it. Curving arcs shield areas much larger than would seem possible, despite being purely a trick of the light.
He draws back his view to see how it looks and is mostly satisfied. All around the opening are dancing shadows designed to distract and misdirect. It isn’t perfect yet though, so he dives back in. Further out from the shadows, he uses the more traditional carving method. Here he creates images of hinted at figures turning away from the darkened room.
Then along the ceiling he places scenes of the sun being eclipsed and on the floor, hedges with animals hidden beneath them. Now when Doyle backs up, he is satisfied at what he sees. The actual shadows in the room are deeper. More important though is that while he isn’t affected by it, he can feel the desire to ignore the room. To turn away and focus on anything else.
Doyle can tell that if it wasn’t for the fact he was the dungeon, it would have been hard to notice even if he resisted the urges. He laughs to himself, ‘Just what I wanted. If I can’t hide the actual ambush locations, why not make them ignore them instead. Sure, such an odd effect will be noticed quickly enough, but that doesn’t stop it from working. One of the joys that comes with those, I’m not here, nothing important going on, effects. What’s the word for that? I know that the general term is misdirection, but I mean the specific effect that causes people to ignore a thing even if they notice it.’
‘Meh, not important. Let’s take a look at setting up the rewards chest. Ally said nothing about it. But this very much seems like a system feature instead of a natural dungeon ability. Sure, we probably figure out how to do this kind of thing, eventually. Having the system shortcut it for us is just convenience.’
‘Now to use it, I probably just need to tell the system what I want. Which I guess is easy enough to try. [System, I would like the fourth floor drops to appear in a loot chest. I want that loot chest to appear either at the end of the floor or the entrance to the floor, depending on which adventurers get to first. I also want there to be more drops if they reach the end. This should include a chance at one of my hinged wooden boxes of preservation if no one on the floor has gotten one from reaching the end in the last week. Also, if over 50 herbs are being dropped, there should be a second chance at a hinged wooden box of preservation.]’