With the entrance of the park taking shape, the guild master reminds Enno of the harsh realities of building a haunted park. They return to Mijanou’s tavern.

“Sorry if I’m blunt, but crafting what makes a haunted park, well, a haunted park can take a while. A haunted park lives and dies with its ghosts!” the GM curtly tells him. “Usually, bosses are crafted in order of installation”

“Are there any… ghost-specific extras?” Enno asks him. “You mentioned background music as one of those extras, and at what cost!”

“For the same recording cost, voice acting!”

“Speaking of which, milord, the Caladon Bog might have only beasts residing in it, but other parks, such as Lower and Upper Perseria, have bosses saying a few lines. I lost count of how many times the boss saying a certain thing saved my bacon, or my teams’!” Saronium exclaims.

“Do you want to be a voice actress for a boss in my haunted park, Saronium?” Enno asks her.

“No thanks, or at least not for now. You don’t even have mechanics in mind for a boss that might use voice acting, and that’s usually what people expect out of a speaking boss!”

I still have a long way to go. I can’t just open a haunted park devoid of mechanics! Enno might have another question for those in the tavern who might have had some experience of running haunted parks.

“As much as I believed haunted park-goers would have accepted a trash-free park only if the story allowed for it, and I chose the bosses believing trash to be ineffective, are the mechanics considered to be part of a park’s story?” Enno asks the two veteran haunted park-goers.

“It depends. If you consider mechanics to be part of the story, generally you don’t want the in-fight dialogue of a given difficulty to allude to mechanics of higher difficulties, even indirectly. Nor to have phases specific to one difficulty. But by and large, most haunted park-goers don’t seem to go into that level of detail. At most they might want to know what they are doing in the park beyond simply collecting loot, so knowing that bosses believe trash to be ineffective, while key to your park, does not a story make” Saronium answers him.

“Long story short, no!” Mijanou curtly answers him.

“One more thing: voice actors usually don’t record lines before the mechanics are set” the GM tells the four. “You said that you wanted a boss to be a lich?”

“I believe so, yes”

This means that some mechanics must use magic on some level, Saronium ponders about what that choice would imply for the resulting fight. Then again all I knew about liches was they are undead wizards.

“What do you want that lich to specialize in?” the GM asks Enno.

“What do you mean by specialty? I am not a wizard, I know only that life, fire, alcohol, arcane and electricity magic exist, but no more than that” Enno asks the GM.

“Major schools of magic include arcane, elemental and holy. You’re describing two tiers of specialties. As with living wizards, liches also tend to specialize in one area within their schools of magic” the GM tells the four.

“I apologize. It’s just that my knowledge of magic is very limited and I have an alcohol witch that sells magical alcohol” Enno tells them.

“There you have it, milord: think of what a fire wizard would do to monetize their magic!” Bryzax challenges his liege lord.

“In my experience dealing with fire wizards in haunted parks, most of them only think of flinging fireballs to kill enemies, or perhaps putting firewalls around themselves to protect against incoming magic, so I couldn’t tell you” Saronium explains herself.

“Saronium, correct me if I’m wrong, but you deal with fire wizards mostly in a haunted park. I dealt with fire wizards in haunted parks, too, just that you know by now that not every wizard thinks of adventuring!” Mijanou hazards a guess about her dealings with fire wizards.

I hate to admit it, but Mijanou is right. Bryzax is asking about how would fire wizards monetize their magic, and Mijanou’s words make me think of what use there is for fire magic outside of battle, Saronium starts thinking of the use they could have for fire magic, before turning towards the two men.

“I’d say cooking or metalworking” Saronium answers Bryzax’s prompt.

“That’s very broad. But since we’re on the topic of non-combat uses of magic, I’d say perhaps I could have the lich summon some non-combat tool with metallic parts and then have that tool do something to a player on contact!” Enno suggests a mechanic to the second boss of this new haunted park.

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“I’d say two or three plows in random directions, but in linear trajectories; plows don’t turn very well” Mijanou adds.

They all try to envision how would that mechanic affect the dynamics of fighting the lich, who is assumed to be powerful enough to pull the magical plows at faster speeds than teams of oxen.

“Mijanou, do you want to be the voice actress for that boss? You have a hand in the mechanics…” Enno makes his offer.

“I might be a saber dancer, performing in taverns and at fairs when I don’t run haunted parks, but… voice acting?” Mijanou yelps, upon hearing about voice acting. “What is voice acting used for, other than for crafting haunted park ghosts?”

To this, everyone else draws a blank. Even the GM of the Haunted Park Construction Guild. They struggle to think of other uses for voice acting, but all of them required magic.

“If I may, milord, some haunted park-goers might be entertainers who crawl haunted parks as a second job” Saronium comments.

“Speaking of which, I might be wondering who could make good voice actors” Mijanou sighs, believing that saber dancers might not be a good fit for voice acting.

“Voice actors might be theater actors whose best acting skills are vocal. A saber dancer, like you, would be good at the non-vocal parts of theater acting” the GM tells her.

“I wonder how good the troubadours or bards I know run haunted parks are as lyrical actors. They can sing, but you make me feel like there’s more to voice acting than singing” Saronium combs through her memories of bards in haunted parks.

Often, bards and troubadours treated adventuring or mercenarial life as day jobs. Not much different from dancers: I learned fencing so I could have an alternate means to earn my keep, Mijanou has memories resurface of why she even took to haunted parks.

“Only having, for a mechanic, plows, moving in random but linear directions, and bleeding players if they get hit is not going to cut it as a boss!” Saronium warns the would-be haunted park operator.

“Saronium, for a while now you tried to help me get my park built, but you never told me why you helped me build the park!” Enno seems to have no idea of what drives her to act this way.

“I would have loved to run my very own haunted park, but I can’t afford the upkeep of one. Since I can’t afford the upkeep of a haunted park, the next-best thing is to help someone build theirs, and ensure its success” Saronium answers him.

Like I would be rich enough to buy a fief and then build a caravanserai on it, but a caravanserai doesn’t cost nearly as much as a haunted park, Saronium reflects on what these years of adventure and haunted park trips yielded her, while Enno turns to the GM.

“Let’s backtrack a bit. How many lines do voice actors have for a given boss?” Enno asks the GM about the cost of that option. “Maybe a few hundred gold would be well worth the cost of voice acting per boss! Caladon Bog’s bosses were all beasts without any voice acting!”

“Usually one per mechanic plus three, if you elect to have it”

“Plus three?” Bryzax asks afterward.

“One for the pull, one for the wipe and one for the death. However, Saronium is right: a one-mechanic boss isn’t going to cut it, especially if it’s a boss deeper in than the first”

“I want to keep the theme of using everyday objects for mechanics, so maybe the boss being invulnerable until some phantom-driven cart explodes within its blast radius, or the boss grabs the cart by the chain!” Enno suggests a second mechanic for the boss.

“It goes without saying the cart’s explosion should hit indiscriminately. What would happen if the chain grabs a player instead of the cart?” Mijanou asks.

“The player would take a big hit upon contact with the boss. That I believe would warrant two extra lines for that one mechanic” Enno mentions the constraint.

“What do you mean, two extra lines?” Saronium asks Enno, furrowing a brow.

“One for when a player is grabbed by the chain, another for the impact of the cart on the boss. Speaking of the cart, I would want the cart to stalk a non-tank at random, too”

“You said that boss was a fire witch in life? I say give her a physical attack in melee range and fireballs at range. But also a mechanic using fire magic, and make her disfigured by scars of burns that didn’t fully heal” the GM suggests them. “Might sound a little cheesy, but a meteor shower”

We kept discussing mechanics and voice acting, but I would think that this boss’ body type would determine how the boss’ garments are going to be. Luckily, I don’t feel like anyone here would have any objections if this boss was bulky, as if she built plows and carts in life, the GM starts thinking of how the boss is going to be once built. And how bosses look are usually not much of a concern to park-goers, but man is the first boss of this park vain!

“This all starts to remind me of a certain someone I met in my youth” the GM, in his old age, takes a trip down memory lane.

“Who does that remind you of?” Saronium asks the elderly man.

“My first banker. Although, at that time, she was the owner, it was really someone else who ran the bank; she also owned a cartwright workshop that sold plows on top of carts!”

“In this case, you can always have her motivated by greed, and become a lich to live an eternal life of running her businesses! And she made a lich of her business partner!” Saronium has a flash of genius, before leaving the tavern. “See you next time, milord!”

“Now I have a better idea of what I want out of my park’s second lich: an alcohol lich! And that lich threatens to make the entire population alcoholics, as well as drunk!” Enno tells the other three about his vision for the last boss of the park.

“I want a phylactery phase, where both liches’ phylacteries are destroyed!” the GM exclaims.

“This means the death quote for the fire lich must hint at her not being fully dead...” Mijanou comments on the voice acting.

“Fine, I will take voice acting for both liches! How much would the second boss cost?” Enno asks about the cost of his park’s second boss.

“The estimate is one hundred eighty-two thousand gold”

Ouch! The first boss already cost me three hundred thousand gold for their gear alone, that they are probably torturing the prisoners to death to pay for their gear, I already paid another three hundred thousand, and then I have committed another 282,000 gold; that’s not even counting the loot system, voice acting, background music or the last two bosses! Enno’s despair is showing, especially given the high cost of his haunted park.