"A good dungeon level is a fish trap," Cecil said, his hands on his hips and his neck craned to look up at the top of the cavern in the first room. Stew had the lights all the way up, so that Cecil and Bossy could see the layout of the room, even if it ruined the effect. "It is a fish trap that the prey feels safe following although the way narrows and narrows, taking away options until the prey is inevitably caught, wiggling and helpless." He made a motion as if stabbing with a spear. "Then it kills them."

Stew shuddered mentally. "We're not going to just–"

"I believe," Bossy interjected, "what our overly enthusiastic friend is trying to say is that a level must tell a story. This is what was lacking in your first effort. It's understandable. This was your first attempt and you had so little time to prepare, but there was no point to it, no narrative. It was just a series of traps with no compelling reason to risk them. Each step and decision of the delver must feel natural, never forced, even though the outcome must be inevitable."

"What outcome is that?"

"I think in this case, the outcome we want is for the delver to feel that they have discovered a forgotten, but long dead branch of the greater dungeon. They should feel they have thoroughly explored what little there is to find. They may gain some small benefit, just so they have some reason to head straight home, but the overall experience should be disappointing. They should be discouraged from exploring further, or taking any special effort to tell anyone."

"So we'll play dead?"

"With Cecil's help. Yes."

"Excellent. I'm quite good at lying around under things. I have this trick I can do with a reasonably large boulder and my hip joint…"

"That is not what I had in mind." Bossy stepped around the rock and looked directly at the hidden door to the secret passage. "Well not initially, anyway. First we must do something about this entrance room. If our goal is to convince our delvers that they have found all of our secrets, it will not do at all to immediately teach them that we hide things. You should remove this secret passage and replace it with an open and inviting path to the next room."

Stew gave a mental shrug and switched the hidden passage to one that looked like a natural cave opening to room two. He was a little disappointed. He really hoped to convince at least some delvers that there was nothing here but a small cave. Maybe that was wishful thinking.

Cecil and Bossy walked forward and stood in room two which was now just a default dungeon room with bare walls and floor.

"Here we can be much more creative. Are you able to make another cavern here, something that looks natural?"

Stew spent the mana and stone and the walls and floor melted away until there was a cavern as large as the first, but with a different shape and layout of dripped stone decorations.

"What can you do to make this room seem significant? There should be something striking about it, something that draws the eye."

Stew poked around in the new Sinister Decor options and found some useful bits. He chose the ruins of a small temple with stone scattered around the floor. When he made his selection, the rubble appeared surrounding two steps and a worn foundation. The broken remains of one wall jutted up at the back. It was all convincingly discolored and crumbled with age. He found a lighting option that added a dramatic, ghostly beam of light pointed at the center of the temple foundation.

"Yes, I believe we can work with that." Bossy turned to the east wall. "Can you connect a passageway from here to the third room?" She took a step and paused, thinking. "Also add a passage from the first room to the third room. It's important to give the illusion of choice to our guests."

Stew did as she suggested.

"I believe you mentioned you could create puzzle rooms and treasure rooms? These next rooms will be making use of that. There should be some sort of mysterious puzzle to solve to open the passage to the fourth room. The fourth room should then be a treasure room."

He was starting to see where she was going with the level.

He had a good time creating the puzzle for room four, though he had to scrap his first idea when Bossy cautioned him that it couldn't be too hard. The point was to make the delver feel smarter than the dungeon.

For the "treasure room" he didn't seem to have much control over what appeared for the treasure. The one thing that was consistent was that it was all worthless junk. Apparently he would need to level up to make anything interesting.

"Cecil, do you have any magic that can make something glow?" Cecil tapped a finger to his lower jaw bone. "Hmm I have a darkness spell, but not light. I could keep enchanting things until something happens to glow, I suppose."

"You don't have any control over your enchantments?" Bossy asked.

"Apparently not. At least, not yet." Cecil shrugged. "Not to sound ungrateful, but do you realize how odd the System is here? It's so… rudimentary."

Stew ignored the dig, intentional or not. "If it's that random, we could waste a lot of actions and time. Even if we found something, there's no telling what the item would actually do to someone once you found an enchantment that just happened to glow. I have another idea."

He added torches to the wall, then kept resetting the contents, sending Cecil in to grab anything interesting and save it in the next room. Eventually they collected some small chests and shiny plates in various metals. Using the chests as makeshift stands, Cecil arranged them like mirrors until the torchlight shone faintly on a single, flawed yellow topaz, just enough to make it noticeable. The whole point was to create a clue that the light beam in room two was important, and that this gem might have something to do with it.

With rooms one through four sorted, Stew turned the passage to room five into a standard dungeon corridor, curved. Room five was going to be Cecil's stage for his big performance to lead the delvers astray, so Stew made it a slightly larger dungeon room with a big feast table and "bait" food that, according to Cecil, would never spoil and would be especially enticing to delvers, though it had no nutritional value.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Right, magic twinkies." Stew stocked the room and put more torches on the wall for that dungeon feel. There was a chair, larger than the others, at the head of the table which would work perfectly for their plans, and Cecil used his loot special ability to create a cheap brass crown with quartz gems for his costume.

Room six would either serve as another puzzle or as a way to wear out the delvers if they didn't fall for Cecil's story. It would also give the golems a great place to level up their fighting skills in the meantime.

Now that Stew knew he could move rooms around and that they didn't have to have doors, he set the storage room and the core room off to the side with only vents to connect them to the other rooms. Vents also connected all of the rooms now, even if they had passages between them, since some of the rooms would have closed puzzle doors.

He moved the Lunar Forge to room nine and connected it via a "secret passage" to Cecil's room five, giving delvers a way to bypass room six with Cecil's help.

He put a closed, but unlocked door between rooms five and six.

He connected room six to the boss room in ten, but also locked the door between six and ten unless the delvers solved the puzzle in room six. He had trouble explaining the reasoning behind his puzzle in this room to Bossy and Cecil, but they agreed that delvers could probably figure it out given enough time and maybe some hints from Cecil.

In room ten, he added "Stairs Downward." They came with a conveniently locked stone door. He set it directly across from the door back to room six to keep delvers from looking around too much. Sinister Decor gave him some stone rubble he could use to fill the bottom of the stairwell.

He left the grass and natural light options alone in room ten. The illusion of wide open spaces and an unobstructed view back to the forest just helped sell the idea that there was nothing to hide here. He opened a notch in the wall that would allow Bossy, along with the kittens and the wolves, to stand out of sight, hidden by that same illusion.

As they walked back to room two, Stew created eleven new golems for room six. He named one of them "Don" and set him up to delegate actions. He named the rest, then set Don to start working through the bracket starting with "Rocky" and "Chuck" while Sluice took up his position in the ring to help with cleanup. Sluice was thrilled.

"Now what do we do about the temple?" Stew asked.

Bossy turned to Cecil. "Can you make something of value we could highlight?"

"What sort of thing do you have in mind? Some kind of key?"

"A sword," Stew said. "That will feel more important." Plus he secretly wanted to see what kind weapons he was up against in this world. "Can you enchant it?"

"I can, but this is a loot sword, so the enchantment will be random, and at the current dungeon level the quality will be low." Cecil stepped onto the temple platform next to the beam of light.

"Do what you can," Bossy said.

Cecil raised his right arm and an old looking bronze short sword appeared in his hand. Even without a face, he managed to look frustrated. "I can try again, just a moment."

"No. That will be fine." Bossy said. "In fact, that will be perfect. Now what enchantment can you place on it?"

Cecil ran his left hand up the blade then back down as if wiping it. He peered at it. "Well it does provide plus one to strength." He was quiet for a long moment. "And it causes the bearer to snore loudly."

"Just great," Stew said. "We'll be here all day. Just start over. No one will pick that up."

"This might not be a problem." Bossy didn't sound any more bothered by the minor curse than she had been by the low quality of the sword. "Only a person of relatively high level will likely have the ability to appraise an unfamiliar item in a dungeon without special tools."

"That's true," Cecil said, perking up visibly.

"All they will potentially see is the name we give it."

Cecil held it over his head like a general addressing his army. "I shall call it, 'Dread Blade Of The Troubled Night!"

"No." Stew didn't know much about magical worlds and magical swords, but he had played enough games to cringe. "A sword with a name that long is always crap. I bet that's true in this world too." He watched as Cecil wilted and Bossy nodded. "So let's really sell it. How about 'Echoing Thunder'?"

Cecil brightened and Bossy snorted. "That should do nicely," she said.

Stew spent the next hour trying to think of some way, any way, to jam the sword into the foundation or trap it in a boulder. Neither Cecil nor Bossy could understand why he thought that would be impressive.

Finally he just summoned three new golems and had them stand in a group, each grasping the sword as if they were fighting over it while holding it straight up in the beam of light. Then he had them freeze in that position like a sculpture, which, he guessed, they actually were now. He wanted to name them "Huey", "Dewey", and "Louie" but Bossy talked him out of it once he tried to explain the names. Instead he named them "Mystery," "Might," and "Magic," but kept it to himself that he thought of them as "The Post-It Brothers."

Cecil and Bossy walked through the level from the entrance to the boss room, talking through how each part would work and options if things went wrong. Stew wished he could automate more of the details, but he would mostly just be waiting for things to happen, then unlocking doors or making things change himself, not that he would have better things to do with delvers in his only level. As soon as they finished talking through the last step, a new prompt appeared.

Level Complete!

Name This Level? (Y/N)

After talking it over, he set it to the deliberately vague, "Shrine Of The Cold Moon."

That, in turn, opened a new prompt unlocking the option to start a second level. He was about to begin poking at that when Bossy called his attention back to room ten.

"This timing cannot be accidental," Bossy said, watching the south wall where "natural light" allowed them to see a robed and hooded figure stepping from the treeline. The mage would have been an ominous sight, but she immediately caught her robe on a bush and spent the next few minutes beating the vegetation with a short, wooden staff.

"She doesn't look very threatening," Stew said with relief.

She stopped flailing and blasted the bush with a spell of some kind. There was no flash or fire, but the bush crumbled to dust.

Stew was about to take back what he said, when a heavily armed and armored man stepped out of the trees a little farther down, followed by a bearded man in colorful clothing, then over a dozen others who wore mismatched leather armor and had their faces painted like skulls.

These last bunch looked like a cross between Robin Hood's Merry Men and a death metal band. They were of all shapes and sizes. One had scales and huge eyes; one of them definitely looked like an Orc, and there were at least a couple that had to be Elves. All of which made Stew feel both terrified and vindicated.

Cecil shaded his empty sockets with one bony hand and stared. "What are a bunch of bandits doing with two Guild adventurers?"

"I would say they are attacking," Bossy said. "Go get your crown. Everyone, to your places!"