Chapter 16: Dungeon Design – Chapter 16

Ally claps, ‘rooms complete and you started them with some denser walls. Convenient as the system seems to have set that as your basic room setup. You do have a bit of space left to make a few more small rooms but we can wait till you have more space. Let’s work on connecting the rooms together. While they share sides, you haven’t opened them up so someone could move from one to the next. For this we can cheat a bit. Instead of cutting each doorway yourself just let the system do it. Think about how big you want the passage and tell the system to connect the small and medium-sized rooms. When you’ve done that do the same between the small and the large room but instead of a doorway just imagine the wall gone.’

Doyle thinks about it and order the system to [from the small room make a doorway to the medium room and remove the wall to the big room]. With the order input into the system he can feel his skills being used. Not quite the same as it was much quicker than he could use them and all at once. There is now a hole and a missing wall.

Unlike the rest of the rooms though these passageways are rough. The doorway is like someone hacked their way through with a hammer and where the wall had been was even stranger. If the doorway at least looked normal the now meter of ground between the big and small rooms looked out of place. It is as if someone had transported a small slice of a natural cave in between the two rooms.

‘This is your dungeon type coming through.’ Ally gestures at the rough stone. ‘Whenever you create terrain without being specific on how it should look the system will automatically style it like a cave. This design can even be forced upon you in special instances. A good example of this is those space station types you could have chosen. While the inside of the rooms is under your control, the system would force a space station like design on the outside of the dungeon.’

‘However these styles are not the end all be all of your future dungeon. As you did with the three rooms, you can design each room. Also, the more floors you get more options become available. With those space station dungeons as an example the later levels allow for them to create attached asteroids and other such features. The strange caverns option you chose mentions a few styles. Ancient ruins, mushroom forests, and even regular forests. Beyond that it inherits ravines and underground lakes from the basic dungeon style. Now focus on your existing rooms and think about changing them to the cave style.’

[Change these rooms to cave style.]

One simple command and everything changes. What was once simple rooms with smooth walls are now caves. As if plucked from the remains of a volcano. In fact, the small room looks more like a lava tube connecting the other rooms.

This change takes Doyle some time to process. While the actual change happened in less than a second it lags his mind out as it goes through each change. The rooms stayed the same size on the outside with only some material flowing inward. This means that he will have to add more stone later but most important to him is it solved his one problem with creation. The only reason he had gone through the effort to create the facade on the outside of those cubes was to keep the stone’s natural grain. To put all his work to shame the system just styles it. Doyle can feel how it happened. Can’t make heads or tails of what the system did but there it is. Best he can figure is with a few more levels under his belt for the creation or control skill will do it.

Ally is oblivious to his annoyance so after the system alerts her that he has succeeded she continues. ‘You can use the styles like wallpaper as well and just color walls like any of your stone patterns. At the moment it bases your style on a volcanic region so lots of obsidian and stone bubbles. A nice starting option as most people expect the classic limestone variety of caves. Might attract more people for the novelty.’

‘That aside your territory has expanded. Not by much but enough you could fit another large room to any side. This should be just enough to create the first level. You will just have to spiral around your core. Oh, and by just enough I mean on a 2d plane. My advice and the common wisdom is to keep your floor design free of massive changes in height until later. You aren’t designing for birdfolk. Just fill the rest of the area in with stone. Honestly, this is a safer design for you anyway as the voidbeings will have a harder time phasing through solid stone.’

‘A good ten to twenty rooms depending on how big you make them should do for the first level. Once you have them setup, give me a heads up and we will continue. Oh and don’t open up your core yet. We want that closed off as long as possible.’ Instructions done Ally sits down on his core again.

Doyle takes a step back and observes his rooms so far. The core room is surrounded on three sides. There is the medium-sized room to what he has taken as the front, the small room to his left, and the large room at his back. The medium room leads into the small room which acts more like a tunnel to the large room.

This setup looks fine to him but he feels a bit exposed on the right so the first thing he does is add a medium-sized room except it extends to match his other medium room so half again as long. Though he can see this way of describing the rooms to be confusing later on. While he has a perfect mental sense of his floor, a way to communicate it to Ally would be convenient.

‘Hey Ally, from now on I am going to take the small rooms as a basic unit of measure for everything else. Just ignore the core room, going to expand the walls out to match a small room. That means a medium room is two by two and the large four by four.’ She rolls her eyes and goes back to reading her book. Doyle does a double take as he didn’t notice when she took it out but ignores it for now. He can’t read what the title is anyway.

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Back to room design that means his new room is two by three. Now Ally had suggested a spiral but Doyle has other plans. Instead of continuing his counter clockwise direction he plans for a more u shaped design. Next room is another large one lined up with his previous but with an actual hallway. By his unit of measure the hallway was two long and puts the new room right at the edge of his territory.

From there he places four medium-sized rooms. The first four to the right and the rest going down with hallways two long and alternating the side the hallway comes from starting on the right. Off the last room a short hallway leads to a small room on the left and then into a two wide but twelve long hallway of a room. A medium room above that which opens at the bottom left and then opens into another large room to the top right. This large room from the center leads to a winding hallway and his final room, another large three above the last.

This brings him to 14 rooms which with the size of them he figures will match what Ally wanted. It was quick to explain but the actual creation took a couple hours to complete. Now ready to show her what he has done Doyle shapes some white and black stone into a blocky representation of the layout. A little C to show his core room and everything was ready.

A couple pokes with the little stone square gets her attention and she takes a look at it. ‘Decent layout. Did you have any plans for the various rooms?’ Doyle bobbles, ‘lots of goats? The long room I made sure had a bunch of protrusions so it is a good place for an assassin vine or two. A kobold tribe at the center might work out as well. Otherwise just goat it up.’

Ally shrugs, ‘eh, not much else you can do. Maybe have a rare chance for one of the assassin vines to end up in that twisty hallway to mess with people but good enough for the first level. Now though you are ready for one of the few things the system let me keep to gift to you.’ She reaches into her leaf dress and pulls out a small pinch of dirt. With care she places it in a pile.

‘This portion of dirt is worthless to anyone else but to you is worth more than any precious metal. More scientific communities have special names for it but don’t they always? Don’t be a snob and just call it dungeon soil. All it does is turn small amounts of world energy into nutrients. A useful feature for anyone but especially so for a dungeon. While your energy field will feed and care for every living creature that is a part of the dungeon it isn’t the most efficient. Dungeon soil on the other hand is specialized for it and for a fraction of the cost keep any plant or fungus growing on it alive.’

‘There are of course some plants, most notable is common dungeon moss, that does this as well. However you don’t currently have access to any of them. Instead, you will want to put down a layer of this stuff everywhere. In fact, that long room could do with a double coating of the stuff or even more. If you’re going to stow your assassin vines in there you will want it to be a veritable jungle with vines hanging down everywhere. Now deconstruct the dirt and spread it out.’

Doyle tilts his core back in exasperation. ‘I will but come on. This is a two-way relationship yet you just seem to order me around. Sure you have to give me the tutorial but would a please here and there kill you?’ In a huff he takes apart the dirt adding another entry to his database. Ally flies up and backward away from him.

With her hands held out in front of her, Ally apologizes. ‘Sorry about that. A lot of this is from a script and I might have fallen into it. However there isn’t much we can do about it at the moment. During the tutorial I give the orders because you don’t know anything yet. Plus there are only so many ways I can ask you to do a thing before it sounds impolite. Now have you spread the dirt around? We are so close to summoning your first monsters and from what I have heard that is a lot of fun.’

Doyle rolls his core some, ‘fine. I can see where you're coming from. Just give me a moment to track dirt all over the place. Whatever it is made of has a butt load of meaning behind it and will take me awhile to place.’ Ally nods, ‘yeah it does. While no one knows the exact origin of it at this point, it is tightly bound to dungeons now. This is both good and bad. Good, because as a dungeon you have a deep connection to it so will be cheaper. Bad because all that meaning increases the creation cost so high even with the nice discount you get it still sucks you dry.’