[D'sP] Garry And Larry - Chapter 407 (Patreon)

Outside of the dungeon, Jim is talking with Garry Johnson and Larry Davis. The inner circle’s tanner and leather worker, respectively. “So, can you manage it?”

Garry and Larry glance at one another. Neither is quite sure, so Garry reiterates, “You want us to both break through the masterwork barrier? When we don’t have the right equipment? The proper chemicals? Or magical equivalents?”

Jim gestures at Kelly, “You will have support. Any chemicals will be sourced or a replacement found. As for the equipment? We will be crafting each of you a set out of mithril or any other material you might want.

“You two will be vitally important from now on. The dungeon won’t let us just coast by anymore. Our gear needs to survive on the deeper floors. That means either grinding out a floor until we get a new set of gear for everyone. If! If that is even possible.

“Because not every floor will have every gear drop. So, the only way to keep up is if we turn the drops into proper equipment. If you turn it into proper equipment. Sure, some of the burden will be on the smiths in the outer circles. Except, we can’t fully trust them and don’t know when they’ll start making masterworks.”

Larry sighs, “Not like we weren’t going to aim for this sort of thing, anyway. After the first masterwork showed up, every crafter has been striving to be the second. Who doesn’t want to be known as master of their craft?”

Garry nods, “If they don’t? They aren’t actually crafters at heart. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. You need grunt work and mass-produced dross to keep the wheels off the economy turning.

“With how skills work, if it wasn’t for people who felt fine making a living by selling new gear, we’d be in trouble. Not everyone can be striving to make the strongest sword. You’d end up flooding the high end market.”

Larry, “I doubt that last bit myself. There’s always another step higher to reach for. Though, it is possible that at some points, supply and demand will be out of whack. For instance, as it stands I can’t actually turn all the leather Garry produces into gear. He can simply cure more leather than I could ever process in the same amount of time.”

Jim raises an eyebrow, “And maybe that would be a good place to start.”

Larry, “I’m working as fast as I can! If you want masterwork gear, it isn’t going to involve me speeding up.”

Jim shakes his head, “No, I mean Garry. Sure, producing a little more than Larry needs isn’t bad. It builds up a stock of materials in case something comes up. However, being careful with fewer hides, couldn’t that be a path towards masterwork leather?”

Garry shrugs, “I can soak one hide as easily as more. Don’t affect the quality to do so. I guess a bit more effort on the prep could eke out some improvements, but I’m really just missing the chemicals and such.”

Jim raises an eyebrow, “I might not have gotten too into actually preparing leather, but I know you can manage it with all the supplies we currently have access to. Even if getting a brain to drop in the dungeon is harder than other pieces.

“Maybe your problem is not being flexible enough? Whatever else, we cannot replicate all the fancy chemicals there were pre-system. You’ll have to adapt to whatever natural stuff we have around, and anything alchemy can whip up.

“Not to say that we won’t get some banger alchemy subs. Just that we are probably a ways off and either way, skill growth will come more readily if you’re trying new things out. Besides, I’m sure your normal steps will start to fall apart soon.”

Garry, “How?”

Jim shrugs, “Well, one thing that got us on this conversation is the potential ashen cow hides. Now, there likely won’t be any inherent problems with them, but what if a hide was resistant to one of the chemicals? What if a water resistant monster has a hide that doesn’t soak right? And so on and so forth.”

Garry frowns, “That would be a problem.”

Jim shakes his head, “That would be a chance. Finding a new way to cure a hide will be worth so much more to level the skills than following those that came before. You will be on the cutting edge of tanning. At least, you will be as long as you keep working at it.”

Garry nods, “I can get behind that. To be honest, I’ve mostly felt like I was treading water. Sure, I’m as strong as anyone else in the inner circle, but my crafting? Well, I won’t say it has been stuck.

“While what you’ve said is completely right, it also misses the power in perfection. I was constantly refining my methods. Tweaking the smallest variables. Hell, I probably have the most accurate scales besides the Barrais.

“It’s just that the old saying about the last ten percent taking ninety percent of the effort tends to be more true than not with these kinds of things. It is easy to get to three quarters efficient, but every percentage point past that takes more and more until it is back breaking.”

Jim shrugs, “Someone does have to do that kind of work. At least, at some point. However, right now it is important that such work gets done on techniques and materials of the moment. A few less hides a batch in exchange for using easily sourced chemicals is a more than worthy trade off.”

Garry shrugs, “At this point I figure we’re just talking past each other. I’m willing to work on this, so we should be fine and dandy.”

Larry nods, “And this doesn’t change my plans all that much. I was already going for masterwork gear. After all, while things like leather packs are nice, I wear the armor, same as everyone else.”

Jim, “Okay, now, either of you able to make some equipment that resists fire better? Like, I know I just dumped a lot of you, but I’d like to break through to the 17th floor. It isn’t like we’re stuck at a skill or strength bottleneck. We can make it.”

The two shrug and Larry gestures into his shop. “I’ve got a lot of orders from the others to work on right now. You’ll have to talk to them and get them to agree to let your project jump to the front of the line. Nevermind the materials we’ll need for it. Though I guess this is a good excuse for you to get back out in the woods. After all, someone will have to scrounge up the herbs and you can certainly manage.”

Of course, nothing is ever that simple. Doyle actually manages to finish his tests with the kobolds well before Jim’s party is fully outfitted in gear capable of at least not burning to a crisp. The work is rough and leans more on curse magic over buffs, but it works. Sorta.

See, the simplest thing was a token and as Doyle suspected, if he wanted magic bone fetishes that work against a specific enemy, you need bones from something at least semi-related to them. So he would have to spawn in human bones for his kobolds to be more effective against the delvers.

And sure, he was a dungeon core now and basically any other core would jump on this at a moment’s notice. However, to Doyle it was just creepy. Not enough to stop him from using them if needed, but he wasn’t going to have them lying around during normal operations.

Thinking of this, Doyle couldn’t help but glance over into the seventeenth floor’s farm area. There are 430 tokens, each made from a piece of human bone. Enough to outfit the last group of kobolds and elders if needed.

There weren’t any more on the other floor. The tokens are meant to improve Doyle’s chance against an attempt on his life, not smack around new delvers. What there was a lot of, was other human bones, because it took a good bit of experimentation to figure out the limits.

For one, a single being can only provide a single token. With the caveat that it has to be a single being and so Doyle had to spawn a bunch of complete human skeletons, just to use a single bone off of each. Also, test tokens made for goats showed an interesting discount to the power needed to create it.

So yeah, while not viable for humans, the goat tokens revealed another interesting quirk. Not even Ally was sure of the exact mechanism behind it, but the more “life” there is to a creature before being turned into a token, the less power you need to make the token. And once that was discovered, Ally gladly answered Doyle that truly important or powerful beings can result in stronger types of token.

This didn’t mean the dungeon bosses would be farmed for powerful tokens. The whole “one token to a being” rule didn’t care if a new living body was made. There would only be one token. Once again, Ally wasn’t certain how it worked, but could confirm this was correct.

Also, it wasn’t soul related, which, with the odd nature of souls, would have honestly been an easier answer. Because no, stronger tokens weren’t limited to sapient. You can have a wolf monster that’s evolved quite far without a soul that makes a quality token.

Not that these tokens are the only outcome of Doyle’s work with bones. Rather, they’re the only outcome that has been specific to bones. You can, of course, use bones for all kinds of stuff that works just as fine with wood and so on.

A sword with a bone handle works just as fine as one with a wood handle. The only caveat being that it better channeled certain powers over others. Which is true of any material. A mangrove handle is going to handle water magic better than the wood of a tree from a desert. Or the most commonly thought of, a tree struck by lightning will in fact have wood better able to handle lightning magic.

Though in what some would find a twist, a wand with a bone handle actually handled healing spells spectacularly. It does make some sense and the usual assumed affinity was also there.

While most would think of necromancy when people start using bones to decorate their gear. Bones are not inherently necromantic. You can use them that way, but bones are just as much of life. Death can be thrown in as well, since that is a separate magic from necromancy.

Now, Doyle was certain there were other uses for the various parts of creatures, but he was limiting himself to bone tokens for the moment. Though speaking of said tokens, it took him more than a moment to figure out how to use them. After all, he was already against using tokens for humans or any of the other awakened races.

That left only his own monsters, but unless he specifically made a floor where monsters would fight one another, it wouldn’t do anything. But there was an answer! The basic token did two things. It had minor adjustments to one’s ability to hit and damage. This was accomplished by jinxing the enemy to end up in the way of your blows.

The other thing it did, was less useful against humans or his own current batch of monsters. That of penetrating natural defenses. So yeah, it might do a tiny bit against a kobold’s scales and nothing to a regular human.

Which leaned into the use Doyle had found for it on the 17th floor. Because there was one bit of intra-dungeon aggression. That of monsters hunting critters for food. And there was one critter that the token would help against, if only at the level of what it would do against a kobold. The lizards.

And so Doyle threw down a bunch of lizard critters for the kobolds to hunt. It doesn’t entirely make sense. After all, they can trap them a lot easier than using a sling. But it at least provided a reason, no matter how flimsy.

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