Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 345 (Patreon)

Chapter 345 – Caves

Once Bargulg left, I brought up my interface again. I’d managed to level up during his team’s run. Levels were coming fewer and further between, but I was still way ahead of where a ‘normal’ dungeon my age would be. Got some extra stats, and some extra skills. Bought up a lot of skills, actually emptying out my ‘available skills’ tab, but I still had eight points left.

The only skills that really jumped out at me, at the moment, were the [Divine Traps] and [Living Spells] skills. One let me infuse my traps with divine power, making it harder for even champions of the gods or the like ignore them. The other? Well, it let me turn a spell into a creature that was almost like a slime or elemental, with it roaming around and blasting anything it saw with the spell. The [Divine Traps] skill got immediate use, as I upgraded all my current and future traps to use it, but I held off on [Living Spells] for now. I wanted that to feature prominently on one of my new floors.

With that in mind, I turned my attention away from the dungeon proper, shifting my avatar to the ‘design studio’ space, where I worked on the different floors. Of course, I didn’t have to actually move to another part of my dungeon, as it was all me, but it was the principle of the thing. Having a space just for playing with designs let me focus better, like a writer choosing to use a table in an office space for his laptop, rather than going in the living room to work.

If the next three floors were going to be caves, then I needed to come up with some kind of setup for them. Just making a big curving path surrounded by rock wasn’t very interesting, after all, and you could only do so much with ‘here’s a giant underground room’. So, I was going to have to get creative in a way that I hadn’t needed to before.

However, I decided that the start of this change would come on the pyramid floor. A quick change set it so that, once the boss fight was finished, the floor tiles around the dais would sink into the ground, forming a set of stairs, leading to the portals heading back to the start or forward, into the caves. The exit portal was set into something that looked like a mirror, while the portal leading on occupied a doorway.

That little flourish done, I began working on the sixteenth floor. The portal would drop people in an area that looked as though it was the other side of the doorway from before, with more Egyptian style stonework leading down a flight of stairs, until it ended in gray stone. A torch glowing with magical light was placed there, and I made sure to make it so that not even a Tier 3 could rip it from the wall.

So far, I hadn’t done much with darkness. Oh, there were shadows in certain parts of the dungeon, and it was hard to see through the fog on the second floor. But even the inside of the Water Temple was generally well lit. But these cave floors? I was going to have them be in almost complete darkness, with only a few key points having light.

The first three floors had people deal with the clinging dampness of the swamps, and showed them how danger could hide just out of sight. The next three floors showed how intelligent enemies, fighting you on their home turf could prove to be a great challenge. Then there were the floors of ‘spiritual temptation and degradation’, as one adventurer had put it, forcing people to confront taboos and horrors in equal measure. The Atlantean floors forced people to fight through disadvantageous situations, or think quickly to turn the tide in their favor. And then, the desert floors had people deal with the sweltering heat and sand, forcing them to rethink their choice of weapons and armor.

With the caves, I was going to force people to deal with the overwhelming claustrophobic feeling of darkness pressing down on them at every opportunity. Would they keep torches or light spells at the ready, so that they could see traps and pitfalls, knowing that they’d risk being spotted by enemies long before? Or would they try for some type of darkvision, and potentially miss any clues written upon the walls? And would any lights they had be spells prone to being dispelled, or physical objects that they would have to carry, leaving them without both hands to defend themselves?

I decided that I would start with Undead as the main monsters for this floor. That would help connect it with the floor before, and the different sounds that undead made would carry in the dark caves more than you would think, making any adventurers start jumping at shadows. The dark and unknown would wear them down more than anything, even before they came across the monsters.

But I needed a layout for the floor. It couldn’t just be one straight line, with different paths branching off from it. Or perhaps I didn’t need to do something complicated? I had the [Random Labyrinth] skill, which I hadn’t used since I first made Goblin Town. If I used it here, on the sixteenth floor, then I just had to make some patterns for the different passages and rooms, and the skill would randomly fill out the floor each time someone entered. This would force every group to take their time and explore, rather than one group mapping the floor, and then everyone else following the same map, which would give them more time to ‘appreciate’ the darkness.

Before they got into the random part of the dungeon, though, I wanted to give them a hint of what was to come. I put an open pit just at the edge of the torch’s light, and dressed it up as a pitfall trap that had already been sprung. In the bottom of the spiked pit, I arranged a skeleton, impaled on the spikes, with a tattered pack on its back.

Inside the pack, I made it so that there would always be a torch, some basic rations, a waterskin, and a journal. The journal’s writing would shift to be written in the native language of whoever was reading it. It was supposed to be the journal of an escaped slave coming from ‘the Shadow City’. They were seeking help to try and free their people from the slavemasters. That would set up Floor 18, and have people thinking about it.

I considered things for a second, and then made the sides of the ‘trap’ smooth and slick, so that people would have trouble climbing in and out. A Lewd Slime Lord like Captain Hentai in the bottom of the pit, hidden in an alcove out of sight from the top, made for a nice extra bit of danger. Danger came with rewards, so I added a map to the pack, which would include a rough sketch of the floor each time, including the location of treasures, and bosses. It would be a reward for anyone who took the time and risk of climbing down into the pit to search the skeleton for clues.

I started with the templates for the different dangers and room types. Most of the dangers were going to be with the various undead, or the traps, but I also wanted to have environmental hazards, too. A hall that sloped upwards, or downwards, and had enough moisture in the air to make footing treacherous. Areas with natural gas leaks, where a pocket lighter could cause an explosion.

Then there were some of the magical, or semi-magical hazards of an underground floor. Ever since I’d introduced the Herbs of Eros on the first floor, I’d worked on giving their aphrodisiac effects to other plants and such, as well having things like passionslimes. One of my successes was the Jolly Mushroom. It constantly gave off spores that combined hallucinogenic and aphrodisiac effects to be a real one-two punch on anyone without proper protections.

On their own, they weren’t dangerous. However, creatures that were immune to their spores could hunt freely in a patch of the Jolly Mushrooms. if I added a couple subterranean versions of the Lewd Assassin Vine to the room, then the whole trap became a lot nastier, without actually increasing the difficulty too much.

Wait, combining things. I laughed as I got an idea, and planted the spores of some of the Jolly Mushrooms on some skeletal undead. As I expected, the undead were unaffected by the mushrooms. However, the mushrooms did grow on the skeletons, giving them a new way to cause trouble for adventurers who found them.

Hmm. I needed to start thinking about bosses. I wanted to actually force people to explore, and make having the map more useful. I decided that the simplest way to make that happen was to have three minibosses, each with one of the keys needed to open the boss room door. That was the easiest way to make sure everyone needed to find their way around in the dark.

First miniboss was special, an ‘environmental’ miniboss. Turned out, the Dark Bargainer tree could live underground, if there was enough mana in the area. A couple crystals to light the area, put it in a ‘bowl’ type depression in the ground, full of Jolly Mushrooms, and you had a nice little trap. The key would hang from one of the tree’s limbs, meaning that you had to get up-close and personal with the carnivorous tree.

For the second miniboss, I decided that it had been too long since I’d used any of the wraiths or other spectral undead in a major way. The room was going to be dimly lit, with phosphorescent moss, while the miniboss was a collection of wraiths that you had to fight in a small chamber, while they were capable of phasing through the walls and floors, and you didn’t get the key until the last wraith fell? That would challenge people plenty, without being as over-the-top lethal as bringing Warhammer 40K power armor to a kid’s football game.

Third miniboss needed to be something different. But looking back at my fight with Bargulg gave me an idea. Take a big, beefy human zombie or ghoul, give them something to resist magic and weapon damage a bit better, and hand them a chainsaw as a weapon. Not a chainsword, but an actual chainsaw. That would be a significant threat for any group that didn’t have seriously good damage output, and the psychological effect of a seemingly unkillable creature that doesn’t feel pain and is coming at you with a chainsaw shouldn’t be overlooked.

Getting all three pieces of the key would allow a party to open the door to the boss room. Unfortunately for them, the boss room was going to be a straight-up problem for most groups. The area in front of the door had a small pier area, with a boat tied up at the pier. Obviously, that meant that the rest of the room was a subterranean lake, and the whole thing was pitch black, with only a feeble torch shining at the pier, and another one on the other side of the lake, highlighting the exit.

I named the boss Grandpa Earl, since he was the much bigger, much badder, much nastier, undead version of Earl, the alligator miniboss on Floor 1. And he was damn near invisible under the water when it was dark like this, meaning that trying to find him was the first part of trying to kill him, and being on a boat, in the dark, in the middle of that lake? That was going to put any party at a serious disadvantage. But if they brought lights, then Grandpa would see them, and start actively hunting.

I had a feeling that people were going to get stuck on this floor for a while before they got to the next one.