Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 346 (Patreon)

Chapter 346 – No Man’s Land

For the seventeenth floor, I wanted to lead into the ‘Shadowed City’ idea more. Set things up so that, when the adventurers got there, they were ready for what was to come. But in order to do that, I needed to create stakes, and I needed to make sure that they had some way to get the information they needed.

Just on the other side of the portal from the floor above, I carved out a small cavern with what were clearly refugee hovels, made out of bits and pieces of everything and anything they could get their hands on, including what looked like animal and beast parts. Including some parts that looked to be chitin taken from over-large spiders.

This little refugee outpost had a stone slab for a door leading further into the floor, thick enough that it could not be easily forced. The idea was that these refugees were all escaped slaves from the Shadowed City, and had fled captivity through this floor’s hazards. Eventually, they found this place, where they could defend themselves from patrols, but they could not go further with the lake blocking their path.

They had tried to get across the lake, but the beast from below rose up, and consumed almost a dozen of their number, before they managed to flee back to the safety of the shore. Realizing that they were trapped, one of the slaves, the only one who had the skills for magical flight, took off, and flew across the lake, to try and find help. But no help came, and what divinations they could perform said that he had died, leaving them trapped in this place.

In the end, the temporary camp had become a permanent settlement, with people venturing out of the safety of the encampment to scavenge for food and other resources. Magic could substitute for many things, but there were limits. Instead, they used magic to stretch what few resources they had, allowing people to remain somewhat healthy, and reducing the wear and tear on their gear, so that it had to be replaced less often.

However, there would be things the outpost lacked. Metals, for the most part. There were resource nodes in the area between the camp and the city, but they could not mine them without the sound drawing patrols, and they barely had the resources to cook their food each day, and none to spare to keep a forge hot. This meant that they were lacking the ability to make processed metal goods, like metal armor or even knives. Most of their equipment was made from stone, bone, or chitin.

I made signs to show the outpost had expanded over time, using Earth magic to carve out a larger cavern for more houses, and even some fungus farms to add to their diet. The camp was now more of a small town of just over a thousand people. Only about a fifth of those were fighters of any sort, though, and the majority of that group were more hunters and scavengers than warriors. The majority of the people in the slave town were just normal people, crafters, cooks, serving girls, and so on. The only thing uniting them was that they’d all escaped from the Shadowed City.

I put a few shops in the town, as well. People would be able to buy food and other supplies, even local weapons and armor, if they wanted. Even if they didn’t want chitin armor or bone weapons, the crafters could still repair any gear they had. Then there were alchemists, who brewed up potions with the local materials. One of the shops even did enchantment work, which could help anyone looking to improve their existing gear.

The town needed a name. I couldn’t just let it be called ‘Refugee Camp’ or ‘Slave Town’. Well, I could, but that wouldn’t encourage people to actually care about these people, and venture on to the Shadowed City. I was starting to get plans for that place, after all.

Thinking about the name, I decided that it needed to be something simple, yet still symbolic. Something to make a conscious pull on the heartstrings, but not something that would sound out of place for a bunch of escaped slaves to call it. Something like… Shatterchain. That’d do nicely.

Outside of the town, I began carving up tunnels and caverns, seemingly at random, with dead ends, loops, and even one area where a passage looped back and crossed a bridge over an earlier area. All of it pitch black, but with helpful messages scattered about that glowed a soft red when exposed to light, allowing them to be read, but were invisible to darkvision, once more playing on the choice between announcing one’s presence with light, or perhaps missing vital clues that could help you with the dungeon. Well, if the ‘clues’ weren’t just troll messages put there by one of the generations of escaped slaves, that is. There was roughly a 50/50 split for those.

I scattered creatures liberally through the area. Most were just plants, some animals adapted to the dark, and a few slimes. Nothing crazy, and nothing a group that had gotten this far wouldn’t be able to contend with. However, they weren’t the only creatures out there.

Shit. I just realized a flaw in my plans. If some of my followers started going into a settlement like Shatterchain, there were going to be big problems. After all, the residents were escaped slaves, and, so, probably wouldn’t be entirely happy to see slaveowners showing up.

No, wait, I could use this. I’d have two outposts. Shatterchain would be one, and the other would be… eh, something fantasy-sounding. Khav-Szarol. That’d do.

I made a new entrance to the floor. If Shatterchain was at roughly 4 o’clock, if looking down at the floor, then I’d have Khav-Szarol at 8 o’clock, with the new entrance at 12 o’clock. Graffiti in a bold script would announce the way to Khav-Szarol, promising good treatment to slaves who came in voluntarily from the ‘wilds’. Another bunch of graffiti, enchanted so that only someone who had once possessed the Slave title (even if they were no longer a Slave) could see it, giving directions to Shatterchain.

Khav-Szarol would be an outpost of Dogik slavers and warriors. I purchased assets from the Galactic DEN just for this. Dogik weapons, armor, architecture, and some beasts from their homeworld. The giant spider people were going to be my counter to the mostly human population of Shatterchain.

Khav-Szarol was a bit larger in size than Shatterchain, but the population was about the same. Only, the demographics were different. Of the thousand or so people, there were a hundred warriors, and another two hundred hunters, gatherers, and fungus farmers. Add on about two hundred crafters, innkeepers, cooks, and so on. The kind of jobs you need to make a place work. The other five hundred? Product, human and otherwise, that was set to be taken back to their home city of Khav-Srokzas, or the Shadowed City as the human slaves knew it.

In my new plan for this level, the floor would be a ‘no man’s land’ between Shatterchain and Khav-Szarol. Adventurers would pick their side, and have to work with the locals to fight back against the other. Khav-Szarol would happily take on human mercenaries, especially if they were tolerant of slaveowners. Shatterchain, on the other hand, would be hostile to any slave owners, but someone with a silver tongue could still talk their way around to letting them join that side.

Of course, I didn’t want people just hopping back and forth every time they ran the dungeon. That was as bad as that time a game company put out a trilogy of games where they said that all your choices mattered, but the ending of the final game boiled down to having red, blue, or green light cover everything. That simply wouldn’t do for my dungeon. With that in mind, I made a hidden Dungeon Law, so that your choice would be remembered on subsequent runs, and you would have to work hard to change things the first time, with each change afterwards requiring more and more effort. This allegiance would carry forward into the rest of this section, as well.

And then, I set up a third faction. I didn’t want to do it, but I knew that, if I didn’t, someone would pull a stupid, and then then I’d have to deal with the problem in the future. This third faction was for people who just tried to murderhobo their way through the floor, killing both sides. The ‘Genocide’ faction would be hunted by everyone, and their experience in the later floors was not going to be fun. And there’d be no changing that route without undergoing some kind of atonement process.

The tasks adventurers needed to complete in order to move on would change based on the faction they chose, but they basically boiled down to hunting down some key members of the enemy faction, and either killing them or bringing them back to your base in chains. Three tasks, and they would give you a keystone to unlock a sealed door that would take you to the boss room, and the portal to the next floor. The boss fight would change based on faction, with each one having a big name there to try and punish the adventurers for their interference.

Now, I just needed to figure out the minibosses and bosses. Since there were two main paths, I needed two sets of each. Of course, the genocide faction would have to fight all of them, and their boss fight would be both bosses fighting together to kill the interloper so that they could get back to killing each other in peace.

On the Shacklechain side, I decided that the three minibosses would be their lead hunter, a team of warriors looking to hunt the Dogik, and some more powerful warriors, escorting a new group of escaped slaves. So, that was one stealth-based encounter, a straight-up fight, and a potential ambush, maybe with women and children to get caught in the crossfire and mess with their heads. The actual boss would be the current leader of Shacklechain, an Earth Sorcerer and his two golem defenders. Fighting them underground would be a good challenge.

Needed to have some symmetry on the Khaz-Szarol side, but I didn’t want to just do a copy/paste job. That would be lazy, and boring. And I simply couldn’t have people call my dungeon either of those things. No, I needed something similar enough that people could see the parallels, but not a lazy color-swap, like some games do so they can reuse a ‘boar’ enemy, but now it is redder, which means it is more powerful, honestly!

So, the first miniboss was going to also be their best hunter. However, instead of using stealth attacks like an assassin, they’d be more of a ‘trapper’, setting up a battlefield with any number of traps, lures, and other things that can catch both meat for the larder, as well as runaway slaves to be returned to their masters. That would be a good challenge for a lot of groups, especially the muscleheads.

The other two miniboss scenarios didn’t need much work. The idea of a Dogik patrol hunting the people who helped the slaves worked on its own, and the ‘escaped slave ambush’ could be turned into a group of warriors escorting a caravan of slaves to the portal, so that they can be transported back to the city. A nice bonus would be that the more righteous adventurers would then have to escort the slaves back to Shacklechain, possibly running into other hunters and dangers along the way, since they’d be a noisy group, with a lot of light so even the clumsy slaves can see their way forward.

As for the boss? That would be a Dogik Mind Sorceress and Slave Master, with some slaves to help fight the ‘insolent adventurers’. That fight would definitely keep people on their toes, since I’d have the composition of the slaves be random, like the healer boss’s minions in the Water Temple.

And all of this would set up the big conflict on Floor 18.