Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 349 (Patreon)

Chapter 349 – Stakes

Of course, if I was making the raid a battle for control of the city, I had to have a reason why this battle was constantly ongoing, rather than being a one and done affair. Even spoiled nobles wouldn’t accept the kind of cycle of death that would happen if every month or so the city was thrown into civil war as the latest coup tried to usurp power. The losses, both in money and in lives, would be too much for even the largest ego to bear after a while.

But then, I was a dungeon, which opened up possibilities that weren’t there in the normal world. What if the battle for control of the city really was just a big game for them? If there was an ‘enchantment’ on them that kept them actually, truly dying during one of these coup attempts? Then, the whole thing would be just a perverse bit of entertainment, another bit of hedonism to add to their already pleasure-filled lives.

Of course, raid bosses couldn’t just constantly respawn again and again during a raid. That wasn’t fair, after all. You needed to have some semblance of balance, and the bosses needed some kind of stakes on their side, too. Not to mention, I wanted to encourage people to find new and interesting ways of accomplishing their objectives. Which meant that their actions before starting each raid needed to matter, or somehow change the balance of power before the raid began.

The first step was determining the schedule for the raids. It had taken Bargulg and his girls just about a week to reach me, and they’d pushed through things fairly quickly, all things considered. Sure, that didn’t sound ‘quick’, but a lot of the things in my floors were physically, as well as mentally, exhausting. Even with the stamina of being high Tier 2s when they entered, fighting through swamps and dealing with things like the Water Temple, or the various challenges of the Dark Temple, and so on all took their toll, and forced them to rest.

And there was more than just fatigue of the body and mind to consider. I also had to acknowledge that running the same raid over and over again would grow tiresome for the adventurers. Even if I put in a special portal for everyone who had already made it to Khav-Srokzas and unlocked the raid, I was under no illusions that people risking their actual lives would be as happy to throw themselves into the fire as gamers playing one of those MMORPGs where they raided every week.

On the other hand, I couldn’t make it just an annual thing. That was too long between events, and people would lose interest between raids. They wouldn’t keep advancing plots and storylines in the city, which meant that all my work would be wasted. Worse, someone who just missed getting there for one raid may have moved on before the next one, so that they never even saw the raid once. So, it had to be at least somewhat regular.

I settled on a bimonthly schedule. Every other month, the Great Game would be held in the Upper City of Khav-Srokzas. Between those Games, the different noble houses would work to gather their forces, improve their fortifications, recruit mercenaries (adventurers), and sabotage their rivals. All the major players and their soldiers were protected, so that, even if they were killed, they would revive once the current Game (or the next Game, if they were killed between raids) was finished. The only people who risked permanent death in the Game were the rabble who had not proven themselves useful enough to protect.

Which gave me another idea. Adventurers already had the Escape Charms I sold, but why not add to that, give another layer of protection for those who pushed themselves? If one’s reputation rose high enough with one of the noble houses in the Upper City, then they would grant the adventurer an item giving them the same respawn ability as the other ‘worthy’ fighters, so long as they fought on the side of the house that item came from. If they died in the Upper City, no matter the cause, they would revive at the end of the next Game.

This would allow the adventurers to take more risks, and engage in tactics before and during the Game that would be far too suicidal for them to normally consider. It also opened up the idea of ‘champion hunting’, where assassins on both sides would strike at key players, whether they were of the dungeon or adventurers, hoping to cripple a house before the Game, without there being as much bad blood or hard feelings. Adventurers could engage in the practice, too, perhaps even hunting other adventurers?

Of course, a Game needed rules. Well, in this case, it was more like etiquette, and codes of conduct. ‘Champion hunters’ would only target those who had the protections. Causing too much collateral would be seen as ‘beneath’ the standards of the Game, the tactics of common rabble. Too much of that, and someone might find their worth fall, and be stripped of their protection. And Champion Hunts were only allowed in the Upper City, where the protections were in place. That would keep the bloodsport civilized.

Now, about the factions. I decided that there would be six Great Houses of nobles in the Upper City. Each house would have different goals, and different tastes that needed to be upheld while they were in power. However, I would put a rule in the Game to say that any changes to the running of the city would not take effect until six months after their inception, and could be repealed at any time before then. That way, big changes could only happen if a House won three successive Games, or they convinced the current rulers not to repeal it for two whole cycles of the Game. This way, I kept things from being too chaotic, while also keeping the event from lacking in stakes or motivation for those who wanted to affect the city’s future.

House Ilzor would be the house that pursued the ‘abolitionist’ path. They ostensibly wanted to get rid of slavery based on religious views. More realistically, they used that rhetoric as a way to gather the more radical rabble into their camp, giving them a steady stream of disposable pawns to throw into the Games. If they ever actually won three Games in a row, their power base would fracture just as much as the other Great Houses, and they knew it. Of course, only the people at the very top of the House were privy to that thinking. Most were too faithful to question things.

House Vomhur was an economic powerhouse. Their primary goal was trade, and the accumulation of wealth. Anything that advanced their goals and swelled their bottom line was good, in their opinion. Their forces were typically well armed and armored, but were are a more uniform skill level, and their commanders were slow to take initiative if there wasn’t a clear profit motive to a course of action. They were also the ones most likely to spend lives as currency in order to achieve their goals.

House Nahlans was a scholarly sort. Specifically, they were focused on magic, in all its forms. Mages, artificers, spellblades, and others of that sort formed the majority of their numbers, meaning that, even though they had less overall members than some of the other houses, they all had powerful magical gear, and could reliably be counted on to be a step above when it came to personal power. They were the ‘quality over quantity’ house, at least when it came to magic.

House Dren were the sometimes allies, sometimes foes of House Nahlans. They were scholars, like Nahlans, but while their rivals focused on magic, House Dren focused on the sciences. Out of all the Great Houses of Khav-Srokzas, House Dren had the best technology, and often used that technology to force fights to turn enough in their favor that they were able to avoid the worst outcomes in the Games. They used a lot of heavy weapons and vehicles in their combats, and even had automatons that could fight for them. And that was before one considered the augmentations they gave members of their House.

House Throk was best known for committing various taboos in the name of power. It was common belief in the Upper City that every core member of House Throk was at least one-eighth something ‘other’. At the very least, almost every member of the family itself was publicly acknowledged to have their first child with a full-blooded demon. For the men, this typically involved summoning a succubus to bed, but for the women, well, not all the fathers of the first-born were incubi, leading to a lot of variation amongst the children of House Throk. Those who didn’t lay with demons instead took undead into their beds, leading to the birth of quasi-dead monstrosities that swelled their ranks. Needless to say, the number of warlocks, summoned demons, necromancers, and other fell magics in their forces far outstripped anything the other houses had at their command.

And last of the six Great Houses was House Aslin. They were, almost without exception, warriors, born and bred. Even those who did not take to the field in combat, either with weapons or spells, still fought their own battles. Logistics was a form of battle. Medicine was a field of battle. Law was an entire theater of war. The scions of House Aslin, no matter what course their lives took, were warriors, who always looked to conquer in battle, whatever shape those battles appeared in. Their forces were, on paper, the strongest, both in numbers and in the supplies offered. However, they were also the largest user of slave soldiers in the Games, which would put them at odds with many of the more ‘righteous’ adventurers.

I wasn’t finished, though. I needed a bit more backstory on how the Games came to be. Right now, House Aslin was the strongest, officially, since none of the other houses could take them one-on-one, and none of the others were capable of working with each other for long enough to unite and take their rival down. Infighting always started up before a coup could be successful, which made the attempt fail, and things continue as they had before. However, the warriors of House Aslin hungered for a proper fight, without causing any of the problems that a full-scale war between the Great Houses would cause. After all, there was no shortage of Minor Houses in the Lower City that would love to take their place.

They needed fights to keep their edge, but they also needed limits to prevent issues from spilling over and causing too many problems. A good fight would release pressure from a system, but too much bad blood caused by deaths or loss of property would turn a good fight into a blood feud that wouldn’t end until one or both sides were either wiped out, or so badly weakened that someone else came in and finished the job. That wasn’t what House Aslin wanted, obviously, especially since their house would be the one everyone aimed for at the beginning.

So, the Games were devised, along with the rules that bound everyone, and the enchantments that would keep unnecessary deaths from starting vendettas. So far, so good. But should things start off with just the most recent Game? Or should the adventurers get a chance to be in the first Game? I could see the argument either way, but I decided it would be best to have the Game already established, so that people didn’t think that it was all about them, or something created for their convenience. While it was all made to entertain adventurers and make them spend more time in my domain, that didn’t mean I wanted them to get a big head about things.

With that in mind, I decided that the first Game set after the adventurers made it to Khav-Srokzas was going to be the fifty-second Game. The Adventurers would be a new element shaking up the Game, which had been relatively stable, with no one House being able to win three in a row since its inception. Changes were slow to come, but generally well-regarded when they did, as consensus was required to keep them from being repealed. As proof of this, House Ilzor had won a couple Games, but they’d never kept the top spot long enough for their abolition decrees to become law, since every time they tried to push it through, a coalition of two or three other Great Houses formed, and forced them out of power.

Now, I just needed adventurers to get to the city, and start working their way up.