Dungeon Building: A Bugbear - Chapter 1+2 (Patreon)

Over the last few years, often times when I was considering seriously making a switch back into Erotica, I would start playing around writing something on CHYOA. It's smaller chapter nature appealed to 'dabbling,' particularly while getting to play just for a while in someone else's sandbox.

"Dungeon Building for Beginners" is a fairly extensive story network over there based on a fun little concept - the Monsters of a VR MMORPG (with erotic features) have become self-aware within the game, and following a major Update they have the chance to really start to take advantage of the same game systems the Players do. The concept was originally posted by DosEsh, based on an earlier story 'Game Monster' by Cantalope.

The Gamified stats-play appealed to me for a bit, and in some ways still interacts with how I sometimes consider scenes in Erection of the Runelords, so I thought it would be a fun idea to port these chapters over with a little bit of TLC to clean them up. They were originally written at the end of 2019 and early 2020, and my storyline remains unfinished as I moved on to other works. If you patrons want to see more, let me know!

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Chapter 1

Course, brown fur juts from your jowls in a rough beard, and covers most of your head. You use some of the water to slick back your hair so that it doesn't stand on end, and your fingers brush over the strange scar that mars your hairline, forehead and left eye. It is jagged, but forms an eldritch rune of some sort. Your left eye is milky white compared to the black of the right, but you can still see from it.

You are a bugbear, the most ferocious of the goblinoids. Taller than a human, naturally muscled and covered in coarse brown fur. Bugbears command tribes of lesser goblinoids, and when they gather under a warlord they rival any orc army.

Unfortunately, the scar and your eye also mark you as an Exile. You have a taint of magic in your blood, and are weaker than your brethren because of it.

You don't have a tribe of hobgoblins or goblins serving your whims. You can't raid a caravan, or ambush a group of adventurers on the road, let alone march to war. You are alone, banished from the foothills and forests. You have been alone a long time, living up in this damn cave.

The loneliness settles in again. What are you going to do? Should you try to do something different this time?

You sigh, still struggling against the murkiness of update reset, and wonder what you're capable of.

Magic in my blood, you think. What magic? That would be on... your Character Sheet.

Level 5 Bugbear Exile
Monster, Bugbear, Explicit
Experience to level up – 500

Attributes
| Strength 20 | Dexterity 25 | Endurance 20 |
| Charisma 32 | Manipulation 32 | Appearance 32 |
| Perception 30 | Intelligence 27 | Wits 28 |

Skills
Brawling 15
Athleticism 15
Presence 25
Lore 25
Occult 30
Stealth 13
Dodge 13
Crafting (Stoneworking) 5
Crafting (Carpentry) 5

Feats
Arcane Blood – Can access magic as a Tier I Sorcerer. Spellcasting statistic is Occult.
Bugbear Dominance – Lesser goblinoids lose ability to resist your commands equal to your Presence, unless they serve a Bugbear or other non-goblinoid creature with a higher presence than you.
Monstrous Appearance – when attempting to use Appearance in a positive way on creatures without the Monster subtype, count it at 20 points lower until the target gets used to you.

Sorcerer Tier I – May cast two spells per day from the following options:

- Fixate: Charm one target creature, which becomes fixated by you for Occult seconds. It slowly approaches you, ignoring all outside influences, and may not otherwise act until the spell ends.
- Purify Food and Drink: Up to 1 cubic foot of food and drink is purified, removing any poisons and disease. Eating purified food and drink restores hit points.
- Thunderclap: All creatures in an Occult feet cone suffer Sonic damage and are pushed half Occult feet directly away.
Wisdom of the Ages – gain a constant, passive buff to your intelligence based on the time since your last death.

Some elements of your Character Sheet, which hovers in front of you with scrolling text, have changed. The update notes had added building skills to the game, and you seemed to have the basic skills for both. Useful, you assume, since as you look around your cave it seems the small changes you usually made had once again been wiped away. Your bed of furs was gone, as was the fire pit you had dug near the entrance.

What hadn't changed were your spells. Purify Food and Drink was nice on the few occasions that you survived an encounter with adventurers. Most of the fights you did win were usually with other monsters of lesser level who thought they could push you around – usually the occasional kobolds coming down from the upper slopes of the mountain, or forest creatures if you went wandering down into the foothills. Thunderclap was good too – it scared the shit out of those lesser monsters, the problem was adventurers didn't get scared, they just came right back at you.

Fixate was the worst, though. It wasn't useful against a single enemy because if you hit them it broke the spell, and it wasn't useful against a group of kobolds or pixies or whatever because it only targeted one of them. The best you had ever come up with was using it to stop a single enemy, and then trying to run away. It had worked once, but you were pretty sure that was because the adventurer had been high enough level he didn't care to chase you down.

You wave away the Character Screen and sigh, looking at your meager cave. Another update, another reset. You knelt down and sucked up another mouthful of water from the spring pool and then stood, walking to the entrance of the cave. Sunrise was coming on, red and blue painting the sky as light clouds swirled overhead.

The entrance to your home was about two thirds of the way up a massive, craggy cliff on the south side of the mountain. The route up was wide enough for a large creature, but because of the contours of the cliff it was hidden from most angles, including above. The entrance however itself was little more than a big, gaping hole that anyone could tell was a cave and not a shadow if they looked longer than a few seconds. Adventurers 'exploring' was one of the most common ways they stumbled on your home and murdered you in their variety of creative ways.

Fuck those guys.

From the mouth of your cave you look out over the foothills of the mountain and the dense forests that cover them. All sorts of creatures were out there, the darker and thicker the trees the more dangerous the beasts. The goblins were the closest, but inevitably some other creature quickly took control of them after an update since it took a couple of hours for you to climb down the mountain. The one time you got to them first, a manticore had come out of the deeper woods looking for the little buggers and killed you.

Enough reminiscing about your previous deaths. There were too many to count, what was the point? This was a new update, with new rules. The players that were left in the game were busy downloading the update, which gave you a chance to get a foot ahead of them.

You needed food, and you needed some creature comforts. Mainly a replacement for your bed and fire pit. You had two options – the first was heading down into the forest, where meaty creatures were more plentiful but you were also more likely to run into other sentient creatures and adventurers. Or you could head up the mountain and try and track down a couple of goats. They were tough to kill with only your quarterstaff, the single item in your inventory, but you also didn't need to walk for hours to get to them.

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Chapter 2

You really didn't feel like making a pointless walk down into the foothills just to risk running into the various denizens of the forest. Not today. Maybe it had something to do with once again seeing 'Exile' as part of your title on your character sheet.

Quickly walking the cliff-side trail, you took a careful look up and down the more used main path leading from the foothills up to the mountain proper. Mount Imporne was probably better than most locations for a lonely monster, considering the low-level mobs running around and the high level mini bosses that picked their way around the mountain. High level players wanting to fight the bigger monsters usually just flew to the top and ignored everything else, and mid level players got frustrated just by the journey to the mountain, let alone dealing with the scattered bands of kobolds, goblins and fey creatures.

No one liked Imporne, which made it fairly perfect for you.

It didn't look like any other monsters were around waiting in ambush, and no adventurers were prancing their way up the winding, switchback path, so with a huff of breath you started your walk again. It didn't take you too long to reach several more casually disguised offshoots from the mountain path. You vaguely remembered exploring them before, but the update was still a heavy haze in your mind and you weren't sure which led to what. Instead of taking one of them, you kept walking up until you saw the main Y-branch. The right path kept heading up the mountain, eventually leading up to the Kobold lands that served the greater monsters above, along with the Wendigo territory on the north face.

The left path, and the one you took, led out onto a long, lightly sloping plateau scattered with boulders, scrawny pine trees and scrub brush. The south end looked out over the cliff his home was carved into, while the north end eventually curved into a steeper series of mountain rises and the west end, away from the path, continued circling the mountain until it faded into a shale slope at the far end of the cliff.

Wood from the pine trees wasn't the greatest for fires, but it was also easier to harvest than it was to track down goats. You left that task for later and headed further onto the plateau, towards the northern rises were the goats usually congregated.

After about an hour of scampering and scooting around boulders and pine trees, trying your best to track goats that left almost no trace on the world, you eventually spotted a little herd of the white, fluffy buggers bleating away to themselves as they sat about fifteen feet up the edge of a rise, looking like they were clinging to the sheer surfaces of the mountain without a care in the world. The thought of being able to climb like that passed through wistfully as you gauged how to get a couple of the goats. The easiest thing to do would be to get right up to the base of the rise and use a spell to get them to fall off - Thunderclap could hit several, and even Fixate could pull one down. The danger was that if you caught too many, the whole herd might try and rush you. When the goats fell from that height, they wouldn't just die and you were going to need to get your hands bloody.

Also, using your spells would leave you defenseless if some asshole miniboss decided to check out what the noise was, or even worse if some adventurers were out on the mountain for some ungodly reason.

In the end, you decided you were going to need to throw something big enough to knock one goat from his perch and hopefully spook the others into running. Rocks were plentiful, but you knew from previous experience you weren't strong enough to throw a rock big enough to do what you needed. You were going to need to throw your Quarterstaff like a spear.

With a sigh, you slowly picked your way around more boulders and pine trees, doing your best to remain hidden despite your abysmal stealth skill. You got about 20 feet away from the rise, hidden beside a boulder, and peeked around it.

Eight goats stared back at you, blinking and bleating. One made a long, loud bleat that sounded an awful lot like a Player screaming, and also like it was laughing at you.

"Fuck you too," you sneered, standing up and pulling back your quarterstaff and throwing it with all your might.

You might have been an exile, but you were still a bugbear and you had certain instincts. Your throw was true, even if the staff did wobble a bit in the air, and you clocked the goat that had made the laughing scream right on the side of the head. It made another one of those screams, this time more panicked, as it's hooves scrabbled against the rock and it fell. The rest of the goats began their own panicked bleating and took off, hopping up the rock face as if it were flat land.

Your target hit the ground hard, moments after your quarterstaff. You ran forward as it jerked, rolled over and began picking itself up, and you grabbed it by it's curly horns. You were shit at hand to hand fighting. You knew from experience a third level basic Fighter could out punch you.

Thankfully, a goat is not a third level Fighter, and you didn't need to punch it. Slamming the head of the goat into the rock face a couple of times stunned the bleating beast into silence, and another few strikes had it jerking and then going still, it's panicked eyes rolling. You let go and it dropped, heaving and wheezing. You were panting heavily yourself, but you went and found a big rock and raised it over your head.

The goat finally went still.

Looking down at your kill, you took a deep breath and felt the low amount of pride you could manage at killing a 0 level creature. At least it would feed you for about a week, if you lasted that long.

Next problem was harvesting the damn thing. All you had was a quarterstaff, and your not-really-sharp claws. They didn't even rate as natural weapons.

It was going to take you a while to harvest this thing properly, and since you couldn't put a whole dead goat into your inventory, you problem solved and decided on the next best course of action. Carrying the fucker down to your cave.

The amount of time it took you to heave the corpse onto your shoulders was embarrassing, but you got it up there and balanced enough to start waddling back towards the cliff edge. If memory served you correctly, there was a spot where you could drop the goat down and land it on the path to your cave instead of carrying it all the way around.