The Dungeon Fairy: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (read novel full .txt) 📕

to creating all of the different environments, but she started with one that would work the best with her current creature family: Forest.

Forest – Environmental Access

The Forest Environment allows the creation of soil, trees, ferns, shrubs, lichen, moss, and a few wildflowers within the dungeon.

Access Costs:

Soil: 2 DF per cubic foot

Trees: 10 – 100 DF depending upon size

Ferns: 5 – 20 DF depending upon size

Shrubs: 3 – 15 DF depending upon size

Lichen: 2 – 10 DF depending upon size

Moss: 2 – 10 DF depending upon size

Wildflowers: 1 – 5 depending upon size

Most Dungeon Cores didn’t even really apply whatever environment they initially chose until they were much stronger – because it could cost quite a bit of Force to create an immersive environment; that and it usually took a larger room to make the environment fit the space, and that of course meant more DF in the construction of that as well.  It was an Assistant’s job to get a Core to create something quickly to open up for Raiders, after all, and taking a year or more to create proper environments in the dungeon went against that speed.  Once they were open to the world, then they would start to customize their rooms – but usually by that time they had moved on to bigger and better things and would rather use their Dungeon Force on something else.

Regardless, there were some great dungeons in the world that took great advantage of their Access, with some that created large, water-filled rooms with the Aquatic Environment, and still others that created hot, moisture-rich jungles that could hide almost as much deadliness as their traps and creatures.  However, Tacca had never heard of a Core utilizing more than one Environment, except for in rare instances where they used environmentally adjacent objects – such as some darker swampland for their aquatic theme.

For a starter, at least, the Forest Environment would allow her to create rooms that had places for her creatures to hide, as well as allowing for the perfect placement of traps along pathways she created.  There was a lot of potential with being able to create a variety of plants and trees, and not just for scenery.

Now that she had selected the Environment she wanted Access to, she came to the last choice – choices, actually: Special Characteristics.  She could select up to three Special Characteristics or even none, depending on what she wanted and how she wanted her dungeon to run.

These selections were really what set apart every dungeon, because while you could have 500 Cores that chose a Goblin Fighter for their initial creature and Variant, Pit-based traps as their Specialization, and a Mountain Environment, each of them could still be different based on their Special Characteristics.  Each Characteristic had a point value, depending on how powerful they were – at least if they were beneficial ones; there were also undesirable Characteristics that had negative point values.  Simple beneficial ones like increasing your Dungeon Force regeneration by 10% were relatively inexpensive pointwise; now, one that would increase your regeneration by 100% was much more expensive – and was precisely why there were “bad” Characteristics to afford something like that.[1]

There were thousands of different Characteristics that could be chosen, both bad and good, which really made each Core different.  It was very rare for two dungeons to choose the exact same things, because every Dungeon Core was an individual consciousness that were their own people with their own decision; the evidence of that was plain enough with how poor the decisions made by her previous assignments had been.

There was a limit to how many Special Characteristics could be chosen during the initial selection process; if Tacca could choose more than the three allotted to her, she would’ve.  However, things being what they were, she had to be very specific with what she chose; at the moment, she was basically useless as a dungeon because she technically couldn’t create any creatures for defense.  Fortunately, there was only a single Special Characteristic that would help with that – and to which she specifically searched for in the list.

When Tacca pulled up the Special Characteristics list, she was shocked at what she saw.  My SCPs have been cut in half!

Just like her Fairy Mana was reduced by half, so apparently was her Special Characteristic Points (SCP); every Dungeon Core was supposed to begin with 100 SCPs, but it was only showing half of that amount.  Tacca was starting to get a little worried, because she wasn’t sure what else might be affected.  Will my maximum Dungeon Force and Dungeon Force Regeneration be cut in half as well?  Of course, she had no way of telling if that was the case yet or not, because she couldn’t access that information until she was done with her selections.

As far as those selections went, she was forced to make some difficult decisions; while the loss of 50 SCPs didn’t sound like a whole lot in the scheme of things, it threw her entire plan off.  The result put an unfortunate hitch in her development plan, but there was no going back now – it would just take longer to get everything up and running the way she wanted it.

Special Characteristics (Choose up to 3) [Partial List]

Available Special Characteristic Points (SCP): 0

Special Characteristics

Value

Cost (SCP)

Access all known Variants for available dungeon creatures

All

1100

----------------

--------

--------

All creatures are reduced in Level (cannot be less than 1)

10

-450

Core Improvement Points are reduced when earned

95%

-600

Tacca thought that it was unfair – now that she was an actual Dungeon Core – that the negative characteristics weren’t proportional to their positive counterparts; for instance, to increase Dungeon Force regeneration by 10% cost 40 SCPs, but a decrease in the same amount only gave out -5 SCPs. Also, as