Khenal
patreon
Peek: The Worst Murderous Dungeon
🕑 Added 2023-09-04 02:35:21 +0000 UTCGather and get comfortable around the fire, as I decide which dungeon to talk about tonight.
Ah, I know. This is the tale of a dungeon that seems to be dedicated to eradicating life, but is also terrible at it. This is the odd dungeon of Centerpoint, located deep in the elven kingdom. It's nestled between three villages: Northtown, Easttown, Southtown. The villages are odd as well, as the time I went to delve this dungeon, Southtown was to the west, Northtown was to the south-east, and Easttown was due north.
How did these villages get their names so wrong? Well, they weren't wrong the first time they settled there. Centerpoint dungeon came into being roughly between the three towns, and it was pretty quickly discovered to be a swarm dungeon, with primarily ant spawners.
The dungeon itself is a twisted network of tunnels and rough earthen rooms, with very few chests or resource nodes. For whatever reason, the dungeon really likes spawning denizens. Which was fine, at least at first. The local guards or local guilds could always use a good place to train new members, and while the dungeon has a great number of denizens, they are all individually weak.
Now, going in and killing denizens makes more mana for the dungeon, which makes more denizens. At first, the locals didn't think too much of it, but all that mana had to go somewhere. What all that mana eventually went into was a massive expedition of ants towards one of the towns. Thankfully, the ants aren't especially fast, so the first village was able to pack up some essentials and get out of the way, and the local guilds came in and eradicated the threat.
Unfortunately, the town itself was destroyed. but the townsfolk were stubborn and decided to just rebuild their town in a different spot, keeping the name. It didn't matter if Easttown was now a bit more north-east, it's still close enough, and they're not going to abandon their name.
They got their town rebuilt just in time for one of the other towns to be attacked, and they relocated similarly. Not to be outdone, they kept their name, too, even if Northtown should probably be called Westtown now. And Southtown could see the writing on the wall, and were ready to move at the first sign of the horde of ants marching towards them.
Well, with a dungeon being so disruptive, the guilds should cordon it off and starve it, right? Well, they were working on doing just that, until someone noticed the former town-sites, and the general path of the ants, were now ripe with mana. High-level farmers could grow all sorts of interesting things, from ordinary crops with massive yields, to rare and potent alchemical ingredients, the soil was practically perfect for growing!
Still, governments and guilds have to take into consideration what the people want, lest someone with more levels than sense decides to make an issue of it. When they asked the three villages, the response was almost unanimous: let the dungeon be. While the regular migration is annoying, the soil left behind is worth it. These are farming folk, after all, and they just need good soil to be happy.
Which makes the guilds and taxmen happy, as they get a good place to train, and good money for the government. Even the dungeon seems to be happy with the situation, though it doesn't have a Voice to tell anyone. It keeps regularly sending out huge swarms of ants, and recharges its stores by fighting the more ordinary beginner delvers. The only people not happy with the arrangement are the cartographers. While they can make more money selling maps, it's a lot more work than they usually have to do to keep them accurate.
~Onthar, Orc Bard Historian
Comments
Joshua James Feenstra
I like to imagine that the dungeon has the "soul" of an ant queen, instead of an intelligent being. Of course, that could mean that they never see any other denizen as part of their colony, and put everything they have into multiplying and spreading their colony. (Or maybe they are 'intelligent' and this is just a weird strategy)
LinaBoeckwurm
Okay this one made me laugh out loud XD Love it!
