Dheart…burped?...and a small drawer in the machine opened toward Vee. Inside was a book as thick as the [Dungeon Master]’s leg. It was bound with leather and adorned with gold. Next to it was a gold chain as thick as Vee’s fingers connected to a gaudy skeleton key.

“What’s this?” he asked as he lifted the book out of the drawer and read the title. The Complete Dungeon Master’s Handbook. As he opened the cover, a piece of paper fell out and Vee bent down to pick up.

“A welcome from the Union of Dungeon Masters, of which you are now a member,” said Dheart.”Dues are twenty five gold fleurs per annum.”

“Dues are what?! I didn’t want to join any stupid union! Can’t I send this junk back and get out of paying?”

Dheart made a whirling noise and some of its tubes rattled. “Only if you want to be an unsanctioned dungeon. I’ll remind you that as a result of current treaties between the nations of the continent, unsanctioned [Dungeon Masters] are considered criminals and subject to being imprisoned or killed by adventurers. Would you like to be an unsanctioned [Dungeon Master] at this time?”

“No! I’ll pay the stupid dues, even if it is extortion.”

He muttered that last bit, but Dheart didn’t seem to notice.

“Excellent. You are free to wear the chain and key or not, but it is your responsibility to make sure that it is not lost or stolen. Requests for duplicates will be denied except under highly specific circumstances as described in Section 7, Page 113, Paragraph 9 of the Union Bylaws.”

Vee grimaced at the chain. Not only did he have to pay a stupidly high sum of money, he also had to protect this idiotic thing? He wondered what sort of person would like such a ludicrously opulent piece of jewelry, but decided that if he hid it with the collar of his jacket, it wouldn’t be too bad. Slipping it on, he winced at the weight and shook his head. Hopefully he’d get used to it in time.

He looked at the piece of paper in his hand. It said basically the same things that Dheart just had, but was signed with a flourished signature he couldn’t read and included an invitation to a forum for other [Dungeon Masters]. Vee had never been much on the “communities” that were formed via crystal ball, but made a mental note to look into it all the same. Perhaps there’d be people he could bounce ideas off with as the dungeon grew. Getting advice wasn’t a bad thing, right?

Vee smiled. Before coming to Oar’s Crest, he would have never dreamed of doing such a thing, but if he was going to be a different, better person, that meant getting outside of his comfort zone.

“Dungeon Master, would you like to set the geographical boundaries of Crestheart?”

“Call me Vee,” he said. “Dungeon Master is too formal. And sure, that sounds good.”

Dheart projected an image of the city that looked a lot like the enchanted map Vee had been given by the adventurer’s guild. It was already looking over the tower and the empty lot, and so Vee didn’t have to move it at all to start drawing his boundaries. He marked the tower as his headquarters and the image on the map turned purple, and then connected four lines into a square around the empty lot, watched the area turn orange and then confirmed that the boundaries were correct.

“As a reminder, the boundaries of your dungeon can be changed at any time,” Dheart said.

“Is there anything else I have to do now?” Vee asked as he looked out at the skyline. It was still afternoon, but Vee wanted to be back in town well before sunset. He’d promised Nen and Cris, after all, as well as the little salamander gate guard.

Dheart confirmed that there were no other pressing demands just then, and so with a gesture to Alforde, Vee put pulled Reginald’s brim so that the hat was sitting properly and made his way down the staircases back to the ground. The light section of his orchestra was hard at work and most of the rooms were looking cleaner already. Seeing them upside down on the ceilings was a bit unsettling, but nothing he couldn’t stomach.

The tower was bigger than he’d really paid attention to on the way up. Thirteen stories, in fact. Wasn’t that supposed to be unlucky? Vee decided not to think about it. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d use all the space for, but he had a few ideas kicking around the back of his mind and there was plenty of time to figure it out.

Naturally, Vee was out of breath by the time he reached the ground. Eventually, he promised himself, he’d get a lift installed in the tower. He was done with stairs.

Thankfully, both carts had been unloaded, and Nen and Cris were sitting on them, looking dirty but unharmed. The heavy section fiends were loitering around the piles of building materials, and they looked at Vee with an expression he didn’t recognize. A check of their status revealed that they were bored. He’d never heard of bored spirits before, but he assigned them to go out into Westown and look for materials along with the orchestra’s medium section. Their rotund bodies loped off into the alleys and deserted streets, and Vee turned to the two bandits.

“You guys ready to head back?”

Nen and Cris seemed all too happy to do so, and Vee and Reginald each hitched a ride. Travelling back took barely any time at all since the carts were so light and Vee hopped down to go bang on the gate until a little slit in it opened and a different guard than the one from earlier peered out at him.

“Watchu want, huh?”

Vee scowled at the man and held up his pass. “I’m the [Dungeon Master] who came out of this gate earlier today. My assistants and I would like to come back into the city.”

The guard cocked his head to the side. “Don’t got no record here of any [Dungeon Master] going out into Westown. How’s I’m ‘sposed to know yer not a fiend, huh?”

Vee pointed to his pale cheeks and all-too-human features. Then he waved his hand at his companions. “Do any of us look like fiends?”

The guard pointed to Alforde. “That one there does, reckon. He’s a big fella.”

Vee turned and though he thought the guard was being ridiculous, he did have to admit that from a distance, Alforde did look like a fiend. Kind of. It must have been the horns on the armorsoul’s helmet. Come to think of it, had they always been that long and jagged? He’d always thought of them as short, stubbly things that weren’t useful for anything but show, but now they looked like they’d be plenty useful in a fight.

As he looked at his friend, Vee noticed that other things about Alforde looked different too. His pauldrons were wider, and came to more of a sharp point instead of a gentle curve at the ends. His chest seemed a bit broader, and his gauntlets looked like they were heavier and more armored than Vee remembered.

Vee had heard that some classes changed their bearer so that they…fit better, but Vee wasn’t sure if [Dungeon Champion] was one of them. If it was, there was no telling how different Alforde would look as time went on. He imagined his friend standing over ten feet tall, covered in [Hellfire] and barking like a dog. He hoped that wouldn’t happen.

“That’s my best friend and [Dungeon Champion],” he told the guard. “We’re staying at Sculla’s boarding house, and the other two with us are Nen and Cris Hallstrum.”

Sculla’s name didn’t do anything for his cause, but the name Hallstrum got the guard’s attention.

“Oi, you two!” he called. “What’s the biggest fish yer old man ever caught?”

Nen looked up and grinned. “He tells everyone that he caught a fifty pound pike once, but the biggest fish any honest man’s ever seen him yank out of the river was a little four pound bass.”

That got the guard to laugh, and Vee heard the cranking noise of the wheel as the door opened. “That’s Bert Hallstrum for yeh,” he said. “Man’s a heckuva bandit but a piss poor fisherman. Tell him I says hi, huh?”

He turned back to Vee. “Sorry about givin’ ya a hard time, Mister. Fiends can be tricksy sometimes. They’re smarter than we gives them credit for, huh?”

Vee shrugged it off and told the man that he’d be bringing loads of materials out to the dungeon every day for the next week or so, and asked what he could do so that he didn’t have to worry about getting locked out at night. As it turned out, there was a list he could sign out on. He wished he’d known that before going out today, but such was life.

Nen and Cris dropped them off at Sculla’s and Vee opened the book that he’d gotten from the union. Alforde practiced his hammer strikes in the corner of the room, and Reginald babbled in Vee’s ear about ideas for the dungeon. Most of them involved tributes to Reginald, and Vee dismissed them all.

***

Construction of the dungeon itself took about a week, and went pretty smoothly overall. Vee wasn’t much involved in the day to day work, leaving the details to Reginald and Alforde, as well as Giorgio, the antlered [Foreman] who’d been the only construction worker willing to take the job. If it hadn’t been for Vee’s orchestra of fiends, the dungeon would have never been finished. Though, at the same time, if it hadn’t been for the fiends all around Westown, they might have just been able to hire a crew of [Construction Workers] instead. Six in one hand, half a dozen in the other, as Vee’s mom always used to say.

Vee spent his days during the build refining ectoplasm, which he formed into cubes and stacked in a second room at Sculla’s after it became obvious that he was going to fill his own room so much that he would have no space to sleep. Without knowing how much time and energy it’d take to run the dungeon each day, Vee wanted to make sure that his stockpile was as big as possible.

Each of his orchestra sections wanted a different type of refined ectoplasm. The light section wanted yellow ectoplasm, which would be good for boosting speed. The medium section requested orange ectoplasm, which was good for boosting endurance, and the heavies wanted green ectoplasm to boost their strength. Once again, Vee was unused to spirits that so clearly articulated their desires. Most spirits were content with any refined ectoplasm they could get their incorporeal hands on.

What other surprises did the orchestra have in store for him?

As expected, the job leveled up his [Ghost Maestro] class. Level 15 gave him access to the [Detect Falsehood] skill, which was a better version of [Detect Lies], as it also covered misdirection and intentional omission. He planned to use it on Reginald at the first opportunity. No matter how much the core-turned-hat made a big show of loyalty, often with loud pronouncements at Alforde’s expense, Vee was still pretty sure that something there was amiss.

Constantly refining ectoplasm was tiring, and Vee took to taking frequent breaks. During these, Vee delved deeper into the book the union had given him. It was dense and boring, the way instruction manuals generally are, but there were some good ideas inside that Vee was glad to learn.

For example, he learned about different types of rooms that were successful in dungeons, different strategies for placing minions, trap management, and other things that would definitely be useful.

Despite these specifics, the author – a seasoned [Dungeon Master] who ran a small outfit out of Quartz Canyon far to the north – made it clear that managing a dungeon was more of an art than a science and repeatedly stressed that experimentation was critical for success. No two dungeons were the same, and it was the [Dungeon Master]’s job to find the perfect balance.

Vee closed the book when he finished.

[You have learned tips and tricks for managing a dungeon successfully! You are now a Dungeon Master, Level 4]

[Wit + 1]

[Plotting +1]

[Devious Mind +1]

Vee leaned back on his bed and put his hands behind his head. What sort of dungeon did he want Crestheart to be? Centering it around ghosts made the most sense, at least for now, since they were plentiful and cheap to maintain.

However, as minions, ghosts were surprisingly inefficient. See, every minion in a dungeon had a chance to drop small gemstones called shards of chaos when defeated. Adventurers collected these gemstones as they moved through the dungeon, and if they succeeded in defeating the [Dungeon Champion], they could exchange their gems for rewards and prizes, like the shards were tickets in an arcade.

The [Dungeon Master] would then take the shards of chaos and use them to improve the dungeon by increasing the capacity of rooms to hold more monsters or traps, or even by buying new floors entirely. Beyond that, shards of chaos were necessary for hiring higher tier monsters, and buying more potent traps. According to his book, shards of chaos were just as valuable as fleurs.

Therein lay the problem. He didn’t think he could get enough shards with ghosts as his primary minions. Most of the level one minions – creeps, lesser elementals, slimes, beastkin, gnome statues and insects – had between a three percent chance and five percent chance to drop a shard of chaos when defeated. In comparison, ghosts only had a quarter percent chance to drop one when they were beaten. This was supposed to be offset by the fact that ghosts were so cheap compared to the other level one minions that you could hire almost a dozen of them for every one of another kind, but Vee wasn’t convinced. He didn’t feel like getting out a piece of paper and doing the math, but the expected values just didn’t seem to add up properly.

That, in combination with the fact that level one ghosts didn’t do much damage and were easy to defeat, meant using them as his primary type of minions seemed like a bad idea. He’d be left with a weaker, easier dungeon than otherwise, and it would take him longer than he wanted to earn the necessary currency to improve it. The last thing he wanted to do was get a reputation for being a newbie dungeon. His book was adamant that newbie dungeons didn’t make money in the long term.

Vee closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. Thinking so much was giving him a headache. Proper dungeon management was a fiddly seesaw. On the one side was current cost and current power, which any smart [Dungeon Master] would want to optimize. He did. However, on the other hand, those things had to be balanced around how fun and exciting the dungeon was for adventurers to try and beat and how much any given adventurer’s run helped the dungeon get stronger in the future.

He groaned.

Rolling over onto his side, Vee decided that he’d talk to Reginald and Alforde when they got back and see if they could help him make a better decision. Future Vee could figure it out later. For now, all he wanted to do was sleep.

Stat sheets:

Vee Vails:

Primary Class: Ghost Maestro (Locksmagister University), Level 15 (+1)

Secondary Class: Dungeon Master (Oar’s Crest), Level 4 (+1)

Might: 6

Wit: 23 (+1)

Faith: 12

Adventurousness: 8

Ambition: 5

Plotting: 4(+1)

Charisma: 2

Devious Mind: 6(+1)

Leadership: 5

Guts: 3

Alforde Armorsoul:

Primary Class: Clunker (Vee Vails), Level 7 (-2)

Secondary Class: Right-hand man (Vee Vails), Level 7 (-1)

Tertiary Class: Hammer Afficionado (Self), Level 4 (+2)

Additional Class: Dungeon Champion (Oar’s Crest), Level 3 (+2)

Might: 19

Wit: 10

Faith: 23

Adventurousness (Bound – Vee Vails): 5

Reginald:

Primary Class: Core Spirit (Unknown), Level ???

Secondary Class: Loudmouth (Self), Level 28 (+2)

Tertiary Class: Majordomo (Vee Vails), Level 4(+3)

Might: 1

Wit: 24

Faith: 2

Ambition: 21 (+1)

Greed: 16

Deceptiveness: 36

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