Month: August 2018

Chapter 12

<People are on the stairs, Dani. Get ready for an incursion! This is gonna be awe-soome.> I nearly sang, enthusiasm dancing in my mental voice.

Hey, Dani, remember how an adventuring party stomped in here and completely wrecked my shit? Well it’s happening again, but this time, I have rabbits!

It’s entirely unclear what kind of party we’ve got entering the dungeon this time. Seems like we’re probably looking at Fighter-y fellows just on the grounds that only those types of guys appear to have arrived right now, but numbers are unstated and it’s not clear how many of them are properly geared up and how many are using hand-me-down chain or leather armor or whatever.

Taking direct control of the largest [rabbit], I launched my new body at the back of someone’s knee. A direct hit in the tender pressure point, and the man fell. The attacks on the other humans had varying degrees of success, with a few landing decent hits against legs, some bouncing off armor, and one even being knocked away by a shield that moved when the guy wasn’t even looking!

So, yeah, they’re not Monty Python style killer rabbits, they don’t have any special powers or anything. Cal is seriously just taking totally ordinary rabbits and using them to try and bludgeon his opponents. And he seems super stoked that this is gonna be super effective. His thorn-spitting, fang-mawed mushrooms are way more threatening, and to the extent that the rabbits are helpful at all, it’s that they might keep a target busy while a thorn ‘shroom lines up a shot.

Continue reading “Dungeon Born: End of the Tutorial” →

Chapter 10

Having taken a couple of days to spend nearly all my free time replaying XCOM in its entirety, I’m pretty sure I’m quite finished half-assing my projects, so let’s dive into Dungeon Born with a proper, full-length post.

It had taken a few weeks of hard travel, but the group of mostly C-ranked adventurers had finally reached a city large enough to have a Guild office, an Elven embassy, and a church with a B-ranked priest.

Okay, so we’re following these guys again. Have we seen the last of Dale? Because he didn’t seem like he was done yet, narrative-wise. He ended his introductory chapter all full of ambition, and so far all he’s done with it is write a letter and show these other guys to the dungeon entrance. I like the idea of having Dale as the consistent face of Cal’s opposition, staying the same while the adventuring parties are usually or always new characters after the last ones die or flee. Since the whole point of a dungeon heart story is that you’re seeing it from the dungeon’s perspective instead of the adventurers’, you might expect that this makes the adventurers the antagonists, and it’d be cool if it turned out that no, the dungeon side equivalent to an adventurer is actually a minion, and it’s the quest givers who are the dungeon’s true antagonist.

Maybe we’ll hop back to Dale and get that dynamic going at some point.

Continue reading “Dungeon Born: Foreshadowing of Five Armies” →

Chapter 9

I was particularly nervous that another group would come in soon, due to every living thing in my dungeon except me, Dani, and the Silverwood tree being dead and reduced to ash when the jerks, I mean- the scouting group, had come through.

This is not an unreasonable fear, but injecting the narrative with a “joke” like this is even worse than leaving them in dialogue. With dialogue, you can pull the trick where other characters present roll their eyes, so if the joke lands, then great, the audience is laughing and probably doesn’t care that other characters in the book didn’t like it, and if the joke flops, then at least the joke was supposed to be a dud, which means the audience’s eye rolls are directed towards a character in the story, not the story itself. It might even help improve their immersion into the story by making the other characters, the ones who are also rolling their eyes, more relatable.

Sticking it in the narrative, on the other hand, means that when the joke is bad, I roll my eyes at the story.

Continue reading “Dungeon Born: That Rabbit’s Not Dynamite” →

EDIT: I forgot to add this to the queue when it was finished editing and didn’t notice that it didn’t publish until late in the evening. Well, I accidentally published a post 12 hours early a few weeks ago, so I figure if I schedule this one for 12 hours late that’s a wash. Also, the title of “late explanations” was actually picked out before this happened. Maybe I should avoid putting the word “late” in future blog post titles to avoid the curse going forward.

Chapter 8

Once again we begin with Cal’s abbreviated perspective on the raid.

I should never have made it so easy to get down. I just really had a thing for the spiral staircase ever since Dani had suggested it.

I am kind of surprised to see the story admitting this is a bad idea. On a similar subject, it’s kind of surprising to have the story let Cal be completely overwhelmed by this crack team of veteran adventurers, even if the delivery was very much underwhelming. This story isn’t without good ideas, although they are unfortunately very often crippled by the execution. For example:

<Dani… I think they are going to kill me.> I uttered slowly when the strange looking man talked about my bloodmoss.

“It’ll be ok Cal; can you tell what rank they are?” Dani replied soothingly.

<No, I just visualize an ‘X’ when I try to analyze them. I can’t analyze their gear either… What is going on?> I demanded, voice low and scared. I liked to understand things.

“The gear makes sense; their aura would protect it unless it got too far away from them. Oh! I never told you about auras! You see, when an aura is present you can’t affect things in the same way.[“]

You can tell from the bracketed close-quote that this isn’t even the end of the lecture. Much like the Cleric shrieking out a calm analysis of the situation, Cal is very likely going to die here and Dani’s all “oh, hey, now’s a great time for a lecture.” Think maybe Dani is acting like this party is a non-threat to try and calm Cal down? Think again:

Continue reading “Dungeon Born: Late Explanations” →