Defend the Core! (Dungeon Core Quest)

Year 1026 Orsi, Okrasi Province, Slaria
From your home and body, you look out at the massive amount of buildings that take up the entirety of the surrounding area in front of your dungeon, from the small dwellings on the outskirts to the slowly rising stone buildings that have been appearing throughout the year, you take in the large change it has been in a short four years, from a beautiful desert to a congested and full city, already you can feel sheer mana that each of those invaders creates emanating from the city as well as the mana you have gained throughout the year as invaders throw themselves into your dungeon en masse. Slowly you sigh and turn back to work, you have more and more monsters to create if the speed of people rising doesn't dissipate.
(+2 DPpT) (+35 MpT)

Year 1026 Orsi, Okrasi Province, Slaria
"Report" you hear from your liege and immediately begin, "While the sheer amount of immigrants we have had has been a shock, we have been able to get a grip of the needed infrastructure, through the use of the mages his majesty has ordered to join our city." Taking a deep breath you continue, "While there has been a slight spike in crime, the use of liege-subject bonds as well as land-man bonds have served to at least lower the crime rate as well as the plentiful food and water the dungeon provides, already we have seen an increase in population throughout the country as more and more people feel safe to create families." Quickly you sit back down and listen in to the next reports from your contemporaries.

Turn 4 Results
Mana: 130 (360 Mana per Turn)
16/20 (14 DP per Turn)
[]Swamp Ecosystem: Water, one of the advantages you have in your dungeon, is a siren song to the world outside of your dungeon, a hot harsh place where a drop of water disappears instantly. By overfilling your dungeon with water and mutating plants to take advantage of this increase in water you can begin to form a swamp-like ecosystem, which provides boosts to the detrimental effects of your environmental traps. (20 per dice 136/200)

With the completion of the aquatic monsters, you have begun increasing the density of swamps in your dungeon, seamlessly blending oases to swamps, however, your mutations have been slow going, hitting roadblocks with every plant you try to mutate, but slowly but surely you pick away at the problem, one by one creating more and more swamp plants, eventually allowing you to seed this plants throughout your dungeon. But the next part of creating the swamp ecosystem requires yet more work, the creation of a mass amount of small animals to seed your ecosystem as a food source for your monsters. Already you have been hitting roadblocks with changing your insects to become more accustomed to swamps. However, the remedy is to just put more work into it til it works out.

[]Basic Quarters: While Monsters are made from mana and don't require rest, building basic quarters in your dungeon would allow you to store more monsters inside your floors and allow for longer fights between you and your invaders allowing you to more of that sweet, sweet mana. (10 Mana per Dice 60/100)

You start quickly, designating areas around your dungeon as monster dens, hollowing out the walls to create deeper caves and various ponds to hold your plants. Already your animals have begun to take advantage of these changes in your dungeon, from the sand hares' porous home of drilled sandstone which hides the deep interconnected tunnels where they live, and create more of their many numbers, to the dens which connect to the fire mana stream where your monitor lizards lay, slowly soaking up both the sand and fire mana you take in en mass. These quarters still require places to hold your aquatic and plant monsters requiring just a few more places to house your monsters, allowing them to at least sleep away from the invaders.

[]Reptile-Based Monsters: With the basic animal monsters, created you can focus more on a few types of monsters, from the lumbering desert monitor to the speedy vipers, you can take these reptiles and enhance them through with your mana allowing you to create more specific monsters, refining mutations and bring the monsters from a small nuisance to something which even the toughest invader will struggle to face. (20 Mana per Dice 186/200)

Throughout the dungeon, the massive amount of mana pushed towards the production of reptile monsters is staggering, already you a large number of mutations have been seen and noted, from the large lumbering crocodiles which have grown rapidly from the few aquatic reptiles to cousins of the crocodile, limbs the size of palm trees and a mouth large enough to swallow an invader, you have slowly been refining this beast of a monster, squeezing more and more improves out of it over time, but it still requires just a little more push to be ready to take on the invaders who would enter your dungeon.

[]Basic Affinity Monsters: Fire, Water, Air and Earth. The basic elements and the most prevalent, make up almost all of the mana generation throughout the world. By taking your understanding of the basic affinities you can mutate your monsters to wield these basic elements in conjunction with the sand mana you have already given them. This will give your monsters more options and provide two avenues of attack to the invaders who enter your dungeon. (15 Mana per Dice 14/200)

From fire to the earth, you have struggled to embed a second affinity into your monsters, already you have been faced with challenges, from the spontaneous combusting of your attempts to instill fire into monsters, to the land drowning gifting monsters the touch of water mana, you have hit roadblock after roadblock on gifting your monsters the affinity they need.

[]Aquatic Monsters: With the large amount of water in your dungeon it seems sensible to create monsters that can survive in the water and hunt those who dare try to steal the water from your home. With the creation of various aquatic creatures, almost every angle of the dungeon will be an ambush point, leaving them constantly fearful of when your monsters will get the drop on them (10 Mana per Dice 96/100) (Autocompletes this Turn) (+2 DPpT) (Unlocks Aquatic Plant Monsters)

From the speedy fish to the large crocodiles you have refined your monsters enough that they can now live under and above water for a time. With the creation of these monsters you have begun to come up with more ideas, from the use of a floating plant monster to the use of boats on your various rivers throughout your dungeon to transport monsters, however without the sufficient intelligence needed to pilot these crafts throughout your dungeon they will remain a far of the idea, sitting there unable to be realized. (+2 DPpT) (Unlocks Aquatic Plant Monsters)

[]Basic Plant Traps: Mushrooms or Flowers, spores or pollen, plants have it all from towering trees to hidden mushrooms, all it takes is a slight adjustment and you have it all. Trees that bleed skin-eating sap, mushrooms that sprout hallucinogenic spores, flowers whose pollen makes invaders descend into a frenzy. These plant traps have a wide breadth of effects, while the first plant traps you make are not these beautiful specimens, they still can be deadly, after a strangler vine slows down invaders as much as flesh-eating sap allowing you to milk them for more of that sweet, sweet mana. (10 Mana per Dice 176/150) (+15 MpT) (Unlocks Fungi-Based Traps) (Unlocks Flower-Based Traps)

Throughout the dungeon your monstrous plants flower from the seeds you have laid throughout the year, from the constricting reeds that are scattered throughout your dungeon to the hallucinogenic mushrooms that litter the dark corners of your dungeon, just waiting to sprout to their full potential and unleash massive amounts of mind-bending spores, already you can see the effects, more effort for each invader to enter your dungeon shedding more and more mana escape your traps which have become truly prolific in your dungeon, eventually leading to the ever-increasing number of deaths in your dungeon, which has been matched by the increasing tempo of invaders entering your dungeon. (+15 MpT) (Unlocks Fungi-Based Traps) (Unlocks Flower-Based Traps)

[]Mana Connection Network: Mana is everywhere, that is known but what isn't known is that dungeons are intelligent mana, holding these thoughts inside a physical medium keeps the intelligent mana from reacting with the world outside of it and killing the core. This case of sapient mana bestows dungeons with the ability to send messages through mana, by sending this message mana through the flows of the world, you will be able to connect and talk to the dungeons throughout the world. (10 Mana per Dice 21/100)

Apparently sending mana through message through mana is harder than it looks, your amateur attempts to send messages to the various dungeons around have been stymied by the fact that when sent off from your dungeon it collapses as the mana rushes into the unprotected message and tears it into pieces, however by learning more about the way to send messages you have begun to be able to tell when they are being sent and you have started to see how the dungeons around you send mass amounts of messages to each through some form of a link, a direct mana link which slowly makes it towards to area where the massive amounts of invaders originate, this place referred to as central.

[]Basic Mana Storage: While something that most don't like to talk about mana decays, whether it's because of an unwanted reaction between affinities or a more hidden reason. Mana dissipates usually over a month, for a good reason too at least for those invaders, if it didn't the land would be a mutated wasteland as when affiliated mana dissipates it usually does in an explosive reaction, usually inside some poor animal causing rapid mutation and frenzy as their brain goes into chemical imbalance. At Least outside a dungeon, inside is a different story. By utilizing various crystallized rocks you can safely dissipate affinitated mana, lessening the burden on your core. (15 Mana per Dice 181/200)

More slow work, piece by piece you have started to build a better idea of how to create more and more mana storage from start to end you can now slowly create these pieces of crystal which will hold the large amount of mana that is needed, however now you need to create a quick way to go from start to finish, already you have developed a few ideas but will a take a bit a of time till you reach the required speed to create them en masse and use them throughout the dungeon.

[]Basic Mana Items: From swords that never need to be sharpened to clothes that keep you warm, mana items are everywhere. Usually formed from instilling affintiated with a specific intention, the cost of these items can be cut down through the use of runes, specific points of concentration, and even small gems to bring down the cost of these weapons, allowing you to produce more and attract more invaders into your body hunting for these riches. (15 Mana per Dice 40/100)

A slow grinding push has been what to describe your work with mana items from the ever-sharpen sword which breaks with a breeze to the clothes which immolate those who touch them your work to recreate the invader's mana items have slowly, ever so slowly leads you to learn more and more about mana items, from a way to weave mana into the threads to cloth to create crystalline formations inside of the edge of the sword through some arcane measurements, there are plentiful ways to enchant you have learned, however, these are only the surface measurements and require a deeper dive to truly understand how to bind these pieces of mana to physical objects.

[]Basic Wall Reinforcement: Invaders are a violent and destructive force, which raid your body for various mana-rich resources. If there is a wall they can break, they will, by reinforcing your walls beforehand you can gain an advantage over those who would enter your dungeon and stop them from creating a straight line throughout your dungeon. (10 Mana per Dice 59/100)

From easily broken walls to somewhat strong walls, you have covered roughly over half of the dungeon in this newly reinforced rock, created by compressing massive amounts of rock onto each other until they begin increasingly strong and then wrapping the mixing the walls with a mix of earth and sand mana to hold them in place, otherwise they tend to explode outward violently, you have begun the work to create a way to stop invaders breaking through your walls to get to your core and get the drop on your monsters. Already there have been improvements, from the stronger invaders not being able to create handholds in your walls to stopping those pesky mages from cutting in your walls, it has gotten harder for the invaders to move throughout your dungeon.

[]Hidden Vents: While not noticeable to the majority of the population some can see mana throughout the world, by installing hidden vents throughout the dungeon, you can hide where the mana is going, stopping people from utilizing this trick to get through mazes or in the eventuality of a mana surge which would make mana visible through sheer quantity, hide which way it is to the core. (15 Mana per Dice 154/200)

Some work has been made on the hidden vents throughout the dungeon, slowly connecting the vents to the main vent which has been done slowly over the year excavated however, you still have parts a large way to go to connect all of the vents to your main vent as well as make sure that throughout now and the future you will have enough space to fit all of the vents that are required throughout your dungeon.

Year 1026 Orsi, Okrasi Province, Slaria
"Give it to me straight," you tell the guildmaster in front of you. Quickly he reaches into his desk and pulls up a pile of papers. "Based on the new laws passed, we have finally been able to document all forms of monsters from the dungeon." Quickly handing over a paper, you look down at it and see all forms of plants and animals, some easily seen and some more bizarre. "The dungeon seems to favor large amounts of plant and animal monsters, each enhanced through their mana affinity and the environment created in the dungeon, roughly at Tier 1 in strength. While this is beneficial for us, as it provides food for ourselves and the kingdom, there have been sightings of monsters that run away when seen, probably a prototype of a monster. From the description we have been given, we believe they will breach Tier 2."

With that, he hands over a different piece of paper covered with various large reptiles, most able to swallow a human whole. "We have already informed the Tier 2 adventures in the city of what monsters will show up and they are prepared to go hunt them to gather data, but it will be tough, we can expect an increase in the death when these monsters are finished, however not enough for us to go into negative thankfully," and with that you leave to report to your liege lord about what the guild master has said.

Turn 5
Mana: 490 (360 Mana per Turn)
16/20 (14 DP per Turn)
Floors (3 Dice):
[]Faean Ecosystem: With the established basic ecosystem, it allows the specialization of the dungeon ecosystem, by manipulating plants throughout the dungeon you can begin to induce mana-specialized mutations in the ecosystem which theoretically would lower the cost of mana-based traps by providing more mana in the air and surrounding area for these magical traps to utilize so that they can perform at high levels and make a greater challenge to invaders. (20 Mana per dice 25/200)

[]Cavern Ecosystem: While the basics have been established you can go one step further and tailor your ecosystem to the area in it, caves. By growing more mushrooms and mutating plants to become beneficial to a cave system you can create the conditions to allow more proliferation of physical traps. Whether hiding behind a taste placement of vines or an actual boulder held up by branches, you can fit more physical traps in a cavern ecosystem allowing you to get traps in a smaller space. (15 Mana per 25/200)

[]Swamp Ecosystem: Water, one of the advantages you have in your dungeon, is a siren song to the world outside of your dungeon, a hot harsh place where a drop of water disappears instantly. By overfilling your dungeon with water and mutating plants to take advantage of this increase in water you can begin to form a swamp-like ecosystem, which provides boosts to the detrimental effects of your environmental traps. (20 per dice 136/200)

[]Small Animal Dens: With the creation of basic resources, you can now create specialized storage places for your resources to reside, allowing you to place monsters within these places, creating a place for monsters to ambush from, allowing you to save mana as well as keep the invaders on their toes. By seeding these dens with a variety of small animals, from bunnies to birds you can hide monsters within them to attack unsuspecting invaders. (15 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Herb Garden: From flowers to various spices, you can create specialized areas where you can grow plant-based resources. These plant resources are something that the invaders, hunt for hours in your dungeon, but by making a dedicated area to place them you can then hide various plant-based monsters inside them as well. Forcing them to brave your perfect ambush points to gather the food they require, allowing you to save on mana as well as kill desperate invaders. (10 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Basic Quarters: While Monsters are made from mana and don't require rest, building basic quarters in your dungeon would allow you to store more monsters inside your floors and allow for longer fights between you and your invaders allowing you to more of that sweet, sweet mana. (10 Mana per Dice 60/100)

[]Basic Workshop: While some traps are easy to replace some may not be, that's where the workshop comes in, allowing you to hold a variety of little helpers to automate various tasks throughout the dungeon saving you mana for replacing parts every time as well as allowing for repairs of various features throughout the dungeon. (10 Mana per Dice 0/100)

Monsters (4 Dice):
[]Basic Intelligent Bipedal Monsters: Kobolds, Goblins and Imps, and various other intelligent creatures created by dungeons, usually the first intelligent monster each dungeon makes. While only smart enough to use stone tools each has been deadly to unsuspecting rookies in large enough numbers, using ambush tactics these basic intelligent lives will be sure to cut down on those pesky invaders. (15 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Basic Sprite-Based Mana Monsters: Fairies, motes, spirits, some of the first mana-based life forms dungeons create, usually in the form of their starting affinity. While not much at first, all of these forms of mana-based life are known to swarm unsuspecting invaders who come for treasures of your body. After all, while one of the weakest mana beings there is a reason most dungeons make them first. Their dirt cheap, most dungeons pump them out by the thousands with just one piece of mana. (15 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Bug-Based Monsters: From the swarms of locusts to the agile scorpions, there is a multitude of bugs in the surrounding desert, which when exposed to your mana, will create monsters for your dungeon, eerily coordinated these bugs will be able to react quickly to any incursion into your dungeon and provide an easy way for you to attack the invaders who will enter your dungeon, after all, bugs breed fast and are plentiful in the surrounding area. (10 Mana per Dice 0/300)

[]Reptile-Based Monsters: With the basic animal monsters, created you can focus more on a few types of monsters, from the lumbering desert monitor to the speedy vipers, you can take these reptiles and enhance them through with your mana allowing you to create more specific monsters, refining mutations and bring the monsters from a small nuisance to something which even the toughest invader will struggle to face. (20 Mana per Dice 186/200)

[]Basic Tree-Based Monsters: From the swaying palm trees to the towering redwood, trees have a lot of variability with the form of trees. By taking advantage of this variability you can create the towering and lumbering monsters or a more agile and speedy fighter. However each of these fighters have one thing in common with their branches grown throughout their body, these monsters have limbs to spare. From specialized limbs to stab-to-bleed flesh-eating saps, tree-based monsters evoke an alien feeling to invaders with their many-branched growths. (20 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Basic Fungi-Based Monsters: From the deadly death caps to the paralyzing mushrooms of the jungles, mushrooms have a wide range of ways to spell death for an invader, but one thing most people don't think about mushrooms is their ability to act as nervous system, with beneficial mutations, you can create a monster which inhabits a whole room, from the moment an invader walks in your fungus monsters, who spit out thing like fire, to poison spores, can accurately attack those who dare enter your dungeon, all is needed is the beneficial mutations of these strains of mushroom (10 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Heat-Sensing Monsters: From magic to plain old camouflage, there is a multitude of ways to hide, however, one that most people don't think of is heat, something that doesn't really come up that often heat is all around us as well as requiring a very technical enchantment and it can be taken advantage of through the use of heat-sensing monsters, your monsters will be able to find anybody hiding through camouflage or invisibility. (15 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Aquatic Plant Monsters: A floating lilypad just waiting to become a bear trap, to seaweed which drags you into their wooden beak, aquatic plants are some of the rarer monsters that you can make, which just makes them more deadly after all most don't understand how these monsters work. By speeding these monsters throughout your dungeon you can create another layer against the invaders entering your dungeon as well as utilizing the mass amount of water you have flowing throughout your dungeon. (10 Mana per Dice 0/300)

[]Basic Affinity Monsters: Fire, Water, Air and Earth. The basic elements and the most prevalent, make up almost all of the mana generation throughout the world. By taking your understanding of the basic affinities you can mutate your monsters to wield these basic elements in conjunction with the sand mana you have already given them. This will give your monsters more options and provide two avenues of attack to the invaders who enter your dungeon. (15 Mana per Dice 14/200)

Traps (2 Dice):
[]Basic Physical Traps: Small or Tall, Complex or Simple, traps are versatile, promising to pump invaders for all their hard-earned energy. While these first few traps aren't the most complex and won't hold them forever, they don't need to, from pit traps to collapsing ceilings, these traps promise to inconvenience and set up for monsters to ambush invaders while they are down. These cheap traps won't be the most mana efficient nor self-loading but they are solid for what they are, simple and cheap. (10 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Basic Magical Traps: Burst of fire or bone-breaking curse, magic, and traps are a match made in hell. With the passive mutability of magic and the preparation of traps, these traps promise to surprise your invaders as they do with a few cracks or an ornate light feature to spell doom for those wandering your body. After all a small bit of mana to sap more mana is a worthy investment. (15 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Basic Toxic Minerals Traps: From the deadly quicksilver to the small amounts of radiation some minerals release, you are flush with ways to spread toxicity throughout your dungeon, weakening those who dare enter your body to hunt for resources. Whether a slow death or a quick one, your mineral traps are sure to pump them off their mana as they struggle to escape your traps. (20 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Basic Pathogen Traps: A spore or a bacteria, a spreading sickness or a rotting virus, pathogens allow you to spread death throughout your dungeon, even if those outside your halls have found a way to stop your sickness, it just means you can concentrate it further, from clouds of spores to animals which give bacteria, there are a multitude of ways to slow down and stop the invaders entering your dungeon and pump them for their mana. (10 Mana per Dice 0/300)

[]Fungi-based Traps: From spore to shroom, mushrooms are easy to hide and can have extremely detrimental effects, from the hallucinogenic spores to a form of parasitism that leads to repentant acts of violence, spores can be fine-tuned to cause all sorts of mental problems to a group of invaders entering your dungeon, creating divides in groups of invaders and making sure that they spend more and more time, being affected, making them waste their mana as well as their life to escape your dungeon. (15 Mana per Dice 0/300)

[]Flower-based Traps: From seed to petal, flowers are some of the more inconspicuous things to have in a dungeon, from paralyzing flowers to one that spontaneously combust, flowers have a wide range of uses when correctly mutated, all it takes is the mana to create those mutations and then you are in business, these traps promise to hamstring the invaders entering your dungeon, afterall while some may look down, a flower is so easily ignored that they are all guaranteed to fall into the trap. (20 Mana per Dice 0/200)

Research (4 Dice):
[]Mana Connection Network: Mana is everywhere, that is known but what isn't known is that dungeons are intelligent mana, holding these thoughts inside a physical medium keeps the intelligent mana from reacting with the world outside of it and killing the core. This case of sapient mana bestows dungeons with the ability to send messages through mana, by sending this message mana through the flows of the world, you will be able to connect and talk to the dungeons throughout the world. (10 Mana per Dice 21/100)

[]Basic Mana Ring: With the creation of basic mana flows and the resulting growth in mana production from invaders entering your dungeon, you can begin large-scale conversions through a mana ring. By leading mana in a circular route around your core, it allows a longer process of conversion allowing you to save large parts of mana which is lost when you de-affinaited the mana in your dungeon. This will overall increase the amount of mana in your dungeon and make the ring around your core visible to the mass presence of mana.(5 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Basic Mana Storage: While something that most don't like to talk about mana decays, whether it's because of an unwanted reaction between affinities or a more hidden reason. Mana dissipates usually over a month, for a good reason too at least for those invaders, if it didn't the land would be a mutated wasteland as when affiliated mana dissipates it usually does in an explosive reaction, usually inside some poor animal causing rapid mutation and frenzy as their brain goes into chemical imbalance. At Least outside a dungeon, inside is a different story. By utilizing various crystallized rocks you can safely dissipate affinitated mana, lessening the burden on your core. (15 Mana per Dice 181/200)

[]Specialized Affinities: With the completion of basic affinities it is time to research specialized affinities, from blood to sand. These affinities are often made through bizarre combinations between the four basic elements from the use of earth, water, and fire to make ice to the use of water, earth, and air in specific quantities to make blood affinity. It will take a long time to go through each grouping of specialized affinities but at least it isn't mind-boggling and mana-twisting high affinities such as time or space. (20 Mana per Dice 0/500)

[]Basic Mana Items: From swords that never need to be sharpened to clothes that keep you warm, mana items are everywhere. Usually formed from instilling affintiated with a specific intention, the cost of these items can be cut down through the use of runes, specific points of concentration, and even small gems to bring down the cost of these weapons, allowing you to produce more and attract more invaders into your body hunting for these riches. (15 Mana per Dice 40/100)

Core (3 Dice):
[]Basic Wall Reinforcement: Invaders are a violent and destructive force, which raid your body for various mana-rich resources. If there is a wall they can break, they will, by reinforcing your walls beforehand you can gain an advantage over those who would enter your dungeon and stop them from creating a straight line throughout your dungeon. (10 Mana per Dice 59/100)

[]Basic Ambush Points: Invaders have some of the weakest senses, they can't hunt through smell, nor understand all of a room from a sound. These weak senses allow for the creation of ambush points, places where monsters can attack from the shadows. Creating dedicated ambush points creates a surplus of places to attack from allowing your monsters to choose where to ambush from and giving a sense of variability to each group as there is always a different ambush location. (20 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Basic Statistical Counting: By counting how many people enter each day and how they act, you can get a sense of whether more or fewer people will enter your dungeon as well as what they want. This allows you to tailor your body so that the invaders will get captured by their greed and fall into traps as well as lull them into a false sense of security by tailoring monster numbers to overpower them with the least amount of monsters. (10 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Stealth Fields: Through the use of notice-me-not enchantments, you can hide your monsters from the focus of invaders, allowing them to spring more ambushes against them. However, due to the mana-based application of these enchantments, there is a chance that mages may be able to sense them, but that is a small chance after all, it takes specific skills to sense mana. (20 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Hidden Tunnels: Movement through the can be treacherous not just for the invaders, but by installing hidden tunnels throughout the dungeon, you can create a hidden system of tunnels to ferry your monsters from place to place, allowing you to hold more monsters in general as well as allow monsters to escape from conflicts if it is known that they are going to lose, allowing you to recoup costs for monsters in your dungeon. (15 Mana per Dice 0/200)

[]Hidden Vents: While not noticeable to the majority of the population some can see mana throughout the world, by installing hidden vents throughout the dungeon, you can hide where the mana is going, stopping people from utilizing this trick to get through mazes or in the eventuality of a mana surge which would make mana visible through sheer quantity, hide which way it is to the core. (15 Mana per Dice 154/200)