Dungeons

What is a dungeon? From a utilitarian perspective: A training ground. One can run about in the real world killing things (monsters, humans, random animals), but there are consequences. Even systemized worlds need ecosystems. If people wander around killing everything, the ecosystem will collapse.

Dungeons are for training. One can kill everything inside without worrying about side-effects.

The LitRPG trope, which is not entirely fictional, is that danger begets improvement. For example, if I am trying to improve my Swordsman skill, whacking at pells helps, but there are limits because the pells don’t react. Sparring helps, but there are limits because my opponent is not really trying to kill me. Running around the countryside dueling every swordsman I come across helps, but there are limits because I need to find the swordsmen and, if I kill them, I’m going to run out of swordsmen. Dungeons solve this problem by providing unlimited opponents who are really trying to kill me.

However, nothing is free. The combined forces exercises that the US military runs are very dungeon-like. They are actually dangerous – although attempts are made to minimize that. They are also very, very expensive. That’s one reason the US has the one of best militaries in the world: Very few can afford to run these sorts of exercises.

If dungeons are only powered by the failures (i.e. dead people), they lose a lot of their utility. They’re either too costly to use – who wants that much risk in training? – or they’re underpowered – no one will go into one unless the odds are drastically in their favor so few people die to power it.

One “obvious” work-around is to throw criminals into dungeons to be eaten. I’m definitely doing this, especially in my current “death penalty for everything” mood. However, it’s not sustainable unless “everything” means literally “everything” and you throw people into dungeons for j-walking, which is a good way to foment rebellion.

That means dungeons need an independent power source. For now, hand-waving “absorb ambient mana” is the answer. I reserve the right to refine that or just add “system fuckery” for special cases.

How do they work? It’s generally accepted that dungeons have a “core”, which is somewhat AI-like. The big per-author question is: How “alive” are they? This varies from “not at all” to “smarter than humans”.

I like books with dungeons as characters (it’s an entire sub-genre), so I’m leaning toward “dungeons are monsters”. It would be very handy to have a cooperative rather than adversarial dungeon.

The thing about LitRPG books is that the main characters need to be OP (over powered), sometimes wildly so. That’s the only way one’s intrepid hero can stand out from the crowd, all of whom have “super powers”. The first few books are about getting an apparently normal character to that state. The next few are about all the fun he has in that state. Then it starts to diverge. The two main paths are Founding a Legacy, in which the intrepid hero becomes the head of some group and pushes everyone forward, and Leave Me Alone, in which the intrepid hero wants to just do his own thing, which rarely works out, but the ensuing hijinks make for good stories.

In short (too late), the first few books are about how the hero becomes OP. Having an allied, if not friendly, dungeon around will help with that – and help the entire group. The series is Pack Rising not Werewolf Rising, but the alpha needs to lead the way. Hmmm. It seems that I’ve already decided I’m going down the Founding a Legacy path – and those are the ones that make me lose interest, eventually. We’ll see how that works out.

Sometime in the not so distant future (chapter 12 or so; I’m letting this part grow organically), our intrepid werewolves are going to accidentally claim a sector, which is going to fail because they need to clear the sector dungeon first. That process will introduce our dungeon character. It’s going to be low level, so more of an Aibo than an actually sentient pet. I see a lot of potential stories in a dungeon’s “teenager” phase.

BTW: I’m stuck on Chapter 5. Our intrepid heroes need to have a “what are we going to do, now?” conversation. I know how I want it to end, but all the dialog in the middle is coming out incredibly lame. I’m going to leave that hanging as a “todo” and move on to Chapter 6, this weekend. Either writing chapter six or outlining through ten will happen. Embrace the power of “and”!