NOVEL SIMPLE Another Vine Room Or Three – Chapter 190
Now with the basic structure of the eighth floor set in place Doyle felt free to play with it and so turned to the first room. He wasn’t ready to go full Escher on it so left space itself alone for now. Instead, through the use of unnaturally tough glass, a number of platforms and bridges are formed. Each one is just clear enough that you might lose sight of it if not paying attention.
Doyle wasn’t planning on hurting people through tossing them off the side of the platforms, especially since by this point most delvers would be made of tougher stuff than the average human. No, instead he wants to make it so that during a fight a party backed into a corner might accidentally lose a mage off the edge as they back up. Then, because he can’t help it, Doyle makes it so that the various bridges shift around when no one is on the floor.
This wasn’t really a randomization of all that much. The platforms stayed in place and with each one the size of a small room only so many fit in the room. In fact, some of the more physical delvers would be able to hop between the closer ones. This room would hold no mysteries, but that was sort of the point.
Doyle was laying everything out on the table, something that very much was not going to be the case higher in the floor. Because yes, the goal of the floor was to get to the top. After all, what was better for a dungeon, something that classically went downward, than to go up?
Happy with the stark esthetics of the room with only the entrance portal and a glass staircase spiraling up through a circular hole, Doyle moves on to the next room. For this one, he wanted to showcase the axebeaks. They aren’t a bad monster, he just didn’t have a decent location for them. This room would change that and in spades.
The main gimmick was going to be gravity. The floor would be down, the ceiling would be down, and one of the glass walls would be down as well. Of course, they wouldn’t be straight down! Oh no, Doyle had a better plan than just that. The floor of the room would be as if slightly slanted away from the wall that was down. That wall would be as if slightly slanted away from the ceiling and of course from there the ceiling was slightly slanted towards that very wall.
This created the illusion that you were walking uphill to the wall and then up the wall and finally towards the opening onto the next room. Said opening was tantalizingly directly over the hole from the previous room. It almost looks like someone could jump the distance with enough strength. This was technically true.
One very important catch was a simple enough feature that Doyle had originally implemented to mess with arrows and spells. The middle third of the room followed the one wall’s gravity. Sure, someone strong enough or using a flying spell could easily bypass this. It did however add just that little bit extra to the difficulty front without putting up a literal wall, something Doyle wanted to avoid if possible.
In the end, Doyle admitted that this room would be super simple after a certain realm of strength and he was fine with that. Though he suspected that even the strong would have a bit of a problem with the shifts in gravity. While it was manipulated to a much finer degree than he had ever done so before, the edges of each gravity field were quite abrupt. Even on the two edges people would be able to walk through to go from floor to wall and then onto the ceiling might cause a problem.
He had wanted it to be more of a gradient or soft border but his abilities still weren’t at that level. Though now that the basic mechanics of the room were taken care of, Doyle focuses on the look of the room. The wall was going to stay glass because he found the idea of people panicking on it hilarious. For the floor and ceiling, though? They both get covered in a healthy layer of dirt and topped off with grass.
Though so as to not take up any extra room space, he actually digs down. Sure, it created a thicker transition between rooms but Doyle was fine with that. Not like the place was an actual skyscraper where he would have to care about the load. Speaking of which, he then adds in a bunch of small boulders.
These rocks aren’t really all that big, topping out around waist height. They are however all quite flat and squat so they can grow moss. Though their primary purpose is to give the lizards and such a place to hide from the axebeaks as needed. The previous room might have stripped any semblance of ecology away, but this one would be more in line with his other floors.
That was enough for now though, and so he moved on. First though, there needs to be a better way to get there than just a hole in the ceiling, so Doyle places a set of stairs that have the gravity flip halfway through. This lets out into the third and fourth room.
Both the third and fourth room because Doyle wanted the two to be devilishly simple. The third room would have the hole to the second room and the fourth room would have the staircase to the fifth room. Both are located at exactly the same place of course. To get to the fifth room, all you have to do is walk across the fourth room.
What makes this simple is the fact you do just have to walk. There aren’t any special methods needed. The complication is that Doyle has put up floor to ceiling gates, similar to the sixth floor except they don’t lead to somewhere random. When active, it will send you to the other room in exactly the same location as if you had been in that room to begin with.
So all a delver needs to do to get to the staircase is to figure out the path they need to walk so that they end up there. An invisible maze of simple complexity. If anyone was able to view from the top, it would be simple to solve. Too bad that isn’t an option.
Though Doyle does add one indicator of where they are. The third room has a grass floor with a few clovers while the fourth room has a clover floor with a few bits of grass. Not the most obvious tell, but it’s there and he’s sure that it will be noticed, eventually. Sort of a one-trick pony situation, of course as once someone shares the info everyone will know but he’s fine with that.
Satisfied, he turns to the fifth room. Easy enough, so far the rooms have been just exemplifying certain things so this one can be about warping space. The only question is how?
Doyle’s first reaction is to make it look stupid simple again and he doesn’t feel like having a second reaction. So with that in mind, the entire room gets left as stone with a circular hole on the opposite end that has part of a staircase hanging down. From there, he cuts loose.
On the last floor, he limited himself to bending things a little bit, like an elephant walked through a door and everything was bowed out. Now he plans to take it to the next level. The first step is to drag the floor up at a steep angle. Not physically, in fact, anyone looking at things from the entrance to the room would see the room as still being flat. No, Doyle was manipulating and stretching space itself.
Space did not quite like this, mostly because part of how the floor’s size was determined was how far Doyle could stretch things. So, like a rubber band pulled tight it didn’t have much give left. Good thing he was able to do more than just stretch it. Just like how the spatial bags take a small portion of his space, he is able to move it around some and so that is what he did.
Now with some extra space to play with Doyle is able to get the far end all the way up to the staircase. This created a not so gentle slope that only became noticeable once someone started climbing on it. Doyle laughed to himself, it definitely wasn’t enough!
So with all the finesse of a sledgehammer Doyle begins to jack up the terrain. Cliffs you only see once you upon them, gulleys that are actually flat ground, and a whole lot of extra space that shouldn’t be able to fit within the nine meters between the floor and ceiling.
Doyle isn’t even certain he wants to add any monsters to this. The simple fact that it looks like a completely empty room with a flat floor is an interesting thing in and of itself. Nevermind the fact that the seemingly impossible terrain is probably just as much of a danger, anyway.
That in mind, he moves on to the sixth, seventh, and eighth rooms. Not that he plans to replicate the third and fourth rooms. To copy that except with three rooms would be boring. No, Doyle has another plan for these three.
For all the previous rooms, there has only been one path. A single entrance and a single exit? Boring! Instead of a single hole between rooms, the way in between room six, seven, and eight will be provided by a multitude of smaller holes.
Of course, Doyle isn’t going to have a bunch of staircases for this mess. Instead, all three rooms are filled with extra strong vines. In fact, he had been tempted to just remove the barriers between the three rooms but his vines and dungeon abilities aren’t quite yet able to be long enough for that and survive being climbed.
That doesn’t stop Doyle from turning the way from six to seven and from seven to eight into swiss cheese. The bits of rock still up there are being used as anchor points for all the vines. This has one unplanned upside. Anyone trying to climb up will have to switch vines in between rooms as not a single one goes all the way to the top.
Not only that, but Doyle decided on another bit of nastiness for the eighth room. Instead of there being one fixed way through to the ninth floor, there is a hole with a ladder that changes position after every visit. This wasn’t originally a part of the plan until he realized that once people figured out where the exit to the ninth floor was everyone would just go right to it.
Doyle had been tempted to make it only change once a day but even that would destroy too much of the challenge. If people didn’t have to bumble around to find the way up, his assassin vines would rarely ever get to catch someone. This would have been a real shame when the whole set up basically begged for the camo’d ambush predators.
In fact, after taking a step back and putting his viewpoint down on the sixth floor he adds even more randomness. After all, even if they didn’t know where the exit was, they would soon learn which vines are best to climb. Can’t have that! So, with just a small tweak, the holes and vines all move around randomly as well.
Besides that, Doyle also removes a few of the holes. While it was hard to see near the center of the room. Along the edges where all the light was, it was somewhat easy to peek at the ceiling of the eighth floor. With that done, Doyle sits back and feels satisfied that he had closed up most of the obvious shortcuts.