Grrl Power #1177 – Stupefy a succubus
It’s always fun when you stump the smartest person in the room. Or at least one of the smartest people in the room. We don’t know how Dabbler’s intelligence compares to Deus’s. But in this instance, she’s got 130-is years of experience on him, and as far as we know he’s never gone Delving, so on this topic she’s probably the expert-est.
Of course, then you’re tempted to keep it rolling so you try and ask her a seemingly complicated question like “How old is time?” and she’s all “Same age as the universe.” and you’re like “Whaaaa?” and she shrugs and is all “Before the universe existed there was no time in which an absence of time could exist, so obviously time started once time started existing.” and then you’re like “But… how… when did… how did the Big Bang happen if there was no time before the Big Bang happened?” and she puts her finger to the side of her nose. “You gotta figure that one out yourself.”
I know “bespoke” isn’t a verb, but then, anything is a verb if you try hard enough.
If you’re trying to view the Patreon double res version, check your pledge and billing, Patreon did something… I don’t know, they temporarily routed billing through Tuvalu or something and it broke some stuff.
So I’m still sick, but I think I’m over the hump. Like I said, colds seems to take a long ass time to burn through me these days. I had one bad feverish night, and now I just have a sporadic cough and some minor lung rattle. I managed to get the comic pages I was working on last week done, but I did have to skip shading them. That probably saved me two days at the pace I had been going. Spent yesterday working on the vote incentive, made some good progress, but it’ll still probably next Monday before I have that done. I guess the next incentive will have to be a simpler piece so I can make up for getting behind on them. (The current one involves 4 participants because I’m dumb and keep underestimating how long that will take me to color.)
But I have been taking it kind of easy. Not like, actual time off, but I’ve been dedicating my evenings to relaxing and playing some video games instead of getting back to drawing after dinner, which I don’t spend a lot of time on these days. Been replaying Mass Effect via the Legendary edition. That game is so good and I wish someone would make something else like it. Been playing on Legendary difficulty, but it don’t matter, because my Shepherd was a sniper on my first playthrough, and she’s a sniper this time around, and I am a one-shot machine. “Oh, some Geth took over one of your flotilla ships and you sent your own “special forces” in and they all got killed? Yeah, Imma take care of that for you right quick.” – One absolute massacre later… – “Yeah, no worries, got your ship back. So… those Geth really kicked you off your own planet huh? Yikes. What? I didn’t say you Quarians are a bunch of ninnies. Out loud. Oh by the way, know you’re a race of refugees, but I still looted the unholy fuck out of that ship, so… no need to thank me I guess.”
I kid the Quarians. I actually really like their post-exodus culture with their resource gathering pilgrimages and how each ship is sort of its own city state but still dedicated to the fleet. I wish they were in some form of media that extended beyond a single video game series. Really all you get to hear about them in the game is a dozen conversations with Tali, her loyalty mission in ME2, and a half dozen other miscellaneous Quarian encounters in the series in the game. And that’s kind of it.
The June vote incentive is finally up! Maxima is prepping for her night out.
And in the Patreon variants, she gets (un)dressed and takes a look through all the makeup options.
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I wouldn’t call monsters “evil”, per se, any more than I would lions or bears. They are dangerous predators who can’t be reasoned with and don’t want to share resources, but I don’t know if that’s exactly the same as “evil”.
Well, if we go by D&D where monsters do have alignment…then, it would seem, yes, they can be evil.
Eh, a lot of monsters like OwlBears are neutrally aligned. So it depends on what sort of monsters.
It’s a common mistake by people, they assume something is evil simply just because it’s dangerous. Evil isn’t actions, it’s intent. A tiger isn’t evil when it hunts, it’s just wanting to survive, but a tiger that hunts only humans by CHOICE is. And I’m not talking about a hurt or sick one, I’m talking about one that likes it. It enjoys the terror it inflicts before the kill! Like a house cat that plays with a mouse before it kills it. Many times the mouse escapes because of the play.
With animals it’s mostly instinct, but anything with at least some intelligence decides to be aggressive, for no reason other than to feel powerful, is basically evil. Anything/anyone that forces others to obey it, on threat of violence, is (in my opinion) evil. It’s a grey area I agree, but it is pretty basic.
>.> There’s space to argue about the monsters designed/developed to only kill good things, like the monsters that feed on the innocent and corrupt people to survive.
Or monsters whose presence in the world only causes destruction and pain. “The plaguespreading dino beast of planet Thralx” isn’t technically evil… but it’s only going to spread plague and death if it’s away from Thralx.
It’s sometimes complex, because the character in Ultimate X-Men whose mutant power was dissolving flesh within a certain radius of him wasn’t evil, but his power was destructive and impossible to deal with in any way beyond either isolating him to survive on a vegan diet with no one allowed near him, or killing him.
But it’s also rather simple: The monsters that come into the dungeon are uniquely and consistently lethal, destructive, and worse by the objective standards of good vs evil: Thus, evil.
In LitRPG you can eat/fight/harvest monsters because they are not sapient and do not choose to be something.
You do that to a sapient and they call you a Necro or some such.
You assume those monster are not as intelligent as humans.
Depends. Some “monsters” have animal like behaviors. Others are just a curse given form.
Owlbears in D&D for example are not animals. Just abominations with an insatiable hunger that destroy an ecosystem and jump to the next one to do the same. They are kill on sight for anyone capable and run like the wind for the rest, druids included. (Yeah, I don’t like the current trends with them).
The “dangerous predators” that you talk about are neutral usually. They kill to survive and defend their territory.
The evil variety are capable of playing with their food in all the cruel ways.
I’m surprised this question so easily stumped Dabbler since she’s all about moral neutrality.
A dungeon not run by a fully sentient AND autonomous evil tyrant, would not have the rules of good or evil even apply. Trials and survival are not concepts of good and evil, they just are what they are.
With a dungeon, you are exchanging the risk of your survival, with items that would aid in you or others survival. Its equivalent exchange. There is no such thing as a good dungeon because a trail by fire is by nature not safe. You risk nothing, so you get nothing.
There are some good stories on Royal Road that explore the “good dungeon” concept.
Nice to hear that Dave is a fellow Mass Effect fan. I don’t know about the Wrex of you but I would be a Liar-a is I said Mass Effect wasn’t one of my favourite SF stories. Take it eezo now Pander.
Do not sully one of my five favorite game series with puns! Andromeda already did enough damage to it.
Sending a ninja hit squad with Alliance Marine Corps as backup, en route.
Your ninjas can’t geth me, I’ll activate the heatsinks and go stealth.
Wouldn’t good curses be blessings?
I’ve seen lots of examples of bad healing spells. Especially when that healing is flesh magic based.
And neutral genocide sounds like what happens when non-indigenous species get added to a biome that can’t defend against them.
A synonym of curse is malediction
malediction is from the french malédiction the first syllabe is mal..
mal is the french word for evil
Do you see the glass as half full, or half empty?
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
If it rains lemons make lemonade.
It all depends on how you look at the world. I’ve read lots of stories where a curse turned out to be a blessing in disguise, and vice versa.
Ethymologicaly a malédiction is a magical evil speech in french :
mal the french word for evil , diction is the french word for elocution
According to the Cambridge Dictionary ..
malediction: words that are intended to bring bad luck to someone or that express the hope that someone will have bad luck
He left, muttering maledictions against them.
Half full or half empty is the wrong question… What’s in it? Half full or half empty glass of gasoline is still waaaaay too much. :P
Or not enough, if you’re trying to get from Dallas to Edmonton. That would take a lot more gasoline than half even a very large glass. Using the most parsimonous moped you would still need more than 18 gallons, a decent economy car would still need almost 66 gallons, and a muscle car that got good mileage for the type would need more than 160 gallons.
So it’s not so much what’s in the glass as what it’s for. And what you can do with it.
There’s a Chinese story about a peasant farmer whose only horse escapes and runs away. The villagers are all sympathetic: “oh that’s awful” etc, but the farmer just says “we’ll see”, leaving them puzzled. The next day the horse comes back with three more wild horses, and the villagers are all amazed: “wowee”, “awesome”, “you’re rich now!”, etc, but again the farmer just says “we’ll see”. The next week the farmer’s son is thrown from one of those horses and breaks his leg, etc., etc., etc..
“Monsters” don’t have to be Evil, Kat. They just have to object to you existing in their territory. plus, harvesting FROM monsters may be part and parcel of what Dabbler had in mind.
“Monster” is a broad term that has little to do with their acts, it’s just they are big and scary and defend their territory and what things they want to keep. A true “monster” goes out to destroy and kill for “fun.”
BUT!
If someone broke into your home and say, killed your child and robbed your home, you’d be pretty pissed off and go looking for them. Suddenly a large group of people start attacking you in your hunt for the guilty, you’d fight back too! Nothing is black and white.
“If someone broke into your home and say, killed your child and robbed your home, you’d be pretty pissed off and go looking for them. Suddenly a large group of people start attacking you in your hunt for the guilty, you’d fight back too! Nothing is black and white.”
Reminds me of the black dragon and the mother of the black dragon from Order of the Stick. :)
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0628.html
The subplot with V’s genocide is the darkest twist I can remember in that comic, Rich does a fantastic job of contrasting good and evil on both sides of the fight.
Ha! If anyone caught that, I figured it’d be you! I don’t remember when I read that, but it does put things in perspective, doesn’t it? It’s been done to death in TV and movies as well, in a more “human” way but it still applies.
Yeah, but Kat’s point is: do they all have to be evil dungeons?
and that is why its so incredibly valuable to have people on your requirements engineering meeting that are not familiar with how things work
they ask those innocuous “stupid” questions that make the rest of the team go “oh yeah… why DO we do that?”
theres just so much you accept as facts when you are deeply immersed and experienced in a field… because at some point you learned from experience what works and what doesnt… and you rarely stop to re-examine that without being prompted on it… so when someone does force you to re-examine your held beliefs… you either can easily answer them and clear up the question…or you realize that there is something you knew that may not be true
Thinking outside the box is what less “informed” people are good at, it’s ego more than anything when “experts” try to ignore good input. People get so set in their ways they think no one else can come up with good ideas. A “dumb” person will ask questions or make statements that can spark an idea none of the rest could do.
Institutional isolation and institutional inertia. You wouldn’t understand , it’s an “us” thing, and this is the way it has always been done. You’ve never seen such pissing and moaning as a hobbyist who is confronted with a new way of doing things, unless its one of the cool kids. Then everyone wants to try it.
The greatest insult to any expert in any field is: “Why?” The rest of us are to respect them and accept what they say without question. Sorry, I’ve been there, engineers hate when someone like me, a mechanic that works on the machines, can tell them where and why the design is bad. Automotive engineers are the worse about that, they design things they “think” people want, but don’t care if a mech has to tear out the entire dashboard to replace a small relay. Which, of course has a high failure rate…
I’m reminded of the car with a battery behind the headlight assembly, which required taking the wheel AND the headlight out to replace the battery.
Interesting, I am an engineer (environmental/geotechnical), and I want people to point out problems with my designs.
I think in many fields and especially in government there is a lot of changing things up to look busy and justify one continued employment rather then making changes that will improve the product but which are expensive /difficult to do or even just admitting,”this is as good as it gets”.
I would say there are good curses.
There’s Curses that are also Blessings, depending on who gets them.
Like “May the gods bless you and deliver unto you everything you deserve!”
If you’re a good person that’s a blessing, yet if you’re a bad person…
‘Curse’ – a solemn utterance intended to invoke a supernatural power to inflict harm or punishment on someone or something. From Oxford Languages.
It is a very old word meant to convey an intent to cause harm. Not much good about that.
That said? There HAVE been beneficial curses in mythology. There have also been those who have put curses to good use in various cultures’ legends as well. King Arthur’s Round Table had a werewolf or something similar in its ranks, to name just one.
That said? 99% of the time, such is for evil. Hence why the word became another term for expletives or using expletives.
I have a character I play in Shadowrun who is cursed with immortality, and can’t stay dead. Also does not have eternal youth or perfect healing, so where he hasn’t had plastic surgery or skin replacements he has tons of scars for minor and major injuries, all his limbs have been relaced or enhanced to repair damage and the one hand that’s still OE is all arthritic and is basically a club at this point, because he can’t use the fingers to do anything useful. All the parts he was born with hurt, what doesn’t hurt has been replaced, and he has outlived all the people he loved from before the event that made the Shadowrun world the Hell on Earth it is. Basically all he has left is his heavily fortified home that has as few electronics as possible to prevent his house from hacking. Mechanical locks and deadbolts that just slide and latch, that kind of thing…
That’s where my “manna in this galaxy is pre-imprinted with the favorite RPG of the forerunners who first discovered how to manufacture it in mass quantities” theory comes in. You could have a “good dungeon”, but you’d have to work for it. Bad dungeon is just a default if you aren’t careful.
That’s the look of a programmer/engineer/scientist who’s suddenly heard something completely novel, and is now realizing it’s something they ‘could’ do.
Dabbler getting stumped by someone other than Sydney, it’s a Red-Letter Day!
I dont think Sidney would have thought of that. While she is Genre-Savvy, “Dungeons have monsters” is the GENRE.
Perhaps the better question would be: Could the same effect be produced some other way (that is not a dungeon).
I mean, it’s a dungeon, not a unicorn farm or divine garden or infinity pool or whatever. Fine, it’s evil. But can you get the same results without a dungeon (which is evil), using something else (not evil) instead? If not, is it just impossible (then why?) or just not economically feasible (and why?)?
Maybe you need an evil dungeon because a good method to get what you want would require you to pay fair prices or wages and that’s just so much more expensive than killing monsters, right?
Because they would then be called Fungeons not Dungeons.
Fudgeons. You gotta eat the monsters.
That’s the premise of the manga “Delicious in Dungeon”
And by manga I mean future anime.
Ok so have to comment on the small print
Good curses – May you have an interesting life (old Irish curse)
Bad healing spells – Remove any viruses dead or living from your body leaving your resistance to future ones, more susceptible.
NuetraL Genocide – I thinking a Star Trek Genisis device unleashed on a planet that they weren’t aware there were sentient life forms on.
Bad healing spells cause cancer.
I guess/think it doesnt tend to happen because of the ancient idiom: “Power corrupts”. Cause on a base level what the dungeons generate is magic power and that attracts those looking for it.
It is amazing what a fresh perspective can bring to the table.
I feel like Dabbler is the kind of genius who is gonna be kicking herself for falling into the preconception trap of “that’s how it always is” feel extra motivated to crack this egg.
Maybe dungeons are conflict-aligned, rather than good or evil, and/or producing something that can fight/be fought is essential to them.
Maybe releasing some sort of tension or getting some important metaphysical resource (mana imbalance? We know vehemic energy is a thing).
Yes, maybe they run on the same energy as that ex-villain who is now in Bob’s Demon Army working for Deus. Which then raises the spectre of a dungeon powered by the same energy that *Dabbler* uses. A literal Sex Dungeon
If dungeons are magical the monsters would be their immune/digestive system.
good demons are called angels. if I’ve learned anything from Babylon 5 its be more suspicious of the angels. they often hide their goals, so the guards won’t shoot them. besides if this is what they look like…
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xMRYFVMk0Bg
tell me how are you going to sneak up on them?
You don’t sneak up on angels, you sing them to sleep, like it was done to Argus by Hermes.
And i halfway expected a “North of the Border” angel sculpture instead of a cosplay one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tq5Glf-H4s
I think there has to be at least one trope that blessings and curses are the same thing. It depends how you look at it.
A fairy gives someone a blessing. But it has a very different opinion about what is a “blessing” than the receiver. There are a couple of stories like that.
Blessing turns out to be a curse and vice versa. One of the oldest themes in legends and fairy tales.
Ok that’s actually a very good question. Why DOES it have to be a dungeon and not a penthouse or something?
Why not build a habitat where “Celestial Alien Species XYZ” absolutely loves to live in, and charge rent in the form of those ingredients? Maybe there’s a species that’s poor and underappreciated because there’s better products in the multiverse than what they can offer, but not on earth, so they’d be more than happy to cooperate?
But then we get into the whole discussion about earth not being allowed to get alien tech (if we broaden the definition of ‘tech’ to include alchemic ingredients), because you can’t just invite aliens to your planet in order to gain their knowledge and stuff, right?
But how would that be different from taking stuff from dungeon monsters? Because if the only difference is that dungeon monsters spawn in a dungeon built on earth, then I call loophole. Not that there’s anything wrong with loopholes story-wise, because politics with loopholes are completely believable, I’m just saying spawning monsters on earth to get alien tech without it technically being alien tech would be a loophole.
Or does this restriction differ between getting ingredients and getting the recipes required to do something with them? Because I kinda doubt this law would allow aliens to just plant high-value ingredients randomly on backwards planets for whatever reason.
Also as a side note: I would definitely love to see an angel make an appearance in the Grrlverse, if only to see how Dave would depict them, especially how they handle sex jokes, and how prude they are compared to Maxima.
Presumably it’s a cosmic-balance thing. If you want to gain treasure, you have to overcome trials.
So you could make a Good Dungeon, but it would only produce cursed items…
OtOH, I’ve read a lot of Dungeon Core novels where the Dungeon is the protagonist and they literally get XP in proportion to the amount of effort/adrenaline/suffering they squeeze out of the dungeon-delving party.
So a Dungeon that doesn’t do that simply doesn’t grow.
Of course, there were also a lot of Dungeon Cores that cheated the System. “So I get power from intense emotions? Then I will found a city right on top of my dungeon and feed on the relationship drama of ten thousand people!!!”
I agree with Elaborate. It would be about the effort that went into the dungeon more than good or evil. Dungeon core stories are often as not about a dungeon that takes a little bit different path than the standard one of eating everybody and then in the end gets huge rewards because of it. A good dungeon is definitely a possibility but then you’re talking about having to pay for the rewards some other way. Maybe a dungeon that’s less dangerous but still a standard combat dungeon but gets more mana out of repeat customers. Or possibly a dungeon run on scientific or magical research, etc. Heck, the work that Dave puts in to make this comic could even power up something in a dungeon core world. Creativity, hard work and increasing skills all go into artwork whether it’s writing, drawing or making videogames. You could make a pretty interesting story world out of an artist dungeon come to think of it. There must be authors that have gone down that road.
>>“So I get power from intense emotions? Then I will found a city right on top of my dungeon and feed on the relationship drama of ten thousand people!!!”
Huh.
*starts taking notes*
You’re way too nice.
Build a hospital complex, a prison, a burial ground, a gym and an infantery training school.
Sweatshops and torture rooms work too, but have ethical limitations.
A city tries to minimize suffering.
Don’t let that happen.
Philosophy aside, I would probably say entropy is at fault. It sounds like in essence you are just causing an area to be flooded with (magic) energy, and throwing uncontrolled energy into a system is only going to cause a breakdown in the order of the system. Even if a weird sage druid guy (or a Flumph) were to emerge, it would be more than balanced out by other things chaotically entering the system and acting in opposition.
If you want an orderly (and friendly) outcome you would need to put a lot more effort and nuance into the project – the equivalent of building some sort of magic reactor instead of just smashing uranium rods against each other. But it is likely to be a much more longer term and costly enterprise, and probably carry the risk of an accident resulting in a dungeon anyway.
My thoughts exactly. Natural (or lightly-curated) dungeons are dangerous and chaotic because that’s just how the law of the jungle works. But get some mages in early to guide the growth and do some seeding and pruning, and you get an underground garden with domesticated creatures.
The opposite of an “evil dungeon” is a farm.
Puzzle dungeons. Adventure park dungeons (the longer you go on the 5-axis Scrambler, the better the reward).
Now THAT was an interesting question.
Is the answer “because the first dungeons were made by brilliant but also selfish, violent, awful people who wanted the competition out, and we’ve just been blindly copying their design because we thought that’s what dungeons are supposed to be like?”
So Farm to table healing potions?
Archon Divine Garden seems to be missing an H. And don’ worry, verbing nouns is kind of a staple in English.
(Also, colds getting longer to get out is a COVID thing too, even if nobody is talking about it anymore.)
And so many other grammar challenged things!
Small wonder the US is such a mess when so many have no idea the difference between a noun, a verb and an adjective. Not even going to START on the math messes…
OH NO!!! She broke Dabbler!!!!
Sydney has done that, what, 4 times now?
This really should not be a hard question for Dabbler.
If a dungeon basically is a self contained eco system its neither good nor bad.
It simply is. And monster is a matter of perspective.
When you intrude the native inhabitants might become monsters.
But to them your either rivals, thieves or food.
Except it’s not self-contained. As Maxima was warned before, an untended dungeon *will* breach.
Sounds like a having a dungeon is like cultivating an invasive species. It’s all good until a natural disaster comes along and releases all the snakes…uh, I mean monsters.
Kudzu- I hear that’s the only word you need to say in certain states for invasive species warnings to be taken seriously. (sometimes Asian varieties of bamboo, but that’s more useful)
Sounds like dungeons are creating more life, weirdness, and power than sentience, and if that was “fixed” then you’d get a newly created race trying for equal rights every few months causing a mess. And every so often they’d fight one another or humanity because large enough populations of sentients tend to eventually do that and it’s DEFINITELY a problem if these have random magic talents and powers but humanity generally does not……
……MUCH better to stick with a random monster of the week with a few reccuring themes and a side order of reality restructuring turning things weird, sorta like the red pool?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvLUT4IvtU4&t=624s
At least they can avoid dorky names like arcDark by planning ahead.
Unless the universe’s greatest lie is that monsters are inherently evil. But I wouldn’t count on sudden fair treatment to result in good behavior.
Imagine you and your kind have been oppressed for eons, with dungeon delvers slaughtering you and taking what ever they want… If a group of them suddenly extended their hand in friendship, would you readily and unhesitatingly accept it? Would you sympathize with others of your kind taking the opportunity to get vengeance?
They’re making a new dungeon, so unless the dungeon creatures have some hive mind memory, they don’t share this traums
I think the answer is that dungeons are inherently evil because of what they are. The denizens aren’t necessarily evil, but from their perspective, you made that dungeon for selfish purposes, they’re in it because it’s there, you’re effectively keeping them captive for your own selfish purposes.
Dungeons are inherently evil because they’re essentially a place of slavery.
Maxima wanting to create a dungeon is effectively wanting to hold sapient creatures against their will for her own selfish purposes, at least selfish to the perspective of the denizens of the dungeon… I mean, think about an Elder Dragon might take to the knowledge that they exist in the place they exist only because some golden woman with purple hair needs Elder Dragon’s own eggs that it needs to have a family, and for healing potions to further her own militaristic goals.
Dabbler doesn’t know the answer to the question because she hasn’t internalized human morality, and why should she? Human morality is prudish and that alone goes against every fiber of her being. For the most part she agrees: no killing innocents, no stealing, etc… But as a slave herself, at least in title, she doesn’t really think of slavery in the same way as many other races.
Magic is often bending the universe to your will, and anyone who wants to build a dungeon is necessarily blinded to the selfishness of magic use. It’s also easier for them to justify when they think of the denizens of the dungeon as strictly evil and thus fair game. But as we know that in this universe demons aren’t inherently evil, it stands to reason that neither are monsters. And so when you look at how humans have historically treated “slave races” as monsters.
They made up all kinds of nonsense to keep black people as slaves, and after being forced to release their slaves, they made up all sorts of nonsense about black people being inherently evil, “just look at the cross section of prison populations” when in reality society was structured in a way that forced the vast majority into crime.
In that same manner, a dungeon forces its denizens into lashing out at the dungeon’s delvers. The delvers are only there to take what belongs to the denizens of the dungeon. So even non-evil dungeon monsters will have an incentive to behave in a manner that the delvers might consider evil. It’s all just a matter of perspective.
I would propose a small scale dungeon run with mutual respect, where the denizens get fair compensation in exchange for the necessary ingredients.
Fair compensation, and no taxation without representation. There’s a reason the entirety of the new world decided to defect from their imperial conquerors, even those from the invading culture. At some point the people doing all the work get tired of exporting the fruits of their labor unless they’re getting something fair in return.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about the creatures a dungeon produces.
“So why aren’t there any good dungeons?”
“Because everything has to eat something and dungeons eat heroes”
Maybe magic is an ecosystem influenced by a variety of factors. Areas of high concentration of magic would attract small astral critters that feed upon magic kind of like an oxygen-rich environment in the ocean. Those little astral critters attract larger astral predators who travel to where the prey is. Predators don’t tend to be NICE to their prey.
Magic is impressionable. Physical creatures that imitate the forms of the astral predators are already predisposed to emerge because of their presence. Now throw in what tends to happen in dungeons: ambitious people plundering them (more predation) for resources.
Magic is repetitive, with precedent leaving behind impressions that make it easier for similar phenomenon to manifest again (spells, different styles of magic, planet-specific magic such as the lycanthropy from an earlier comic featuring Dabbler). Maybe early mages who found these raw magical hotbeds tended to monopolize them as their seats of power, which primes them even further towards ruthless behavior as they ward off assassins from their competitors.
All of this together primes dungeons to become hotbeds of dangerous intelligent predators made from a combination of impressions from intelligent astral predators and the types of mortals who frequent them.
Personally I think the answer is in what everyone wants to do. Seed an area then farm the results. But, they are not Cultivating the seed. Just setting it in place and allowing it to grow wild like kudzu. Probably if you guided it you could get the vegetation you wish to have.
“Verbing weirds language” -Calvin
The ‘Blue Core’ books go into that a little. Blue is a dungeon core that goes into radically different direction than any other dungeon known. Even a several millennia old dragoness has to wonder if the nature of dungeons as it is known is actually the truth or if there is much more to dungeons than anyone knows.
Yeah i tried that one. I gave up upon it in disgust when part of the main cast nuked a civilian harbor town.
Then basically brushed it off with a “might makes right”
I only read the free beginnings to tell the truth.
While amusing, I have better things on my list to read.
Remember Zip, “evil” spelled backwards is “live”. And we all want to do that.—Mok Swagger, Rock and Rule
I want an alternate universe mass effect 2 & 3 where they didn’t take the head writer away to work on SWTOR. *sigh*
Also bad healing spells are a thing I’ve seen in fiction, although the darkest example I’ve seen of that kind of thing is the weaponized hippiemancy from Erfworld’s backstory. *sigh*
Annual “colds” or whatever you want to call them suck. According to the Star Trek universe we’ll still be suffering from this malady hundreds of years into the future. Feel better and get well quickly.
Hmm, interesting take on dungeons, brilliant. Although, the “good” equivalent of a dungeon should probably have a different name…a “Xanadu” perhaps.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
I suspect Dabbler knows full well that there are dungeons that she would consider good. And some that are very good, IYKWIMAITYD, and she knows this by personal experience. The only thing that surprises me is that she has enough of a filter to not boast about it.
It’s a a form Socratic maieutics or Socratic questioning, in this case the question is more suited to deeply probe recipient thinking, to help recipient begin to distinguish what they know or understand from what they do not know or understand…
The second use of Socratic questioning is to incite foster recipient’s’ abilities to ask Socratic questions, using tools of Socratic dialogue , differentiating between systematic and fragmented thinking, while forcing individuals to understand the root of their knowledge and ideas…
It’s a tool invented in Fifth century AD…
BC for Socrates not AD
Maybe it is like the Dark Side of the force?
The very act of forcing magic into a specific shape with a dungeon core corrupts it, and only gives negative results?
If you want to have a “good dungeon”, you have to learn to “live with the flow”.
So some sort of “Oasis of Goodwill” or the “Wellspring of Beneficial Friendship” with a dragon manicure booth.
That last one to attract dragons, to have their sharp parts serviced (can we get Mo-Laar the Super Dentist too?) so those dragons look better, have a pleasant time with humans and supers and therefore also setting up the dragons to defend the whole thing, because they actually benefit from the interaction?
The Who’s Who says Katrina is a newly wered hare. But since ‘werehare’ is ‘man-rabbit,’ wouldn’t she be a newly hared were?
only if she shaved first.
I want to commit horrible acts of violence so badly right now….