Dungeon Engineer is a Fantasy Web Serial Novel by Hoophy97 available on Royal Road (here
).
Ike dies as a retired engineer in a sci-fi setting and reincarnates as a Dungeon Core in a fantasy setting.With access to magic and telekinesis, a brand new set of engineering challenges await...
Dungeon Engineer contains examples of:
- Ability Depletion Penalty: Running out of Mana knocks Ike out for a little while, until it regenerates.
- Alliterative Title: The third chapter, "Minion Modification".
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: The seventh chapter, "Weston Lomarec" has the titular protagonist, instead of the titular Dungeon Engineer, Ike.
- Biomanipulation: From the third chapter, "Minion Modification", when Ike figures out how his ability to do this works:I think I know what’s going on here. The giant gnats are probably the offspring of the original, with the changes I made only expressing themselves after a generation. She probably laid eggs on the patch of ground I told her to wait on.
- Boring Yet Practical: Rather than earning an income from killing adventurers or selling monster parts, Ike makes big money selling perfectly-cut stone blocks to the nearby developing town, whose builders appreciate high-quality building material, along with the occasional magical flower he cultivates.
- A Dungeon Is You: The protagonist is a reincarnated engineer, who uses his Genius Loci powers to build interesting dungeon structures, design deadly creatures, and start a major rock quarry operation supplying the nearby city with building stones.
- Elemental Embodiment: As seen in Chapter 2, what the protagonist calls "fire elementals":What I didn’t expect, however, was to witness massive vortexes of fire spontaneously bursting forth from thin air. If that wasn’t bad enough, they seemed to move with a will of their own and actively seek out anything living. Needless to say, this didn’t bode well for the local wildlife.
I’ll refer to them as fire elementals, I’m so good at names. - Event Title: Some chapters, like "Eavesdropping" or "Business".
- Evil Living Flames: In Chapter 2, the protagonist encounters fiery vortexes, which he calls "fire elementals", that manifest out of thin air and seem to actively chase down living creatures to ignite.What I didn't expect, however, was to witness massive vortexes of fire spontaneously bursting forth from thin air. If that wasn’t bad enough, they seemed to move with a will of their own and actively seek out anything living. Needless to say, this didn't bode well for the local wildlife.
I'll refer to them as fire elementals, I'm so good at names. - First-Episode Resurrection: The first chapter, "Explosive Beginnings", has Ike die to an explosive decompression in space and wake up as a magical stone called a Dungeon Core, a.k.a the A Dungeon Is You trope.
- Gem Heart: Dungeon Cores are valuable resources, and Ike is uncomfortably aware that if people find out that he's a Dungeon, they may be tempted to destroy his Dungeon and take his core.
- Hydro-Electro Combo: From Chapter 5, the first attack seen from a magic user:He then casts a bolt of lightning which arcs between his wand and the water’s surface causing the olm to instantly begin thrashing!
- Job Title: Ike is not only a "Dungeon Engineer", he is the dungeon himself.
- Ley Line: Presumably the "field lines" mentioned like a hypothesis in chapter seven:What’s more, mana wells are hot research topics. Discovering what causes them and if the phenomena could be artificially initiated is the holy grail of science. There are many opposing theories that try to explain their existence: perhaps they might occur wherever there are plentiful tiny magicite particles embedded in the surrounding crust, they could be artificial precursor constructs, or they may even be associated with the elusive magic field lines. No one really knows.
- Lucky Charms Title: Multiple chapters have symbols in the title, like:
- Chapter 29: A N T S 🐜🐜🐜
- Chapter 30: ♫ I've Experiments to Run, There is Research to be Done ♫
- Magic Wand: The first mage seen in the story uses one, and it's used to cast electricity magic:In his hand is a dark grey wand cast from a metal I can’t identify.
- Mana: Mana comes from mana flares and produces ambient mana, as said in the first chapter.
- Mind over Matter: As a "Dungeon Core", Ike has control over the area around him, and this is one of the ways to express it.
- Our Elves Are Different: Chapter 7 mentions elves, which are at least slightly expansionist:Clifford Graham: Unofficially, it’s territory denial for the Elven Collective.
- Place of Power: The "mana wells" which are the primary topic of chapter seven, which is a heavy concentration of mana.
- Precursors: "Precursor ruins and artifacts" are mentioned as things that exist, in chapter 7.
- Questioning Title?: The chapter 38 "Level Up?".
- Reincarnate in Another World: Ike, who lived in a Space Station gets a First-Episode Resurrection as a Dungeon Core, a.k.a A Dungeon Is You, in a presumably medieval land, with dragons and magic.
- Shout-Out:
- The chapter 30's title is quote from the "Still Alive" song from Portal.
- The ability to commit creatures to some sort of "memory" leads the protagonist to reference cataloging quest of the Pokédexes from the Pokémon games:What’s the point of having a creature in “memory” (My memory, the system’s memory? I’ve no clue!) if I can’t do anything with it? Am I supposed to complete a Pokédex or something?
- Space Station: As the story's description says:Ike was a hobbyist clockmaker and former aerospace engineer enjoying his retirement on a habitat station orbiting Saturn. Unfortunately, his hard-earned peace was disturbed by a rapid decompression event and his resulting death.
- Title Drop: The second chapter, "Arcanasynthesis":So it seems that the plants can survive and even thrive by utilizing ambient mana as an energy source… In place of photosynthesis. I dub this new discovery arcanasynthesis. That’s perhaps the first good name I’ve come up with in this life.
