A sentient dungeon has woken up after a thousand years with a broken Dungeon Heart and is now struggling to establish herself as a successful new dungeon.
Deem embedded her broken off piece into a golem, but her problems include not being used to being treated as person and occasionally hemorrhaging mana everywhere due to over-stressing her damaged heart.
A Forum Quest run on Questden. The chapter list can be found here
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Dungeoneer contains examples of:
- A Dungeon Is You: Deem is simultaneously the dungeon and a golem which has a piece of her Dungeon Heart embedded in it, letting her run around and administer her dungeon. Dungeons are a kind of mana reactor that generates power off gold and conflict. The wild monsters that appear in the area surrounding a dungeon are basically a form of pollution that has to be managed. Officially, a sentient dungeon is unheard of.
- Dungeon Crawling: Deem is consistently trying improve her dungeon crawl experience. The first adventurer arrived before the dungeon was in a proper state to receive visitors so their crawl consisted of fighting the dungeon's various denizens who'd been hurriedly deployed to various rooms, leading her to conclude this was a "rocks, lizards and spooky things" dungeon.
- Dungeon Maintenance: A big focus is the downtime between adventurers and what work goes on then: recruiting monsters, digging out new rooms for the dungeon and sending people out on supply runs. Maintaining morale has also been a problem as different people are comfortable with different things.
- Golem: Deem can create golems to serve as workers and has recruited a golemeter, a wizard who specializes in creating golems to help her out. Golem making is presented as being a partially philosophical pursuit attempting to create a complete living being.
- Ontological Mystery: It should be practically impossible to destroy a Dungeon Heart and Deem doesn't know or doesn't want to tell what hurt her.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: So far Deem has managed to recruit a quasidragon, a golemeter trying to create thinking golems, a boy wizard with a squid for a staff, a half ogre blacksmith a 'hammerai', a slime queen and an evil pot.
- Soul Jar: Deem is actually a magic rock that serves as the core of a dungeon. It can be removed from a dungeon but that cuts off most of Deem's abilities until it can be anchored in a new location.
