dragonheartednovels

[D'sP] Commanding Limits - Chapter 52

Doyle laughs at her suggestion, ‘I guess having that leader on the first floor is panning out! Though I assume the monsters being commanded by someone has to be close enough to get orders. Otherwise I could just say that a single kobold hid away in a cubby somewhere was the leader so the rest of the monsters have a perma boost.’

Ally shrugs, ‘There should be some sort of limit to it and not just the monsters being ordered around. Otherwise you could just give that hidden kobold a ...

[D'sP] Eternal Hivemind - Chapter 51

They both stare at his paths for a moment more and then Doyle asks, ‘so any opinions on this? I have 51 points to spend.’

Ally stretches out before looking back at the list. ‘Hmm, your class path is never a terrible choice. The cost skyrockets crazy quick of course, but the bonuses come often and fit what your core competency is. If anything ten or so points into it so you can start on it wouldn’t be out of place. At this point you likely aren’t going almost 100 points lying a...

[NR] Explaining Sub-Skills - Chapter 177

Courtney nods at Jason’s explanation but then remembers something else he had said. “Your farming skill advanced?”

Jason pauses at the sudden change in topic. “Uh, well, I did get an alert about it. Actually, let’s take a look at it.”

Jason goes to pull up the skill but Rosha stops him, “I know we get along pretty well but sharing a skill is, well, yeah.”

Jason laughs, “I trust you both enough to share my farming skill with you two. Plus with a...

[NR] And You Didn't Tell Us? - Chapter 176

Rosha smiles at the oil’s description. “That is handy! I bet we could sprinkle some around our campsite at night and it would keep the undead away. I don’t know about the rest of you but early morning has had a stray zombie wander in a time or two.”

Courtney is happy about the oil, but Rosha’s words cause her head to snap up. “Wait a second. You’ve been fighting undead while on watch? I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them. You better have an excellent reason ...

[D'sP] Second Floor Complete - Chapter 50

Doyle yawns, not tired but more out of habit. ‘Still one thing left though before the floor is ready for people. Don’t want to forget about setting up their behaviors again. Now lets see.’

‘Hmm, the first two kobolds can be hiding behind random boulders. Besides that, let them follow their instincts. For the two large rooms with shepherds have them keep the goats around until one gets too old and then send it into the next room for the axe beaks. The goats can follow their order...

[NR] The Scent of Roses in the Morning - Chapter 175

Dinner passes uneventfully for the group as Jason spends most of his time with the roses he collected. He pulls each flower apart and keeping only the petals. With that finished he turns to the group, “So can I take last watch? I want to give the petals a little time to dry some before the next step. Though you can both watch for a quarter of the night and leave the last half for me. I will probably need the time.” Neither Rosha nor Courtney have anything against this so after spreading t...

[NR] Roses Everywhere - Chapter 174

And a couple more days it was. The only real difference from previous days was their diet. Instead of dried soup blocks and meat, there were a lot of fresh vegetables and mushrooms as Lily continued to beat up on the local plant monsters. But then on the third day they saw signs of what the group had been searching for.

Jason is the first to see signs of it because of his skills with plants. The scene was common enough. A small thorny vine the others overlooked. It was a wi...

[D'sP] Second Floor Monster Placement - Chapter 49

‘Now for the last Huge room. What should I do?’ Doyle moves his view back to his new forest. ‘There aren’t that many places to carve into. Maybe the tree bark?’

Doyle thinks of a couple other things but none of them satisfy him so he goes through the whole room, piece by piece. The wood platform was a suitable place to carve something. Trees he had thought of already and didn’t want to. Dirt and clovers aren’t the most permanent of things to carve. The ceiling was already ...

[D'sP] Levels of Knowledge - Chapter 48

Ally double checks the patterns but can only shrug. ‘Just use creation with the intent of making a tree. You should be able to throw up a good oak or two with no trouble.’

Doyle sat still for a moment. ‘Okay. Not much else I can do about it at the moment anyway. Plus creation has a bit of that intent based nonsense going on anyway.’

Ready to try, he shifts his view back to the last huge room. No obvious place to begin, so he starts small. In the area at the bottom of the w...

[NR] Fox Fight - Chapter 173

More days pass for the group. Lily gaining more and more combat experience until she passes an important point. After having beat up on plants and other similar monsters, Jason sets up a fight with a fox the group comes across. While lower level than Lily, the predator and prey relationship is hard to surmount. This challenge generally left to those who have a bottleneck over the predator or enough friends.

The fight starts with the fox’s confusion. Why was this prey comi...

[NR] Not a Plant but Still a Fight - Chapter 172

Jason rolls his eyes, “Of course magic would make food taste better. Do the different power types do different things to flavor? I am sure that fire attuned stuff is spicy or some such nonsense.”

Rosha chuckles, “And what? You have personal experience with how powered food would taste? But you aren’t wrong. Mana tends to give things a lighter complex flavor. High class chefs from our world are really enamored with what it does. Qi goes in the opposite direction and ...

Patron Input for both my stories (looking for monsters)

So both my stories are coming up on a point where a monster is going to be in needed. With the recent jump in patrons now felt like a good time to start doing more patron input so here we are. You can make suggestions for either one, just put NR before a NeoRealm suggestion and D'sP before a Dungeon's Path suggestion.

Anyway, with NeoRealm it is fairly obvious (if you're reading the early access chapters, spoilers I guess if you aren't) that Lily will fight a boss and breakthrough to le...

[D'sP] What About the Hills - Chapter 47

Doyle glances over his goat farm and nods. It turned out exactly how he wanted it, if a little opulent. He has one last thing to do in the room. While he had said he would wait to spawn monsters Doyle still places down a breeding pair of goats. As with the rabbits the goats will need some time to become real enough to have kids so he wanted to get them started on that.

Doyle creates a couple of cubes in his core room and clacks them together. He only has two more rooms to design. Of cou...

[NR] Lily Wins Again - Chapter 171

A couple more days pass for the group with only a spattering of undead to disturb them. Not that it is peaceful. Every day Rosha gets better at spotting the plant monsters and this just reveals higher and higher leveled threats. None above level 49 yet, but if things don’t change, they feel it is only a matter of time.

On the third day, things change for the better. The hidden plant monsters for the first time go down in level despite her skill’s level increasing. She i...

[NR] Rosha's Waiting Room - Chapter 170

 Rosha yawns and stretches as she looks around her waiting room. Not too long ago it had been done up like some scifi thriller. With her family, it was assured that she would end up playing NeoRealm. So of course she rebelled by reaching for the stars. Sure some of the more classic works were a little sexist for her taste but the space opera genre sang to her soul.

Past tense though because of NeoRealm or more specifically Lily. All around her is a peaceful forest scene. A relative...

[D'sP] Goat Farm - Chapter 46

Ally turns back to the map, ‘So how do you plan to place your monsters? Oh, and what is the plan for separating the goat farm from the main dungeon area?’

Doyle highlights the two connecting tunnels from the offscreen goat farm. ‘Notice how the tunnels don’t break through to the two large rooms? One way heavy stone doors go there. I have some plans for that and will use vines on the wall to hide it for the moment, as no one seems to be searching for hidden doors yet. Not that I ...

[D'sP] Basic Layout for the Second Floor - Chapter 45

Doyle nods, ‘that is good to know. For the near future, we can easily avoid it. Plus it is cheap enough I can pick it up whenever I need to.’

Ally shrugs, ‘don’t assume it will stay cheap. It might be one of those paths that scales quickly like the class paths. Maybe the points needed double every time you take it?’

Doyle’s core shifts back and forth, ‘eh, true enough. It doesn’t matter too much at the moment, though. I am still sitting here in the middle of a void...

[NR] It was Your Plan - Chapter 169

Rosha and Jason are sitting around the dead campfire when Courtney re-enters the game. They look at her expectantly and she sighs, then explains what she had found out. Rosha in particular asks a number of pointed questions about the looks and habits for each monster.

The leaf walkers interest her. It is a plant that mimics the walking stick insect, which mimics a stick and leaves. The creatures form when a tree experiences a spike in mystical energy. To prevent negative mu...

[NR] Its a Flower, Its a Slug - Chapter 168

Courtney exits the game and appears inside her waiting room. Though if others were to see it, they would more likely call it an operations headquarters. She had spent a lot of both hers and Rosha’s father’s money on it. While you can make almost any cosmetic change to the room within some limits, the sheer size of the room alone has gone beyond those limits.

She floats in the center, having paid to remove the limits on using earth-like physics. All around her is a giant...

[D'sP] A Stats Worth - Chapter 44

Ruby thinks over the problem of the dungeons new quirk. She has already decided she is going to be hanging around the portal every moment she can. Magic skills are really hard to level up early on because of the limited mana. One more mana an hour could cut off days of time even in the short term. Then she thinks of all the others they had saved, and she sighs.

“We can’t just keep this to ourselves. That sort of thing is the very reason we could get everyone behind us in the first p...

[NR] Lily is a Smart Girl - Chapter 167

The group stands there in silence. Courtney looks back and forth between the other two until Jason speaks up. “That is interesting. Now how do we find a boss battle for Lily if we can’t see what counts as a boss? Also from the sounds of it we can’t cheat and find her a level one carrot boss for her to gnaw on.”

Courtney coughs, “Well. Yes. There is a reason that less locals make it past the second bottleneck beyond just the fact that death is slightly more permane...

[NR] How Can She Fight a Boss? - Chapter 166

Jason wakes up the next morning, half sad and half happy. Sad because he won’t see his trainer again anytime soon. Happy though as when war stomp ranked up it gained an additional effect called “Free Form”. The skill was useful, but the free form effect raised its usability to the level of his blast punch. Before he could only use it with a stomp attack.

Now Jason was able to use it just like his blast punch. Even just standing around idly, he can tear up the ground b...

[D'sP] New Worries for Ace - Chapter 43

Doyle looks at the option for a random monster again. ‘Eh, the first floor is stocked up and while I should probably use my world energy on the second floor why not? [System, I want to buy the random monster package].’

{Selecting random monster…

Axe Beak Selected}

{Axe Beak

S[11] A[9] C[10] I[1] W[4] P[6]

Skills: Blunt Trauma Resistance lv3

Description: An axe beak is a tall flightless bird with strong legs and a heavy, wedge-shaped beak. It has a nas...

[D'sP] She was Worried - Chapter 42

Doyle’s concentration is on a single point of void at the center of his core. All around him is a sea of power and he has to move it. The void is his potential to expand, while small the space within has no conceivable limit. So if it wants to expand, Doyle just has to encourage it in a more literal sense.

He pushes on that void and without changing expands outward to cover his core and pushing the sea of power outward. Now all he has to do is use that pooled potential to squeeze the ...

[NR] Don't Do That Except Maybe You Can - Chapter 165

Sadly for the ghouls, their banter has little effect on the party. Instead, they double down on their defensive and wait for the undead to attack. The ghoul at the back clicks its tongue and joins the other two in attacking.

Jason swings around to the side as it joins the skirmish. He faints an elbow blow to the head and the ghoul wants none of that, practically falling backwards to get out of the way.

Jason however continues his rotation, ducks down, and with the muc...

[NR] Visitors at Night - Chapter 164

 Tea fiasco over not much happens so Jason turns in early, wanting to get some time to cultivate outside of the game. With a warning to the others, he lies back on his sleeping bag and logs out.

Waking up in the pod is as discordant as always. “They really should do something about the design inside these things”, Jason muses. Of course, that isn’t really an option, every surface designed to facilitate the signal transfer. If they left the head out, it might be possible, but ...

[D'sP] Momentary Breakdown - Chapter 41

‘So uh, what do I do with this fancy new level?’

Ally laughs, ‘Absolutely nothing! You already got everything you are going to get with it. Your stats went up for all your per a level stuff. Nice wisdom gain by the way. What does that do for you anyway?’

Doyle pauses, ‘huh, I don’t actually know. I haven’t checked all the stats ever since I turned into a dungeon core. [Show us the description of wisdom please].’

{Wisdom: The finesse of one’s mind. Your race...

[NR] You Will Like the Tea - Chapter 163

Jason stretches and turns back to the fire. “No real tea yet but if you’re partial to traditional medicine, I can make a mean lingzhi tea.”

Rosha shakes her head, “Not my cup of tea. Plus there should be something better to use it for.”

Jason shrugs, “You could look at these two bottles as a form of unrefined potion of Qi. Actually, now that I think about it, do you use Qi? I know Courtney uses Mana and I use Energy.”

“Huh”, Rosha tilts her hea...

[NR] Jason's Harvest - Chapter 162

Authors Note: Just going to note that I plan change how characters logging off works. The short of it is that if you're logged out and something happens to disturb your character in the game it will react as if you were controlling the character except less effective. So any previous mention of what happens when you log off is now non-canon and I will need to do an edit at some point.

They gather around their campfire for the night. Courtney is sorting out the loot, mo...

[D'sP] Thats a Nifty Spell - Chapter 40

“Take those greaves and be thankful! Didn’t your tutorial guide teach you about gear? Not the random scrap we are wearing but true blue magical equipment?” Jeremy pauses and looks at Ruby, but she gestures for him to continue. He shrugs, “Guess I get to be your guide while my wife finishes with the olives.”

From behind them Susan shouts at them that, “it would be quicker if you helped!”

Jeremy ignores her, “so anyway, for an item to be magical it needs to be a mast...