Inflation, at least as it was commonly understood, represented the rise in prices of goods and services over time. In a more technical sense, it was often related to “money printer go brrrr.” In a well managed economy, inflation was kept under control and prices and wages rose slowly. Managed poorly, high inflation could lead to major economic problems, or even go into the stratosphere of hyperinflation.


    What was interesting was that inflation was also a problem in many games, particularly massively multiplayer online games. You login to an online role-playing game, pick your race, choose a class, make your vitals big, and off you go into the virtual world. You probably started by going to some local NPCs and picking up some easy quests–kill 10 rats or deliver this letter or whatever. You completed the quest, you gave 10 rat tails to the NPC and you received bronze, silver, gold coins! But where did that money come from? It’s not real money or precious metals, and there isn’t a fixed supply–the program made the money when you completed the quest. In other words: money printer go brrrr.


    So, game developers figured out a solution to the problem of an ever expanding money supply in their games: have two currencies. The first currency was the standard currency like gold or coins you earned by doing regular activities of the game, such as completing quests. The second currency, crystals or such, was very limited, and almost impossible to get. The former could be used for most of the basic features of the game, but the latter was used for special features. The first key was you could only use crystals for these special features. Want to buy an item from the auction house?--you could use gold like any other player. Want to buy that new awesome mount in the game shop?--sorry that’s only available in crystals. The second key was that converting gold to crystals carried an abysmal exchange rate. Overpaying for crystals means the amount of gold sloshing around is reduced; the game’s economy is balanced.


    Then there was a kind of inflation in many “gamelit” stories. The writer set up the basics–classes, skills, attributes, traits–and swore that in this story, they were going to be meaningful. Really! “Cross my heart, hope to die!”  Over time, as the plot goes on, the stats kept going up and up and soon they “go brrrr” to the point of being meaningless. So the author introduced a newly discovered stat to compensate for the power creep and the cycle repeats: aura! concepts! bloodlines! embodiments!


    And now, I found myself in this very hell. First, I had mana. Simple thing (even if alien to my past life sensibilities) that was simple to use. Spend mana, get mana over time. Mana printer might someday go brrrr, but I was not even close to that stage of the story!


    But no, there it was. Essence.


    What was essence? No answer.


    How did I get essence? Again, no answer.


    Nevertheless, I had a strong idea of what it was about. After all, words held meaning, and essence was a commonly used word in fantasy stories that it seemed plausible it held similar meaning for me in the here and now.


    Which brought me back full circle to my keys to survivability.


    I had to build an effective defense. And this dungeon, I believed, would not only serve to defend me but also probably was the means to gain this essence. Build a dungeon, kill the delvers, profit.


    I knew I wanted to use the existing facility and have the central deep shaft play an important role, but for now I put my focus on the first room of my dungeon, which also was probably going to be the most difficult one to make. I decided to start my dungeon with the existing top-most room with the collapsed stairs and use it largely as-is in terms of its general size and shape.


    My plan here was to increase the effectiveness of my skeleton fighter by turning one into a trap. I turned my attention to one of the corners near the open doorway that led to the central staircase and pushed to create a skeleton fighter. However, as I did so, I envisioned the skeleton sitting on the floor with its back at the corner and its legs splayed out. I also wanted one of its arms to be on its chest, held about where its sternum was.


    My mana felt like it started to move, as if to pay for the fighter, but it all fizzled out and nothing happened. A couple more tries with the same results indicated the system did not agree with my idea. Skeleton fighters, I guess, came “as-is.”


    But!--there was more than one way to skin this cat.


    As a test, I used Landscape to create a simple bone, which actually worked quite easily. I reabsorbed the test and then put an actual Skeleton Fighter in the exact spot where my core had started. The Skeleton Fighter looked exactly the same as the very first one I had made, which I now expected. Anyways, I used the Skeleton Fighter as a frame of reference as I meticulously created the sitting skeleton bone-by-bone. I had to firm up the bones with connecting bone or dirt as this skeleton was not put together by animating magic, but after several hours of work, I had a respectable replica.


    I finished the set piece by making a large iron ring, clenched by the skeleton’s hand that was at its chest, and four smaller rings strung onto the large loop. On three of those rings, I created three skeleton keys–complete with skeleton shaped head–and each the same except for slightly different teeth.


    Originally, my idea was that when a person came and saw the key ring, they would try to grab it out of the skeleton’s hand, at which point the Skeleton Fighter would jump up and attack the person. Since using a skeleton fighter this way was not an option, I needed to change the trap to be more simplistic–in this case, a dart trap.


    Trap Creation was a skill I had received purely as a byproduct of other activities, meaning I had never actively tried to use it. Now, I leaned into the skill and began working on creating the trap. The first thing I noticed was that it was surprisingly intuitive. Just as the system filled in most of the particularly when I created my skeleton fighter, here the system largely worked to put into place the mechanics of the trap without me having to get into exacting mechanics. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    What really made the whole thing a snap was when I forced the system to show me what I was doing by means of showing each part as an overlay before installation. First, I placed a trigger mechanism on the hand with imprinted instructions that if the hand was forced open or moved, the trap would trigger. Then, I willed a dart thrower into existing inside the mouth of the skull, linked to the trigger. This was pure plug-and-play and it was great. I made the thrower fit three darts that would fire at the same time in a spread pattern.[1] Finally, I made another trigger on the skull’s jaw bone to drop down and open so the darts could fire into the room.


    In the case of the dart thrower, three small tubes were instantly mounted against the wall and preloaded with darts.


    I blocked off the old entrance to the central stairway and created a new one on a different side. I then absorbed stone and made a new twisting passage going from the skeleton key room to the next room down the complex, which sat at the opposite side and was about a floor lower. I detailed the passageway using Landscape, making one section where the ceiling had partially collapsed and a second section where there was a pile of rock debris partially blocking the way. The effect was that in some places, a person would have to clamber over difficult terrain and in others they would have to crouch uncomfortably low to squeeze through.


    Again, the second room I pretty much left it as it was, but I did create some stone shelving set into two of the walls. On these shelves, I created various amphora and jars all made of iron. I even scattered a few extra containers around on the floor to make the room look like it was an abandoned store room. I picked one of the amphora on the shelves and created another iron skeleton key inside.


    Now, it was time to put in the danger element. For this room, I wanted to put in some poisonous spiders, but since they did not match my monster type, I would have to use my last fauna spot. I was pretty sure spiders lived in caves, and there must be some sort of poisonous cave spider, so I focused on the slot and demanded it to be filled. I had to push against the system for a few seconds, but it quickly relented. I checked The Monstruary and saw I now had “Wandering Spider (Poison)” listed.


    I put a Wandering Spider into the amphora with the key. It was brown colored and fairly large, about the size of an adult human’s hand. I tried to give it some orders to attack anyone reaching for the key, but I didn’t think the spider took direct orders (at least with my current abilities).


    I wanted to put something else into the amphora to better hide the key and the spider, and thought that clumps of moss could do the trick. I wanted the inside to be as dark as possible, which wouldn’t work with shining moss, so I tried creating moss that gave off black light. While normally this was impossible, but the power of magic meant I actually succeeded. The effect was exactly what I wanted: the insides of the amphora was unusually dark, hiding both the key and spider. A delver would have to stick their hand and rummage around inside or dump the contents out, either way they were in for a surprise. I liked the results so much, I went and filled the other amphora with a black moss and even put spiders in two more of them. The second room was done.


    The second room’s exit led to a short hallway then the central staircase with a window to the shaft. I walled-off the staircase and enlarged the window to match the hallway. I made a matching exit on the other side of the shaft. In between, I constructed a walkway made of wood that had widely spaced planks so it looked really rather dangerous to cross (although, as far I could tell, it was more than stable enough for someone to cross on).


    At the top of the central shaft, I remodeled the well plug significantly and set up the second part of the bridge trap. I hollowed out the plug and changed the bottom from solid stone to an iron grate. I made a bunch of large stones to sit in a pile on top of the grate, and then used Trap Creation to designate the iron grate to open from the middle and the two sections to swing down so the rocks would fall towards the bridge, which would then cause the bridge to collapse and plummet bridge, rocks, and anyone caught on the bridge down.


    But that wasn’t enough.  At the bottom of the cone-shaped base of the shaft, I made a mess of iron spikes, such that anyone falling would have a nasty end. And just as a bonus, I covered the bottom room in black moss as well as the walls and trap grate at the top of the shaft; thus, someone crossing the bridge would only see darkness when looking up or down.


    The trickiest part was how to set the trap to spring. Obviously I wanted the rocks to fall onto the bridge when someone was near the middle of the bridge. My initial thought was to make a sort of pressure plate two thirds of the way across, but then I remember how people could easily avoid the trigger by simply walking over it. So I created a trigger mechanism with two conditions: if someone stepped on the board or if there were four “feet” on the bridge at the same time. It wasn’t perfect, but it seemed relatively reasonable. I guess if someone figured out how to bypass both of those conditions, they probably deserved the free pass.


    At this point I still had a little less than two-thirds of my mana. Considering the cost for each skeleton fighter, I think I would limit myself to just one more room.


    I sealed all the other entrances and windows of the central stairway, except for the very bottom one that went towards the room I woke up in.


    The first thing I did was make a new door to the room. However, instead of using Landscape, I used Trap Creation.[2] The door was actually a double door that opened in the middle and the two doors swung into the room. In addition, the doors were locked by Trap Creation and could only be opened if the right key was put into the keyhole. Of course, the correct key was the key hidden inside the amphora with the spider.


    For the room, I only made two simple modifications. On the same wall that had the new door, I absorbed some stone on each side of the door and created two small alcoves, just large enough for a person to stand in. I then put a Skeleton Fighter in each of the alcoves. This was an old trick from one of the original classic first-person shooter games: Wolfenstein 3D. When a delver opened the door, the two skeletons would not be visible, hidden within the alcoves and further obfuscated by the doors. The delver would be looking forward when entering the room, and would not see the skeletons attack from beyond their peripheral vision.


    To keep eyes forward, the skeleton "model" I had put in the room before should serve as a stark warning of imminent danger that had to be addressed. To further encourage delvers to be greedy, I then made a large iron box that sat right over the stairs, hiding them from view, but also enticing people with the potential for rewards.


    Making the three skeleton fighters had taken most of my remaining mana, but I felt the beginner dungeon was largely complete. My buffed mana generation really helped and after one day, I had enough mana to place a second skeleton next to the iron box, completing the room.


    I think I had just enough mana for the last piece of the dungeon. In the very last room, the portal room, I built a stone plinth in the center that rose to about chest height. On the top, I worked to create a facsimile of my own core, copying to as close a detail as I could. Hopefully, anyone who made it the “core room” would take or destroy the fake one instead of me!


    As for my true core? I created a crawl space in one of the corners of the walls and ceilings in the funnel room, the entrance hidden by a bunch of moss, and stashed my core there.