Room - A Whole River Of It
With the magic enveloping the pods no longer twinkling in her nostrils, Doddot realizes that the air meeting her isn't spicy.
It's sweet.
She picks her way through the narrow cave toward a butterscotch glow. Here and there, she uses her pickaxe to widen the cavern enough to pass comfortably - not enough to build out, not yet at least, but enough to explore. There, however, her pickaxe sinks in. It's only by another bout of luck that she avoids being sprayed by molten molasses.
A sugar vein.
Remnants of a dead world, various confectionary liquids course through the earth seemingly at random. Honey, caramel, maple syrup, many such phenomenon have been catalogued. Molasses isn't common, but it's also not rare.
The pressurized molasses hits the far wall, quickly coagulating into a puddle. It does not stop spewing forward. As these things do, the puddle becomes a stream becomes a river. Once it hits the volcanic shaft, the thick liquid begins to drain out, but is too thick to do so before the shaft is saturated. The river thusly goes on, disappearing into the blackness. Meanwhile, where the river is draining, a viscous maelstrom forms, churning over itself with intimidating slowness.
Doddot eyes the candied remains of some long-dead cave dweller. Indistinguishable thanks to their sugary death mask, Doddot still spares them a grimace of sympathy.
Hell of a way to go, caught in an eruption of slow, boiling sugar.
Doddot goes the other way.
Summary
- 7♣️ - Natural Formation - A River of Magma
The Hold
Buildings
- Library - 2/5 Mage Occupancy, Good Magic: Nurse's Sigil (when Units move through this square, they recover all of their STR).
- Kitchen - +50% STR to units housed in adjacent squares (current: Library).
- Forge - 0/1 Cannon Occupancy, can build traps.
Formations
- Natural Magic - Good Magic: Pawtral (May pay 5 Trade Goods to roll 1d4. Rolling a 4 gains a friendly Sabretooth, 20 STR + 2 movement, spawns from Kennel during combat. Also, lovable cats.)
- Volcanic Shaft - Dormant. For now. Intersects river of magma. Rule of cool: erupts on both floors.
- River of Magma - Liquid. Doesn't do anything. Intersects volcanic shaft. Rule of cool: erupts on both floors.
Resources
- Resources - 1/50
- Trade Goods - 5/50
- Soldiers - 5/X - 5 STR
- Mages - 2/5 - 4 (+2) STR
- Cannons - 0/1 - 30 STR, 1/fight
World Notes
- Doddot Dimorc - The ostensible protagonist mining the caves beneath her family hold. A bit dim herself.
- Hamgard - The chef! He's never been a chef before, but he's figuring it out quickly.
- Sandwich - Doddot's gross white cat, hatchling of the Pawtral magical room. He accompanies Doddot on her adventures.
Takeaways
- Is death by magma bad? Yes. Is death by molten sugar more scary to me? Also yes.
- Because magma's molten rock below the surface and lava is what you call it once it breaches, I wasn't sure what to call it in a cave with ready surface access. Google suggests it's still magma. I like that magma becomes lava when it sees the sky.
- Not gonna lie, this was a close one. What's supposed to happen with this formation is that you mine into an unexpected outflow and it floods all of the squares in one direction to the end of the closer page. If I had been going in the opposite direction, this would have damaged my Pawtral room, made it impossible to use most of the area under my hold until I could clean it up, and certainly killed Doddot. It could have slashed through up to half the map and made venturing downward a hell of a lot harder - liquids flow down if they can.
