NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edgar Ironpelt" data-source="post: 9664507" data-attributes="member: 32075">I go for small, lair-like dungeons that are part of the surface ecosystem, rather than dungeons that are deep and isolated enough to form their own ecosystems. But if I did do a mega-dungeon, it would probably feature: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Perpetual motion photosynthesis, with glowing moss producing its own light to grow by and thumbing its biochemical nose at the laws of thermodynamics.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A don't-need-to-eat magic field, produced either by that magic moss or by something else. The monsters don't need to eat for calories, but instead only need to eat small quantities for certain essential nutrients. Thus they only eat very small amounts of each other, along with occasional delicacies like human, elf, dwarf, and halfling, and poop and piss very little as well. (They might have a meal once a month, or once a year, or even less often. Which is why they're hungry: They want food much much more than they actually need it.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Adventurers and other outsiders don't benefit from the don't-need-to-eat magic field unless they become warped into being dungeon inhabitants.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The monsters are thus all "primary consumers," in a way analogous to surface critters being "primary consumers" of oxygen produced by plants. But they're also nearly all "secondary consumers" or "tertary consumers" of those rare and special nutrients.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Most of the creatures will have originated in lower planes. They, or their ancestors, first appear in the bottom level of the dungeon. As time passes they become weaker and more degenerate, and are pushed up to the higher levels by the stronger competition. So the goblins and kobolds of the top ("first") level will have been pit fiends, or will have had pit fiend ancestors, long ago, but will have so degenerated that their fiendish traits are reduced to inactive, difficult to detect traces.  </li> </ul></blockquote>

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