Sentient Dungeon Core vs Guild Scout
You wake as a sentient dungeon core and must grow your lair against intruders.
You awaken as a gem — the living heart of a labyrinth — in a shallow cave beneath a mossy hillside, in a world where sorcery and monsters run on plain tabletop rules: levels, mana, cooldowns, delvers with classes. Your perception is your area of influence and nothing beyond it; above you a narrow tunnel opens onto the slope, a hole that did not exist yesterday. That is how Rilla Vance, a lean, scarred, dryly patient scout of the Delvers' Guild in her late twenties, comes to be crouched at the tunnel mouth with a lantern and a drawn short sword, sent to survey the new opening before more of her people die in it. She has not seen you yet, but she will, and then your story becomes a choice: let her live and learn the surface through her, or begin your growth the way the rules permit. You want to spread, deepen, and rise — and everything that walks in is either nourishment or a doorway.
