"Okay, we're all gonna be countries in this world!" a blue-robed figure explained from the screen-stage as reality restabilized around explanation. "Or dungeon cores. It's a genre, so don't be fanfic of any one dungeon story you know, got it? Add RPG dynamics but we'll make it up as we go. Have people able to make up their own rules and stuff like that."
"So what?" Ciaran questioned, adopting a voluptuous brunette form in a slightly-too-little black dress already spiraling with great walls as patterns. "You'll try and bad-end me by defeating my capital city or whatever?"
"Works for me." Blue Robes the wearer of blue robes confirmed. "I confirm this as Blue Robes the blue!"
Ciaran merely pointed at the map and deposited a simple castle-like design acting as the surface of her dungeon-self body drilling into the ground. A few other players waved about hands and chattered with each other, forming nearby villages and the occasional menacing tower or flying island fortress. Many settlements blossomed, first settlers and cores popping into existence and others assembling themselves from sparks in the void like accreting planetary matter. A large continent sprung out, a large central valley ringed by mountains and beaches with the occasional spot of forest or other biome. Ciaran's city-face loomed ominously atop the foothills of one end of the central valley, with a pair of menacing eyes of red glowing fog dimly lighting the near air in contrast to the bright yellowy sun above. Blue Robes' assorted villages were marked by varying tall transparent hexagon jewels of blue, with various other players picking settlement-observing sigil eyes in every color of the rainbow and then some.
Each player spread their awareness from the central core to countless implementing bodies, many shaped like human adventurers and others like simple mechanical drones or creatures of fantasy.
"Uh...you wanna make up the rules?" Blue Robes asked Ciaran, gem-eyes flickering every which way to account for the masses of neighbors. "I'm kinda improvising because nobody else did."
Ciaran facepalmed, drilling another sub-basement into the earth and letting her silver-boxed scarlet core descend another floor on a mix of spiderlike robot legs and the power of stairs.
"No comment?" Blue Robes wondered. "No comment."
He set about examining his options. The blue sphere of his core rested gently, hovering on a color-shifting cushion above an altar in the town hall of his starting settlement. Autonomic processes extended his web of will and operated beyond it, connecting clusters of guards and letting resource-conjuring spawnpoints be managed by farmers without much effort. Thatched roofs and tile roofs on lots of brick-and-mortar buildings with reinforcement logs...pretty quiet 'some form of medieval fantasy' setup he'd gotten himself. Nothing too unfamiliar for a reality warper, albeit a bit erratic on what magical infrastructure was about to accomplish what with the sleek black-and-chrome robot things going on with those blue gems. He felt like he should make more of those. Seemed much of his efforts would be in construction and military work, then.
An expression of will and some robotic winged worker-drones emerged from his core. Each individual was like a mote of light and a few metal limbs to him that he didn't need to order more precisely, a general sense of directive for them to accomplish enough to drive them about. Buzzing builder-insects swirled out from his core like the flexing of an arm or an exhalation, and pushed open the doors to begin their flight out. They carried wires forged from the passively accumulated resources, and carried them to a designated build site. As the wires were set down, they began to unfold into the framework of a new building.
"Building a spawner already, huh?" a series of green stars spoke up on area chat, observing the proceedings from a mountainside beach around a corner. "I don't think you'll be able to classically rush Ciaran anymore."
True to the green stars' thought, a new series of stone walls burst from the earth around Ciaran's castle, rising up before spiking themselves with crenellations and watchtowers. The automatic units were morose rather than smug, tired-faced humans wielding spear-launching hwacha and crude firearms to go with the spears.
"She's got a gun!" Blue Robes exclaimed, before realizing that he too could probably build guns. "Dude, we should get better guns. Magic guns."
Various settlements began to proliferate, sketching out research tables and resource builders alongside all manner of thing-spawners. The green stars group did in fact decide to start building magic guns, which prompted Blue Robes to think of a question.
"Hey, consensus outta character for a moment." Blue Robes called for, his city-face's eyes looking in every direction and his azure-cloaked shadowy body in the theatre room waving to get the attention of assorted strategists and the indecent alike.
Ciaran's theatre-seated body tilted their head and leaned forward to watch, meriting the attention of many who were also watching Blue Robes. "What, what is it?" they said with a female facet, hair beginning to shift colors again.
"Okay, if we're all making up our own rules we should still have like, a guideline." Blue Robes said. "Howzabout we make that, uh...defined progression and resource-pathy stuff? So we have a reason to establish these tech trees to make game units stronger than each other, or whatever. Then we can get a bunch of crazy magic going and negotiate, uh, as we go. Or auto-resolve."
"Any of that's fine." Ciaran said, waving a hand and not resisting the reality of consensus washing about as several others nodded along and decided to go for an excuse to write more lore in the middle of smut. "Continue, continue."
"Alrighty then," Blue Robes commented, "good to know. Guess we'll get into transformative weapons once we really get into conflict or something."
Basic method of combat force resolution established, Blue Robes thought about adjusting the purpose of this latest building they were assembling. Could probably use a solid theme to these random starter settlements to deal with Ciaran's rocketry gimmick.
GOOD ENDS: 0/100
BAD ENDS: 0/100