Dungeon Costs (Patreon)

I’ve been neglecting the extra content tier, so why not put in some of my notes about Dungeon costs and budget, before the scribbled notes are lost somewhere.

Lets start with material costs. These are the mana costs for producing material out of nowhere.

Coins: 

One coin weighs about 10 grams, costs are the same if just producing unshaped material

Copper: 1 mana makes 100 coins

Silver: 1 mana makes 10 coins

Gold: 1 mana makes 1 coin

Base Metals: One mana makes 1kg

Magical Metals: One mana makes 1 gram

Stone: One mana makes 10kg

Dirt/Organics: One mana makes 100kg

Water: One mana makes 1 tonne.

Monsters

Monsters have five stats, other than Threat. Size, Strength, Agility, Perception and Finesse. HP are Threat*Strength*10. Multiply a Stat by the Threat to get all other skill totals.

By default, all stats are the same as the Threat. To get the cost, calculate the differences between the actual stats and the defaults. Add up all the positive numbers (P), and add up all the negative numbers (N) separately.

Cost is Threat * (1+P) / (1+N)

The +1 is there to ensure that we don’t divide by zero.

Magic Items

Each magic effect has a base cost, that I mostly pull out of my ass or base on the closest spell. Add together the base costs for all the spells and multiply by 10. Then there are some modifiers. To name a few that came up:

Increased spell total: Add the difference in spell total to the base cost (after you multiply).

Constant Effect: +25% base cost

Inside Dungeon Only: -50% to base cost

Multiple effects in one item: +10% for each additional effect.

So for the concealer spell, it was 20 for the spell holder, 10 for the Conceal Mana spell. That comes to 300 mana as a base cost. Then 25% for the constant effect, +10% for two effects and you get 480 mana. Or that’s what you get if you misread the 25% as 50%. It should have been 405 mana. I’ll fix that when I decide if I want to change the 480 or the 25%

Floors:

There’s a formula for floor cost, but I’ll just give you a table

1 0

2 50

3 125

4 250

5 425

6 650

7 925

8 1250

9 1625

10 2050

As you can see, it gets expensive. The mana cap increases with the number of floors, but more slowly— and it also depends on the ambient mana. Back in Oakway, Rhis could only get a fourth floor because he bought all that extra mana efficiency. Without it, with 15 ambient mana (what the current location has) he would be limited to 6 floors.