Type: Hazard / phenomenon
Origin: The Nihilith invasion (the Great Cataclysm)
Regulated by: The Guild Accord
Kinds: Five (see below)
Where the Nihilith touch the world, the damage does not heal cleanly. Their energies soak into stone and soil, and even after the Nihilith are driven off that residue festers, twisting caverns into mazes, rewriting the rules of a place, and filling the dark with corrupted creatures, old traps, and cursed treasure. These wounds are the Abyss-Touched Dungeons. Some are fleeting, surfacing and fading as the corruption ebbs; others sink roots and become permanent. As long as Abyssal energy lingers in Eldranis new ones keep appearing, which is why the Nihilith threat is never fully behind us.
Type | What it is | Danger | Reward |
|---|---|---|---|
Abyssal Blooms | Fresh, temporary corruption (days to weeks) | Unstable, time-pressured | Good if you're fast |
Sanctified | Temple-cleared and warded | Low, steady | Reduced |
Stabilized | A bloom that took permanent root | High, evolved | Strong |
Ancient Ruins | Pre-Cataclysm sites touched by corruption | Moderate | Historic, prized |
Elder Depths | Vast permanent megadungeons | Extreme (deepens with depth) | Legendary |
From a lecture at the College, a professor to a curious student.
The simplest way to see a dungeon core is as a heart, with magic for blood. Raw material is drawn from within the dungeon itself, carried to the heart, converted into the dungeon's manifestation type, and pumped back out through the halls. For a dungeon is alive. Each room is a limb or an organ with a purpose: some store energy (a pool of water, a lake of acid, a vein of flame), others serve as stomachs, wombs, or waste. Kill a great enough dungeon and you will find it built much like a body.
Cores are sorted by their manifestation. The four elements are only the illustration: a fire core fills its halls with heat and fire-touched creatures, a water core with every form of liquid, and cores can just as easily manifest metal, wood, or the plain physical types, slashing, piercing, bludgeoning, where it is the method of delivery that matters, not the element. Rarer cores manifest stranger things still. One the professor was called to investigate manifested terrors pulled from the party's own dreams; they classed it a Nightmare core. A core, he warns, can exist for almost anything, even a feeling or an idea.
It is not enough to kill a core. It must be harvested, cut out and carried from the dungeon, where it decays and fades. Leave a dead core in place and its corpse behaves like any other: things move in, spread, and feed. Given long enough, a Necrophagous core grows over the old one, taking on its own type and often the dead core's as well. His first was a slain Air core parasitized by a Wolf core, its howls could burst an eardrum and some of its creatures moved as living mist.
Harvested, cores are the backbone of magical craft. Earth-core dust reinforces brick; wood cores make resilient, self-mending training arms; metal cores forge blades that hold an edge far past ordinary steel; a fire core wreathes a weapon in flame without harming its wielder. Beyond the basics you need a specialist, and if a thing is conceivably within a core's purview, a good one can find a way to make it so.