Building a Dungeon, Starting with Handcrafted Mini-Games

[Where can I find a group of workers who don’t need to be paid, are willing to toil, and will come and go at my command?]

After enduring every hardship to finally secure a patch of land on the chaotic imperial frontier, Daimian, a dragonborn night watchman with a Lord System, fell into deep thought.

A golem craze? An undead army? Mass-produced mechanical servants? The Fourth Calamity?

After much deliberation, he came up with a nearly perfect solution that played to his strengths: set up a sandbox, so players could remotely work the screws for me on their computers!

And so, a brutally hardcore skeletal assembly game with an absurd name, Bone-Bone Assembly, was born. To prove they weren’t cowards, a million medical students worked night and day.

Next came Potion-Potion Brewing, the bizarrely named Coin-Coin Minting, The Proper Use of Steel and Gunpowder, which nearly got banned across the internet, and Operation Triangle Basket, which led countless players through massive tactical exercises and sent them to loot-and-scoot from the Death Lord’s home...

Orc Shaman: “You’re telling me your family has a whole wagonload of a potion this difficult to make?”

Human Noble: “What kind of weapon is this? How can a mere twitch of the finger kill someone supernatural?”

Death Lord: “Is there no law at all? How do you even know where I keep my private stash!”

By the time Daimian had defeated countless powerful foes and breached the imperial capital with just eight hundred elite troops, he looked at the severed royal banner in the distance and suddenly remembered a saying:

“Dragons are the mark of an emperor.”