7 Things about Spawn Points

1. What is a Spawn Point

A Spawn Point is a place where monsters routinely appear. Dungeons are chock-full of spawn points, obviously. As dungeons are geomantic organisms, they can create, organize, manipulate, and move spawn points inside their boundaries at will. Outside of a dungeon, spawn points are less common. They are also not GPS-precise in their location, so a spawn point is generally a few dozen feet wide at the smallest, while most are generally measured in acres. These points are usually not near cultivated farming areas, heavily traveled roads, and other areas of intense habitation, sentient activity, and the like. THey are much more common in unexplored areas, frontier areas, border zones, and in places of high natural essence. 

2. What Causes a Spawn Point

A Spawn Point is created by an eddy or incidental cultivation point in the natural flow of essence through the DungeonVerse. As mentioned, dungeon cores can create these with near impunity and almost no cost to themselves. In nature, this requires an elevated level of essence, and a confluence of geomantic features to cause the essence to flow into a circle or spiral, like an oxbend or pool in a river. As the natural essence accumulates in this area, it condenses and eventually triggers a Summon Monster power to dissipate the energy. In areas where the elements prevent a summoning, the essence can increase until it starts collapsing in on itself and shifting states to increasing density, ambient becoming mist, mist becoming liquid, until a stable point is reached. This is how high magic areas are created, fey woods, hellholes, and the like. 

3. What Can Appear at a Spawn Point

Essence is flavored, corrupted, or influenced by what it flows through. Forest essence summons forest monsters, oceanic essence summons sea monsters. This is pretty straightforward.

What cannot appear at spawn points? Monsters diametrically opposed the resonance of the essence. Fire monsters don't pop in forests, swamp monsters don't show up in badlands or deserts. 

4. Can Spawn Points be Captured

Spawn Points can technically be captured, but this is difficult and requires a high level of magical mastery or geomancy and architecture. Wizards' towers and obelisks are useful devices for capturing spawn points and changing them from monster spawns to essence batteries. Villains and other sentient monsters can also capture spawn points and use their own abilities to turn them into spawning pits, and enhance their monster creation capacity. 

5. Can Spawn Points be Contained

Technically, yes, but containing a spawn point is a geomantic engineering project on par with building a dam, or enclosing a forest with a wall. A contained spawn point might start rising in power as the flow of essence is concentrated by the containment efforts, condensing said essence and causing it to start spawning larger and more dangerous monsters. This is specifically what has happened in the Obtort Ward. Formerly a nuisance spawn point has become a critical spawn point.

6. Can Spawn Points be Destroyed

Yes, but its on par with things like can a mountain, river, forest, or lake be destroyed. Yes, but with great effort and terrible consequences that are likely much worse than the spawn point had been.

7. Random

Zul'Dox gained a large amount of his power by capturing networks of spawn points. The initial captures were all in Scathanna, but he expanded this network. Why this was important is that it gave him an endless supply of goblin spawns to replace the hideous losses his armies experienced, and a literal river of essence to power his sorcerous ambitions. With a gesture, he could draw upon massive reserves of mana to unleash world level spells. Likewise he could push the mana the opposite direction and all the spawn points he controlled would start barfing up hordes of basic goblins.