What is a Warren

What is a Warren?

A Warren is a fragment of something else, the origin of which is contested and debated. The most popular theories are bubbles, fragments of lost worlds, magical constructs, or tools created by the High Fae.

The Bubble Theory - Warrens are bubbles of stable reality that drift through the Aether and eventually come into contact with the DungeonVerse, bringing their own dynamic powers that can be accessed through conduits. The warrens cling to the Dungeonverse like a cluster of small soap bubbles around a large one.

The Fragments Theory - worlds end, universes are sundered, and realities fragment and break apart. The Warrens are broken pieces of dead worlds and they have been cast adrift like flotsam from a wrecked ship, and like the bubble theory, they are drawn to the DungeonVerse where they touch and cluster together creating greater stability for all.

The Magical Construct Theory - the Warrens were created by the powerful magi of long-deceased empires, hundreds or even thousands of years in the past. This is commonly disputed as there are no new or recently discovered Warrens, and the current list is actually less than the list known during previous Imperial Epochs.

The High Fae Theory - a major faith assumes Cridhedun, the DungeonVerse, and the Numinous Road were all created by the High Fae, and the Warrens were accordingly created as a sort of mechanical/service access to the new realm, providing elemental power and reinforcement as required. The Warrens also allowed for passing magic to lesser races and to facilitate travel to and from places too far apart to consider mundane means. Cridhedun is easily the size of Eurasian, and crossing it is a massive undertaking.

Nature of a Warren

Warrens encompass an ideal, concept, or abstraction, so the interior layout will vary considerably between them.

1. Entrance and Guardian

Every Warren has a specific requirement to open and enter. To enter any warren, the magic user attempting to access it must be versed in that Warren, its powers, and its lore. This is the main way Warrens are maintained because if a wizard doesn't have the knowledge of the Warren and understanding of its power (aka cast spells related to it) they cannot brute force their way in. That being said, a single wizard can open a warren and bring almost any number of people with them, assuming they can hold the strain of keeping the portal open that long, and Warrens are not always friendly to human/mortal life, so that has to be taken into consideration as well.

Elemental beings and guardians are often posted at commonly used access points within the Warren, either placed by wizards who have access and power, or by the Avatar of the Warren. 

2. Puzzle/RP Challenge

The most common RP challenge of a Warren is surviving and navigating through the Warren. Delving a Warren is required to increase a magic user's connection to the Warren and increase their magic power and potential. Without doing this, magic users are functionally limited to cantrips and weak spells, a sort of maestery, where their power is rote and ritual, not an innate connection to a Warren. Knowledge of a Warren and its own internal laws and orders is its own skill/ability. Failing too many lore checks in a Warren can be fatal, and people can be lost in a Warren, or perish there.

3. Trick or Setback

Warrens are functionally their own elemental dungeon and behave in accordance with their respective concepts or elements. The core elements are relatively stable, like Stone, Ice, and Green. Water and Air are mercurial, and the Warrens of chaos, the Fae, and more esoteric concepts are much more challenging, demanding, and misleading.

4. Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict

Every Warren has a Founder and an Avatar. The Founder is the first person who accessed the Warren and became part of the Warren as a spiritual figurehead. The current Avatar is the most powerful magic user with access to the Warren. Accordingly, many magi who become increasingly powerful within a Warren feel its pull because the Warren wants to draw them in and make them a part of it like a Dungeon Core capturing a powerful being and making it a Dungeon Champion. 

5. Reward or Twist

The fundamental nature of a Warren follows the Dan Harmon story wheel. A magic user has a reason to enter the Warren, this is not something done trivially or lightly, as every trip is a chance of death or worse. They have an objective, they have to fight their way through it, and then are allowed a chance to return. But, Warrens are dynamic places where elements and concepts are fundamentally important and leave their mark on people who pass through them. Stereotypes about practitioners of different Warrens are observations of this effect.

Residents of the Warren

Warrens are home to Elementals related to their basic element, as well as a variety of lifeforms related to or influenced by the core concept of the Warren. These are magical beings and they cannot long live outside the Warren. The beasts can be reached and tamed, befriended, or allied and used in Summoning spells. They can also be beaten, bound, and forced into slave summons. Some Warrens have their own civilizations, sentient races, and so forth. The most powerful of these can break out of a Warren and survive in the DungeonVerse, adding to its ecological wonder and horror.

Visitors to a Warren can only stay so long. The longer they are present, the greater the chance of them being assimilated by the Warren and becoming residents. The alternative to this is that a strong person (willpower, constitution) can actually become Ascended or a Desolate One, depending on the nature of the Warren, innately magical beings that are no longer human.

A Sample Warren

Melenhe Cemenrauco, the Earth Power

Melenhe Cemenrauco is almost exclusively known as the Earth Power, Earth Path, or Way Under the Mountain. This is likely the most common Warren accessed by humans and is enormously important to Cridhedun civilization for a large number of reasons.

1. Guardian/Entrance

One must know the Path of Stone before the doorway to Melenhe Cemenrauco makes itself known. Then, it can be found as a doorway invisible to non-stone shapers. These doors appear in natural unworked stone, and when opened will appear to fold out of the rock and this manifestation is known as a dweomergate. These gates open into Melenhe Cemenrauco's upper level because the Warren is a giant fortress hewn out of the earth and looks like the standard fantasy dungeon with worked bricks, cut stones, mortar, and the corridors, plazas and other accouterments from genre fantasy gaming. This is a testament to the hundreds of years of active human stone shapers working with and through Melenhe Ceremrauco.

Guardians include Orieds (female rock spirits) Caryatids (female animated statues) Golems, and the most prolific race in Melenhe Ceremrauco, the Dweorg.

The Dweorg are dwarves, straight-up fantasy dwarves. As they are magical by nature, pure-blooded Dweorgs cannot leave Melenhe Ceremrauco for long periods of time, they can be summoned by magic to accomplish a task or aid in construction, but they cannot survive outside of the Warren. They can survive inside a Dungeon, especially one like Terrasquestone. These dungeon-dwelling Dweorgs start losing some of their elemental affinity and take on more organic elements, and can produce offspring, creating the race known as Dwarves that most people are familiar with. Thus Halflings and Dwarves are the generational offspring of Dweorgs who escaped Ceremrauco and found new homes.

Dungeon Wights and Dweorgs share a mutually exclusive racial animus towards each other and given the opportunity will seek to wipe the other out.

2. RP/Puzzle Challenge

Melenhe Ceremrauco is a maze. Getting anywhere requires navigating the maze, its hazards, and its denizens.

After finding a gateway into the Warren, visitors enter one of many landing platforms which functionally resemble subway stations, but no tracks or trains. There are often settlements here, dweorgs looking to make money, and the strange folk of the Ceremrauco who linger in the area. This tends to make these landing stations have a low and mean feeling. Or the platform is empty, there is no in-between. Skilled stone shapers can discern where different doors lead into the Warren, depending on where they are in Cridhedun, and can 'aim' accordingly.

After the platform, guests must descend stairs in great numbers. Traversing the Warren can take days, even weeks, depending on the destination required. This does seem like a terrible amount of time, but by using this method, a Lord can enter at Terrasquestone and exit a few days walking from Lichelight, which is on the other side of the continent and would take months to reach not sixteen days. This is taking the Road Under the Mountain and facilitates long-range travel. Merchants and armies cannot use the Warren for this purpose as it tends to eat large hosts that try to enter it.

Reaching other objectives within the maze likewise requires navigation, surviving hazards, and in some places, traps and monsters.

3. Trick or Setback

There are traps, Melenhe Ceremrauco is a hungry place and seeks to keep those who delve too deeply into it. Beyond the superficial dungeon-y type of traps and rock monsters, there are supernatural lures also, unwary travelers can find themselves in living caves with all the bastard monsters that early D&D came up with, living stalactites, darkmantles, living rocks, etc. There are fell cities where Underdweorg lives, and Stone Elves, alien with their white skin and eyeless faces. In the depths, things can get weird and that's not counting Dungeon Psychosis, paranoia, and the twin terrors of Melenhe Ceremrauco, claustrophobia and fear of the dark. There are many completely lightless places within the warren, and these are deeply disturbing areas.

Warrens are by nature unstable. The more a warren interacts with sentient beings from the Nameless Realm, the more stable it becomes. This is part of the reason that there are many tricks and traps in the warren, because the more populated it becomes, the more permanent it becomes. Melenhe Ceremrauco is old, and has been in use for centuries, leaving it as easily the largest and most stable of the known warrens.

4. Climax/Big Battle/Conflict

There are two commodities that a warren offers, utility and power. The former is relatively easy, if a user wants to travel quickly across Cridhedun they use Menelhe Ceremrauco and can travel in days what would take weeks or months by other means, and aside from the relatively modest dangers of getting lost, navigating the warren, and encountering others using for the same purpose, it is relatively no great feat. What does require danger and real effort is gaining power. To grow stronger in the Earth Power of the Warren, a practitioner must spend time in the Warren, they must seek out its secrets and mysteries, and travel ever deeper into its depths. There, near the center of the warren's power, they have to test themselves. This could be a puzzle or a riddle, overcoming a specific obstacle, winning a duel, or fighting a pitched battle to gain their desired power.

This isn't a single preset condition, and each practitioner of the earth power finds different challenges, and these challenges are personalized to them, and to what they are seeking. There are three potential outcomes, the stone shaper perishes in the attempt, they become trapped and part of the warren, or they succeed and return to the Nameless Realm (what the main realm, or DungeonVerse is known as outside of the warrens) changed.

5. Reward/Twist

Death, unfortunate, really. The warrens are not dungeons, so there is no being resurrected by some alien and unknowable core hidden somewhere deep inside the warren.

Being trapped, not so bad as being dead, but not ideal. Sentient beings trapped by a warren will be shaped over time to serve as an avatar of the warren, exhibiting its elemental aspects and nature. In the case of Menelhe Ceremrauco, the avatars are slowly turned into stone-skinned people, and then into living statues that cannot leave the warren even if they make their way to a gate. The only way out is to be summoned by a powerful magic user with a spell, or by being invoked by a potent stone shaper, and in both instances, the summoning is temporary, and the avatar is under the command of the summoner.

Avatars are very powerful in the magic of their parent warren and can teach stone shapers some of their now fundamental powers.

Success is a different story. Stone shapers who advance in the art are slowly changed by it. The most obvious changes are steady increases in constitution/endurance/stamina. The power of the earth is endless, and as such skilled stone shapers are just as relentless. Strength also increases, because the earth power is heavy and demanding. This comes at a cost, stone shapers tend to become more deliberate in their actions, lose empathy, and disconnect from their innate humanity. This is a common issue with all warren users.

There does come a point in the voyage of a warren user, they will eventually either become a transcendent being and will no longer be human, or even mortal, or they will deliberately enter the warren to become part of it, or even both. People who become stranded in a warren long enough can transcend, it just takes longer.