The Portal Tithe
Stakes Who controls dungeon spoils, portal access, and the authority to decide which threats deserve lives and armies.
World Atlas·Sphere·Beneath three broken moons, every miracle eventually becomes a dungeon.
Guild headquarters and the planet's main ranking, training, and contract center. · Highland grasslands cut by white crystal ravines
Hook
Guild riders patrol a scar where the dungeon entrance appears only beneath a different numbered milestone each night.
The Twelve Scars is a wounded sphere beneath three shattered moons. Every region bears a deep lunar scar where magic pools until it forms a dungeon portal, and every portal promises wealth, monsters, and a living dungeon lord. The Adventurers Guild holds the planet's only broad mandate to clear them, but rulers, liches, death knights, miners, and desperate villagers all claim the portals belong to them.
Themes
Form · Sphere
A globe marked by twelve major lunar scars, with smaller fractures crossing oceans and continents between them.
Traversal
Travel follows roads, rivers, ships, and mountain passes, while Guild lodges provide safe routes between regions. Active portals can briefly connect distant dungeons, but such crossings are unstable and dangerous.

Sphere

Magic
Mythic

Technology
Medieval

Death & Souls
Before the Scars
The First Survey
The Breaking
The Moonfall War
The Dungeon Years
The Portal Reckoning
The Present
The Guild Compact
The Portal Tithe
Who controls dungeon spoils, portal access, and the authority to decide which threats deserve lives and armies.
The Broken Dungeon
If the escaped dungeon is not contained, its growing domain may connect every scar on the planet and make all portals permanent.
The Guild wants every dungeon ranked, taxed, and cleared before it can become a regional catastrophe, while quietly monopolizing the safest crystal trade.
The lich wants to preserve every dungeon as a permanent archive of magic, believing that dissipated portals destroy irreplaceable knowledge.
The death knight wants to gather dungeon deaths into an army that can conquer the scarlands and impose one law on every portal.
The Tidecallers want lunar crystal harvests regulated by local communities rather than crowns, guilds, or undead rulers.
The Twelve Seats want to renegotiate the Guild Compact so each region can own, seal, or weaponize its own dungeons.
Stakes Who controls dungeon spoils, portal access, and the authority to decide which threats deserve lives and armies.
Stakes If the escaped dungeon is not contained, its growing domain may connect every scar on the planet and make all portals permanent.
Early kingdoms mapped the world beneath three intact moons and learned to draw magic from their crossings. Trade roads, fortress towns, and temple schools grew around reliable ley lines, while old survey marks became the basis for borders and place names.
Mages and kings turned the moons against one another, shattering Nuitari, Lunitari, and Solinari. Their fragments scarred the continents, twisted ley lines, and left magic pooling in dangerous concentrations that still shape weather, creatures, and politics.
The first dungeon portals opened where accumulated magic condensed into living labyrinths. Adventurers discovered that every portal had a dungeon lord, and that defeated dungeons faded, while neglected ones grew stronger and began spilling monsters into the surrounding lands.
The Adventurers Guild now ranks explorers and dungeons alike, collecting crystals, monster parts, and relics to fund civilization. Twelve regional powers enforce the compact unevenly, arguing over portal rights while one undefeated dungeon has already broken into the wider world.
A newly opened portal is producing crystals engraved with future dates from the First Survey calendar.
The Guild's ranking ledgers have been altered so a low-ranked party receives an S-rank dungeon contract.
Moon fragments over several regions begin drifting toward one another, causing portals to exchange monsters and rooms.
A dead adventurer returns from a dungeon carrying a warning that the dungeon lords are meeting beneath the world.
Regional rulers threaten to leave the Guild Compact unless they receive a greater share of portal spoils.
The twelve scars are linked by a buried dungeon older than the Moonfall War.
Discovery · Several unrelated dungeon maps share the same missing corridor when placed beneath moonlight.
Impact · The portals may be parts of one planetary dungeon, and defeating local dungeon lords could awaken its true master.
The scar pattern was engineered after the moons shattered.
Discovery · Lich records and Guild casualty books disagree about which lunar fragments struck each region.
Impact · Someone has been moving moon fragments for centuries, deliberately steering where dungeons form.
The shattered moons still possess wills, and each wants a different future.
Discovery · Returned dungeon echoes repeat the same phrase in different languages: the moons were not destroyed, they were imprisoned.
Impact · Freeing or destroying the lunar fragments could end dungeon formation, but may also erase magic from the world.