Collective Bargaining

He can't leave his own building. His staff just realized they can walk out of it.

Nate Halloway was a mediocre landlord in life. In death he's a Dungeon Core - a fist-sized grey rock the magical bureaucracy treats like a distressed rental property, with monsters for tenants, adventurers for paying customers, and rent due on the first of the month. He dragged the condemned Stingy Warren up from a one-star slum to an honest going concern, and he let himself believe the hard part was behind him.

Then the monsters organized.

[ NEW OBJECTIVE: Collective Bargaining ]
Your workforce has unionized. Reach an agreement before your rating collapses. Reward: a dungeon that runs itself. Penalty: everything you've built.

Grumble the kobold has a clipboard, a list of grievances, and two words he will not stop saying: collective bargaining. Overnight, the cheapest labor in the dungeon stops being cheap - or quiet. Wages. Safety. Hazard pay for the trap rooms. A break room, of all ridiculous things. And Nate has to negotiate with his own workforce while he literally cannot leave the property to get away from a single one of them.

It only gets worse. A gilded rival core two hexes over - an ex-tax-attorney with a dungeon like a foreclosure and a smile like a late fee - starts buying up struggling dungeons across the district, and he has his eye on the fault line under the Warren. A broker at the Goblin Market wants a cut Nate can't pay. And something down in that fault, something that knows his name, keeps whispering that he could just... rest. Stop. Set the weight down for good.

He's a landlord. Setting things down was never his problem. Getting anyone to stay - that's the whole job.

This is the book where the Warren stops being a dungeon Nate runs and becomes a home his people refuse to leave - and where a slumlord learns the difference between rest you steal and rest you give, the one lesson the thing in the fault would very much prefer he never worked out.

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING is Book Two of Legend of the Dungeon Core Landlord: a cozy, funny, base-building dungeon core LitRPG about labor, loyalty, and running a slum with a heart.

What's inside:

• A full-length dungeon-core LitRPG with real base-building - new rooms, a new floor, the dungeon's first true trap, and its very first Break Room
• System panels, Comment Cards, and a rating economy where you get paid for scaring customers half to death and letting them walk out grateful
• Workplace comedy with teeth - the wit of Dungeon Crawler Carl braided with real stakes and real heart
• A loyal, ridiculous, unionizing crew: a sarcastic goblin, a litigious kobold, two pun-slinging mimic brothers, and a skeleton who would rather dance than fight
• Cozy, low-stakes progression fantasy that still lands a punch when it counts
• A quick "story so far" recap up front - brand-new readers can start right here, or binge from Book One