Literature / Dungeon Crawler Carl

The Apocalypse will be televised!

Congratulations! You've earned your first achievement: Crazy Cat Lady.
You have entered the World Dungeon accompanied by a cat. Ahh, isn't that sweet?
Reward: You've received a Bronze Pet Box!

Without warning, in an instant, every man-made structure collapses, killing everyone with a roof over their head, and the planet is seized by the interstellar Syndicate to be mined of all valuable resources. The few surviving humans are offered a choice: eke out a living somehow from what remains, or enter the World Dungeon, where a live audience will watch as they battle through eighteen floors to reclaim their planet. Too bad no one ever wins!

Carl isn't anyone special, really. He just happened to be caught outside chasing his ex-girlfriend's cat at 2:23 AM when it all literally went down. But he might just be the best chance humanity has left. Or maybe the cat will do better.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a LitRPG story by "Doctor Hepa" (Matt Dinniman), originally published serially on Royal Road (here) and then later as a series of books via Amazon. The first six books are complete as of July 2023.

• Dungeon Crawler Carl Book One
• Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2: Carl's Doomsday Scenario
• Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 3: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook
• Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 4: The Gate Of The Feral Gods
• Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 5: The Butcher's Masquerade
• Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 6: The Eye Of The Bedlam Bride

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Dungeon Crawler Carl provides examples of:

A-C

• Abnormal Ammo: Carl receives a benefactor box containing a xistera extension slot, customised to throw decapitated love doll heads. He immediately puts it to use.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Carl does manage to get a laugh out of one guard after he remotely stabs a Naga with a pen, for getting in his face and making threats, but another guard quickly silences him.
  Carl: Come on. You have to admit, that was pretty awesome.
• Aggressive Play Incentive: Each floor of the World Dungeon remains open for only a limited time, and any players who haven't reached a stairwell in that time are killed in the collapse (and their bodies reclaimed as raw materials). And naturally, each floor contains stronger monsters and hazards than the one before, so going straight to the stairwell immediately will leave crawlers underpowered and unprepared for further floors. The only way to possibly survive is to "get out there and kill, kill, kill!" to quickly level up.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The World Dungeon is run by a Syndicate AI with a snarky sense of humour. It's bound to be fair to the crawlers and even sometimes defends them from the company sponsoring the dungeon, but it's also slowly (or not so slowly) going insane. Apparently that always happens; past A.I.s get stuck in a simulation where they can do what they want without affecting anyone, essentially putting them out to pasture. Mordecai gets concerned about how fast this one is going downhill, though; it normally takes until around the twelfth floor for them to be completely cuckoo, but there are serious warning signs by the fifth. Based on a note that the AI slipped to Carl, it's possible that this AI isn't a new one, but an old reused one, meaning that it would have started crazy and only gone downhill from there.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Turns out that the reason Bea posted the pic of her cheating on Carl was because she was drunk, and her boytoy convinced her it was a good idea. She was so broken up over losing Carl that she left her vacation early, came back to Seattle, and survived the Collapse.
• Amazon Brigade: Early in the crawl, Hekla is given a magical repeating crossbow with unlimited standard ammunition, which gets faster and stronger for every woman she adds to her party. Naturally, she gathers dozens of otherwise-unremarkable female crawlers, making the crossbow practically a machine gun. She wants to recruit Donut, too, but Donut is loyal to Carl, leading Hekla to attempt more nefarious measures.
• An Arm and a Leg: Severed limbs are one of the few things that the dungeon can't heal (except with specific races or classes, or expensive healing items).
  • Odette lost her legs as a crawler and received a belt that allows her to attach monster parts to her own body. As a show host she is shown to own a personal hover-platform she can fly on.
  • Frank lost a hand to a trap, and he was drunk during race selection so even though it could have been healed by taking the right race or class, he was left without it after.
  • Carl rips Quan Ch's arm off, after Quan almost gets hundreds of people killed by interfering with their quest toward the end of The Gate of the Feral Gods.
  • Tran loses his legs in the Country Boss fight at the end of the sixth floor, but survives thanks to a heal spell and gets a flying wheelchair from a benefactor.
• Animate Dead: Donut gets the Second Chance spell that lets her temporarily raise and control a corpse. She's not enthusiastic about something so icky, until Carl points out that she can kill a dog, then raise it and make it kill other dogs, at which point she declares it to be the best spell ever.
• Anti-Mentor: Most of the game guides vary between "not very good at their jobs" and "actively screwing over the crawlers." Donut theorizes that they hate their jobs and are taking it out on the crawlers. Mordecai mentions financial incentives to make the guides do their best, but apparently those aren't particularly effective. Special mention goes to Frank and Maggie's guide (who told them the only way to advance was to murder other crawlers, leading to the death of their daughter), and Meadow Lark's guide (who seems mostly good at her job, but once she becomes a manager she just checks out and treats the whole thing as a vacation).
• Arc Words: Carl often repeats the phrase "You will not break me" to himself. It slowly starts appearing elsewhere in different variations, especially once it becomes apparent that he is part of a Secret Legacy.
• Artifact of Death: Mordecai repeatedly tells Carl to get rid of the Enchanted Night Wyrm's Ring of Divine Suffering and the associated "Marked for Death" skill, insisting that it's not meant for Crawlers to use; it's for the hunters on floors 6 and 9 (and it makes the holder a prime target for those hunters). It allows rapid stat growth, at the cost of killing other crawlers, and once it's marked a target, the user can't heal until the target is dead. Frank Q actually gave it to Carl specifically in hopes that he would be unable to resist using it and would get himself killed.
  If you are injured, or poisoned, or if you get a hangnail, you will suffer the ill effects and pain of that injury until the moment your prey is killed. So choose your marks carefully. Don't let them get away.
  • Frank Q explains to Carl that this is why Maggie killed their daughter. They'd given her the ring and told her to use the Mark in hopes that she'd level up quickly and survive. Instead, Carl escaped and she was left on the edge of death.
• Ascended Meme: In universe. At one point, while meeting with their attorney out of the dungeon, the pair encounter a huge Donut stan wearing a T Shirt with the caption "Goddamnit Donut!" in huge letters.
• Attack Animal:
  • The Royal Court picks up Mongo on the second floor. It takes some time to tame him, but he's then fiercely loyal and just fierce in general. He gets kept in storage most of the time just so that he doesn't get himself killed fighting threats outside his weight class.
  • Lucia Mar brings two Rottweilers into the dungeon, and both of them get enhancements that turn them into killing machines. She's seen in the recap using them to start a fight with Florin and Ifechi.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Mordecai advises Carl that every boss has some kind of weakness to look for. "The Juicer", a rippling hulk of muscle who flings barbells at you? Go for his jugular vein. Denise the crazy goose that's completely immune to attacks and chases you all over its house? Jam it into the kitchen sink's garbage grinder; it's not immune to the environment.
• Attack on One Is an Attack on All: The third floor town guards are all telepathically connected. Attacking one will make them all hostile. And they are relatively slow, but at a vastly higher level than the crawlers and extremely deadly.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: Carl and Donut develop a playbook of standard attack patterns so that they can adapt and respond quickly in a fight, eg "Double Shot" to have Donut shoot two Magic Missiles at the enemy's head, or "Monster Mash" to have her raise a corpse and multiply it with Clockwork Triplicate.
• Attention Whore: Donut, being a prize-winning show cat, is far too addicted to the idea of being adored by legions of fans. But it's actually an asset in the Dungeon, where popularity means better loot boxes, and also means that the hosts may be more reluctant to arrange your death. The fact that she's genuinely adorable and easily dissolves into delight when presented with a nice surprise means she's Spoiled Sweet rather than an Alpha Bitch.
• Automatic Crossbows: Hekla's magical crossbow is semi-automatic, at least with standard ammunition, and fires faster as more women are added to the party. It can be loaded with other bolts, but doesn't have the same benefit.
• Ax-Crazy: Lucia Mar appears to have only a partial grip on reality, talking to herself and imagining that people have insulted her. She's also been granted some very powerful skills like damage reflection, and kills people casually. The audience loves her.
  Lucia Mar: There is nothing wrong with my head. Why would you say that? Speak no more, or there will be something wrong with your girlfriend's head.
• Bait-and-Switch: Borant definitely gets concerned about Carl's stated plans to release a feral god on the under-prepared armies of the Skull Empire, but they think can handle it. Then, instead of doing that, he actually floods the city of Larracos where the armies had retreated, killing thousands of soldiers and vital NPCs.
  Zev: This is not what you promised.
  Carl: I promised nothing.
• Beast of Battle: Mongo wouldn't normally qualify, but Donut is the right size.
• Benevolent Precursors: We don't know enough about the Primals to judge who or what they are, but the mysterious creator of the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook certainly counts. The intro to the 24th edition, which Carl receives, making him the author of the 25th edition, says that "This guide to creating chaos was originally generated into the system during the fifteenth season. It was awarded to the High Elf Crawler Porthus the Rogue on the ninth floor, disguised as a blank sketchbook." However, Porthus is described in the text as the author of the second edition. Someone before him managed to create the Cookbook and seed it into the programming of the crawl itself without leaving their name or any other information on its pages.
• The Berserker:
  • Donut's pet velociraptor, Mongo, tends to attack everything on sight. Just as well Donut can put him in extra-dimensional storage until needed.
  • Carl magically induces a berserk rage in Lusca's octo-shark babies to turn them against each other.
• Berserk Button: Donut acts like dogs are hers, immediately attacking any dog-themed mobs on sight, but she's probably playing it up for the viewers. Her real berserk button proves to be betrayal, specifically "trading up" someone who trusts you for someone more valuable. Turns out she knew about Bea's plans after all. When Donut realizes that Hekla tried to kill Katia as part of a plot to get Donut to join Hekla's party, Donut shoots her in the face with a full-force magic missile and won't stop screaming at her.
• Bilingual Bonus: If it can be considered a "bonus", that is. Carl doesn't speak Spanish, so he can't understand the first Neighborhood Boss that he fights, but if the reader does, they can see that she's confused, scared, and begging Jesus to forgive her.
• Blackmail: Donut keeps very careful track of her money, allowing her to notice when Clarabelle, a bouncer at the Desperado Club, is embezzling some — which enables her and Carl to extort a favour at a critical time.
  Donut: I wanted to say something about the discrepancy, but Carl here has a kind heart, and he thought we should take the matter up with you privately. <Beat> This is us, taking the matter up privately.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The alien species of the Syndicate are aliens. Many of them largely have human systems of thought, belief, and morality, but some are weird. The Valtay (body-hijacking brain worms) and the Caprids (bipedal screaming goats) stand out in this regard.
• Booby Trap:
  • Carl's class grants him skills for setting, detecting and disarming various types of traps, with perhaps the most entertaining being the "alarm" traps that play a top twenty song at earbursting volume.
  • Nonetheless, he's too slow to react when Donut's random "prize" suitcase turns out to contain Literal Fire Ants.
• Bond Creatures: Crawlers can find and bond with "pets". Naturally, they're not puppies and goldfish, but full-sized monsters; Donut chooses a Velociraptor.
  • At the end of the eighth floor, Carl is gifted a Tummy Acher by dying crawler Ren.
• Boring, but Practical: Carl states outright that his preferred mode of operation is "quiet efficiency," contrasting with Donut's much more stage-friendly persona. Against single enemies, he punches or stomps them. Against bigger or more numerous enemies, he blows them up with cheap explosives. No messing around with magic or poison. Ironically, his "boring" methods usually result in huge catastrophes that level cities and nearly kill him as well, making him at least as entertaining to viewers as the more charismatic Donut.
• Bottomless Magazines: Hekla's magical crossbow has a special bolt that can be fired an unlimited number of times; it can load other bolts, but they have normal limits. Katia later gets another bolt that can gain the same benefit, with extra damage and armour-piercing.
• Bothering by the Book: Carl gradually learns how best to fight back against the system. He takes advantage of Exact Words and Loophole Abuse, gradually breaking the game and putting the galaxy's elites in a very uncomfortable position. He has two very important resources helping him in this endeavour, making him quite dangerous: 1) the Lethal Joke Item The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook is full of centuries worth of insight into the dungeons and 2) the AI has a massive hard-on for Carl's feet and wants to help him win.
• Bounty Hunter:
  • Anyone who was inside an enclosed structure during the collapse belongs to Borant, but if one of those who survived and didn't enter the dungeon becomes interesting, then Borant may offer rewards for bringing them in. It's illegal to interfere with the remaining humans, but no one bothers to enforce that. Carl's ex-girlfriend and Donut's former owner Bea gets collected with the intent of turning her into a Country Boss for Carl and Donut to fight, just to tug at the heartstrings, but those hunters are intercepted by a second group with different motivations.
  • The top ten crawlers all get bounties on their heads, payable to any crawler who kills them. On the bright side, every time they survive and go down a floor, they get paid the bounty, too. By the sixth floor, Carl is in the number one spot, and the 300,000 gold comes in handy.
  • The sixth floor doesn't offer specific bounties, but is full of hunters aiming to kill the crawlers and sell their equipment to the ninth floor factions. That's why it's called The Hunting Grounds. It becomes particularly important after Carl wrecks the usual supply lines for the factions, forcing them to rely on the hunters to kit out their armies.
• Breaking the Fellowship: Katia decides to leave the Royal Court in order to reach out to her former party and gather them back together after Hekla's death — otherwise they might find a nastier leader in Eva.
  Donut: What? You're breaking up with us? What did Carl do? What did you do, Carl?
  Katia: He didn't do anything. It's because of Eva.
• Bring It:
  • Carl throws out his challenge to the sky immediately before descending to the sixth floor.
  • And again in response to Hunter Vrah's death threats.
  • Then a third time before he descends to the ninth, ahead of the largest army of crawlers ever to make it this far, united as an unprecedented faction in the Faction Wars and about to be joined by an equally unprecedented army, half again as large as that already in the dungeon, of former crawlers signing on to their faction as mercenaries eager for revenge.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Borant Corporation is happy for crawlers to die in spectacular, sensational, and sadistic ways, but it does take steps to protect them from (prematurely) completely wiping themselves out, since that would lose money.
  Borant: That would have been an extinction-level event for this floor and the next. As exciting as that would be, we still have another floor of sponsorship bidding to get through before we can allow it.
• Caps Lock: Donut always uses the chat system in all-caps. Always. Later on, so does Samantha. Occasionally Donut slips up and types normally, showing that she can avoid it, but is doing her best to always stay in character as a cat who is so extra.
• Catchphrase:
  • The Borant admin who gives patch notes ends every broadcast with "Now get out there and kill, kill, kill!" Zev says the same thing after being (seemingly) brainwashed.
  • It's suggested early on that Carl come up with one. Donut quickly latches onto the idea and tries to suggest a few, to Carl's annoyance. And to his extreme displeasure, he discovers that the watchers have already decided he has one. "Goddammit Donut."
• Cat/Dog Dichotomy: Donut's opinion of other people is strongly influenced by their attitudes toward dogs. Even Maggie My, a cold-blooded serial killer, gets some credit in Donut's eyes for having once run over a dog with her car.
  Donut: AND JUST BECAUSE YOU KILLED A DOG DOESN'T MAKE UP FOR WHAT YOU DID TO CHRIS.
• Cats Are Mean: Princess Donut is spoiled, prissy, more powerful than everyone around her and knows it, and explicitly considers Carl a manservant. Carl almost abandons her five minutes after she gains intelligence, and only changes his mind when she apologizes. She even admits to it when facing Bea; "I know I make fun of him sometimes. I can’t help it. I’m a cat. That’s what I do. Plus, I mean, let’s be honest here. He walks right into it most of the time."
  Carl: Cats are assholes. I get it. But do you know why people like cats, despite their asshole-ness? It's because they don't fucking talk. If they did, and they were all like you, they'd all be extinct because we'd have killed you all by now.
• Celebrity Superhero: Making serious progress in the World Dungeon generally requires persuading fans and sponsors to pay for good loot boxes, and each crawler can see the number of views, followers, and favorites that they've attracted (which, with a galactic audience, can reach the quadrillions and septillions). Alien television programs can also (for a fee) pull them out of the Dungeon temporarily for interviews. The top ten crawlers get a special focus — and get bounties posted on them.
• Central Theme: The series is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, but with the sardonic humor and anti-capitalist message dialed up until the dial broke. It explicitly notes that corporate nature of the game is tied to the fascist core of the people running it, while also giving Carl the Dungeon Anarchist Cookbook and criticizing the Soviet Union. If Dinniman didn't have an anarchist message there, then he stumbled right the hell onto it.
  "Capital punishment means those without the capital get the punishment." - EXECUTED PRISONER JOHN A. SPENKELINK, opening quote to "Gate of the Feral Gods"
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • One at the start of the fourth floor. The seemingly inconsequential Train Conductor Souvenir Hat that every single crawler gets a copy of for free at the start is one of the only ways to safely ride a train all the way back to the depot and then the stairs.
  • A potato gun, in this case. Near the start of the fifth floor, a benefactor sends Carl a root vegetable that looks like a sweet potato. The item description informs him that it's rare, but tastes awful and is pointless. Mordecai wants to investigate it and do some research. He eventually turns it into a potion allowing the drinker to phase through lava rock, which lets Carl yank a Puppeteer Parasite right out of another crawler's head. And that's not even its main intended purpose.
• Clarke's Third Law: The dungeon mechanics frequently refer to "magic" and "spells", but it's apparently a matter of highly advanced technology. As far as the crawlers can tell, it works like magic. At the Syndicate's level of technology, there may not be much difference.
• Contrived Coincidence: In-Universe, anything that's supposed to be random is actually subject to the (sadistic, murderous) whims of the AI. Hunter Iota points out that the odds of him "randomly" appearing right in front of Carl are pretty slim, and Quasar, when mentioning the Zerzura spell's random targeting, confirms that "when I say random, I mean in the worst possible area."
• Cool Gate: The Gate of the Feral Gods allows its user to tear a hole through reality to travel to another location. Too bad about what comes out of the hole when the gate closes...
• Could Say It, But...: Zev is just shocked and appalled by the Royal Court opening a gate to flood the city of Larracos. So appalled that she goes on to describe in specific and valuable detail just how much and what kinds of damage and disruption it will cause. Carl soon realises it's deliberate.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • When Carl is given a fan-sponsored box with a choice of different rewards, he takes a risk and chooses the single book. Congratulations, it's a recipe book for things like cooking goblins! At least, that's what it looks like in public. Away from prying eyes, it's revealed to be The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, a volume kept secret from the Syndicate, where past generations of crawlers have recorded their thoughts, plans, and discoveries, all with a view to burning the system down. From how to break ghostly possession, to which potion recipes are effective against undead, to the nature of the force fields protecting sysadmins during out-of-dungeon broadcasts, Carl finds their many tips and tricks invaluable; his biggest challenge is finding ways to use them without anyone guessing the book exists.
  • Outside the game world, the books' covers don't do a great job presenting Donut. They get it right in that she's a flat-faced Persian, but they don't do well with her coloring. She's described as a tortoiseshell by the text, specifically a mix of black, white, and beige (a brief mention in the first chapter of the first book). The covers present her as uniformly beige.
• Crapsack World: Imagine a darker, more nakedly cynical version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Galactic corporations seed worlds with intelligent races, plant operatives to shape their history, give bronze-age civilizations a fifty year window to appeal their status as a mining colony off world, then return to "harvest their minerals" and force the survivors of the ensuing multi-billion person genocide into a The Running Man style dungeon crawl for entertainment where they and the NPCs are all explicitly referred to as slaves and the system deliberately fucks with them for ratings.
• Crime of Self-Defense: Carl lays a trap for two people who tried to murder him without cause, which kills their daughter, who he was unaware even existed. They both decide to murder Carl for what he did to them. Frank is at least self-aware enough to realize he's a Hypocrite (though he's still out for revenge), but Maggie is so crazy she has convinced herself that everything was entirely Carl's fault.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Hekla's party is built completely around her, and her overpowered crossbow that becomes more powerful the more women who are in the party. Of almost thirty crawlers, most of them are healers, a handful are offensive mages and other damage-dealers, and there is not a single tank. Once Hekla dies, the party immediately disbands, and Carl theorizes it couldn't have lasted much longer anyway.
• Cruel Mercy: Signet thinks Carl has gone soft when he asks to heal a captured enemy. He hasn't. The Ring of Divine Suffering can only mark a full-health target.

D-K

• Decoy Getaway: Maggie-infested Chris has dislodged and damaged the carefully placed Gate! All is lost! (All is not lost; it was a carefully constructed fake, while Katia took the real Gate to the aquatic zone.)
• Determinator: Carl refuses to give up. Not just his life—in fact, he makes it clear several times that it's one of his lower priorities. But he refuses to give up his humanity to this horrible, soul-eating machine of cruelty that the dungeon has made of his world.
  Carl: You will not break me.
• Devoured by the Horde: A crawler is mentioned in passing to have been killed by a trap that injected a tube into his stomach and filled him with "Finger-sized Flesh Weasels".
• Disc-One Nuke: There are various spells and buffs that will make the first several floors easy when used properly.
  • Cloud of Exhaust puts groups of mobs to sleep, works even on higher level mobs, and enhances damage for thirty seconds after they wake up. Miriam Dom has it, and is in the top ten crawlers; she and her partner nearly took down a province boss with it until they were interrupted. On the other hand, Louis has the same spell, but is squandering it by running away from every fight.
  • Quan Ch has a celestial item that lets him fly, shoot lightning bolts, and shield against physical and magical damage. Mordecai predicts that a celestial item could carry a crawler through to level 12.
  • Carl is offered a legendary box that would let him cruise through to level 8, in exchange for giving up the source of information that helped him kill Loita, but he rejects the deal.
  • There's not enough detail to know for sure, but apparently Lucia Mar received a similar deal to Carl when she killed two admins. Unlike Carl, she took it, and that's likely why she's so overpowered.
• Divided We Fall:
  • The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook warns of the dangers of defeating a Country Boss and collecting the Treasure Map that it leaves behind. Crawlers who have just been through a terrible fight, and have seen their nominal allies trample on each other in their efforts to take the boss down, are suddenly given knowledge of where all the loot is and its quality, which tends to trigger a second bloodbath.
  • The Hunters don't turn on each other, but Carl notes that their tendency to work alone and scatter in the face of a threat makes them easy meat when the tables are turned and the Crawlers unitedly come for them.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The story is predicated on a galactic capitalism with the brakes off, a naked, unstoppable colonialism that provides us a Jerry Springer with no shame.
• Dungeon Bypass: Prepotente exploits a weakness in the starting chamber of the seventh floor, and destroys the entire floor before it begins, sending all the Crawlers straight to the eighth floor.
• Dungeon Crawling: The Syndicate literally refers to it as the World Dungeon, and the participants as Crawlers. It's packed with monsters and loot all the way through. No one is meant to reach floor 18 and the final boss, though.
• Dwindling Party: Nearly 14 million people enter the dungeon's first floor; it's down to about 3 million before the floor is over. The kill count slows dramatically with each following floor and the losses become more personally significant, as Carl is horrified less by the immense scale of the genocide and more by the personal cost of losing the individuals who have managed to survive to the lower floors.
• Elite Army: By the time the sixth floor is over, pretty much all of the player killers and selfish douchebags are dead, and the surviving Crawlers are a Found Family of Fire-Forged Friends who will do everything they can to keep the group alive, to keep hope alive. The sixth floor ends with an unprecedented 100% mortality rate among the Hunters, and the eighth floor ends with a surprise twist that, instead of 30,000 Crawlers dying to betrayal and despair, 30,000 Crawlers survive thanks to a Hail Mary from Carl.
• Enemy Mine: Carl and Donut join forces with Tsarina Signet to kill hunters. They're not exactly friends, and have been in conflict before, but they respect each other's skills and have a common enemy.
• Even Evil Has Standards: One of the few things that is actually banned from the crawls is using "collected" children or pregnant women as NPCs. (Although considering what's still allowed, that restriction seems a bit arbitrary.)
• Evil Gloating: Actually justified when Hunter Vrah has Carl in her sights; they're being watched by a galactic audience, and she wants his death to send a message. She still doesn't spend very long talking, but long enough to be a mistake.
• Existential Horror: It's possible for NPCs to recognise that they're in a fake, temporary world and all their memories are false. Some of them adapt, others just break down.
  • Special mention to Fire Brandy, who gains awareness of the dungeon and makes a Heroic Sacrifice to help the crawlers pass the floor.
  • Extra-special mention to Juice Box, who accepts the job of awakening other NPCs to their situation.
  • And the purple heart goes to Growler Gary, who becomes aware of his nature as part of being repeatedly killed and respawned in order to harvest copies of his hand to make a portal cart work. After he learns what's really going on and why, he asks only that they make it as painless as possible and give him a drink afterward.
  • Signet also gets special mention, because she's not just a random NPC, but a special elite NPC part of an ongoing show intended for floors three, six, and nine. By the end of the sixth floor, she's been awakened to her status and realizes that her quest for vengeance is a sham for an audience and instead sacrifices her self, voluntarily going to eternal torment and giving her family a second chance at life while also giving the crawlers the opportunity to survive and move to the next floor.
• Exploited Immunity: Carl ensures that all the Crawlers attending the Butcher's Masquerade are supplied with dinosaur repellent and feather-fall potions. When the castle is transported to the ninth floor, all the Crawlers and hunters are left behind, along with a pack of velociraptors, falling out of the sky into a bloody free-for-all.
  Plink, plink, plink. The icons of hunters started to get X'd out as they splattered against the ground.
• Family of Choice: Carl and Donut already loved each other before the dungeon, but it get intensified by the trauma of surviving. Mordecai also gets in on the act, and by the end of the fifth floor views Carl and Donut as surrogate children, even calling Carl "son" when trying to get him to get rid of the Ring of Divine Suffering. Katia becomes a sister, the Meadow Larkers their cousins, all crawlers their extended family as Carl takes on more and more of a messiah complex.
• Famous for Being First: Carl enters the World Dungeon quite early and receives several bonuses from the system AI as a result. Most notably, being the first person to bring a cat into the dungeon grants him a Legendary Pet Box, which turns out to give the cat sapience and make her a dungeon crawler in her own right.
  New achievement! Trailblazing Crazy Cat Lady.
  You are the first crawler to have entered to the World Dungeon accompanied by a cat. You must really love that thing. Too bad you're both probably going to die a horrible death at any moment. Or maybe not. Look at the prize you just received!
  Reward: You've received a Legendary Pet Box!
  • Miriam Dom got one, too, for entering the dungeon with a dozen goats. Her Legendary Pet Box made her goat Prepotente a crawler just like Donut.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Devout kua-tin Party members hate all other races. Loita makes it very clear to Carl and Donut that she wishes the crawl wasn't happening and that Earth had simply been destroyed for the sake of wiping humans out. Carl orchestrates her death. Arguably it was self defence.
    Carl: Why are you so angry all the time, Loita?
    Loita: You. Your cat. Your people. Your ugly culture. This is a cancer upon the Bloom, and we should not be doing this.
    Carl: Doing what?
    Loita: We should not be celebrating your culture. Spreading your filth so the fry may see.
    Carl: Celebrating? You call this celebrating our culture? You're exterminating us and profiting upon our ashes.
    Loita: If it were up to me, we'd simply exterminate you and nothing else. You're filthy. You're dry. You're a rot upon the Bloom.
  • Roswell Greys are apparently a species of aliens known as "nulls", whom other species dislike. Roswell happened because they weren't careful enough — but they take their widespread depiction in Earth culture as evidence that humans hate them too.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: The kua-tin Party is racist and clearly more concerned with kickbacks for Party members and ideological purity than actually running an effective company. According to Mordecai, they've run their entire star system into the ground, and the whole Crawl is a last-ditch attempt to escape bankruptcy, which is why they keep screwing with the dungeon.
• Feather Fingers: Mordecai changes form with each floor, and on the fifth floor he's a skyfowl, similar to his original body.
  Skyfowl didn't have arms. Just feet and wings, like regular eagles. "Can you still, you know, do potion stuff in that body?"
  He looked at me as if I just asked to see nudes of his mom.
  "Better than ever," he said.
• Felony Misdemeanor:
  • Crawlers who badmouth Borant Corporation or the Syndicate may find their experience being accelerated. Meaning they will face an endlessly spawning horde of monsters until they die horribly.
  • Despite the plentiful bathrooms, crawlers keep urinating in the corridors! Obviously, the appropriate response is to punish them by releasing Rage Elementals from the thirteenth floor. Onto the second floor.
• Fetish: The system AI becomes obsessed with Carl's bare feet, and especially watching him squish things with them. It grants him loot that gives him valuable boosts at the cost of needing to keep his feet bare, and the whole dungeon shudders when Carl steps on a "frenzied gerbil". Unfortunately this later results in the system getting upset about him not stepping on one, and it sends an endless wave of gerbils after him until he gives in and squashes fifty.
• Fleeing for the Fallout Shelter: After every structure on Earth suddenly collapses into the ground without warning, a message from the interstellar Syndicate plays, informing the survivors (ie those who were outdoors) that the entrances to the World Dungeon will now be open for the next hour. Anyone who doesn't reach an entrance in time will be stuck; practically all of society's infrastructure has collapsed — every building, every enclosed vehicle — and the majority of its population is already dead.
  I didn't think about it. My head still swam with all the information that had been thrown at me. The pink Crocs barely fit on my feet. The distant fire was further away than I thought. I had seen first hand what hypothermia did to people.
  So I turned toward the light, and I ran.
• Foreshadowing: Dinniman put his intentions for the story right into the quote that precedes the first book.
  Rome will exist as long as the Coliseum does; when the Coliseum falls, so will Rome; when Rome falls, so will the world.
  - THE VENERABLE BEDE
• Frame-Up: Odette has her agent blame the killing of a bounty hunter and Bea's boyfriend on the victims. Since two are dead and one is easily paid off, it's not hard.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: From the perspective of the Syndicate and the elites, Carl and Donut are like a specter coming out of the darkness and destroying them. Carl is personally murdering the members of the highest houses and turning their playgrounds into charnel dens. Meanwhile, Donut overthrew a government as a favor to a friend.
  • Juice Box is even worse than Carl. Carl is a natural born person with a few rights according to galactic law. Juice Box is an artificial person, an NPC, she's not even supposed to be aware that she's a disposable character in a game show. That doesn't stop her from repeatedly assassinating some of the most powerful people in the galaxy and establishing a safe haven in the heart of their playground.
• Game-Breaker: In-Universe. The Gate of the Feral Gods is powerful enough to turn the whole floor into a dead wasteland within an hour. A Syndicate liaison informs Carl that it set off all sorts of system flags and balance check subroutines when it was generated. Which is why the Syndicate strong-arms Carl into temporarily giving it up.
• Game Master: The Syndicate AI. It doesn't have completely arbitrary power, it has to be more or less fair to the crawlers, but since it can see everything that happens everywhere and can control loot, random encounters, and information, it can easily make or break someone's crawl. Too bad it's showing signs of becoming increasingly insane. With a foot fetish and a crush on Carl.
• Genre Savvy: Carl wants to loot the mayor's body, but Donut has seen horror movies before and doesn't want to sneak into the room full of sleeping monsters.
• Giftedly Bad: Donut is thrilled to obtain a class that lets her cast spells just by singing. Mordecai admits that it could potentially be quite good, but...
  Donut: I'M A BARD! ISN'T IT GREAT! IT'S NOT A NECROBARD LIKE THEY OFFERED ME BEFORE, BUT IT'S BETTER. I'M A LEGENDARY DIVA. THAT'S WHAT THE CLASS IS CALLED. LEGENDARY DIVA. I SING!
  Carl: You sing.
  
  Donut's new bard class didn't use mana. All she needed to do was sing, and the bard spells would be cast. That was great, but there was a problem. A big problem. The song had to be in key. And until we found that item, her new class was useless.
  Why?
  Because Donut sounded like a helium-drunk cat being crushed by a steamroller when she attempted to sing, that was why. And even though she wasn't that bad of a dancer, when it came to making a song emerge from that tone-deaf gullet of hers, her rhythm was that of a drunk, three-legged donkey trying to negotiate its way down a set of ice-covered stairs.
• Glass Cannon: Donut is actually stronger than Carl, but with miniscule Constitution, so she can't properly fight in melee. She makes a decent Squishy Wizard, though. On the fifth floor, she actually takes on the "Glass Cannon" subclass.
• Gotta Kill Them All: Before descending to the sixth floor, Carl promises to kill every single hunter who participates. The AI is shocked but very impressed that he pulls it off (he killed the most and also killed the very last one), granting him a Celestial-tier loot box and calling him "a very scary dude."
• Grievous Harm with a Body: When Hekla's husband didn't survive the first floor, she proceeded to kill the monsters responsible using one of his ribs. The AI was impressed, and rewarded her with a highly magical crossbow.
• Groin Attack: With a difference. Carl comes across a magical arrow that will inflict "Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea" on the target.
  AI: Trust me, you don't want Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: The recap episodes portray Carl this way, only showing his violent moments and splicing in clips of him laughing to make it look like he's Laughing Mad after killing things. This backfires on Hekla, who thinks she can easily bait him into trying to attack and then defending herself in order to get him killed and free up Donut. Instead, Carl picks apart her plan and reacts calmly, ultimately resulting in Hekla's own death.
• Hammerspace: All Crawlers get access to an inventory system that lets them put as much as they want into extra-dimensional storage, so long as they can pick up each item and hold it for four seconds. Naturally, the system gets several patches throughout the crawl to stop Loophole Abuse.
• Harmful to Minors: Carl theorizes that Lucia Mar had an actual mental disorder before the collapse, but it's clear that being stuck in a murder dungeon with no companionship besides two dogs is making her much, much worse. Carl's first instinct is to put her in a mental hospital... but since that is obviously not possible, he resolves to kill her quickly and humanely at the earliest opportunity. We learn in The Butcher's Masquerade that it's even worse than that. Somehow she's multiple children, one a 12 year old Dutch girl, all crammed in one head and being contolled by one of her dogs, Gustav 3.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Donut isn't impressed by the Hole spell, which just makes a temporary, small, and shallow hole in a surface, but Carl sees massive potential in it once it levels up a bit. Such as Portal Cuts.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • When it comes down to a choice between the death of Miriam Dom or her Ascended Animal companion Prepotente, she chooses to die in order to keep him safe. (It probably helps that she knew that her death would cure all the vampires on the floor.)
  • Carl intends to sacrifice himself in order to break Diwata's peace seal and let the other Crawlers fight the hunters and Queen Imogen. But Signet, who has become aware of her own NPC status, sacrifices herself instead.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: After the Royal Court keeps inadvertently breaking the "Robot Donut" toys placed with them, Loita insists on the toys having a self-destruct system to avoid them being able to access the internals. Carl successfully rigs one to blow her up, a fairly literal example.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: "Juice Box" the changeling cares a lot about her brothers and sisters, and is very helpful to the Royal Court in exchange for protecting them. She goes to the ninth floor to rally the surviving NPCs, in exchange for Carl's promise to bring the other changelings with him instead of leaving them to die in the floor collapse. (Carl doesn't make use of her professional services, although several other crawlers do.)
• Horrible Judge of Character: Where Carl tends to be fairly level-headed and capable of sussing out whether someone is friend or foe, Donut leaps wildly between the extremes of trusting someone because they seem nice or hating them because they say something nice about dogs. Apart from them, we have Hekla, of Brunhilde's Daughters, who think's Carl is a Mad Bomber and completely unstable, despite extended interactions with him during out-of-dungeon interviews and being a psychologist.
• I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: Loita lets Carl know that terrible things were done to Zev's family to ensure her compliance. That just makes Carl more certain that Loita needs to die. Zev later reveals that her family was slaughtered.
• If I Do Not Return: Before facing Vrah and her siblings, Carl entrusts Donut's safety to Zev in the event that he gets killed.
• Improvised Weapon: Carl stabs someone in the neck with a Sharpie. Specifically, a Sharpie for signing autographs at CrawlCon, with its motions being mimicked halfway across the galaxy where the actual recipients are.
• Inertia Is a Harsh Mistress: Carl's Protective Shell spell stays in one place for twenty seconds, physically blocking all hostile mobs but not magic or physical materials. On the trains, he discovers that dropping the shell at the front of the train results in all the mobs getting violently dragged through all the walls, inevitably killing all of them. With some trickery, he clears the Nightmare train this way, killing a host of powerful monsters and three neighborhood bosses in one move.
  • He repeats it on the fifth floor during a specially designed battle that goes beyond the typical scripted boss battles.
• Inexplicably Awesome: Agatha, from the Meadow Lark retirement home, just strolls through the dungeon leaving people scratching their heads in her wake. There are some indications that she is one of the Valtay and got caught up in the dungeon by mistake, but that still doesn't really explain how she's surviving and progressing without doing the usual crawler things. We eventually learn that she's a Primal, a remnant of the first civilization that has split into at least two factions. Her faction is determined to extinguish all life in the galaxy, and that's why she's in the dungeon.
  Li Jun: That woman is here, by the way. The one with the shopping cart. She just pulled up out of nowhere and entered the stairwell. She didn't talk to us, and she went down before the six hour mark. I don't know where she came from. She's only level 12.
  Carl: Yeah, that's Agatha. We just ignore Agatha. Best of luck to you.
• Insistent Terminology: When Donut accuses Hekla of firing arrows at Katia, while she's attached to the Nightmare Express, Hekla repeatedly reminds Donut that they're bolts, not arrows, instead of defending herself.
• Intangibility: Mordecai makes Carl a potion that allows him to pass effortlessly through lava and molten rock — including crawlers of the Coal Engine race.
• Interface Spoiler: Crawlers' built-in interface allows for an absurd amount of customization, including the ability to monitor their social media popularity. Carl takes advantage of this when he realizes that their views skyrocket if the audience knows that something exciting is just about to happen, allowing the Court to avoid being ambushed and taken by surprise.
• Involuntary Shapeshifting: Mordecai is transformed into a different species on each floor, with no control over the process. On the fifth floor, he actually becomes a different subspecies of his native race, the Skyfowl — which he's happy about, but as he's in a form that can only fly short distances, he's also disappointed.
• Ironic Echo: Loita brushes aside Carl's concern for the way that a young NPC has been traumatised, telling him that "no one likes melodrama." Carl repeats it back to her when she's cursing him with her last breath.
• It Amused Me: The system AI has constraints, but within them, it frequently acts in a way that's clearly just for its own entertainment. The descriptions of achievements, items, and monsters are particularly telling.
  AI: Ever seen a hundred Dromedarians die because their lungs imploded, followed by their skin getting melted off their body just before they all shatter into mist? Well now's your chance!
• I've Never Seen Anything Like This Before: Despite Mordecai's long experience of past crawls, this one keeps breaking new ground. The AI giving a crawler shares of stock in real companies outside the World Dungeon? Feral gods and the Scolopendra plotline getting tangled up in the fifth floor? It makes him even grumpier.
• Killed Off for Real: On some of the floors, Syndicate tourists can enter the Dungeon and safely participate, for a fee. The ninth floor faction wars revolve around this concept. However, on the sixth floor, the AI does not reserve a portion of their health and whisk them away from lethal danger; if a hunter is killed on the sixth floor, they're truly dead. (Of course, this merely puts them in the same position that the Crawlers were in all along, but to them, it feels like a big deal to be in so much danger.)
• Klingon Promotion: Crawlers can take control of villages and cities on the Scolopendra floors by killing the current mayor. Even if it's as blatant as openly murdering the mayor in front of the town guards.

L-P

• Laugh Themselves Sick: Upon seeing Mordecai's sixth floor form, a cross between a capybara, a miniature bear, and a sugar glider, Carl falls off the couch laughing. Mordecai is less amused.
• Lethally Expensive: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook is replete with cases where the past crawlers lost their lives to obtain their information, such as learning that administrators in out-of-dungeon broadcasts might only be present as holograms, and that the broadcast trailers are protected by force fields — by attempting to blow one up, and slowly dying in the wreckage.
• Level Grinding: Common; many passages amount to a quick "we ground against mobs for the day." Both Carl and Mordecai would prefer they do nothing but this, but they keep getting caught up in schemes and quests. Special mention goes to the time Katia formed into a cowcatcher on the front of a train, killing hundreds of mobs in minutes as they sped through the floor. By the end of it, she's gone from middle-of-the-pack to the highest level crawler in the dungeon.
• Literal Metaphor: The Royal Court encounters "Literal Fire Ants" on the fourth floor.
  Like regular fire ants, but with more enthusiasm. Plus they hate you and want you to die. They're pretty good at making that happen.
  We all scrambled backwards away from the flaming tide.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • The whole thing started because of a loophole in the universe's laws: A species has fifty years after First Contact to make a proper claim to their planet's resources. If they default, they have no rights whatsoever, and can be immediately killed and their entire planet looted. First Contact can be made at any time the planet has something that can reasonably be called a civilization and a few cities—Earth got contacted during Ancient Egypt. If the planet has no ability to actually file a claim because they have no space travel or even widespread planetary communication? Too bad, they're all dead now.
  • Carl gets a lot of mileage out of exploiting the system rules. Sometimes exploits get patched, but other times they remain feasible.
    • Monsters that enter one of the stairwells to the next floor are destroyed. Even the ridiculously powerful Rage Elementals unleashed in retaliation for crawlers urinating in the hallways. That one gets patched.
    • The "Protective Shell" spell lasts just 20 seconds, remains immobile once cast, and only reacts to hostile creatures. Which means that if Carl casts it in front of a fast-moving enemy — or a train full of enemies — and then gets out of the way, it will basically pancake his foes while leaving allies, neutrals and structure intact.
    • A Sapper table enhances the effect of explosives placed on it. Including the anti-tampering Self Destruct system in the Robot Donut toy, which Carl uses to kill Loita.
    • The Gate of the Feral Gods releases a rampaging god after it closes. But if the origin point was inside one of the indestructible bubbles on floor 5, then the god is trapped and harmless. Furthermore, Crawlers absolutely cannot use it to cross floors. But NPCs can, and they can even bring Carl's flying house through, making it available on the next floor. And so can mobs, allowing Carl to flood a city with shark-infested water.
  • Donut's Former Child Actor class lets her pick a class to emulate on each new floor, with some limitations. It has two major unintended benefits: First, as she grows in power and experience she becomes eligible for far more rare and powerful classes that no one could have qualified at normal class selection. Second, if she gets a boost to any skills that she doesn't already have, she can carry those skills to the next floor as long as she levels them up at least once. It's difficult to get a skill in the first place, but once she starts earning experience for it she gets to keep it.
  • The sixth floor hunters are locked up in the city of Zockau for thirty hours once the crawlers arrive, to give crawlers a head start and a fighting chance. But nothing says a hunter's pets (read: vicious magical Attack Animals) have to stay there. And nothing says a crawler can't deliberately travel to Zockau and make a surprise attack.
• Losing Your Head: Psamathe the sex doll ends up as a disembodied but still perfectly functional head, albeit with a vicious attitude.
  Samantha: Quick, give me a weapon.
  Carl: A weapon? You can't move.
  Samantha: You have daggers in your inventory! Stick one in my mouth!
• Mad Bomber: Carl is actually fairly sane and stable (considering the circumstances), but the recap broadcasts pick and choose what they show to give other crawlers the impression that he's this trope. He does, admittedly, use a lot of explosives, and pulls off some pretty wacky and dangerous stunts. The fact that he wears no pants or shoes (just boxers) probably doesn't help his image, either.
  Carl: Why is it every time there’s a big explosion, you immediatelythink I had something to do with it?
  Elle: Because it usually is you.
  Donut: She does have a point, Carl.
• Magical Barefooter: The AI pushes Carl into this, giving him a pedicure set that makes his feet Nigh-Invulnerable but requires him to wear no shoes. It's worth the trade-off — so long as he doesn't forget to reapply it daily.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The second floor is infested with "brindle pupa" larvae, which are so harmless that they don't even give experience. However, they will consume any dead material and multiply rapidly, then form cocoons, and within a few days, emerge as swarms of dozens or hundreds of giant killer wasps. And whatever the wasps kill gets swarmed with more brindle pupae...
  • Most races give stat boosts compared to remaining human. Carl instead chooses one that gives him a small penalty across the board, but in return allows all skills to be eventually trained up to level 20 rather than 15. (The real reason he chose it, though, is because it's the bogeyman of the show producers, the race that scares children.)
  • The Ring of Divine Suffering gives a permanent stat bonus every time you kill a designated crawler or "tourist;" that is, anyone besides an NPC. While not bad, it's not really worth the risk, since you can't heal until you kill them—meaning you're in serious trouble if they get away. But the bonus also increases as your total kill count increases. According to Mordecai, crawlers never actually benefit from the rings; instead, hunters kill them for the rings, then line up a few hundred enemies and kill them all one by one.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: This certainly isn't true on the earlier floors, and still isn't true later, as everyone has to do everything they can to survive. That said, the end game on each floor is increasingly "Carl comes up with something insane to save the world" starting with the fourth floor.
• Make It Look Like an Accident:
  • The "dirty little crossbow bolt" remains invisible and drains its target to very low health, but doesn't actually kill them — so the person who fired it doesn't get marked with a player-killer skull if the victim should "unfortunately" die to the next monster attack.
  • Despite a full investigation, the murder of Loita via exploding toy can't be successfully pinned on Carl. The investigator is impressed. Carl did such a good job with limited resources that the investigator assumes Carl had even more knowledge and resources than he actually did, making the murder looking all the more accidental and impressive (although the investigator, a secret ally, may have been trying to overplay the case to make it more plausible that Carl didn't do it). (Carl did do it.)
• Mama Bear + Papa Wolf: The nursery where all the children and pregant people who entered the dungeon were sent to is in the south of India. The south of India is on fire, visible from space, because the surviving humans on the surface won't stop fighting to reclaim those inside the nursery.
• Manipulative Editing: The dungeon broadcasts often do this. Carl notes that not only does the first broadcast for Earth show only the most impoverished and crime-ridden parts of the world, but they're lifting some images straight out of disaster movies, all to make the planet look like a dump that was beyond saving.
• Mark of Shame: Killing another crawler, for any reason, gets you marked with a skull, visible to any crawler who looks at you. How they'll react to this varies.
  • Within the Royal Court, Carl has thus far avoided it, but Donut has a skull from killing an assassin, and Katia has a golden skull from killing Hekla and claiming her bounty — although she was actually aiming for someone else.
  • Frank and Maggie have five skulls when Carl meets them, but insist it was self-defence. It wasn't. But it was for their daughter's sake. When Carl finally ends Maggie, she has accumulated lots more.
  • Florin even gets one for unintentionally killing his girlfriend, by shooting someone with damage reflection. Apparently it doesn't matter whose fault the kill is, just who landed the blow.
  • When Carl and Donut first meet the Lark Meadows crew, they're shocked to see Yolanda has twelve skulls and is already at level nine. Turns out their retirement home stumbled on some monsters that lit a dozen residents on fire and she had to Mercy Kill them.
• Marked to Die: Crawlers can get a skill literally called "Marked for Death", where they select a target and must then kill that person, which grants them stat boosts when they do. Of course, it also brands them with skulls. And they can't heal themselves in any way until they've killed the target. And they can't lift the mark without killing them. And they can only mark them when they're at full health, aka the start of the fight. It's still an unreasonably powerful skill in the right hands, since the stat boosts become ever greater as they kill more marks.
• Meaningful Name: Hump Town is full of camels, prostitutes, and prostitutes in camel form.
• Mentor in Sour Armor: Mordecai is fairly grumpy, and specifically unhappy about becoming Donut's manager, which is delaying his retirement, but is very knowledgeable and does prove to be quite helpful. How much of that is because he actually cares about them, vs how much is because he gets financial incentives to help them get as far as possible, is hard to say.
• Metaphorically True: The description of the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook isn't exactly lying when it claims that, "Each recipe is accompanied by a hilarious tale by the anonymous author, recounting some of the zany and madcap misadventures they experienced gathering these mouth-watering recipes." It's just that unlike what it implies, the recipes are less about making food, and more about Loophole Abuse — both inside the dungeon and outside.
• Mighty Glacier: The town guards on the third floor are slow enough for crawlers to outrun them, and only carry swords, but are level 75, vastly higher than even the strongest crawlers, making them extremely durable and highly lethal if they catch you. And they're telepathically connected; attacking one will make them all hostile.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Thoroughly averted. Nearly everyone on Earth dies in the initial collapse and a little more than fourteen million people make it into the dungeon and the numbers drop shockingly fast, with several million dead by the end of the first day. Carl is horrified and motivated to get revenge by the scale of the death he's seeing. Belgium made it into the dungeon, Poughkeepsie made it to the ninth floor. As the crawlers make it deeper into the dungeon, it gets inverted, with the number of surviving crawlers being a point of pride, honor, and revenge. They may have been reduced to the population of a small, backwater city, but goddammit if they're not going to make those bastards hurt.
• Mistaken for Insane: Carl is believed by most crawlers and viewers to be kind of an Ax-Crazy Mad Bomber who loves killing people, including children. This is partly due to the deceptive editing of the Kua-Tin broadcasts and partly to the fact that Carl is a little bit crazy. Despite his slight penchant for casually juggling lethal explosives, however, he's resolute about helping the helpless and fighting the elite assholes who put everyone in this situation, so when the uninformed try to manipulate him based on their belief that he's just one of those dipshit Bomb-Throwing Anarchists, it tends to go completely pear-shaped for them.
• Mix-and-Match Weapon: It's a bit cobbled together, but Carl's rocket-powered buzz-saw proves to be effective against Lusca the Octo-Shark.
• Mobile Maze: The fourth floor is a mess of hundreds of train lines known as "The Iron Tangle", with stations all over the place letting you transfer between lines. The trains are all loaded with monsters, the high-speed trains that allow backtracking have extra special monsters, and when crawlers start inevitably derailing some of them, the monsters get really dangerous. And riding the trains to the end of the line will dump you into an incinerator unless you have a portal key, in which case you're taken to a train yard full of zombies.
• Monstrous Seal: Monk Seals are big, tough, fast, sapient, trained in martial arts (yes, really), and can use some simple spells. Which is why Carl wants one Reforged into a Minion.
• Never Speak Ill of the Dead: Carl has a lot of problems with his ex-girlfriend Bea, but since she's dead he doesn't see the need to bring them up. Especially since she was essentially Donut's mother, and Carl really doesn't want to ruin Donut's memory of her by telling her about how she was planning to sell Donut as a breeder and replace her with a kitten. Turns out Donut knew the entire time. Also turns out Bea's not dead.
• Not Good with Rejection: After Carl dumped her, Bea freaked out and tried to fly home from her holiday immediately, dragging with her the boy she was cheating with. As a result, she survives the initial Collapse, but she's left broken and hollow afterward. She eventually gets a chance to see Carl and Donut, but can't do much more than stare at them and give minimal answers to questions she's asked.
• Not Quite Dead: Donut's "Cockroach" skill lets her occasionally survive an attack that ought to have killed her. (Since she has very low Constitution, that's not a high bar.) She first uses it to survive an assassination attempt in the Desperado Club.
• The Not-So-Harmless Punishment: Landing on a "Nothing!" space on either the roulette tables or the Wheel of Fortune game in the Desperado Club's casino results in the hapless wagerer getting literal "nothing" — that is, they get instantly dumped into some kind of hell dimension. Carl doesn't realize this until after he's already placed his bet. His Wheel of Fortune spin comes dangerously close, but ultimately gives him a Scroll of Upgrade instead.
• Oh, My Gods!: The religion of the dungeon is probably made up, but there are various religions out in the larger galaxy. People frequently swear (usually at Carl) with "Godsdammit" (note the plural) and Mordecai and others favor "By his left tit!".
• Off the Rails: Carl and company do everything they can to make plans and prepare contingencies, but the dungeon is very good at throwing curve balls that screw everything up from the jump. Fortunately, Carl's real expertise is the Indy Ploy.
• Off with His Head!:
  • Carl kills a skin-stealing warmage with a Portal Cut.
  • Mongo's first reaction to Robot Donut is to bite its head off. Actually, Mongo does that to a lot of things.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Carl's ex-girlfriend Bea did this, as she was taught by her mother to never let Carl know how smart she was—they both believed that men can't handle intelligent women (intelligent men will discard them; dumb men will, too, but only if the women are foolish enough to let the men know they're intelligent). This trait passed on to Donut more than a little, and she plays up her ignorance and childishness when people are watching. Carl is worried because people are always watching, so she never takes off the mask.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: Carl is presented with three options for dealing with the Gate of the Feral Gods; two of them involve the death of himself and everyone around him.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: After Carl kills Hunter Vrah's sister, she sends him a helpful warning — because she wants him to survive until she can kill him slowly and painfully herself.
• Our Goblins Are Different: These ones are not especially physically strong, but are known for using large amounts of less-than-stable explosives. After almost getting killed by some of them, Carl lucks into a tattoo that makes them not automatically hostile, allowing him to stock up on various types of bombs.
• Out-Gambitted: Borant Corporation and the Skull Empire have enough warning to adapt to a feral god being dropped on the Skull Empire's camp on the ninth floor. Too bad that Carl had found a secret way to coordinate with his team, outside even the crawler chat, and arranged to instead flood the city of Larracos, catching them completely off guard and wiping out their supply lines.
• Pacifist Run: Carl comes across a group of crawlers from a nursing home, who were lucky enough to be outside when the world collapsed and who were brought into the dungeon because it was dangerously cold outside. Many of them die, but those who survive to the third floor, obviously without killing anything, get Legendary "Pacifist" loot boxes that (in conjunction with the third floor race selection) make them serious contenders.
• Parental Incest: The only way for Vrah to be cured of her Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea is to pass it on to someone else, but all the other mantids on the floor are dead. So her mother pays an exorbitant amount of money to manifest in the Dungeon as a shapeshifting deity, takes on a male mantis form, and relieves her. Then shapeshifts into a female mantis and starts pumping out baby mantises for revenge on Carl. The Crawlers agree that it's all kinds of messed up.
• Paying for Air: In the Crapsack World outside the dungeon, if you're not a citizen, you have to pay for the right to have oxygen.
• Plot Armor: In-Universe. Elite mobs are part of scripted shows, entertainment programs that take place inside the dungeon. Mordecai warns that the writers and producers behind these shows don't like crawlers messing with their planned plots, and they can edit an elite's mind at will and shift their abilities to a limited degree. So in addition to elites being extremely powerful, they are also liable to turn on a crawler despite all logic, suddenly have extra uses of their overpowered spells, and have allies pop up out of nowhere. Mordecai recommends staying far away from them.
• Plot-Inciting Infidelity: One of the first things we find out about Carl is that his girlfriend cheated on him while she was on vacation. He ended it quickly and maturely, and was just waiting for her father to come and pick up all her stuff from their apartment. This indirectly led to the plot; he was smoking with the window open (Bea hated him smoking inside, but he doesn't care any more), his girlfriend's cat jumps out, and he has to go out in the freezing cold in the middle of the night to get her—right when everyone who is indoors is killed by the dungeon forming. Donut later tells him that Bea was cheating on him a lot, with multiple people.
• Portal Cut: Donut gains a spell called "Hole," which simply puts a temporary hole in a material. Carl's "Surprise Three" is for her to make a hole, drag something through it, and cancel the spell so that the mob is cut in half. They aren't sure it will work until they actually try it. It does work, letting Carl kill an otherwise very powerful warmage with ease.
• Power at a Price: Donut's tiara gives her stat boosts and gives her attacks a chance of inflicting sepsis, but also means that she can't leave the ninth floor until everyone in the Blood Sultanate line of succession is dead. And if she ever takes it off, it will vanish, but the drawback will remain. She eventually has to remove it on the third floor, when their magic items run wild.
• Power Perversion Potential: The changelings in "Hump Town" are all prostitutes who are willing to use their powers to put on a show. Louis and Firas quite appreciate forms like Slave Leia, for example.
• Precursors: The Primals, a vanished race so ancient no one today knows what they look like. They created the AI technology that turned the Inner Systems into the haven of peace and power it is today, and which powers the dungeon crawls. The Mantids have been trying to recreate it. Carl takes Primal as his race on the third floor, giving him some advantages while leaving him looking human.
• Puppeteer Parasite:
  • The Valtay "brain worms" inhabit other bodies, sometimes willing, sometimes not... Carl isn't sure what to make of them, but he actually gets sponsored by them.
  • Maggie My takes on the Infiltrator race and infests a crawler in order to get close to Carl and try to assassinate him.
• Put on a Bus: On the fourth floor, right when Mordecai is starting to figure out the big puzzle of the floor, he encounters an old enemy, attacks him, and is put in a "time-out" for seven days—meaning he'll come back only a day and a half before the floor collapses. Carl immediately deduces that this was set up deliberately to screw them over.

R-Z

• Rainbow Pimp Gear: Yes, Carl wears boxer shorts, a trollskin shirt covering some nipple rings, a bandana, and no shoes. At least he's distinctive?
• Random Number God: Carl realizes early on that the "random" lootboxes are far from random. In addition to the AI giving him all sorts of loot for his feet, he never gets shoes or pants because he keeps complaining about not having shoes and pants. The reason Donut keeps getting common torches in her minor boxes is because she hisses in annoyance every time she gets one, and the AI finds it funny. This has worked out in their favor more than a few times; it's implied that the entire reason Donut got such a good "random" benefit from the Legendary Pet Biscuit was as reward for being the first cat in the dungeon, even though the dungeon couldn't directly reward her that way.
• Rare Candy:
  • Potions that boost one skill by a few levels are common. They come both in varieties that upgrade a random skill, and ones that upgrade a specific skill. They typically have a timer, forcing you to drink them immediately so that you can't wait to level the skill first and get a bigger benefit. There are even rare ones that max out a skill.
  • Carl gets a bottle of "Pawna's Tears", which will immediately raise any skill of his choice by five levels and is not on a timer. Mordecai immediately advises him to save it for later, once he's gotten a skill to level 15, so he can immediately boost it to 20. Mordecai explains that part of the reason the item is so valuable is that there are quite a few rare and useful skills that don't normally have potions, but Pawna's Tears can boost any skill.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Zev, Donut and Carl's agent, is progressive, forward-thinking, good at negotiating, takes their needs and tastes into account when getting them on programs, and is willing to put up with a lot of backtalk. Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, she's essentially a Jewish sympathizer in Nazi Germany, so she's limited in what she can do without pissing off her bosses. The first clue to her status is when Mordecai, at first terrified, visibly relaxes on closer examination of her, which she explains to Carl and Donut is because she's not a Party member.
• Red Shirt: Lampshaded by Tran, when he's being recruited for a highly dangerous trip into the ocean full of monsters. Tran actually survives, while Vadim doesn't.
  Tran: Do you own a red shirt? I feel as if I should put one on.
  Vadim: What does that mean?
• Reforged into a Minion: The eighth floor allows squads to collect up to six more "recruits" by beating monsters nearly to the point of death and then marking them with special flags that convert them into summoning cards.
• Refuge in Audacity: Carl's stock in trade, and the AI loves it almost as much as it love Carl's feet.
  Carl: Holy shit I have a glorious idea.
  Mordecai: No.
  Carl: You don’t know what it is yet.
  Mordecai: I don’t care what it is. If it’s a Carl idea, it’s probably a brilliant idea that’s going to get you killed.
• The Reveal: As the series continues, we learn a lot about the various characters and their relationships to one another and the larger universe.
  • In the distant past, Odette was manager to Mordecai, his brother, and their friend Chaco. Desperate to earn enough money to live comfortably when she was free, she saved Mordecai's life by forcing Chaco to kill Mordecai's brother. She's lived with the guilt ever since.
  • Agatha is a Primal. One of at least two factions, her goal is to destroy all life in the universe.
  • The Krakaren isn't just a racist joke, it's a remnant of the Primals as well. Mordecai says early on it's better known as The Apothecary, which Agatha thinks of as the traitor Primal.
  • Donut is just a show-winning princess. Were you expecting an actual surprise here? Joke's on you. Now get out there and kill kill kill!
• Revenge:
  • There's no bringing back Earth, but Carl is resolved to bring down the people responsible for taking it away.
    Carl: This I swear on my life. One by one, I will break you. I will break you all.
  • He in turn picks up a hunter who swears a vendetta to eat his organs and take his head as a trophy, after he kills her sister.
  • Maggie My, in a Never My Fault fashion blames Carl and Donut for the death of her daughter and is hell-bent on killing them both.
• Rewatch Bonus: On the fourth floor, Carl discovers that the dungeon-spanning Krakaren storyline is actually a super racist pastiche of a political enemy of Borant. This makes the creature descriptions of Krakaren and her minions in the early floors (about how the Krakaren gets stupider as it grows and its minions are all brainwashed idiots) significantly less funny and more uncomfortable, as it becomes less a stupid joke and more blatant propaganda.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: On the sixth floor, Mordecai is turned into a small fuzzy bear-like creature with oversized eyes. Carl falls off the couch laughing. Donut is unimpressed by his reaction.
  Donut: You shouldn't make fun of someone just because they're small and adorable, Carl.
• Ridiculously Potent Explosive: Carl picks up a soul crystal enclosed in a magical cage Just in Time before it goes off. If he ever takes it out of his inventory again, it will explode with enough force to "rattle the teeth of a god". He's finally able to work with it once he gets an advanced bomb-making workshop that can hold the explosion in stasis. If he tries anywhere outside his workshop, he has a third of a millisecond before it kills everything in a 45 kilometer radius.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: After Miriam Dom lets herself die so that Prepotente can survive halfway through "The Butcher's Masquerade", he sets out to either kill everyone remotely responsible, or die trying. Carl can relate.
• Rule of Cool:
  • Like Jurassic Park, the books portray velociraptors incorrectly. They were about the size of a turkey, not a horse (albeit six feet long, with the tail). However, they're just so damn awesome this way.
  • The dungeon as a whole operates this way as often as it subverts it. Sometimes it gives crawlers items because it would be so damn awesome for them to have that item. Other times it makes it a point to screw the crawler over. This is how Elle McGibbons ended up a floating death ice princess and Li Na ended up a chain demon, while Carl is stuck wearing a sleeveless holed leather jacket, heart boxers, and knee pads over bare feet. Also, Princess Donut has a tiara and sunglasses.
• My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: Along with Refuge in Audacity, Indy Ploy, and Achievements in Ignorance, this is Carl's stock in trade. He's good at discovering loopholes and taking advantage of his knowledge of the systems at play to thoroughly break the dungeon. After he gets The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook in The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, he just gets more effective.
• Sadist:
  • The AI gets disappointed if things stay too peaceful. It can tolerate a certain amount of non-violence, and even admire the skill involved in winning without fighting, but in the end it wants crawlers to kill, kill, kill!
    AI: Hmmm. Maybe that's a little too easy. Do you know not a single crawler in Bubble 18 has yet died? The whole world has been turned to lava, and they're all still alive! That's just ridiculous. That's no fiesta. Let me think on this for a minute.
    ...
    New Quest! Get Orthrus.
    This is a world quest! All living crawlers on the fifth floor will receive this message!
    Now it's a party.
  • Before the dungeon, Miriam Dom was a vegan. So the producers thought it would be hilarious to arrange for her to be cursed and turned into a vampire.
  • The Kua-Tin are no better. Cascadia, who has been in charge of designing the dungeon, is the one telling the crawlers to stop sucking and get out there and kill, kill, kill! When the Kua-Tin notice that the crawlers have started cooperating by the fourth floor to make sure as many people as possible survive, they make it a point to split them up so they can't do that on the fifth floor.
• Schmuck Bait: The dungeon loves to lure people into traps. Sometimes it's as simple as a sign for "Da Tutorial Guild" a hundred feet from the entrance to the first floor of the dungeon. Sometimes it's more subtle, like the Enchanted Night Wyrm's Ring of Divine Suffering, which offers incredible bonuses, but only if you kill other crawlers (or hunters) and only if you make a very risky decision at the start of the fight to guarantee that one of you dies. According to Mordecai, the dungeon AI loves to give that to crawlers so that they become targets for hunters who then use it to set up the plot of the ninth and twelfth floors.
• Secret Legacy: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook introduces The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, which is the latest in a long line of seemingly worthless items that have appeared in various crawls since the fifteenth season (first author still unknown). Each one appears innocuous except when read by the person it was meant for, and will disappear if that person talks about it, dies, or tries to share it. Crawlers can leave notes to each other from crawl to crawl, mostly recipes for important potions and explosives, but also monster information and—most importantly—secrets about how to circumvent system protections and eventually bring the entire system down. The exact criteria for the Cookbook are not explained, but each owner is essentially the same person, dedicated to vengeance for their destroyed world and passing everything they can to the next generation. In addition to Carl, several other contributors to the Cookbook are alive and well and working to bring down the Crawl, if not the Syndicate as a whole.
  Hello, Crawler. As you're about to find, this is a very special book. If you're reading these words, it means this book has found its way into your hands for one purpose and one purpose only.
  Together, we will burn it all to the ground.
• See-Thru Specs: Donut's benefactor sends her a pair of sunglasses that allow her to see invisible objects. Which is how she spots the enchanted crossbow bolts that Hekla fires at Katia. Oh, and they also focus her Magic Missile spell into a laser beam.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism:
  • Each floor is atomised and "reclaimed" when its timer runs out, which can vary from days to weeks; any crawlers who haven't gone down a staircase by that time are dead. Mordecai notes that the sponsors seem to be in a hurry this season, with timers being unusually short.
  • The "robot Donut" toy placed with Carl has anti-tampering features that cause it to explode when damaged. He can't get his head around how this is supposed to be marketed to children, but Loita insists that the reason he keeps destroying them is just because of his dungeon-enhanced strength.
• Share the Sickness: The [Super Spreader] benefit allows Carl to pass on his ailments to other people on contact. It turns out that the inability to heal after marking someone with the Ring of Divine Suffering counts as an effect that can be spread in this way.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: As the survivors get lower and lower into the dungeon, we start to see that the constant violence is starting to wear on them. The focus is naturally on the viewpoint character, Carl, but we get to see others deteriorate as well. Especially Lucia Mar.
• Shock and Awe: The celestial box given to Quan Ch grants the ability to shoot lightning blasts. And Flight. And Anti-Magic. And Deflector Shields. It's a potent combination for level grinding. Too bad he doesn't care who else gets hurt in the process.
• Shown Their Work: Dinniman frequently includes details that demonstrate he's done his research on a wide variety of topics in order to include them in the story.
  • For example, Donut's full name is GC, BWR, NW Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk. GC means Grand Champion, BWR means Breed Winner Regional, and NW means National Winner, while Queen Anne is an upscale neighborhood in Seattle and she's thus the Chonk of Queen Anne and her title of Princess isn't redundant with that of Queen. And that's just for her name and is never explained in the books.
  • Worshipping gods in the dungeon is presented as more trouble than it's worth. Most religions in human history have gods that represent the dangerous and uncontrollable forces of nature that are, at best, indifferent to humanity. For the Greeks in particular, worshipping a god didn't necessarily get you their favor, but was likely to earn the jealousy of another. If the gods in the dungeon are controlled by the AI, they're definitely indifferent at best. If they're sponsored by an outsider, then they're likely to be actively malicious and certainly can't be trusted.
• Shrinking Violet: Katia is not really prepared for the spotlight when she first joins the Royal Court, especially when they're pulled out onto a major broadcast show; she gives monosyllabic answers and wants to vanish into a corner. Fortunately for her, the host is more interested in Carl and Donut than in heckling her.
• Skeleton Key: With emphasis on the "skeleton". Carl's "Scavenger's Daughter" back patch gives him the Mysterious Bone Key ability, which will permanently consume the entire patch plus one of his own bones to produce a single-use key for any lock in the Dungeon. The choice of bone depends on the complexity of the needed key. Some things a few people say imply that the ability might let him pick someone else to sacrifice the bone, and it's yet another cruel joke giving him the opportunity to screw over his friends to survive.
• The Slacker: Mordecai isn't the only guide who gives good advice, but it seems pretty rare. Most of them are checked out and apathetic, leading to some awful scenarios. Tiatha, Katia's guide, is okay, but is The Alcoholic (like Mordecai, too, but to a greater extent), while Frank's and Maggie's guide told them to become player killers off the bat.
• Slow and Steady Wins the Race: Carl chooses the Primal race on the third floor, which lowers all of his stats, but makes it possible to raise all of his skills to 20 rather than the normal cap of 15. Donut, meanwhile, is stuck with a certain kind of progression thanks to being a cat, meaning that Carl is slowly overtaking her on stats.
• Small Name, Big Ego: A brief scene from Brad's perspective shows him constantly thinking of himself as a "king," looking down on Carl, and overall just being the epitome of a douchebag stereotype. Donut, on the other hand, refers to him as Bea's sex toy. He doesn't even appear to be aware that he's not the only person Bea is cheating on Carl with. When some bounty hunters try to grab Bea, he gets himself shot trying to grab their gun, and then he is left to bleed out with zero fanfare.
• Soul Eating: The Soul Reaper ability allows its user to consume the soul essence of those they kill with melee attacks, then imbue all their collected essence into another melee attack. Furthermore, every time they fill their essence capacity and discharge it, the capacity increases. However, carrying essence around for too long can be harmful.
  Actually, you know what? Just ignore this warning. Forget I said anything. Carrying corrupted essence around on your back builds character. You already have a ring that's doing much worse to you anyway.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • The crawl's intended structure starts to break down when Carl prematurely kills off the supply lines for the faction wars (and kills a considerable portion of the armies, too).
    Zev: If they want to fix this, they'll have to get the Syndicate to vote on it. And they won't have the votes. And even if they did, they'll have to get the AI on board, and that's not going to happen. The whole system is already spiraling, and it's the earliest this has ever happened.
  • Carl later learns about a past crawl where Remex the Grand accidentally unleashed a horde of powerful revenants on the ninth floor, severely disrupting the faction wars — especially since the horde didn't go away until Remex himself arrived, weeks later.
• Spit Take: Carl asks a train conductor for a map of the Iron Tangle, while the conductor is taking a drink, and has to wait several seconds while the conductor deals with the liquid that spurted up his nose when he tried to laugh.
  Vernon: A map of the entire Tangle? Ain't no such thing. Way too complicated. There are hundreds of lines, maybe thousands, and they all twist around each other.
• Sufficiently Advanced Magic: Mordecai explains early on that the Syndicate has technology so advanced as to be effectively magic. Spells and mana points are referenced throughout the dungeon, but it's unclear if they're real or just part of the theme. Mordecai mentions that other dungeons, such as the Valtay, sometimes do a sci-fi theme instead, implying that there's no actual difference between the two and magic is just one way to package everything.
• Summon Bigger Fish: The best way to deal with a god is bringing in another god who doesn't like the first one. By the end of the fifth floor, summonings of feral and non-feral gods are flying thick and fast; there's even a feral demon, taken out by summoning a god.
• Super-Strength: It doesn't take very many bonuses to the Strength stat to reach significantly superhuman levels. Katia is not extraordinary in that regard, but still manages to carry a literal ton of metal as part of incorporating it into her body.
• Team Killer:
  • The system deliberately encourages this, because it's entertaining for the viewers. Killing any crawler for the first time, for any reason, rewards the killer with a ticket for each member of their current party. Each ticket promises highly lucrative rewards for killing the crawler named on the ticket. Carl finds out later that Donut received tickets after she killed an assassin in self-defence, and she wasn't sure how to deal with them. He's not too worried for himself, knowing that Donut would never backstab him, but Katia finds out about the tickets and gets seriously concerned.
  • Hekla tries to arrange for Katia to be killed in a way that will cause Carl to get into a fight and get himself killed too, so that Donut will be left alone and open to joining Hekla's party.
  • Chaco warns Carl that if he gets far enough, the showrunners will engineer a situation where he's forced to turn against his party members, and that Chaco himself was once forced to kill Mordecai's brother in order for anyone in their party to survive.
    Chaco: It happens every time. You'll regret making it as far as you have, no matter who is helping you. No matter how close you are, we’re all alone in the end. Alone and broken with the choices we’ve had to make.
• There Can Be Only One: Anyone who has ever put on the Enchanted Crown of the Sepsis Whore — even if they later give it up — becomes part of the royal line of inheritance for the Blood Sultanate, and cannot descend past the ninth floor until every other candidate is dead. Donut was so enthralled by its appearance that she rushed to put it on before reading that part. And then Eva puts it on Katia against her will, before Katia can finish her off.
• Threatening Shark:
  • The fifth floor's aquatic quadrant is full of sharks. They're really just the "janitor" mobs intended to clean up corpses, but they don't mind getting a head start on any living crawlers they find.
  • Then Carl has to fight a giant tentacled "Octo-Shark". Why not a sharktopus? Apparently the octo-shark is a real alien species. The AI agrees that Carl's name is better.
  • They're not just dangerous to crawlers, though; he later opens a portal to flood a city with shark-infested water.
• Truce Zone: No one at the Butcher's Masquerade is allowed to attack anyone else, even though they're specifically selected for maximum interpersonal conflict and the host is a Country Boss. They're encouraged to break the truce (and suffer a terrible consequence) because the alternative is the Country Boss receiving a huge upgrade that will make the ensuing fight that much more difficult.
• Took a Level in Badass: Of course any crawler who survives is going to become an unstoppable badass in normal terms, but a few deserve special mention.
  • The Meadowlark residents. These are septa-, octa-, and nona-genarians who were all on the edge of death from old age. Those that made it to the third floor got new races and classes that rejuvenated them, quite literally, and gave them a lot of power. Tip of the hat to Elle McGibbons, who made it to the top ten with her ice princess class/race.
  • Katia was an underpowered, underleveled filler character in Hekla's party. Hekla just gathered as many women around herself as possible to turn her crossbow into a killing machine, but that left everyone else trailing behind. Katia's race and class were ... underwhelming in Hekla's view, so she tossed her to Carl and Donut as part of a larger plan. However, with their help, she developed into a strong character and a strong person, able to lead the way on the fifth and sixth floors. Where her Doppelganger race is initially difficult and painful for her to use, she rapidly becomes so adept at it that she can shift into many configurations with ease.
  • Quan Ch, unfortunately, has to be mentioned here. He was an otherwise unexceptional crawler, but was the only person to receive and open a celestial box when Carl solved the unsolvable quest on the third floor. This allowed him to turn into a nearly unkillable kill-stealing coward asshole who caused problems until the end of the eighth floor.
  • Donut, Prepotente, and Bianca are a category unto themselves, alongside Lucia Mar's dogs (or at least one of them). They were regular animals when they entered the dungeon, but special pet biscuits turned them into amazing creatures. Donut and Propotente became intelligent crawlers in their own right, both with a spot in the top ten. Bianca and Lucia Mar's dogs (at least one of them) became incredibly powerful pets. Note that this isn't inevitable; the rest of Miriam Dom's goats, apart from Propotente and Bianca, are kept locked away in pet cages because they didn't get any sort of boost. Oh, and the repeated "at least one of them" is because there's something hinky about one of Lucia's dogs.
• Undying Loyalty: Carl values loyalty above all else. He will be loyal to anyone who seems to deserve it, but immediately cut ties without fanfare if they prove to have abused his trust. This is why he broke up with Bea, and why he sticks with Donut even though she causes many problems for him. Donut has inherited this more than a little. As it turns out, she knew about Bea's plans to sell her, and she flies into a rage when Hekla does something similar to Katia.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: In-Universe example when Carl is talking to an out-of-dungeon audience about how to deal with the impending ambush by hunter mantises. Information is not meant to be leaked into the Dungeon, but in practice it happens, so he can get ideas but can't afford to decide on his real plan in public.
  • This is basically enforced In-Universe. The only party that has unlimited access to every piece of communication among the players is the AI, because it controls the universe of the Dungeon, even then, that only gives it special access to a few places the people running the games can't see, like bathrooms. The people running the games can see every other location and every form of communication. To get past the fascist shits running the game, Carl and his friends have to put a cheat in the bathroom, and even then they have to be subtle to sneak things past the increasingly insane AI.
• Unwinnable by Design: Crawlers don't win. Ever. You're lucky if you make it to the tenth floor. The thirteenth is the furthest anyone's ever gotten. If you make it through the eighteenth, you win. No one ever has. Ever.
• Uplifted Animal: Carl's cat, "Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk", gets an intelligence upgrade from the system AI as a reward for being the first cat in the dungeon. She actually ends up with a higher intelligence score than Carl himself, and insists on leading the party, which she renames to The Royal Court of Princess Donut. Miriam Dom entered the dungeon with a dozen goats, one of whom (Prepotente) gets uplifted like Donut did. Another just gets turned into an impossibly awesome hell-beast.
• Video Game Caring Potential: The dungeon is a live-action computer role playing game and Carl, as a gamer, has a bit of meta-knowledge advantage. The AI bounces back and forth between encouraging Carl to be a monster and chastising him for it, but he ultimately gets much, much more out of being kind to his fellow crawlers and the NPCs than he would have if he'd just murder-hoboed his way through the dungeon.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting:
  • Katia takes on a Doppelganger race that lets her (painfully) reconfigure her whole body. She can even incorporate other material into her form, so long as she can pick it up; Carl finds a way for her to incorporate a large amount of high-grade steel, allowing her to encase her remaining biological parts inside thick layers of armor. The possibilities inherent in this character inspired a spin-off story by another author, Dungeon Crawler Katia.
  • Changelings are even more dangerous, since they actually get abilities from the races they change into.
    Carl: She can't be too strong. She's only level 17.
    Mordecai: That's misleading. Regular crawlers who become changelings can only shift once every ten minutes. Shifting on demand is a skill unique to the race. She is easily the equivalent of level 15 in the Race Shifter Skill, and I'm willing to bet every one of these prostitutes in town is the same. A changeling who can switch that quickly is very dangerous. Remember, unlike doppelgangers, changelings gain some of the abilities of the race they're mimicking. She can turn into a gorgon at the snap of the finger and hit you with a petrify spell, then switch to a rocksling to shatter your stone body into dust, and then turn to a forge ogre and take that dust and pressurize it enough to make it a diamond. All before you could say "Ouch."
• We Work Well Together: A recurring motif is Carl gathering a group of people around himself because he can't bear to leave anyone to die and succeeding against all the odds.
• The Worm That Walks: Or, in this case, the giant ball of pigs that rolls around at high speed to crush any crawlers unfortunate enough to be locked in with it. Its weakness is physics; relying on rolling means that it can get jammed into a tight space and hacked apart. Unlike the Trope Namer, though, it doesn't retreat and regenerate when heavily damaged, but instead just falls apart and is easily finished.
• Xanatos Gambit: A Mayor on the third floor is preparing for a massive ritual spell that will devastate the area. Kill them, and all the energy they've gathered will soon become unstable and incinerate the area. Disarm that, and the leftover energy will destabilize everything magical in a wide radius...
• Yandere: The AI's apparent infatuation with Carl's feet doesn't get any less disturbing when its description of a boss monster is spoken in a different tone from usual and seems Close to Home.
  The knowledge that the man's feelings are not mutual is like a dagger in its heart, if it had one. It wrestles daily with this realization, teetering on the edge of indecision. Do I protect him because I love him? Do I kill him because he doesn't love me back? Do I continue with my duty? What would become of me if I simply disobeyed?
  It's a lot of stress for a creature not used to having any emotion. It's almost too much. But even if this creature wanted to end it all, it couldn't. Its master has the ability to bring it right back, over and over again.
• Zerg Rush:
  • Frenzied Gerbils are dangerous, but low-level and fragile; a single one is not a big threat. A literally endless swarm of them, though...
  • Carl encounters something close to the original meaning of the term when a sixth-floor hunter sends her invisible pets with paralytic venom to attack him within minutes of arriving on the floor, before he's even been able to greet the guards and walk into town. Only intervention from Donut and Katia rushing to the scene saves him.

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Now get back out there and wick, wick, wick!