Literature / The Daily Grind

Just another day of mortal combat at the office.

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The Daily Grind is a webserial following a bored and stressed tech-support geek, who stumbles into an infinite office space that shows traits from RPG mechanics. However, the monsters are made from stationery supplies, the environments are twisted versions of cubicle farms that would give M.C. Escher a headache, and the whole place shows disturbing signs of being alive and aware.

The magic of that place can be brought back out to the real world, and James and his growing party of "delvers", the Order of Endless Rooms, have to navigate powers both in and outside the dungeon in their attempts to fix all of reality, which is far, far stranger than anyone imagined.

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The Daily Grind contains examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo
  • Maimframes fire RAM sticks at surprisingly high speeds.
  • The Office has traps that fire unreasonably sharp pencils.
  • Similarly, pencil sharpeners use pencil dust to create "smoke" clouds.
  • Harlan's Wolfpack imbues their bullets with memories. The result will actually penetrate Squo shields and is highly damaging...if you don't mind perpetual amnesia.
• Action Girl: It's quicker to list the female characters who aren't this, though obviously the various dungeon powerups help with that. Alanna is described as amazonian and Theo plays rugby on the weekends before any magical assistance though.
• Alien Geometries: The dungeon, naturally, with walls that go up forever without quite meeting the ceiling and extending out as far as you can see while also curving slightly upwards. Also in smaller areas via space-warping orange orbs, creating endless corridors, or sections that are shorter in one direction than the other.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Fort Door is overrun by a massive wave of dungeon monsters as the Exodus Run counts down the last hour to the door opening back to reality. Due to the reawakened dungeon's regular resets, the position is reset back to cubicles and ceases to exist.
• Amazon Chaser: James and Alana's relationship pre-dungeon existed in large part because he wasn't intimidated by a six foot seven woman who was stronger than him
• Backstory Invader: Ben, who Winter's Climb tosses into the the first delve group. And then just hangs out because he likes the Order, even though nobody can quite remember him but they're sure they known him.
• Badass Driver: James, thanks to a yellow orb, becomes a very competent driver. It's mainly used at first for emergency response (though the notepad teleports replace this later), but gets much more direct use in the road dungeon.
• Badass Normal: Myles, a Rogue who very deliberately has no magic, as high-level magic users can sense others with magic, so he's effectively invisible to them. Looses this status due to the Underburbs flu, and quickly starts popping orbs to catch up with everyone else.
• Bag of Holding: Mostly absent, much to the characters' annoyance, though some limited versions do show up eventually, like an infinite lunchbag (that will only hold food) and an expanded wallet (though don't put anything that shouldn't be folded into the latter; a gun comes out creased).
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Sarah's natural kindness is able to win over an attic dungeon.
• Bedtime Brainwashing: Secret often speaks to people in their dreams, and can influence their behavior while doing so.
• Bigger on the Inside: Constantly. It's actually a surprise when a dungeon-related area doesn't do this until it grows, that is.
• Bio-Augmentation: The skulljacks the delvers eventually end up with are purely biological (the clip for the cable is keratin, for example), but fit a standard ethernet cable and let your brain talk to anything else with same connector.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Anesh, as benefiting a British man of Indian descent, likes his curries fiery hot. And then in Chapter 103 he gets a Shell Upgrade that gives him an extra 391,040 Scovilles spice tolerance (At which point a high-end habanero just barely registers as having flavor). His cooking soon reaches nuclear levels that everyone else just barely manages to choke down.
• Blood Magic: The gear found by Status Quo offers powerful magic items in exchange for blood. Unfortunately, since getting good items also requires life force, there's not really a non-evil way to properly use it.
• Bottomless Magazines: The Status Quo gun bracelets invoke this, as they allow the user to instantly reload whatever weapon they're bonded to. Slightly less absurdly overpowered than it sounds, as you "only" get 20 reloads before the bracelet runs out and needs to recharge
  • The bracelets rescue the Fireball Nerf Gun, long out of ammunition, from retirement in the basement.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Most of the Order, but special mention goes to Momo, a goth young woman who spends a great deal amount of time wandering the lair in a bathrobe while singlehandedly pioneering the field of red-orb totems on little sleep.
• Chekhov's Gun: Lampshaded. The plasma nerf gun is left in Fort Door with a "Chekhov's" label stuck on it. It comes in handy during the Battle of Fort Door.
• Chef of Iron: Nate is a former army cook, who is hired by the Order to manage catering, and soon claims the kitchen as his territory. He doesn't get a lot of dungeon superpowers, but he's a hardened veteran and FBI agent, who knows guns inside and out and isn't afraid to get his hands dirty.
• Classified Information:
  • Status Quo redacts its own internal records and uses coded language, despite being a secret agency that answers to no one.
  • While the Order is normally fairly open about information, the Mechanist's papers are sensitive enough that you need permission from a senior Order member to see them, at which case you're allowed to read them in the secure vault with someone else watching you and note taking isn't allowed. Pretty justified given they're a how-to guide to creating your own zombie apocalypses.
• Defeat Means Friendship: James's second-favorite recruitment tactic seems to be co-opting other groups into the Order
• Due to the Dead:
  • The liberated cameracondas keep enteral vigil over the body of the woman who saved them, perfectly preserving her corpse in their paralyzing glare.
  • The orbs of fallen Order members are preserved in a memorial in one of the basements.
  • Later, discussing what, if anything should be done with the orbs of the fallen, Alana asks to be reincarnated as a dragon using her yellow orb.
• Damage-Proof Vehicle: The enemies from the road dungeon are able to shrug off several entire clips from a P90, even when aiming for normally vulnerable areas like tires or engines.
• Discussed Trope: Early on, James and Anesh discuss which common RPG tropes they'll find, such as Healing Potion or Bag of Holding.
• The Dreaded: The Old Gun. Encountered during the Sewer's emergence, she's...something. Bordering on Physical God, Super-Speed, absurdly powerful weapons. A Rogue who spots her later is ordered to leave instantly, and has to wait to see if she followed.
• Dungeon-Based Economy: The delvers develop a system of trade between themselves for the various orbs, and often use them as the stake in various random bets.
• Dungeon Crawling: Being a massive geek, James immediately recognizes the tropes in the office, and it's no surprise when his entire D&D group end up replacing the pretend version with doing it for real. They even discuss their disappointment at the lack of some common elements.
• Electronic Telepathy: The skulljacks with a wifi adaptor allow this. The bigger challenge is limiting how much of yourself you share over the connection.
• Edible Ammunition: The Office uses cups of inhumanly hot coffee as mines in the breakrooms. This is, oddly, the only case where a food item created by the office isn't completly fine to eat. The Order's rationalization for this is that it legally isn't food.
  "We’ve determined that the office operates under the ruling of the 1994 lawsuit against McDonald’s which states that coffee above a certain temperature is no longer classified as ‘food’, leaving the detonating coffee cups as something that is, from a legal perspective, either disinfectant, or heavy ordnance.”
• Empathic Weapon: Enforced by Status Quo's equipment, which can "bind" a weapon and apply substantial boosts to it, but has a (sometimes long) cool-down before it can bind a new one. Fortunately it doesn't actually stop you from using anything else.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Alanna was pretty scary before, and then she became bullet-proof.
• Essence Drop: The orbs dropped by dungeon Life prove to be an essential component of creating new Life, giving rise to speculation that they're souls, or perhaps pieces of souls. The fact that people with orb-granted abilities will also drop orbs when they die is also telling.
• Famed In-Story: Lula has a reputation among students who survived the Sewer event. She was already known as an actually decent counselor who both listened and cared, and then the Sewer exploded into reality and she stalked the halls rescuing kids and snapping monsters necks with a glance- "Rotate Sixty Degrees" is a hell of a weapon.
• Fantastically Indifferent:
  • Order members increasingly become this as they progress toward having Seen It All. James still has fun watching newcomers' reactions, though. And he's still encountering new weirdness that gives him pause.
    James: Please eat light, you’re on call.
    Momo: It’s fine, I can artificially decrease my mass if I need to!
    Anesh: Should we be concerned about that?
    James: What, that Momo is absolutely being irresponsible with phenomenal cosmic power, or that she can reduce mass?
    Anesh: The mass thing.
    James: Yes. But she said ‘her mass’, not ‘mass’, so it’s probably not as exploitable as we’d like. Though I am kinda curious as to where she got that.
  • Even local civilians end up this way, with the staff of several local cafes casually accepting giant snake people, sapient staplers, and multiple Aneshes as normal.
• Fictional Geneva Conventions: Part of the Ethics section of the Operations manual states that they're not allowed to work on memetic weaponry. No infobombs, no idea guns, no identity erasers or persona blankers or *whatever*.
• Fireballs: A Nerf Gun is found within Officium Mundi turns out to shoot some two foot wide balls of plasma that will punch through pretty much anything..
• Friendly Fireproof: The SQ bracers can eventually unlock the ability to never hit friends, although they can only use it a small number of times without recharging. James, upon hearing about this, immediately orders more testing.
  James: I want to know if that works on a grenade launcher.
• Functional Magic: This is how El's abilities behave, since each dungeon manifests its rewards differently.
• Genre Savvy: The dungeon follows the expected tropes suspiciously well, and since the entire group plays D&D (among others) it is recognized for what it is very quickly.
• Genius Loci: The dungeon appears to be able to think for itself.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • The Cat being held in the Research basement is an incredibly dangerous animal that you can't actually see and can fight an entire delve team and win single-handed. It gets released during the Status Quo raid as Research throws everything they have at their attackers.
  • The Old Gun and related entities are such a threat that the Order's manual outright states that when facing them, there are no rules. Said lack of restrictions are not in regards to killing her- they're about breaking contact long enough to escape.
    Section 6, Part 7 - High Powered Individual Threats: When facing such an entity that is hostile to humanity, there are no rules of engagement. Take the ethics guidebook, and throw it in the trash. There is no tactic that is unacceptable, there is no level of collateral damage too high. Someone or something like that, if it chooses to start trying to kill everyone, is an existential threat that must be answered as immediately as possible.
• The Gunslinger: James has some definite shades of Trick Shot, with his skill ranks for the Walther P38, Aim II, and Agility I. Combined with Status Quo gun braclets he's a terrifyingly good shot who never has to reload.
  "My actual soul is upgraded to the point that I’m about fifty percent less likely to miss anything. I can reload this weapon with a thought, and fire bullets faster than the gun actually loads them. And I can move faster than most living humans while doing it, when I want to. "
• Healing Potion: The Order would really like to find one, but hasn't yet.
  • Gasoline from Route Horizon's gas stations does this for vehicles however.
  • Orbs have been found to reduce the possible number of broken bones this month, and -1 Cancer/year. The latter is copied by the Order in large quantities for distribution.
  • Iced Veins is a Winter's Climb spell that turns cold water into a blood transfusion. Ice even automatically matches blood type.
• Hollywood Acid: Ratroach bodily fluids are absurdly corrosive, and vomiting bile as an Acid Attack is highly effective. Thanks to dungeon bullshit, their fluids are neither acid nor base.
• Good with Numbers: Anesh is a college student studying advanced mathematics nobody else even pretends to understand.
  "He had something called Applied Regression Analysis 445. That's not a class, that's the name of an improbably dangerous sci-fi weapon."
• Guns Are Worthless: Played with;
  • Inside Officium Mundi, they can be useful, but the noise is liable to attract a swarm of Striders, who are a bit too small to easily shoot.
  • In combat against Status Quo, the widespread use of shield bracelets, hardening potions, and other magic items can turn firearms into near-worthless accessories, albeit with serious threat to anyone whose bracer ran out.
    James: “I am worried that we’re going to get out of this and I’m going to forget that bullets are actually dangerous.”
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Played with.
  • James initially finds weapons like crowbars to be more practical and useful, or guns against more serious threats, but JP insists on carrying a sword. Which mostly just gets in the way. And then turns out to actually be very useful in a specific situation, after which lots of delvers start carrying them. James later hangs a sword on the wall and suggests having it engraved with "In Case of Cat".
  • Lampshaded when James and Anesh confront the Mechanic in Chapter 160:
    Mechanic: Ya seem big on the whole hero angle.
    James/ Anesh: It’s the sword, right? It makes the look.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Secret gives up everything to defend the whole Order from Status Quo. Too bad no one even remembers...
• Hive Mind: The skulljack upgrades can create these, among other uses. Some of the delvers take to this more than others.
  • Monster-Karen forced captured humans into one.
  • MarLea is a two person hive mind that uses singular pronouns and is quite enthused with the whole thing. She's apparently written several essays on the subject as well.
• Humanity Is Infectious: Dungeon life seems to significantly mellow with extended exposure to humans. Even a few of the ratroaches manage to escape their hellish home and become relatively well-adjusted members of society.
  • Even the cat, after weeks locked up in the Lair's secure area, goes from absurdly dangerous killing machine to semi-friendly, and finds its way to a veterinarian who adopts him
• Human Weapon: The Last Line of Defense's "daughters", the Camille series, are absurdly powerful warriors who exist to fight and die.
• I Owe You My Life:
  • Many of the early delver recruits are drawn from those who were saved from threats like Monster-Karen. James gets uncomfortable with the level of hero-worship, but isn't going to send them away.
  • An entire religion develops around the Heroic Sacrifice that protected a colony of camracondas from being puppeted by the dungeon.
• Immune to Mind Control: Turns out Liz, Karen's daughter is immune to the effects of infomorphs.
• Insistent Terminology: Much of the main cast enjoy arguing over exactly what parts of the dungeon should be called, and they each have their preferred nomenclature.
• Interspecies Romance: Deb and Frequency-Of-Sunlight.
• Invisibility:
  • If you see an ordinary-looking cat hanging around the office, it's just an illusion. The real cat is unseen nearby and is the size of a car. The invisibility effect doesn't wear off until it's dead, either.
  • One of the items looted from Status Quo are earrings that grant temporary invisibility.
• Jumped at the Call: James definitely, and most of his friends too.
• Kill It with Fire: Thermite bombs are the Order's preferred weapon against particularly tough enemies, and have been in use ever since Anesh whipped up a few in his college's chemistry lab. early on.
• Kindly Vet: Dr. Amy Marris, who the Order starts using for off-the-books medical care and eventually gets their card. She later adopts the cat after it was released during the raid.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: One of the major protective measures by the dungeon is to make those outside gradually forget about anyone who enters it. Which is fine if you're only in there a few minutes, and rather less so if you get stuck in one for months or years.
• Lesser of Two Evils: The Order would really prefer not to ever go back to the Akashic Sewer, but ignoring it would likely just result in escalation, and that ended badly the previous time.
• Longevity Treatment:
  • A rare upgrade from a purple orb is extra lifespan.
  • Absorbing a yellow orb, instead of cracking it, can theoretically extend life by a few hours in emergency situations, but doesn't have a lasting effect afterward. Useful for things like getting to the emergency ward with what would otherwise be fatal wounds.
• Loophole Abuse: The Akashic Sewer won't allow delvers to bring in anything not allow in a school, including firearms. Upon hearing this, Officer Rourke suggests that he might be able to get one in because he's a police officer. However, the idea hasn't been tested yet.
• Magic Enhancement: Killing the creatures in the dungeon rewards coloured orbs, and these can be used to learn skills, solve problems, gain magical abilities or improve your "shell" (body).
• Malevolent Architecture:
  • The office mostly relies on monsters rather than hazardous environments, but it does have a go at trapping the delvers in Escher-space powered by orange orbs.
  • The school basement makes the office look positively friendly by comparison. Leaking pipes dripping unidentifiable corrosive liquids are one of the least horrible things about it.
• Man-Eating Plant: The vending machines in the office all have potted plants next to them. Some of them are actually just plants. Others are vicious predators. (And yes, the vending machines are sentient, too.)
• Mana Meter:
  • Route Horizon, the road Dungeon, gives delvers "Velocity", recharged by moving, the faster the better.
  • Winter's Climb, the mountain Dungeon, allows the use of Breath. This is your actual breath, being used to power spells
• Masquerade:
  • Enforced by the dungeon at first, via Laser-Guided Amnesia, though James decides he's not that bothered about keeping things hidden.
  • In a darker turn, it's later enforced by a rogue government agency calling itself Status Quo, which hunts delvers in order to keep things orderly instead of chaotic.
• The Man Behind the Man: Implied- Status Quo turns out to be much younger than they claim, and it was somehow reconstituted after Secret obliterates them.
• The Medic: Deb, a former med student, becomes the Order's main doctor and soon finds herself working on the various non-humans the Order keeps adding to its ranks. Also Nik, who has a medically-inclined Authority and picked up Iced Veins for instant blood transfusions.
• Mêlée à Trois:
  • Chapters 187-1888 have the Order attempting to meet with the Alchemists. The meet is crashed by the CIA, Harlan's Wolfpack, a right-wing militia group, an alarming number of brainwashed cops, a trio of local delvers, and a Pillar, all of whom want the Alchemist for their own reasons. And start shooting at each other.
  • in Chapter 242, the Order finds the headquarters of a revived Status Quo, which is about to be raided by two FBI agents, a fake FBI agent, two Camilles, and a local street gang. The Order crashes the party, teams up with the pair of actually-not-FBI agents, and then encounters a Pillar going by Chain Breaker. So yes, a six way fight.
• More Dakka: The gun bracelets have the Cluster Shot ability, turning one shot into three. Thing get downright ridiculous when applied to automatic weapons- or the plasma nerf gun.
• Mind Manipulation: Weaponised ideas are encountered frequently, and are far more powerful than they might otherwise sound. "No weapons allowed at work" becomes scary when said "work" is a nightmare-office-dungeon full of hostile entities and you can no longer hold anything you consider a weapon.
• Mind Virus: Information is alive, given the right conditions, and "infomorphs" exist on all sides of the conflict in people's minds, willingly or otherwise.
• The Mole: Nate, originally.
• Mundane Utility: A lot of the incredible abilities and items acquired from the dungeon end up being used in far more practical ways than expected.
  • The overhead projector that was originally creating copies of mask monsters becomes a lynchpin of their logistics.
  • Camraconda paralysis is very effective for stabilizing emergency patients. Bill also notes that construction is a lot easier when you can just freeze stuff in place.
  • James gets a Orange quest that allows him to spawn a small amount of saffron, an absurdly expensive spice.
  • The Order invokes this trope on a Sewer run, collecting samples of all the nasty gross fluids the place has on the chance some of them might be useful.
• My Skull Runneth Over: Momo's red totems typically feed information into nearby people's brains, such as the location and wait times of nearby hospitals, or the number of nearby cats over 30 pounds. However, the prototype versions have no limiters, frequently leading to nosebleeds and unconsciousness.
  • She actually weaponizes these for the Status Quo raid. Getting full engine schematics for every vehicle for 20 miles is a bit distracting.
• Natural Weapon: During the Exodus Run, Sarah gets a blue that allows her to control magnetic fields. Once she figures out what exactly the power does, she weaponizes it into becoming a human railgun.
• Necromancer: The Mechanic, head of the Route Horizon cultists, uses dead people to create zombie asphalt monsters dubbed "necroads"
• No-Sell: One of the spells available from the Winter's Climb dungeon, "Mountain of the Self", gives the user half a second of absolute and total invulnerability. How total? Alex uses the spell to escape getting tossed into the Underburbs via magic grenade
• Not Completely Useless: "Sublimate Rubber" is a much more useful ability than it seems when being attacked by a creature made entirely of electrical cables.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • Dave's escape from the bottomless chasm he was knocked into during the Monster-Karen fight. It actually got a Shrug of God on how it happened.
  • Winter's Climb- an insanely cold and hostile mountain- was discovered by Liz, Morgan, and Color-of-Dawn. Not only were the humans dressed for an Australian summer, but the humans are non-delver children with no orbs. The group successfully escapes without serious injury
• One-Steve Limit: Averted
  • Monster Karen and "regular" Karen, who ironically was part of Monster's Hive Mind.
  • James Lyle the protagonist and "Other James" ( who never even gets a last name), yet another Monster-Karen victim. Other James is killed in Status Quo's assault, but lives on in Simon's head
  • The Route Horizon cultists turn out to have two Marks, and admit that yes, it confuses them as well.
  • One of the dead from the Status Quo attack is Mark Diaz. Some time later, the Order recruits another Mark Diaz, who has a brief existential crisis before James reassures him that it's all a weird coincidence.
• "Open!" Says Me: Reed uses [Remove Entrance], a blue power, during the Sewer Emergence to blast open the dungeons-secured school doors
  Anesh:We had, briefly, a blue power for ‘Remove Entrance’.”
  James: I remember that. Reed demolished half of a building. It was metal as fuck.”
• Our Dragons Are Different:
  • Deep in the Office are massive dragons made of server racks, the "Terrorbytes", who true to form rest atop massive piles of orbs and breath lightning bolts. Easily the Exodus Run's biggest obstacle, the Order has avoided them the few times they've been that deep. During the Long Delve, they finally confront one. It turns out to be a Riddling Sphinx who challenges them with math so complex only Anesh can figure out the answer. It eventually admits they're smart, and spits a bunch of orbs at them before telling them to leave or be eaten.
    James: To be clear, the dragon is not a literal dragon. It’s like if a server room stood up, had wings, and was angry at you
  • Pendragon was created by Dave out of a pen and some other random bits, then massively expanded upon. At present she's large enough to carry a half-dozen fully equipped delvers, and is still growing.
  • Winter's Climb has stone dragons, all the more dangerous due to a mental attack that leaves you too amazed by the world to fight back
• Our Mages Are Different: All of the characters basically end up with magical abilities via using small coloured orbs scavenged from the corpses of living office stationery.
  • Momo stands out in her ability to construct and use numerous types of magical devices. A pair of magic glasses that show one's affiliation and title labels her as "War Witch", which she adopts
• The Paralyzer: Camracondas can harmlessly freeze the person they're looking at — harmless, that is, until the snake slithers up and bites your still-frozen body. Very dangerous to individuals, not so much to groups, since they can only target one at a time and it wears off instantly when they look away. They become especially important when the Order rescues a colony of them from the Office's control; they're very effective in a mixed group, where they can lock down one enemy at a time that others will then clobber.
• Perception Filter: Used by the "Paper Pushers" of the dungeon when they're carrying out missions outside the dungeon.
• Police Are Useless: James thinks so, and his long-term plans include replacing them with a more effective organisation. Possibly justified by how many times he's had police officers crack under the strain of all the weirdness and blame him for it.
  James: Yes, I am annoyed that this is the second time today the police have shot at me. You know, I’m starting to think that ya’ll don’t like me much.
• The Power of Friendship: Relationsticks allow two users who share feeling for each other to share sleep, speed, or other useful abilities with each other
  • Sarah eventually reveals that she has dozens of links.
    Anesh: Uh… I just had a thought.
    James: Is it that Sarah lets us turn one person into a superhuman through the power of friendship?
• Power Trio: For unknown reasons, delver groups seem to be limited to three people, possibly due to informorph interference.
  • The Order averting this (due largely to being founded by James's group and forty-odd rescues from Monster Karen) makes them a massive outlier and far more powerful than anyone else.
  • Sarah had a group, and El is implied to have been part of a three-person delve group but lost her memories of them to an informorph
  • The head of Status Quo looses his smugness completly and panics when he realizes James don't only isn't alone, he brought an army with him.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: As camracondas and ratroaches don't get human references, the Order hosts "Explain movies to the camracondas" nights to help them catch up on human pop culture.
• Pop the Tires: Attempted by Anesh when attacked in the road dungeon, though without much success since they're not really tires in the standard sense.
• Polyamory: James, Anesh and Alanna. And Anesh.
• Pro-Human Transhuman: The delvers consider themselves this, seeking to use the powers and benefits from the dungeon for the benefit of humanity, such as copying organs for organ transplants.
• Punny Name: The main characters are overly fond of these, often refusing to name new dungeon monsters until they can come up with suitably painful puns for them. "Camracondas" (cable snakes with a security camera for a face), "Maul Carts" (psychotic office mail carts) and "Maimframes" (giant PCs that fire high-speed RAM sticks) are among the many examples.
• Random Drop: While getting a powerup is guaranteed, and even the type and size of orb is fairly predictable, its exact effects are completely random, much to the delvers' frustration at first.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: While this describes much of the dungeon areas, mis-calibrating an orange orb totem is really unpleasant to be around.
• Reckless Gun Usage: Anesh finds a Nerf Gun in the Office and casually points it at James, prompting an angry demand to point that thing elsewhere this is a dungeon. While that Nerf gun turns out to be a regular model, a later one shoots plasma blasts.
• Running Gag:
  • The area-enhancing green orbs keep adding more basements to the Lair, all of which not only have to be tracked down, but overlap the same space. Anesh finds it frustrating.
    James: It wasn’t even my fault this time! I just took the notes!
  • Everyone's first yellow orb skill is useless. To the point it's a running joke in delver circles
  • James's facial injuries. He has the uncanny ability to get hit in the head.
• Self-Duplication: Anesh can make copies of himself, courtesy of an orange orb quest.
• Semantic Superpower: The blue orb abilities are these. "Affix" just lets you join two things together, but with some imagination it turns out that's incredibly powerful in a fight. Anyone with a neck should not get in a fight against someone who has "Rotate Sixty Degrees". And as for "Remove Half Of", well...
• Sleep Deprivation: A chronic issue for delvers, who spend an extra eight hours awake at 3:45 AM, utterly wrecking sleep schedules.
  • Momo, her life eaten by the dungeon's erasure, handles her loss of family poorly and wanders the Lair at all hours working on red totems.
• Story-Breaker Power: Absorbed blues verge on this at times, which is probably why uses are limited. Three copiers would normally be a massive fight for a well-equipped team. Or you could just "Remove Half Of" their internal space and let them self-destruct.
  James: The powers from those are always the most unbalanced bullshit.
• Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: What the R&D team are attempting to do, with varying degrees of success.
• Super-Reflexes: A coffee machine looted from the Office turns out to produce coffee that temporarily boosts the drinker's dexterity. It eventually becomes standard equipment when expecting a fight, although it is still coffee, so there are limits on how much one person should have.
• Super-Strength:
  • The delvers achieve fairly minor versions by stacking a lot of yellow orbs.
  • Humanoid dungeon "employees" are made of paper, and are appropriately damaged by fire and water, but somehow have much greater than human strength if they catch you.
• Super-Speed:
  • With the right Yellow skorbs and some speed coffee, this is quite possible.
  • The Old Gun is so fast, camracondas can't stop her. It takes two of them to get her down to "still absurdly fast" levels
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Injuries are exactly as serious as they should be, at least at first. The various upgrades do help with that, though. And experience and training are still very important even given the upgrades.
• Teleportation with Drawbacks: One of the most helpful items found in the Office is a notepad that sends you to the location you've written on it. Once the Order finds a way to mass-produce them, they become the standard means of transportation.
  • The pads have a few rules. They're limited to Earth, you need the exact address/location of anything not in line of sight, and trying abstract concepts will land you in whatever city has the closest name. "Home" gets you Home, Kansas and "Safety" gets you Safe Harbor, Florida
• Tempting Fate:
  • Before a Sewer run, Sarah tries to say that "at least it can't get any worse" before Frequency-Of-Sunlight freezes her and the rest of the delve team yells at her.
  • Nik offhandedly comments that "nothing could get through that storm" during the first real Winter's Climb delve, and gets told off for it. The dungeon has already hit them with an infiltrator.
• Theme Naming: The Order's various departments all have names starting with "R"
  • Response- A teleporting band of paramedic replacements and police substitutes. Run by Harvey
  • Recovery- Dedicated to helping dungeon survivors put their lives back together. Run by Actual Karen.
  • Research- The Sufficiently Analyzed Magic branch. Run by Reed with Momo doing her own thing
  • Ritual- Momo's near-singlehanded effort to make useful totems.
  • Rogues- A dedicated intelligence agency focusing on Status Quo and other delver threats. Run by JP with assistance from Nate.
• There Are No Therapists: The Order does work hard to avert this, with their own internal counseling sessions, but still faces the problem that actual professionals are out of the loop. How do you explain to a psychologist that you're depressed because you magically forgot about your best friend of ten years, but instinctively still miss them? Or that you were traumatized by being kidnapped and forcibly added to a Borg-style Hive Mind for several months? Generally they fall back on supporting each other and returning to the dungeon better prepared.
• Uncanny Valley: This is stated In-Universe to be the characteristic feature of "paper pushers", which take human form but are clearly not human when you look at their faces.
• Unnaturally Looping Location: A common creation by orange orbs installed in "totems". Escaping generally requires breaking the totem.
• Useless Useful Spell: Knowledge of templating a New York phone book is useful if you're a graphic designer, not so much when trying to survive a dungeon. Many of the dungeon rewards are like this.
• Vehicular Assault: A lot of the road dungeon combat involves this, for obvious reasons.
• Weaponized Car: Route Predation has these as monsters. Turns out they're also a Living Sentient Vehicle
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Not everything in the dungeon is immediately hostile, and one of the big questions the delvers have to answer as they progress is how they should treat the various inhabitants they encounter.
  • Striders are the "staple" enemies, but occasionally there are some peaceful ones. Rufus appears to have more intelligence than a dog, although his thought patterns aren't the same as humans.
  • The office itself appears to have some kind of life, to the point where it can theoretically be killed, raising ethical questions about whether they should try.
  • This really comes to the fore when the Order is joined by an entire colony of free camracondas, with very different culture, and some language barriers, but apparently human-level intelligence.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Last Line of Defense, who takes a very brutal approach to dungeons attempting to escape into the real world. He just seals off the area, lets everyone die, and then kills the dungeon. Fortunately he can be talked into giving the heroes a chance to work it out on their own,
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: The few minutes the door is open from our reality allows eight hours of dungeon-time. It's later established, though, that the dungeon isn't making extra time, just shifting it from other places in the week; in the long run it balances out.
• Zerg Rush: Even experienced delvers can still struggle to deal with large swarms of striders. They're very killable, but they just keep coming...

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