Manga / Delicious in Dungeon

Who's hungry?

"Dungeon food. Eat or be eaten. There is no hierarchy involved. Eating is simply the privilege of the living. Dungeon food. Oh, dungeon food."

— Episode / chapter 1 closing narration

Delicious in Dungeon (Japanese: ダンジョン飯, Dungeon Meshi, literally translated as "Dungeon Food") is a Fantastic Comedy seinen manga created by Ryōko Kui. The manga began serialization in Enterbrain's Harta magazine in 2014, concluding in September 2023 with 97 chapters across 14 volumes. Yen Press has licensed its run in North America.

In a fantasy world of dungeon exploration, guilds go out on expeditions to raid dungeons, hoping to find the mysterious Golden Kingdom claimed to be the ultimate treasure of a particular island dungeon, said to be created by a Lunatic Magician after sinking the Kingdom to the ground. Human knight Laios Touden and his adventuring team are saved from a Total Party Kill by a fearsome beast, the Red Dragon, when his sister, Falin, sacrifices herself to teleport them all out of danger. Now she's in the dragon's belly, and it's only a matter of time before she's digested and it's too late to revive her. Laios and his friends must delve back into the depths to recover her remains - but there's not enough time or resources to buy enough rations for the trip. His solution: take advantage of the sprawling ecosystem of the dungeon itself by cooking the various monsters within into delicious, wholesome, dungeon-sourced meals.

Secretly, Laios has always been fascinated by dungeon monsters and has wanted to try eating them for a long time. However, this is typically never done and Chilchuck (the party's halfling trapmaster) and Marcille (their elf mage) are opposed. On the first floor of the dungeon, the team meets Senshi, a dwarf and experienced dungeon cook who agrees to help and joins their party as Team Chef.

Every chapter shows this team of four traveling through the dungeon, introducing environments (such as forests and lagoons) filled with new creatures. Part classic Dungeon Crawler, part Cooking Show, the manga focuses on world-building detailed fantasy environments, and captures a daily-life snapshot of fantasy dungeon raids and those who embark on them.

An anime adaptation based on the manga by Studio TRIGGER (who had previously animated a commercial for volume 8) was announced on August 9th, 2022, and began airing in January 2024. The show is airing in Japan via Tokyo MX and other Japanese TV stations. Overseas, Netflix is in charge of streaming it in Japanese with regional dub tracks.

Compare Toriko and Food Wars!, both also adventure series about Food Porn.

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Tropes are the exclusive privilege of the living. If you want to live, you have to trope:

Tropes A to H

• 24-Hour Armor: Downplayed, Laios has had to sleep fully armored occasionally, but usually strips down to shirtsleeves or the padded under-layer when making camp. Played more straight generally in that the main party spends most of their trip without a change of clothes until they recover their gear from the last run they made.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade:
  • Senshi's mithril knife is the only thing capable of slicing through dragon scales. Being Senshi, he uses it for cooking.
  • There's also Shuro's sword which he uses to behead a sea serpent with one cut.
• Accidental Misnaming: Laios isn't the best at getting names right.
  • When Laios first met Toshiro, he mumbled his name and Laios misheard it as Shuro. Unfortunately, he then introduced Shuro to the rest of his party as that name, and Shuro didn't bother to correct them.
  • A Running Gag is that Laios always forgets Kabru's name (or even what he looks like), calling him things like Kap and Kapru.
• Action Girl: Most female adventurers are well-equipped to fight, as it's rare for any adventurer to enter the dungeon without being able to take care of themselves in a pinch. Standout examples in the series are Falin and Marcille, whom are both powerful mages, and Izutsumi, who is quick and crafty.
• Action Hero: The modus operandi of your average party of adventurers. Monsters can't exactly be reasoned with and so fighting them is the only way to delve deeper into the dungeon. Subverted later on when Team Touden decide that talking with the Lunatic Magician would be a better plan than trying to fight him.
• Adaptation Distillation: In-universe. When Mithrun relays the backstory of how he became a lord of a dungeon to Kabru, Kabru is annoyed about how complicated and bloated it is, with way too many characters and subplots involved that would make it difficult for someone who wasn't him to follow. So he trims it down to the bare essential of just Mithrun and the demon and leaving everyone else out as nameless extras (as well as cutting out the part where Mithrun turns out to be an illegitimate son and excising the subplot involving his brother, due to being irrelevant) in his retelling.
• Advertised Extra: In the first opening for the anime, Shuro and Namari are given individual posed shots like the rest of the party and Kabru despite the fact they both quickly opt out of the Falin recovery mission and largely serve as recurring minor characters for the rest of the story.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: According to the World Guide, the real reason why Izutsumi was taken from an exhibit at a freak show to become a servant for a noble family is because Shuro's father tried to buy her as a "pet kitten" for Maizuru while he was extremely drunk.
• All-Accessible Magic: Magic mostly involves speaking or inscribing spells in a Language of Magic, fueled by an inner reserve of Mana that people replenish through their normal diet. Anyone can learn the spells, but the average size of a personal mana reserve varies considerably by race, setting limits on how much magic they can do in a short time. When Marcille is briefly transformed into a half-foot, she's knocked out from casting a single explosion spell of the type she can normally throw around freely.
• All There in the Manual: The omakes, supplementary guide book, and character profiles contain a lot of world-building and personal information that are otherwise only briefly alluded to in the story proper.
• All Trolls Are Different: Trolls have so far only been seen in Imagine Spots, but it's confirmed that they do exist as a distinct demihuman race, and seem to resemble ugly, brutish humanoids. Later supplementary material subverts this; trolls do not actually exist, and are a myth derived from half-foot impressions of tall-men, with even the word "troll" being heavily corrupted "tall-man".
  • According to Chilchuck in an omake, they're a boogeyman in half-foot society to make children do as they're told ^note as well as the half-foot word for "tallman"
• Always a Bigger Fish: While crossing an underground lake, Team Touden are attacked by a group of merfolk, who are then driven off by a kraken.
• Amazon Brigade: Shuro's party consists of a group of badass female retainers, each an elite warrior in her own right.
• Ambiguous Situation: Laios defeats the Winged Lion by wishing to become the ultimate monster from his sketchbook — which included a recently-added note that it can even eat desires. It's unclear whether he pulled a Kansas City Shuffle on the Lion, succumbed to the Lion's temptation, or both at once, and his companions decide it's better not to ask.
• Ambiguous Syntax: In Chapter 74, Marcille meets with the Canaries, but the situation is complicated when Chilchuck, under the lingering effects of an illusionary spell that forces the afflicted to tell the truth, announces that Marcille is the daughter of a royal court mage. The original Japanese text has no distinction 'a' and 'the', leading most of the Canaries to assume Marcille's mother is part of the elven royal court, but in reality she's the court mage of some distant tall-man kingdom, which elves hold very little respect towards.
• Amputative Sentencing: Discussed — there's an in-universe urban legend that the Half-foot race was named for how many of them had had a foot cut off as a punishment for theft. However, it's not true and there's no other mention of such sentences being imposed.
• Anachronism Stew: No examples in the main story, but this trope is Played for Laughs in a Christmas Episode gift exchange series of sketches. Whether or not it's supposed to be set in the medieval time period of the story or the modern day is unclear (Delgal is gifted a copy of Ring Fit Adventure by Thistle, but most of the other gifts are mundane objects like liquor, a quill pen, or a whetstone), although only Kabru seems to notice.
  "If there's Christmas, where are we and what time period are we in? Is there still a dungeon?"
  "So Tokyu Hands or Loft are things that exist in this era...?"^note Both Tokyu Hands and Loft are Japanese department store chains.
• Anchored Teleportation: Return spells are a very convenient method of exiting a dungeon without a lengthy trip back the way you came, temporarily opening a portal by placing an enchanted scroll or picture frame on a wall and stepping through it to the surface. However, this only works if there is another enchanted scroll/picture frame at the surface in an enclosed room. Supplementary material explains the room must be enclosed, because the nature of the spell is that it temporarily transforms the room into an extension of the dungeon to make this type of magic possible at the surface. If the magical seal of this room is broken, such as by a window or door being opened, the spell is also immediately broken. If someone is only partway through the scroll/frame when the spell breaks... well...
• And I Must Scream: In an omake, Laios draws a doodle of himself inside a magic painting, which makes the doodle sentient. The party is unaware of this, and then leave doodle-Laios inside the painting, all while he's screaming and shouting for them to come back. Shortly afterwards, the doodle gradually forgets his own identity, while the narration simply says that "amateurs shouldn't mess with magic".
• And Then What?: Chapter 95 is dedicated to Izutsumi trying to work out what to do next once she's finally free to do what she wants, which she does as she asks the rest of Team Touden what they want to do next after the Winged Lion's defeat and Falin's consumption/resurrection.
• Animated Armor: Laios laments his inability to cook and eat them, something that he'd been getting accustomed to with other monsters. Turns out they’re a kind of mollusc who mimic armour with their metallic shells. Senshi cooks them like shellfish.
• Arc Words: "Eating is the privilege of the living." A sentiment that ends both the very first and very last chapter of the story, and ties directly into the repeated themes of the entire tale.
• Arranged Marriage: Laios mentions in passing that both he and Falin, as children of the village chief, had been engaged to strangers. His engagement broke when he ran away and hers ended when she went to magic school, much to their apparent indifference.
• Art Shift:
  • Laios' tenure as king of the Golden Kingdom is depicted as a series of medieval tapestries before shifting back to the regular art style on the final page.
  • The anime adaptation depicts the prologue with King Delgal in the beginning of the first chapter in a very rough, pencil or charcoal sketched style.
• Artificial Outdoors Display: The dungeon was created by sinking an entire kingdom underground; however, some sort of magical projection still gives it a normal day/night cycle on those levels that used to be open to the air. This was part of the work of the Lunatic Magician in attempting to give the residents of the Golden Kingdom the semblance of normal life after trapping them underground.
• Asshole Victim: The corpse-hunters who stalk Team Kabru and attempt to murder them when they try to leave the dungeon. Kabru rejects the leader's offer of letting his party claim the reward for retrieving the corpses of two members of the hunters' team (who were still alive by the way, just unconscious) and instead stabs him in the throat. They kill the rest of the hunters and dump their bodies in a lake where they'll likely never be recovered.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Dragons are large, strong, and have near-impenetrable scales. But there's a gap in the scales on the throat which is located near vital organs; attacking this gap will instantly kill the dragon. Team Touden kills the Red Dragon this way.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever:
  • The kraken is basically a squid the size of a house. It's even killed and eaten like one.
  • When activity in the dungeon elevates its power, the first floor is invaded by giant walking mushrooms.
  • Several of the forms that the Demon takes turn into giant Animalistic Abominations at the height of its power. It was a giant pig when it was worshipped as a god, became a giant goat by the time it consumed Mithrun's desires, and as the Winged Lion turned into a horned beast composed of wings that swallowed Team Touden whole.
• Author Appeal: Delicious, expertly-made food. Plus eating a healthy diet and just taking care of yourself in general. Ryoko Kui would like her readers to know that punishing and pushing yourself so hard your output starts to suffer is not a good way to operate. A less punchy bit of author appeal is worldbuilding. The setting is very well fleshed out in a way that will seem familiar to people who've read some of her other work.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Teams who push to get as deep into the dungeon as they can in the least amount of time. Sounds badass but in reality it means they're exhausting and starving themselves, greatly increasing the odds of making critical errors and suffering a wipe-out or even a Total Party Kill.
  • For that matter, eating only monster carcasses and other forage without bringing any other food means not having to pay for and carry heavy rations, but there are problems as well - there is a higher time expenditure involved when it comes to butchering and cooking monsters, some monsters such as kraken just aren't good to eat, and some floors such as the third have very few potential ingredients running around. In the early chapters the Touden party sometimes goes to bed hungry; they do better in later chapters, when they're given additional ingredients such as rice and in that way stretching their food supply.
  • Marcille's way of harvesting mandrakes (that poor dog!). Though it turns out her way makes them taste better.
  • An omake shows that Thistle initially attempted to protect the Golden Kingdom inside the dungeon by placing a terrifying monster called "The End of All Things", said to be the very strongest monster imaginable, at the entrance of the dungeon. It died only a few minutes later because it immediately starved to death due to its enormous mana requirement. The reason most dungeons have similar layouts is because it's the most practical, but Thistle still laments having to stock the dungeon mostly full of boring old slimes and walking mushrooms.
• Back from the Dead: In a dungeon, and a dungeon alone, resurrection spells are a rudimentary trade in the world of adventuring. So long as a party has a capable cleric, and the deceased has only recently died and was left in one piece, death is only an inconvenience. All of the principle characters, and many other minor characters, have died at least once before or during the events of the story.
• Badass Adorable:
  • Laios, a Ditzy Genius Magic Knight who is also one of the best and most skilled adventurers on the Island.
  • There's also his sister, Falin, who is just as cute as Laios as well as being a hugely powerful cleric.
• Badass in Distress:
  • Every member of Team Touden is a bona fide badass and they've all needed rescuing from the perils of the dungeon at some point. Such as when Marcille is caught by a Man-Eating Plant or when all of them, bar Senshi, are possessed by spirits.
  • There's also Shuro's Amazon Brigade party of retainers, most of whom are killed or badly injured by Falin's chimera form.
• Bad Boss: Mickbell abuses Kuro's loyalty terribly. The other members of Team Kabru discuss how he's probably barely paying him and just giving him food instead. In all his interactions with Kuro, he treats him more like a pet than a person. It's explained in supplementary material that Mickbell treats Kuro like this to discourage him from going independent, because he's actually very lonely. Kuro, for his part, recognizes that Mickbell is lonely and stays with him in spite of the cruddy treatment because he knows that Mickbell needs a friend he can rely on.
• Bait-and-Switch: When Laios mentions eating monsters around Falin, it looks like Falin is going to be horrified. Instead she is excited. Very excited.
  Chilchuck: Guess you were worried about nothing, huh?
  Marcille: No, I was worried about this.
  • A succubus appears to Laios in the form of Marcille. At first it looks like your run-of-the-mill Ship Tease, but then succubus!Marcille tells Laios that she's actually a monster and can turn him into one as well.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: The dryad flowers resemble naked humans but lack nipples or genitalia. Justified since they're plants and so pollinate each other through kissing and don't nurse their young.
• Basilisk and Cockatrice:
  • A basilisk is one of the early monsters the party encounters. It looks like a giant chicken with a snake for a tail; it also has poisonous claws. Interestingly, the real head is the snake, and basilisk eggs look more like snake eggs than chicken eggs. Laios mentions that the cockatrice is a close relative to the basilisk which lives deeper inside the dungeon.
  • The party encounters a cockatrice later, and it's clear even at a glance that it's more dangerous than a mere giant chicken. The cockatrice is twice as tall, has a leaner body, longer legs and wings with claws on them, and more reptilian-looking eyes. Also, getting bitten by the snake head turns you to stone.
• Beast Man: Kobolds look like bipedal dogs.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't waste food in front of Senshi.
  • Zon almost crushes Laios's head when the latter comments on the attractiveness of his wives. After Zon had asked him no less!
  • Don't get in the way when Chilchuck is trying to do his job disarming traps.
  • The normally chill Kuro snarls and growls when chimeras are near.
• The Big Bad Shuffle:
  • The Red Dragon initially takes the spotlight after eating Falin alive, forcing the party to go save her. The Lunatic Magician is set up to be the overall villain in the first couple of pages, being the one who created the dungeon by sinking a whole kingdom into the ground, but doesn’t really appear physically and may even be a myth. However, after it is revealed the Magician (aka Thistle) very much exists and is behind the Red Dragon, he becomes the primary antagonist. He cursed the residents of the Golden Kingdom with immortality, executes any who try to escape, attacks Team Touden with the monsters he controls, steals away Falin and mutates her into her chimera form, and is just murderously insane in general. Even the people he's "protecting" hate him.
  • Once Thistle is defeated, the true main villain, the demon that gave Thistle that power in the first place, begins to make himself known. Through numerous incarnations, he's satified the desires of his contracts in order to feed on them, was responsible for Thistle and Mithrun's deterioration into their current states, and manipulated Team Touden into freeing him so he can feed on the entire world.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies:
  • One of the first monsters Team Touden encounters and subsequently eats is a giant scorpion (although it's smaller than most examples, being only a bit bigger than a lobster).
  • Much later, they are attacked by succubi, which are actually a type of magically-disguised giant mosquito.
  • Even later, they encounter giant spiders, which are stated in an omake to come in numerous species.
• Big Fancy Castle: The castle of the Golden Kingdom. It's so tall its highest towers stretch almost to the top of the dungeon.
• Bigger on the Inside: The titular dungeon. Although it's located on a small island, it turns out the Golden Kingdom that is inside it is the size of a large country.
• Bittersweet Ending: By and large sweet. After everything they go through, not only does Laios's party save Falin for real, they destroy the Winged Lion and resurface the lost Golden Kingdom, which Laios is crowned king of. The bitterness comes in three-fold for Laios: first, he never wanted to lead (in fact, he became an adventurer to get away from the responsibility of eventually being chief of his village); second, eating the appetite of the Winged Lion has left Laios perpetually slightly hungry (he states he never feels more than about 40% full), which doesn't change the fact that his body can only eat so much before he'll get fat; finally, his greatest dreams were about monsters - living in harmony with them, being one, etc. However, the Winged Lion's Dying Curse that his greatest wish will never come true ends up meaning that all monsters give him a very wide berth. This incidentally makes his kingdom more prosperous as the monsters stay out of the kingdom itself but protect its borders from invaders simply by existing, but it's a big bummer for Laios himself.
• Black Comedy:
  • Due to how the dungeon provides the ability for easy revival so long as injuries aren't too severe, there are a lot of gags based around characters dying, such as Kabru's party going through a long segment of bravely and confidently challenging the dungeon like a heroic party before a Gilligan Cut full of Mood Whiplash where Laios' party finds their corpses after a Total Party Kill, or Chilchuck cheerfully opening a chest for treasure only to get skewered by a trap while still smiling.
  • While trying to catch rabbits for curry, the entire party aside from Marcille and Izutsumi (who manages to climb a tree) get quickly killed by the rabbits. Marcille, who is wearing Laios's neck guard which protects her from the rabbit's direct for-the-throat attacks, proceeds to use necromancy to direct the corpses of her friends to be bait while she uses magic to stun the rabbits before adding them to the spell in order to bring along, all of the corpses and bodies moving exactly the way Marcille is moving (with her allies also having the same expressions.) When she finds Izutsumi, Izutsumi is terrified and falls out of the tree screaming. When she's caught by corpse-Laios, she immediately has a heart attack and dies as well. What stops this from being entirely horrifying and makes it hilarious is the knowledge that Marcille can (and does) revive them after everything is done - and the fact that her reactions the entire time are frantic excitement at her successes and over the top yelling frustration at the setbacks. That said, when it's over she breaks down in tears twice.
  • Done again in the battle against Thistle, when the latter summoned calamities to face off against the party. Everyone but Laios is killed off, and as they die, a recipe annotation is written just above their corpses: Baked Senshi, Chilchuck Rui-be, Seawater-pickled Izutsumi, and Shinkei-jime Marcille.
• Blob Monster: Slimes. Senshi rescues Marcille from one that had engulfed her head, and then shows Team Touden how to prepare and eat them. Apparently, they are a delicacy when dried. Unlike most instances, it's shown they are some type of animal with organs (that seem to be translucent and the same colour as their slime), so Senshi is able to kill it with a simple knife.
• Bookends:
  • Team Touden's adventure begins and ends with racing to pry Falin out of the Red Dragon: while at first this meant cutting the beast open before she can be digested, by the end this means separating her chimera form's dragon half from her human half and eating it before both can remerge.
  • The first monster Laios is shown slaying to eat is a basic walking mushroom. The very last monster he's shown eating is also a walking mushroom, and, just like his first attempt at eating a monster, he gets sick from it.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • It's suggested that the main reason the party succeeds is the simple fact that they eat well and get regular sleep, where many other adventurers survive off the kinds of rations that they can carry and may not sleep as well. In a supplementary comic it's shown that carrying weeks worth of food gets extremely bland and is very heavy.
  • At one point Marcille offers to disarm some traps with her magic. Laios says it's better to just let Chilchuck do it by hand.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Marcille and Chief Zon have a heated discussion on whether the orcs are justified in attacking other adventurers for supplies. Zon defend his people's actions since the other races drove them off from their lands, forcing them to live in the dungeon and survive in anyway they can. However, Marcille points out it was the orcs' fault they got driven out from their lands in the first place because they constantly raided the other races for supplies instead of trading with them; the other races had enough of the orcs attacking them and drove them off.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Often happens literally since the entire point of the series is cooking monsters into Food Porn. Senshi's lists of ingredients will usually start out ordinary (oil, salt, vegetables, etc.) only to throw in some monster parts (giant bat flesh, sliced kraken parasite, dryad fruits) as the main ingredient.
• Brick Joke:
  • Laios's "Idea of a Cool Monster", shown when discussing the merits of chimera, returns nearly forty chapters later as a summoned monster within his dreams to defend himself from a shin. Even later, it reappears as the form Laios takes in order to defeat the Winged Lion.
  • In a very early chapter, we see the things in the dungeon that scare each individual party member. For Chilchuck, one thing is a rabbit. At the bottom of the dungeon, right outside the Mad Sorcerer's house, there is a horde of rabbits that fully justify Chilchuck's fears, as they quickly slaughter the entire party aside from Marcille and Izutsumi.
  • In chapter 61, Kabru is attacked by a shin, causing him to have a nightmare about Laios turning his back on humanity to indulge in his monster obesession. This ends up saving Laios while he tries to escape Thistle's horde of dragons; one of those same shin is killed by a wyrm's poison breath, causing it to spit out an image of Laios amidst the poison mist, making Thistle assume he was caught in it.
  • One side comic has Chilchuk telling the rest of the party about his 3 daughters, one of whom really wants to date a dwarf. Marcille mentions it would be nice one day to have dinner with the three of them. In the art accompanying the afterword from the author at the end of the final volume, we see that they eventually do have that dinner together, and the daughter who was interested in dating a dwarf seems particularly attentive with Senshi around.
• Broken Pedestal: In the first chapter, Laios consults a dungeon food guide to determine whether a species of walking mushroom is edible. It's apparent he's read the book a lot and deeply treasures it, but when he tries to eat kraken flesh, described in the book as delicious, but in reality inedibly bitter, he realizes most of the content is bogus and the author was probably making it up. This comes at a great disappointment to Laios.
• Brown Note: Anyone, person or monster, who hears a mandrake's scream at close range will be harmed by it, with the amount of harm depending on proximity. Marcille catches enough of one's scream as it's tapering off to be affected but recovers in a few minutes. Interestingly, pulling them out and letting them scream before dying rather than killing them before they can start makes them taste better.
• Call-Back: The chapter art for chapter 50, which is after the party gets mutated into different races by changeling mushrooms, is a recreation of the first volume's cover with their new appearances, with the chimera Falin in the background replacing the red dragon and Izutsumi with them.
• Cannibal Tribe: It's offhandedly mentioned in the Adventurer's Bible that there are some primitive elf tribes which practice cannibalism (this never comes up in the actual story, however).
• Can't Argue with Elves: The "long-lived" races (elves, dwarves, and gnomes) treat the "shorter-lived" races exploring a dungeon like children playing with explosives and are quick to run in and seal off dungeons that have progressed to a certain point. We gradually learn more about how much of a problem this mindset is to the "shorter-lived": Tallmen captured by elves will essentially die of old age in jail because the elves don't think 60 years is that long of a time to detain someone and think 2 years is a reasonable span of time between questioning sessions, and most of the world's fertile lands are occupied by "long-lived" races, leaving everyone else to fight over the scraps.
• Carnivore Confusion: Comes up a lot. Just how close to human intelligence and appearance do monsters have to be before it becomes unacceptable to eat them? Laios thinks that fish-type merfolk aren't even mammals so it should be fine to eat them. Chilchuck, reflecting that they have humanlike arms and fingers and enough intelligence to use and possibly make weapons, vigorously disagrees. Mammalian merfolk are unconcerned and happily eat young fish-type merfolk, but that variety of merfolk, despite looking far more human, doesn't use weapons and may or may not even be intelligent.
• Cast from Calories: Healing and resurrection magic (the latter explicitly noted to be an extended version of the former) are stated to take their energy from the person's body fat and muscle tissue first, so one part of dungeon-delving preparation is bulking up as a precaution, because if you're too skinny the spell turns into Cast from Lifespan as it takes the energy from your internal organs instead (a supplementary sketch explaining this process in detail also notes that Kabru has become quite thin since the story began).
• Cast of Snowflakes: Ryoko Kui deliberately designed her cast so that they could all be told apart even if they swapped clothes with characters who have similar silhouettes. Each has their own unique features, even relatively minor characters. Characters who are related have similar features while still not being identical. This is illustrated beautifully in a page that shows what each of the main cast would like as a human, elf, halfling, dwarf, or gnome. Each character and their race are completely distinct but identifiable. Marcille braids and ties her hair up into a new style every time the party rests but remains completely recognizable even when her hair becomes as unkempt and ragged as that of one of the Canaries.
• Casting Gag: In the Latin American Spanish dub, this is not the first time Erika Ugalde (Marcille Donato) had voiced an elven mage before.
• Cat Girl: Izutsumi, due to her curse.
• Central Theme:
  • Food. Appreciating it, making it, respecting it, exploring tastes and ingredients, the necessity and pleasures of it.
    • While the main characters have a pretty big goal in gathering food for explorations, it also takes part in the conflicts of the series: They're trying to save a team member from becoming food for the Red Dragon, the Mad Sorcerer doesn't understand the importance or the interest of others in food, being so unattentive to it that when Laios explains it to him, he assumes that trapping people and force-feeding them a nutrient-filled soup is the same.
    • The Greater-Scope Villain's whole deal is that he's looking for something delicious and nutritious for him. The Winged Lion is an Emotion Eater demon that wants to feed on the desires of humans. He wants to feed on Thistle's desires and then continue his meal by turning one of the members of Team Touden, preferably Marcille or Laios, into the next Master of the Dungeon.
  • Desires, which also ties into the theme of food (as wanting and needing to eat is one of the most basic, universal desires). Heroes and villains alike are driven by a desire, often to an obsessive degree. Meanwhile, having a lack of desire makes a person little more than a vegetable (as Mithrun can attest to, as he had nearly all of his desires eaten by the Winged Lion, the only thing driving him being the desire to get Revenge). It is because someone desires something that makes them truly alive, and even invincible beings can be taken down if you target what they want the most. The Winged Lion is ultimately defeated when he unknowingly gives Laios the power of digest desires; Laios eats the demon's very appetite, which is the reason why he exists in this world at all. Without it, the Winged Lion reverts back to a force of nature without sentience or personality.
  • Ageism, while not as major as food, is still a consistent theme brought up in the interactions between characters. Longer lived races like elves, dwarves, and gnomes have a habit of looking down on shorter lived races like half-foots, tallmen, and ogres, and treat them like children incapable of taking care of themselves. This is most present in how the elf Marcille and dwarf Senshi treat the half-foot Chilchuck like a child despite him being an adult with three grown children of his own, but omakes and supplementary material also show this discrimination in detail, such as how the elf Milsiril, who runs an orphanage for shorter-lived races, is accused of treating her children more like pets than humans with agency (even though the accusers are just as guilty of treating short-lived races as even less than pets), and relationships between short-lived and long lived races face discrimination because the long lived races can't see past the literal age difference and treat it akin to pedophilia. One of the greatest issues that arise as a result, though, is the fact that long-lived races will outlive short-lived races, resulting in loneliness and grief for the former. Marcile, as a half-elf, will outlive even other elves, and her wish to equalize everyone's lifespans drives her to becoming the Lord of the Dungeon.
• Chekhov's Gag: In Chapter 3, we're introduced to Laios' idea of "the coolest monster", a chimera with many different random animal parts, such as one bat wing and one bird wing, one rhinoceros head, one eagle head, and a snake-headed tail, among many other features. After being manipulated by the Winged Lion, he is granted his ultimate deepest desire to become "the coolest monster" (although he added a wolf head to it after his encounter with the succubus with the appearance of the Marcille scylla).
• Chekhov's Skill: In one minor scene Falin off-handedly mention that Laios is great at acting like a dog. This comes into play during the shapeshifter chapter where Laios acts like a vicious hunting dog to scare the shapeshifter (a tanuki-like creature) away from its hiding.
• Chest Monster: Called mimics here. They're Chilchuck's bane, since he's been tricked and killed by them many times earlier in his career. A little different than typical mimics, the monster resembles a young hermit crab and uses larger and larger containers as its "shell". It is even cooked and eaten like a crab.
• Childhood Friends: Marcille and Falin. They met at magic school, when Falin was ten and Marcille was forty.
• City of Adventure: The sunken kingdom has become part of the dungeon and is alive with dangerous flora, fauna and traps.
• Climax Boss: The Red Dragon turns out to be this. Team Touden kill it about halfway into the story. After that, the story becomes about saving Falin after she becomes a chimera due to Marcille's resurrection spell accidentally fusing Falin's soul with the Red Dragon's, and ultimately solving the mystery of the dungeon itself.
• Clingy Costume: The suits they made out of the giant frog skins ended up like this in a non-fanservice way. They didn't have enough time to tan them properly so the blood ended up sticking to their clothing. They ended up removing them between chapters. Marcille mourns that the outfit she was wearing underneath the frog skin was unsalvageable.
• Clothing Damage: Chilchuck is in for this sometimes, whether through monster attacks or growing under the influence of changeling spores. After a mimic encounter Chilchuck is seen mending his torn neckwrap. Chimaera Falin also tears her shirt off after Kabru stabs through it repeatedly.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • Subverted in Chapter 51. Due to Falin's resurrection using dragon flesh, her soul is mixed with the dragon's, and Thistle turning Falin into a chimera using the remaining dragon carcass, turned her mostly dragon. However, Senshi points out the dragon meat they ate didn't get merged with Falin, because once it's consumed and digested, it can't be considered part of the dragon anymore, so, theoretically, all they have to do is cut away and eat the dragon parts of her to get her back to normal next time. Most of the party is against the idea due to the cannibalistic implications, but Laios is only concerned by the quantity they'd need to eat, considering how big a dragon is. Marcille, Izutsumi, and Chilchuck scream that he's missing the point, only for Laios to scream right back that it's exactly the point because this is the best plan they've come up with so far and no one else has an alternate suggestion.
  • In Chapter 81, the characters are stuck in a kitchen and need to lure Marcille inside to escape. They decide they need to make some delicious Comfort Food to lure her in. They question a construct of Marcille's memories on her backstory for clues. Although it's made quite apparent she comes from an equivalent of Italy (with the construct mentioning porchetta and spaghetti), they end up making chashu ramen instead (because it has the roast pork and noodles mentioned). Izutsumi is the only one who points out that's totally wrong, they've should've made something like lasagna or penne arabbiata (the others still don't quite get it). It ends up luring Marcille in anyway, and it becomes a Running Gag that they call this dish "Marcille's Local Cuisine", to her confusion.
• Compressed Adaptation: In-Universe. It's established in supplementary material that Marcille is a big fan of an elven romantic drama series epic the The Daltian Clan. The series has been adapted into a popular screenplay, but while the written story spans 24 volumes (doorstopper ones at that), the theatre adaptation only covers about one chapter. Marcille isn't a fan for all the changes made (on top of the particular performance she watches being acted by tallmen instead of elves), but Falin loves it (for the effects, not the story), while quickly growing bored when given the actual books to read.
• Conspicuous in the Crowd: When the dungeon lobby is attacked by a wave of monsters, Captain Mithrun deduces that the Lord of the Dungeon must be personally controlling them and looks for anyone who seems out of place. Sure enough, he's the one person in the crowd who isn't panicking.
• Cool Old Guy: Mr. and Mrs. Tansu, a pair of elderly gnomes who lead their own party of adventurers. They're both highly capable and Mr. Tansu also works a second job as advisor to the Island's lord, despite both being over two hundred years old.
• Cool vs. Awesome:
  • Team Touden vs. the Red Dragon.
  • Later on, Team Touden, Team Kabru and Team Shuro vs. chimera!Falin and a flock of harpies controlled by the Lunatic Magician.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: In chapter 62 we are told that dungeons were actually created by the Precursors to trap demons (in this series, demons are Eldritch Abomination Emotion Eaters from a dimension of infinite energy) Beneath the Earth. Demons attempt to lure adventurers into the dungeons using illusions, false promises, and spawning treasure in order to feed on their desires and gain power. If a demon consumes enough desire, it will grow powerful enough to tear through the dungeon and bring destruction untold upon the surface world.
• Creepy Changing Painting: The first living painting the party pass has eyes that follow them from panel to panel.
• Cursed with Awesome: The Winged Lion's "curse" of Laios' greatest desire never being granted turns out to be that he can never see another monster again, because now they avoid him like the plague, never coming within many miles of him. To anyone but Laios, this would be a blessing, especially because the monsters will never bother his kingdom and keep his domain safe from hostile invaders, by only dwelling around its outskirts.
• Curtains Match the Window: Laios's and Falin's hair and eyes are the same faded blonde/gold.
• Cute Little Fangs: Izustumi has a pair. Makes sense since she's a cat beastkin.
  • After Falin is revived for good and almost human, she has multiple Little Bit Beastly features including small fangs.
• Daddy Issues: In the nightmares chapter, it's revealed that Laios hasn't spoken to his parents in ten years. In a nightmare he has, they consider him a disappointment for choosing a career in Dungeon Crawling. Falin, by contrast, continued exchanging letters with them even during their adventuring days and hopes that he and they will reconcille.
• The Dark Arts: Marcille dabbles in forbidden magic, believing that magic is inherently neither good nor evil and only man can be both. Could also be terribly, terribly wrong about this - when she's using forbidden magic to cast dispel on the Lunatic Magician's dragonblood minions, she starts chuckling and smiling as she's spattered with blood, bleeding from the nose, and her eyes are unclear and distant. However this are also symptoms of large usage of mana, which Blood Magic uses so it might just be that.
• Dating Sim: Parodied. The cover page for chapter 56 is a collection of events from previous chapters, but styled like a dating sim game from Chilchuck's point of view. Apparently, Laios and Senshi are options, too. They also have the highest love meter shown.
• Daytime Drama Queen: An omake after the incident with the shin has the party notice that Marcille's dreams look like a romantic soap opera. They start watching them and over the first "season", everyone aside from Senshi gets super into it with them crying on the last episode. Then they watch the second "season" and everyone but Izutsumi (who spends the whole omake silently fixated on the soap with a vacant expression) get turned off by the drama getting dragged out pointlessly.
• Deal with the Devil: Not so much "the Devil" as a member of a "devil species". Faustian bargains are apparently how demons nourish themselves, in keeping with the manga's theme of "to live is to eat".
• Death Is Cheap: Being killed isn't an uncommon occurrence in the dungeon, in fact nearly every member of Laios's party has died at least once before the proper story begins. Due to the magic of the dungeon, souls tend to be tethered to their bodies even after death for a good while. However, the body still needs to be generally intact for revival spells to work. That's why Laios's party is in a hurry to return to where Falin is, as if they are unable to recover her body before it's digested by the dragon that ate her, she will be lost for good.
• Death Montage: In Chapter 13, Chilchuck reminisces on his numerous deaths by mimics as a novice adventurer. The first time, he was too eager about an unlocked chest with no trap he didn't think about why it was unlocked and had no trap, the second time he incorrectly assumed that because a chest was locked there couldn't possibly be a mimic inside it, the third time he was so preoccupied about a mimic possibly being inside he forgot that there could be other traps in the chest too.
• Death World: The dungeon is incredibly dangerous to even be in due to the multitude of hostile monsters and deadly traps. Going it alone is certain death, and going it in groups still doesn't guarantee that the entire group won't be wiped out. However, with the help of necromancing magicians, Death Is Cheap, so many adventurers still try and plunder it.
• Decade Dissonance: While most of the setting appears to be a typical Medieval European Fantasy for the most part (aside from the areas from the "East", which are basically Wutai-themed), dwarf-inhabited areas are shown to be centuries ahead of everyone else technologically, already having invented automated trolleys, wireless telephones, and harnessed steam-power. While the abodes of other races tend to be constructed of wood and stone, dwarves often use metal for homes and vehicles. From what little we see, elven society seems to be roughly equivalent to European Renaissance level, while orcs are the lowest on the technological spectrum, with only tribal level culture and very basic agricultural knowledge.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: It's made apparent a few times that Laios and Falin came from a very socially conservative and insular community, even by the standards of the largely medieval setting. Falin was a social pariah as a child there because she showed magic proficiency (leading Marcille to ask incredulously if they lived in the Middle Ages) in a world where magical users are commonplace and normal, they consider nearby mountain tribes subhuman savages to be killed on sight (a mentality that disturbs Kabru, and is ironic considering how Laios and Falin are perfectly fine with other human or demihuman races that are regularly discriminated against), and in a What If? omake, it's stated that if Laios had been born a woman, he never would've left the village and just became a domestic housewife, much to his normal self's disappointment.
• Dem Bones: Walking skeletons are a type of monster that can be found in the titular dungeon. They occur when a dead body is possessed by a wandering spirit and, because the ghost inhabiting it isn't the right one, the flesh rots off but the bones keep moving.
• Demihuman:
  • Elves, half-foots, gnomes, dwarves, and orcs are the most prominent races. Laios argues with Chilchuck over whether or not fish-type mermaids are more monster or demi-human, as since they're mammals they're not as closely related. Supplementary material clarifies that elves, half-foots, gnomes, dwarves, and ogres, and tallmen (the "normal" humans) all fall under the umbrella of "human" in this universe, while more animalistic races like orcs, kobolds, goblins, and lizardmen are considered demi-human (the easiest distinction, according to Kabru, being that they have a different number of bones from "humans").
  • There are also beastmen in the setting, but they are artificially created when a beast soul and human soul are put in the same vessel. The effects of this can vary from relatively minor changes as we see with Itsuzumi who has grown fur all over her body and grown cat ears and a tail, to rather monstrous changes such as with Falin, who has turned into a giant half-human half-dragon monstrosity after being fused with a dragon soul.
• Description Cut: Near the end of Chapter 55, Kabru is seemingly falling to his death, while his internal monologue declaring that he entrusts Laios to conquer this dungeon. Cut to Team Touden once again having been race-swapped by changeling mushrooms and then having their bodies changed in goofy ways by wrong application of the cure.
• Developing Doomed Characters: Kabru's party gets a Black Comedy example of this in episode 5. We spend the first act getting to know them, interacting and seeing their flaws and friendship, their skill and determination. They find a box of treasure and decide to head back to celebrate... then we cut to them dead on the ground and found by Laios' party. We've seen random corpses of dead adventurers before... Laios' party act no different here. But we got to know these poor souls who are just more corpses for the clean up crew to bring back and revive.
• Devil, but No God: The winged lion is the emblem of the Golden Kingdom's guardian deity. There is a Winged Lion in the story who is imprisoned by Thistle and believed to be that deity by the remaining citizens of the kingdom, but it in fact turns out to be a demon. If gods help at all in the story it's very indirect; there are other religions, but no mention of other gods aside from the demon having been worshipped as a god while in other forms. After defeating the demon, Laios reflects that he thinks it actually isn't the original winged lion but took that shape to better manipulate the people in the region, and chooses to keep its symbol going forwards as he does believe the basis for it is benign.
• Didn't Think This Through: Team Touden decide to use Senshi's adamant cooking pot as a shield against the Red Dragon's fire...forgetting the main reason Senshi converted his ancestral shield into said pot is because one of its properties is spreading heat fast and evenly. Cue Laios dropping the pot in pain after the first blast of fire burns his hands.
• Dinosaurs Are Dragons: The dragon designs are given very theropod-like anatomical traits, such as tyrannosaur-like heads, and in one case, raptor-like retractable claws. In one of Laios' Imagine Spots, a Velociraptor (among other creatures) is depicted as type of lesser dragon.
• Disability Immunity: A rather fantastic disability, but Izutsumi, by virtue of being a human soul blended with an animal soul, cannot be enthralled by succubi. They either take the form of a human (which the cat part doesn't care about) or of a cat (which the human part doesn't care about). This allows her to be the sole survivor of the succubus attack and save everyone.
• Disappeared Dad: It's never mentioned what happened to Kabru's father or whether he died with the rest of the village.
• Disc-One Final Boss: The Red Dragon. Just because Team Touden have tracked down and killed it, doesn't mean their adventure is close to being over.
• Disciplines of Magic: An omake explains that elvish and gnomish magics, the two primary magic systems (half-foots and dwarves tend to be magically deficient races, while tallmen tend to use either one or the other) differ in application despite originating from the same source. Elven magic is more rigid and reliable, treating magic as a tool, but has a higher mana cost, while gnomish magic tends to be more powerful at a lower mana cost, treating magic like a sacred gift, but the results are more variable and unpredictable.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Lunatic Magician views dungeon crawlers as thieves and deals with said adventurers either by feeding them to monsters or burning them alive. Note that most of these unfortunate folks have no idea any of the residents of the Golden Kingdom are even still alive. They just see it as collecting resources from a culture that died out long ago.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The scene where the goat demon devours Mithrun's desires is framed a lot like a rape, as the incident takes place in a bedroom with the victim made to stop struggling. The imagery is repeated when the Winged Lion eats Thistle's desires, including long laviscious licks and the victim screaming and struggling against the violation. It returns a third time when Laios devours the Winged Lion's desires, this time depicted in a more feral manner.
• Doing In the Wizard: Downplayed, as magic most certainly exists in the setting. However, a lot of elements that would traditionally just be straight up magic, are instead depicted as actually just very alien organisms, so that they can be eaten. Spirits are depicted as akin to microbes that live off of mana and can be consumed in order to consume said mana, and animated armor, rather than being puppeteered by magic as typical (and as assumed in-universe, too), they're actually mollusks who's shells merely resemble armor plates and work in a human-shaped colony. Likewise, Laios' sentient Cool Sword isn't enchanted, but rather its just one of these mollusks in a sword shaped shell, that he decided to keep rather than eat.
• Don't Try This at Home:
  • The chapter where the party harvesting and cooking up mandrakes has a disclaimer reminding the reader that real Mandragora plants (which the fictional ones in the chapter are based on) are highly toxic, and should never be eaten.
  • When Laios suggests eating the living armour after finding out they are actually animals with soft parts inside the armour plates, Marcille worries that they might be poisonous, but Laios brushes it off saying that, since the monsters have to hide themselves inside armour to survive, they definitely wouldn't have poison, unlike something like the definitely venomous basilisk, which proudly displays itself without fear because it's poisonous. There's a disclaimer from the author right under this panel saying this is absolutely not true.
• Double-Meaning Title: The title of the anime's ending song, "Party", could be interpreted to mean either a festive gathering, or a group of people working together. Both definitions are fitting, as the song has a cheerful, party-like sound, and the show is about a party of Dungeon Crawling adventurers.
• Downer Beginning: The manga begins with Falin being eaten by the Red Dragon, then two members of her team leaving instead of sticking around to help her brother rescue her. Fortunately it gets less depressing from there.
• Dragon Variety Pack: For the first part of the story, a four-legged, wingless red dragon represents the climactic opponent that the protagonists have to defeat. The existence of other kinds of dragons is also alluded to, but this isn't shown in full until the confrontation with the Lunatic Magician, who summons many different kinds of dragons at once to take out the party. This includes a swarm of wyverns, a hydra, another red dragon, a green dragon (the classic 'winged with four legs' variety), a wyrm (salamander-like and with poisonous gas breath), an eastern dragon (capable of conjuring thunderstorms), a white dragon (furry and breathes ice), a leviathan (an orca-like sea monster that can generate sea water), and "shin" (a Lotus-Eater Machine clam which apparently count as a dragon species). An Imagine Spot also depicts dinosaurs, Komodo dragons, and the mušḫuššu as minor varieties of dragon.
• Dramatic Irony: The Lunatic Magician is desperately searching for the king of the Golden Kingdom...who the reader saw crawling up to the surface and promptly crumbling into dust. On the very first page of the series. Even when he is told right to his face that the king is long dead, he refuses to believe it.
• Dream Emergency Exit: Marcille gets trapped in a nightmare by a clam-like creature called a nightmare, hidden in her pillow and feeding on her distress. The safest way to wake someone attacked like this is for someone else to fall asleep on top of them, entering their dream and helping them fight it off, which Laios does. It turns out Marcille’s worst nightmare is seeing all her friends and family die before she does, and she’s only able to escape when Laios inspires her to manifest her greatest desire, the Lunatic Magician’s spellbook, which contains the secret of immortality. When Marcille wakes up, all she remembers about the nightmare is going on an adventure with a funny dog.
• Dream Sequence: Chapter 42 is about Laios going into Marcille's dream to rescue her from a pack of nightmares that have trapped her there. It starts with Laios already in his own dream and quickly moves onto Marcille's once he remembers where he is.
• *Drool* Hello: In the first chapter, some slime drips on Marcille's head from a crack in the ceiling. But the early warning isn't enough for her to avoid a Blob Monster to the face.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: The Lunatic Magician is believed to be female for a large portion of the story due to his effeminate appearance, but he is eventually revealed to be male. This doesn't stop members of Team Touden (at least in the English translation) from periodically slipping up and referring to him with female pronouns anyway. It's that striking.
• Dug Too Deep: When Senshi recounts his backstory he says that as his initial party explored the golden city they found underground, the other dwarves behaved strangely, eyes gleaming in the darkness and seemingly drawn deeper and deeper. They did in fact find monsters, and by the time they discovered that the place was turning into a dungeon it was no longer a simple manner to escape.
• Dungeon-Based Economy:
  • Delving into the sunken kingdom is a mainstay of the region's economy, including supporting niche industries like body recovery, tourism, and maintaining campgrounds. Slightly deconstructed in that the upper levels of the dungeon have been picked clean already, so most of the wealth is from searching for secret passages, harvesting monster parts, or trading with the orcs and outlaws that decided to live in the dungeon.
  • Even more interestingly, a flashback with Marcille shows that dungeons are a natural phenomenon. Building one, even a tiny one in a glass jar, will generate magic and spawn monsters. Falin reveals she's extremely good at it, even carefully cultivating a cave's ecology to be a self-sustaining source of magic. The economy is based on making dungeons, not just looting them!
• Dungeon Crawling: A major industry and social activity for adventurers.
• Dungeon Maintenance: Basically the entire point, but particularly evident in the oddly convenient toilets set aside throughout the dungeons which Senshi is using to harvest fertilizer for his golem fields.
  • On a larger scale, the Lunatic Magician acts as dungeon maintenance for the dungeon as a whole. A flashback to Marcille's school days shows that mage students create a tiny dungeon in a jar called a "dungeonium" as a project. The large-scale dungeons are generally run by people who make a pact with a demon.
• Dungeon Shop: The first floor has turned a cemetery into a social hub and marketplace. A few black-market shops have also set up in the lower levels, populated mainly by renegades and rogues. There's a village of orcs further down, too, but they’re usually not so into trade.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: At the very start of the manga Falin dies making a Heroic Sacrifice to save her team from a Total Party Kill by the Red Dragon. Killing the dragon, cutting it open, and finding her body and resurrecting her is the party's chief priority.
• Dying Race: It's said in the World Guide that ogres once had a large nation but have been in decline for a long time and are now rare and mostly found in small regions on the East. Even there they're subject to Fantastic Racism and those who live among tallmen are often de-fanged and de-horned to try to seem more harmless. Speculation as to why they've declined includes that they're too large to ride most horses and as Big Eaters they can't tolerate famine.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The first anime opening shows glimpses of multiple characters who do not become properly relevant until later in the story such as Izutsumi, Thistle, and the Canaries.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Marcille in the earliest chapters isn't nearly as frantic to rescue Falin as she's shown to be later. While she's willing to head back into the dungeon for her immediately and reluctantly begins eating monsters, like Chilchuck, she'd like to get a meal at a tavern first. Reflected on later in the manga, when she looks back and thinks that she'd assumed they would be able to reach Falin quickly. This is also alluded to when the party encounters shapeshifters who impersonate the party. One Marcille is characterized as being willing to do anything to save Falin with stoic determination, while the other Marcille panics trying to assure everyone that she would do anything for Falin too.
  • Kabru on the fourth floor regards mammal-type mermaids with calm admiration and thinks it's a pity that with earplugs in to protect him he won't get to hear their song. This is odd given his backstory: monsters from a dungeon overran his hometown and killed his mother. Kabru's not appreciative of monsters; he can and does readily hide his true feelings under a pleasant mask, but in this circumstance he's not even talking to the party. Perhaps the mermaids appearing so human, and drowning the people who approach them but not otherwise attacking, makes them seem less threatening to him.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After many weeks of struggling, crawling through dungeon halls, fighting off monsters, an insane wizard, and a reality-warping demon, nearly being caught and imprisoned by elves for magic crimes, and almost causing the end of the world, Laios and the others are able to end the threat of demonic invasion for good and finally resurrect Falin with the help of everyone they've befriended over the course of their adventure. To top it off, Laios is crowned king of the Golden Kingdom, and Marcille becomes his chief advisor, gaining far more than they ever asked for in the process.
• Eats Babies: In an omake a human-type mermaid is shown eating a piscine-type mermaid's hatchling.
• Eldritch Location: The titular dungeon. Really, just dungeons in general: They drip with magic, swarm with monsters that often can't survive outside, and death itself is forbidden there. Dungeons respond to peoples' desires and shift around, giving them sources of clean water and safe places to rest, while also trying to compel them to go deeper. They also seem to have a deleterious effect on humans - someone tells Kabru that most of the large successful parties have fragmented by now, between disappearances and fights between members. Greed takes hold in the hearts of those who live in or near the dungeon, making people such as the Shadow Lord of the Island focus on wealth and disregard lives.
• Elfeminate: All the elves so far range from androgynous to very feminine-looking, with some of the males being the latter (albeit flat-chested). Some non-elf characters struggle to discern male from female. Otta, one of the Canaries, keeps her hair very short and wears a masculine outfit that has her sometimes mistaken for a boy even by other elves. In a Daydream Hour where the artist genderswapped the main Canary party, all the characters' faces and hair are unchanged and clothing is barely different, with heights being the most visible alteration. When Senshi is transformed into an elf by changeling mushroom spores, his huge beard turns into a single lock of a beard and a wisp of a moustache and his stout and burly dwarf body is turned into a very slender one, complete with Bishie Sparkles.
• Elves vs. Dwarves: In the past, elves fought with dwarves (with gnomes allying with the dwarves) over the ownership of the island. The elves won, but then gave it to humans because it was too big to take care of.
• Emotion Eater: The nightmares trap their victims in never-ending bad dreams and feed on the victims' fear.
• Escape Rope: Return spells are a subtype of teleportation magic which use enchanted scrolls or paintings to allow adventurers inside a dungeon to step through them and walk out of another pre-prepared scroll/painting on the surface. It's extremely convenient, as expeditions into dungeons regularly last weeks, but the spell is complicated to perform, and has some risk involved (namely, if the immediate surroundings of the aboveground scroll/painting are disturbed while a person is halfway through, the spell will break and a Portal Cut will ensue).
• Everything Trying to Kill You: The dungeon is full of hostile fauna and flora, plus numerous traps. Marcille mentions that monsters differ from normal animals in that their aggression is stronger than their self-preservation instincts.
• Exact Words:
  • Namari mentions that adamantine can stand up to a dragon's fangs. The party later misremember her words and end up thinking it will protect against a dragon's fire. While the metal itself can withstand the fire, it does nothing to stop the heat - as you might expect from a cooking pot.
  • In the first chapter, Senshi says he's been delving through the dungeon for over ten years. It's later clarified that the "over" part of "over ten years" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because he's actually been in and out of the dungeon for seventy-six years (he's spent plenty of time out on the surface on the island and along the coast, but always returned and only became serious about monster eating in the past decade or so).
• Exotic Extended Marriage: In a bonus chapter, the orc chief points out three different women in the village as his wives. It's unclear if this is standard practice for all orc men, or a special privilege of the chief.
  • The former is proven to be the case to an extent in an extra describing Senshi's time living among the orcs. As Senshi explains it, a male orc's rank in their village hierarchy determines how many wives he's allowed to wed. With a diagram indicating that if he wanted, it might be possible for an orc chief to take on even more than three wives.
• Extradimensional Power Source: The basis of Forbidden Magic is to draw power from a separate universe that holds infinite energy, bypassing the normal limits of Mana use. The dungeon is also said to be created with similar magic. Turns out that there's a good reason such magic is forbidden: that other universe is a malevolent Sentient Cosmic Force.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The entire adventure, from Falin being eaten by the red dragon to the Winged Lion's defeat and Falin's second resurrection, takes place in just over one month.
• Eyes Always Shut: Falin is drawn like this most of the time, though she does open them during more serious moments, such as when she's possessed by the Lunatic Magician. Supplementary material states it's because she's nearsighted, but doesn't want to wear glasses and so constantly squints. Notably, when she's merged with a dragon, she gains the dragon's superior eyesight and no longer squints.
  • The elderly gnome Mrs. Tansu also has such eyes, though they droop more.
• Fairy Ring: Changeling myths are revealed to be the result of the magical spores of a certain mushroom species. When an animal or object picks up the spores and then crosses through a ring, it is transformed into something different but similar: sapient beings get swapped into other sapient beings, dumplings turn into other kinds of dumplings, and so on. These mushrooms often grow in rings, thus triggering the effect automatically, but any kind of ring will do: a ring of arms, the open mouth of a statue...
• Fantastic Aesop: On a long delve, being open to eating monsters is a better idea than trying to survive on nutritionally limited rations from the surface.
  • This gets refined when Izutsumi joins the party and is initially unwilling to eat monsters, much to Laios's exasperation and contempt. Marcille explains to Izutsumi that it's sometimes necessary to do unpleasant things in pursuit of a greater goal, and tells Laios that food taboos aren't pointless or useless.
  • Played for Laughs when the party kills a kraken and Senshi grills one of its giant parasites. Laios eats some raw parasite and contracts one of it's parasites, which tries to bore through his stomach lining and gives him a miserable night before it dies. The narration concludes that chapter and episode by saying that Laios vows to never eat raw parasite again.
• Fantastical Social Services: The economy that's grown up around the dungeon includes government-subsidized "corpse retrievers" that resurrect dead adventurers in exchange for a cut of their treasure. The most unethical ones deliberately sabotage adventurers to drum up business.
• Fantastic Caste System: It's only implicitly alluded to in the main story, but supplementary material states dwarves have a society built up like this. Dwarf communities, known as clans or towns, are very closely knit and the social status and class of a dwarf within the clan is determined at birth. The chief of a clan is considered the very highest authority by the community, even above the area's royalty. Dwarves outside a group are social pariahs with far fewer legal rights, excluding them from leasing dwarf property, buying from dwarf-owned businesses, or working with other dwarves, among other restrictions.
• Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: The dungeon is a magical ecosystem with its own food web, including edible plants.
  • Pollinated dryad flowers turn into pumpkin-like fruits with human faces on them. Laios is appropriately excited to eat them and Marcille equally appropriately freaked-out.
  • Man-Eating Plants produce fruit to lure in their prey; Laios' party retrieves some and makes it into a tart. A footnote mentions that different kinds of plants produce different fruit: the digestive types' are juicy and sweet, while the fertilizer types' are dense and full-flavoured.
  • Mandrakes can be cooked like root vegetables and are rich in natural Mana, although they unleash a deadly scream when first picked.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • According to Ryoko Kui's artbook, halflings suffer from discrimination. Although this is only briefly touched upon in the manga itself:
    • In one instance, Namari tells Laios to never buy weapons from a store run by halflings.
    • In an omake, it's mentioned one way to avoid mermaids is to bring a halfling on the ship. The halfling, who has sharper senses, will hear the mermaids' song first (and possibly die) while the other crew members steer to safety.
    • In one chapter, when Marcille asks Chilchuck why he doesn't learn magic, Chilchuck says that halflings who come into possession of magical artifacts often end up being kidnapped by elves, never to be seen again.
    • According to Izutsumi, halflings are known as such due to a large number of them having a single foot cut off over thefts.
    • Chilchuck's dungeon career started with him joining a succubus-hunting party. He realized it was strange that the rest of the party was all much more experienced than him and he had little to do, so spied on them until he realized they had brought him on to feed to succubi so the rare, valuable monsters could reproduce. Afterwards he only took jobs that paid up front and formed a union, trying to look out for other half-foots and keep them from being seen as disposable.
  • Inverted with Laios and Falin, who are very open-minded toward demi-human species like kobolds but have some unfortunate prejudices toward the "barbarian" human groups who live near their village, much to Kabru's discomfort.
  • The longer-lived peoples broadly look down on shorter-lived ones, with Kabru saying elves and dwarves see humans as "nothing more than infants" and don't have much respect for their sovereignty. Notably, when the Elf Queen discusses the sudden expansion of The Island's dungeon with the leaders of the other races, she only contacts the similarly long-lived dwarves and gnomes. This factors more into the story with the arrival of the elven Canaries. In an omake several Canaries bicker over what to call shorter-lived races only to be horrified when their older captain says that elves used to call short-lived people "lesser races." Also, according to Marcille when half-elves show up in elvish literature they're frequently stereotyped as energetic and simpleminded.
    • Elves, with their long lifespans, androgynous beauty, and high aptitude for magic, are commonly admired by tallmen. Tallmen royals sometimes have elves serve them, boosting their status and stoking their vanity. That's all to the good for someone like Marcille's mother the court magician, but these royals also fear that elves can manipulate them and follow their own agendas - and just because the Western Elves are a powerful nation doesn't mean all elves are more wealthy and powerful than all tallmen. Delgal's father wanted an elf servant and had a child, young enough that the renamed 'Thistle' couldn't remember where he was from or what his name had been before, kidnapped to be his jester.
• Fantastic Slurs:
  • The orcs refer to humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings as long-legs, long-ears, depths-dwellers, and little men respectively.
  • Elves used to call short-lived human races "inferior species". This is considered a highly offensive term even by them nowadays though.
• Fantasy Metals:
  • Senshi's cooking pot is made of adamantine. It was originally a family heirloom shield, but having no use for it and being more interested in cooking, he turned it into a pot, much to Namari's chagrin. Apparently it can withstand dragon's breath and the party even uses it to trap an angry undine in one chapter. It also spreads heat evenly when cooking.
  • Senshi's kitchen knife is made of mithril. It can even slice through dragon scales, though it doesn't have much effect since it's only a medium-sized kitchen knife.
• Fate Worse than Death: The reason that Only Mostly Dead works is that when in a dungeon, one's soul doesn't leave the body right away and simple healing magic brings people back from the dead. The trade-off is that if a resurrect spell isn't used, the person will become undead; their body turns into a zombie, their soul into a ghost.
• Find the Cure!: One chapter involves Laios, Senshi, and Chilchuck trying to find a cure for Marcille after she is turned to stone by a cockatrice. They try a variety of methods at the same time, so it's never made clear which of said methods was ultimately effective when she turns back to normal.
• Flapping Cheeks: Played for Gallows Humor in Chapter 69 — Chilchuck takes the icy blast of a white dragon's Breath Weapon head-on, freezing him solid with his cheeks mid-flap.
• Food Chain of Evil: Unlike many dungeon crawling settings, this series presents dungeons as a legitimate, self-sustaining ecosystem, with the various monsters feeding on one another. This contributes to the standard dungeon structure; weak, low-level monsters are much more common than large, powerful monsters because the powerful ones eat the weak monsters (the basis of the food chain is mana). Examples shown include bladefish being eaten by mermen, which are in turn hunted by the kraken, and mimics being fed upon by treasure bugs (in this case, the former is actually much bigger than the latter, but the treasure bugs are parasitoids whose larvae eat the mimics from the inside out).
• The Food Poisoning Incident:
  • Marcille mentions in the first chapter that people eating monsters are frequently afflicted by food poisoning. Somehow, the party never contract it themselves. On the early floors that's probably Senshi's doing, but they often encounter monsters Senshi's unfamiliar with and consult Laios's monster-eating guide (which turns out to be largely if not entirely fabricated). There are a few times where they cook something only to find they dislike the taste, but the closest they've ever come to poison is when Laios eats a bite of kraken parasite raw, and he contracts a parasite that was living inside that parasite. He spends the night writhing in agony, on the brink of death (only not dying because Marcille periodically casts a healing spell on him) until the parasite dies.
  • In Chapter 50, the whole party is suddenly beset by painful fevers, and Laios thinks food poisoning has happened at last (and flashes back to moments like not washing their hands before cooking). It turns out to be something completely unrelated however.
• Food Porn: From the Giant Scorpion and Walking Mushroom Hotpot to Mandrake and Basilisk Omelette, every recipe created is rendered in loving, mouth-watering detail.
• Forced Transformation: Changelings in this series are a species of mushrooms that form a ring that transform anything that steps in them into a similar species. This explains the change of behavior and appearance when it happens to children. This even affects remains such as when the party tests it by turning griffin meat into hippogriff meat. Unfortunately, they all unknowingly step in one when they move on. Laios becomes a dwarf, Marcille a halfling, Chilchuck a human, Senshi an elf and Izutsumi a kobold (with cat ears).
  • Happens to them again after fighting a giant walking changeling. This time Laios becomes a gnome, Marcille an ogre, Chilchuck a dwarf, Senshi a halfling, and Izutsumi an orc (still with cat ears).
• Foreign Queasine: A type of nut cake (sometimes called "elf cake") is a very popular dessert food in the elven homeland. However, we're only shown it being eaten from the perspective of outsiders (in supplementary comics), Kabru, Delgal, and Thistle (although Thistle is an elf, he remembers almost nothing about his homeland because he was taken so young). All three of them are shown disliking it. Kabru describes the taste as bland, powdery, and filled with sickly sweet candied nuts that gum up your teeth (on his character profile, it's stated this cake is his most disliked food). The most positive thing Delgal can say is that it wasn't THAT bad.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Chapter 28 when Falin says she's not sure she'd fit in a bed with Marcille anymore as she'd grown since magic school, the latter looks briefly stricken before seemingly laughing it off. This is fourteen chapters before we learn that Marcille is terrified of outliving everyone around her and long before this fear is fully explored.
  • Namari is shocked at the unmaintained state of Senshi's axe, warning him that it would shatter if he tried to use it against the Red Dragon. She's right.
  • Kuro snarling at Asebi/Izustumi hints at the fact she's a chimera, since he reacts in exactly the same way when the newly chimera-fied Falin appears.
  • The first time Falin holds Kensuke, it immediately jumps out of her hands. Up till then, Kensuke had only rattled or moved when confronted with a powerful enemy monster. This is the first hint that Falin has Come Back Wrong and that the soul of the Red Dragon still lives on inside her.
  • The motif of a winged lion is everywhere in the dungeon, from statues to carvings to Living Armor, even on the upper levels. It turns out that this was hinting at a real creature: the winged lion that guards the people of the Golden Kingdom and is part of the prophecy that might see the Lunatic Magician beaten for good.
  • A meta example. Most chapters of the manga are named after a monster that is being hunted to be turned into food, or the dish that the team prepares to eat. During the second battle against Thistle, the chapters are named after him, much like the multi-chapter fight against the Red Dragon, which also ends up as a meal. The fight ends with The Winged Lion eating Thistle's desires and turning him into an Empty Shell, making him the dish that was served at the end of this arc, except the dish was for the demon, not the party.
• Foul Medicine: Played for Laughs when the orcs help Marcille and Laios recuperate from a bad fight. The orcs' medicine is a glorp mashed up from strange fruit, strange bugs, a monster leg, and some slime, administered mouth-to-mouth because they're too weak to move — yet it works, though Marcille might have preferred death.
• The Four Loves: All are present in the series:
  • Siblings Falin and Laios are storge.
  • All of Team Touden are phileo.
  • Shuro's romantic love for Falin is eros.
  • All-Loving Hero Falin is agape.
• Frying Pan of Doom: Laios is holding one on the cover of volume one. It's part of a Running Gag of characters using cooking implements as weapons on the covers.
• Fun with Acronyms: The English title Delicious in Dungeon is a play on D&D, the initials for Dungeons & Dragons.
• Funny Background Event: In Chapter 5, Chilchuck lists over the special skills each member of the party possesses, but skips over Laios, who can be seen with a vacant expression in the back, realizing he didn't get mentioned, and Marcille giving him a pitiful look.
• Gemstone Assault: Treasure bugs which, indeed, look like treasure, such as coins, rings, and even a tiara, the last of which is actually a nest with eggs and larvae resembling gems. While there are some that look like cut and polished gemstones, they haven't been encountered yet. It's stated in an omake that they can be as valuable as actual treasure, if not more so, to bug collectors.
• Gender-Bent Alternate Universe: In one omake, Laios uses a magic mirror to see what it would be like if he or various other people were the opposite gender. Every reality it shows indicates the party would never form or would fall apart early, except the one where everyone is the opposite gender, which shows an image of burning ruins and bones.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: The original Team Touden was this, with three women (Falin, Marcille and Namari) and three men (Laios, Shuro and Chilchuck) before Falin is eaten by the Red Dragon in the first chapter and the party breaks up.
• Generation Xerox: Side material reveals that while Chilchuck has 3 daughters, his first daughter Meijack nearly a replica of him. Not only does she look the most like her father compared to her sisters, she followed the same trade that he did of locksmith and is much more serious than her boy-crazy sisters.
• Genius Loci: The dungeon responds to the desires of people who go into it. Very simple desires, like wanting water or shelter, are granted instantly and without concern, but people with higher-level desires for money, power, and so forth find the monsters of the dungeon becoming gradually more powerful.
• Geometric Magic: It's not the default, but mages sometimes write out a spell with geometric figures and inscriptions in the Language of Magic when it's extremely complicated (like creating a Familiar) or needs to be left unattended (like a magic circle to heat a cooking pot).
• Ghostly Chill: Ghosts create a zone of intense cold; when one of them grabs Laios, his armor frosts over. Senshi takes advantage of this by making a formula for Holy Water that turns into sorbet if the bottle is swung on a rope like a flail to exorcise the ghosts.
• Gilligan Cut: A supplementary comic has Milsiril getting an invitation to a family gathering. Kabru (at this point still a young child) is very curious about it and really wants to go, but Milsiril tells him to forget it because she hates those parties. The very next panel has the two of them arriving at the gathering (the very introverted Milsiril still ends up hating it, but the much more sociable Kabru loved the experience).
• Girls with Moustaches: Discussed in an omake, where Laios asks Namari whether female dwarves have facial hair. The answer is yes — just like human women. When Marcille mentions she doesn't grow any facial hair at all, she's met with disbelief, and the two of them drag her off for a closer inspection.
• Good Is Not Soft: Team Touden are all heroic characters who'd generally prefer to talk things out, but they don't hesitate to cut down the monsters of the dungeon, including demi-humans of the nonspeaking variety. Laios even lectures Senshi about how no one can ever know what a monster is thinking and so to trust them is suicidal. He's immediately proved right when Anne, the kelpie Senshi had become close to, tries to kill and eat the dwarf. Laios and Senshi kill her and they make her into their next meal.
• G-Rated Sex: At one point, the party comes across three dryads pollinating each other. Senshi mistakes them for humans and thinks they're actually getting ready to do it, so he covers Chilchuck's eyes.
• Half-Breed Discrimination: It seems that most elven literature depicts half-elves as being impulsive, silly, and a little, well, slow. Marcille was expecting the same from the Daltian Clan books, only to discover that they included a half-elf who was actually a well-developed main character, to the point where she wondered if the author might have been basing it off their own experience (they weren't). According to Cithis the Queen of the Western Elves wouldn't accept a half-elf as a member of her court. Elves also seem to uniformly think that all half-elves wish they were full elves, which Marcille can assure you is not the case.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Certain races can intermingle and bear children. So far, the only major example (Marcille) is of human and elven lineage, having the sturdiness of the former and the longevity of the latter. A few very minor characters are also hybrids (the tearful newbie elf on the second floor is another half-tallman half-elf, and the corpse reviver party contains a half-tallman, half-gnome and a half-tallman, half dwarf), but this never comes up in the story. The world guide says that tallmen can have fertile children with half-foots and ogres, while gnomes and dwarves can have fertile children together, but unlike most fantasy examples, otherwise mixed-race children are mainly sterile.
• Harmony Versus Discipline: The elven school of magic works through specific instructions that yield consistent, repeatable results. In contrast, gnome magic works by asking Nature Spirits for the desired result, which can be more powerful and less mana-intensive than elven magic, but only if the spirits are feeling cooperative.
• Harping on About Harpies: The Lunatic Magician sends a group of harpies to attack Team Touden and Team Shuro. They're dealing with them fine, but then he sends in Falin...
• Harsh Word Impact: When Marcille first met up with Laios and Falin on the Island, she had strong feelings about their choice of career. When she demanded to know if they really intended to spend the rest of their lives in the dead-end profession of Dungeon Crawling, her speech bubble speared not only Laios but several bystanders as well.
• Headless Horseman: In chapter 57, Laios is nearly killed by a horseless dullahan, but it spares his life in exchange for the body of the conveniently decapitated bicorn the party had just killed, which becomes its steed.
• Healing Hands: Spells to reverse injuries are a staple in dungeon-delving — even Laios learns basic healing magic, and a skilled healer in a dungeon can easily reverse dismemberment and death. However, matter can't be created; any missing mass needs to be replaced from the patient's own body (which can be harmful in itself) or from an external source of flesh (which can destabilize their soul).
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Laios, Namari, Kabru and Shuro (three warriors and a samurai, respectively) all wear full armor below the neck but lack helmets.
• Here We Go Again!: After multiple chapters spent trying to undo the Physical Attribute Swap from stepping into a changeling circle, Team Touden finds themselves swapped again after they had to fight a giant walking changeling mushroom.
• Hero of Another Story: Supplementary information, including the Adventurer's Bible, explains the motivations and dreams of many minor characters which are only subtly alluded to in the story proper. For example, Mickbell's life goal is to get enough money to buy a mansion to live in with Kuro, while Kuro wants to travel the world together with Mickbell, but neither of these motives are mentioned anywhere outside their character profile and get no conclusion in the actual story, since these are relatively minor characters. Even the two newbie adventurers almost killed by the basilisk in Chapter 3 are given names, character profiles, and backstories despite this being their only major appearance, and none of this information comes up in the story in any way.
• He's Just Hiding: In-Universe example with the Lunatic Magician being convinced that King Delgal is still alive and just missing somewhere in the dungeon ...the same King Delgal we see die on the very first page of the series.
• Hobbits: Called Half-Foots, they are a humanoid race with below-average physical, magical attributes and shorter than average lifespans, but with keen senses. They are by far the smallest of all the races, growing only about a meter tall on average. If they are part of an adventuring group, they usually perform non-combat functions, like finding and disarming traps. Members of the sub-species are also baby-faced, with other groups, like tallmen and dwarves comparing them to children of their own sub-species. As an example, Chilchuck doesn't look older than 14, but when transformed into a tallman, he looked like a middle-aged man. They also have a terrible reputation, with many sayings and stereotypes putting them as thieves and disposable, and some less ethical groups intentionally use them as disposable bait against certain monsters.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: In an omake, it's explained that demons were actually created by a precursor civilization in order to more easily utilize magic, by giving it an intelligence that they could communicate with. They eventually realized giving form and sentience to infinite energy and an endless appetite, capable of warping reality, was a bad idea, but by then it was too late.
• Holy Water: In chapter 11, when the party is attacked by a large group of spirits, Senshi makes some holy water on the fly by creatively interpreting the items they have on hand with any possible religious background and randomly throwing them together to create "deluxe multicultural holy water". He then ties the jar of it to a rope, and swings the holy water at the spirits like a flail to dispel them. It not only works but, since the spirits are so cold, the jar is frozen, turning the holy water into tasty holy sorbet.
• Hope Spot: The brief period after Team Touden got Falin back before she is taken by the Lunatic Magician.
• Humans Are Average: Technically speaking, what we would call humans are called tallmen in the setting. They're known for their long limbs (as their name implies, they're one of the tallest races, only shorter than the very rare ogres) and short lifespans, but don't have much in the way of other benefits. They also have no disadvantages, however. Also, Namari notes that tallmen seem to be more musically-inclined on the whole than other races. An omake has Laios lamenting tallmen have no inherently special traits, unlike other races; Namari says that tallmen have a better dancing skill than other races, but this doesn't make Laios feel any better because he's a terrible dancer.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters:
  • It's gradually shown that Laios' interest in monsters originally stems from the fact he didn't have any real human friends and was too often turned off by human cruelty and discrimination, such as his sister being shunned and feared by the villagers of his hometown when she showed proficiency in sorcery, being bullied by other soldiers while in the army, or being taken advantage of as by his supposed teammates as a newbie dungeon adventurer. Monsters are explicitly created to be vicious, while humans make the choice to be cruel.
  • We're initially told that the advanced precursor civilization of the ancient past was destroyed by demons. It's eventually revealed that while a demon technically did destroy this civilization, it did so simply because one of its human masters wished for all of it to be destroyed, and was horrified by what it had been forced to do (if only because everyone dying means no more desires to feed on). An omake also states that demons were initially created by human will to begin with, and a scholar of ancient magics declaring that demons are not malicious, but they will always end up causing destruction simply because humans will always eventually wish for it.
• Humans by Any Other Name: In this world, humans are known as "tallmen" (because they tend to be taller on average than most of the other common races).^note An artbook mini-comic goes in more detail. The western regions considers all humanoids with the same number of bones to be human, and that includes everything from gnomes to tallmen. Notably, this classification includes ogres but excludes orcs from the human umbrella. In the eastern region, no such super-classification occurs, so humans are simply called humans. Those from eastern regions actually find the term ironic since the only other race they coexist with are ogres, which are much taller than humans/tallmen. Ogres are not considered humans and in fact easterners don't regard elves dwarves etc as human either.
• Hunk: Laios and Shuro. Both are handsome and well-built men.
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted:
  • The series runs on this. Almost all of the dungeon monsters encountered try to kill Team Touden, only for them to kill and eat the monsters instead.
  • The Red Dragon defeats Team Touden in chapter 1 and eats Falin, so they track it down to kill it and get her back. When they confront it and their plan goes wrong, it starts chasing them again until they can regroup and finish it off for good.
  • For centuries, the Winged Lion had preyed on the desires of mortal beings, beginning when it consumed an insect's desire to eat and eventually settling on encouraging the varied desires of humans. By the end of Team Touden's final confrontation with it, A tallman (Laios) managed to consume its desire to eat, the one action that could actually stop it.
• Hybrid Monster: Walking mushrooms are low-level type of fungus monster equivalent to The Goomba, although there are a much tougher giant variant. There are also changelings, which are a non-animate magical fungus which release spores that cause entities to change into something different (but related to the original form in some way). We find there are walking changeling mushrooms, which also come in a giant variant.

Tropes I to P

• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Many chapters are named after the dish the party cook in its pages, e.g. "Hotpot" and "Tart", or after the creature that's prepared and eaten. Including characters with names. The party doesn't eat Thistle, but something else certainly does. There are some exceptions, such as the "Orcs" chapter not actually involving the orcs being eaten and the final chapter which is named after the story itself.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Laios tries this on chimera!Falin. He seems to be getting through to her...until Kabru attacks and she goes berserk again.
• I'm Having Soul Pains: Downplayed with the "mana sickness" that spellcasters suffer when they overdraw their Mana reserves, such as when Laios uses magic for the first time. Symptoms include extreme exhaustion, hallucinations, and the sense of something crawling under their skin.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: On a couple of occasions in Chapter 28 Marcille assures Falin and the party that the means used to resurrect the former were perfectly safe and legitimate. Also, they should never talk about it, forget it ever happened, and erase the evidence before anyone sees it. Nobody finds this particularly comforting.
• Immortal Breaker: The series proposes Eating the Enemy as a method of dealing with Resurrective Immortality. (Reasoning that the flesh of a creature loses its original identity when it's digested by and becomes part of another.)
• Immortality Field: The titular dungeon (and it's implied most other dungeons) has had a spell placed over it that enables anyone killed on its premises to be resurrected with regular healing magic. It's theorized that the spell "forbids death", preventing one's soul from leaving their body when they die, so that once their body is in shape to support life again they immediately return to it. Some characters are in the dungeon to study and replicate the spell, which could theoretically grant immortality. However, it has its limits: the greater the damage to the body, the more powerful and skilled the healer has to be to successfully revive it. Losing as little as 1/13th of your mass, if it can't be put back together (such as being reduced to ash), dramatically reduces the chances of resurrection. As well, as the body decays, so does its bond to its soul; eventually the soul breaks loose and becomes a wandering spirit, usually searching for a new body to inhabit.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothes: Some of the members of the Golden Kingdom are excited to try out the clothes they've created on Marcille. It turns out that thousands of years of immortality and separation from the rest of the world results in odd tastes in fashion.
• Interspecies Adoption:
  • The retired Canary Milsiril doesn't like the company of other elves and prefers to adopt orphans of shorter-lived species. Other elves accuse her of treating them more like toys or cute pets than like people. The situation is a little more complicated than that but she is smothering.
  • Though not directly mentioned in the manga, Ryoko Kui's artbook reveals that the human twins Kiki and Kaka count as this. The elderly gnome couple, Mr. and Mrs. Tansu, aren't their employers - they're the twins' parents, who raised them from young childhood after they were abandoned by their birth family. The twins are quite Happily Adopted and have a laid-back, gnomish attitude, but they do sometimes feel distance from their parents' peers, standing out as they do.
• I See Dead People: Laios starts seeing a ghost after Marcille begins teaching him magic. At first he thinks it's a mana sickness hallucination and tries to ignore it, but the party later realize it's actually there and trying to communicate with them.
• Jerkass: The corpse hunters who resurrect Team Kabru. They deliberately don't tell them how they died the first time (treasure bugs) on the off chance the bugs might wipe them out again, and so get the hunters even more money in resurrection fees. Later on they disguise themselves as monsters and try to straight up murder them. It does not go well.
• Killed Off for Real: Any adventurers whose bodies are completely destroyed or who have been dead long enough for their soul to break away from their corpse. Only Mostly Dead stops working if there's no body to work with or no link left between body and soul. Orcs like to feed killed adventurers to wargs to prevent them from being brought back to life, as being passed all the way through a digestive system destroys that link. This also happens to anyone suffering a normal death outside of the dungeon, as the effect which links body and soul in the first place isn't universal.
• Killer Rabbit: One of the monsters Chilchuck imagines in Chapter 1 resembles a small, fluffy rabbit. This turns out to be a reference to a real deep-dungeon beast, a rabbit known for decapitating adventurers that seems to be a direct Shout-Out to the Trope Namer. Indeed, it turns out to be one of the most dangerous monsters the party faces, as an encounter with them results in everyone except Marcille being killed; the first deaths of the main character in the story outside of flashbacks.
• Kill It with Fire: Undines, oddly enough, considering they're water spirits (it works because spirits in this universe are basically magical microorganisms, so boiling kills them, the same as non-magical microorganisms).
• Klingon Scientists Get No Respect: Dwarves value blacksmithing and mining above all other professions; Senshi's seen as an oddball at best for eschewing those in favor of hunting, cooking and farming.
• Kraken and Leviathan: Team Touden encounters a kraken while crossing the underground lake. After killing it, they cook up some grilled squid, which turns out to be inedibly bitter (presumably due to the ammonium chloride in its tissues that giant squid use instead of a swim bladder to modulate their buoyancy).
• Language of Magic: Mages such as Marcille and Rin often speak in an untranslated, rune-like language while casting spells, or inscribe it around magical diagrams. One omake shows Marcille running out of space while writing around a magic circle and being forced to cram all the remaining characters together at the end. Similar runic script can be found in places throughout the dungeon, responsible for the spell of immortality cast over it — the Floke family entered the dungeon for the express purpose of copying it down for research.
• Life-Affirming Aesop: Mithrun is ready to lie down and die at the end, having achieved his all-consuming goal of Revenge. When Kabru tells him that he can always find new interests and desires like they have on their journeys, his teammates encourage him, and Senshi (coincidentally) explains how even old vegetable scraps can be put to good use, he decides to keep going.
• Little Bit Beastly: Discussed and chastised by Laios. He compares Lycion's self proclaimed werewolf body modifications and ignorance of the animal habits of the monster he fused with to humanoids that call themselves "Beastmen" but only have animalistic ears and tails to show for it. As Lycion is far happier with his werewolf body than he ever was as an elf, this sours him on Laios (and confuses Izutsumi, a beastman with animal ears and a tail).
• Loads and Loads of Races: This manga features many races as befitting fantasy story. The main party alone has a human (known as "tallmen" here), an elf (actually a half-elf), a dwarf, a halfling, and a Cat Girl.
• Local Reference: The series takes place on an island that seems like your average Medieval European Fantasy, except there are also characters who come from the "East". Which is basically medieval Japan, giving the creator an excuse to use some characters from her own country. One even joins the party later on, so we have four Western-type fantasy characters and one Japanese Cat Girl ninja.
• Long-Lived: As one might expect, elves, gnomes, and dwarves all have lifespans which can be measured in multiple centuries. Half-elves apparently have the longest possible lifespan, of up to an entire millennium. Even a member of the short-lived races can potentially see 100 years, though this is considered quite rare.
• The Lost Lenore:
  • King Delgal is a platonic example for the Lunatic Magician. He's been searching desperately for him ever since the series began, not realizing a) he's already dead and b) he died begging that Thistle be defeated.
  • Falin for Shuro. He had even proposed to her before she was eaten though she hadn't given him and answer and it's currently unknown if she returned his feelings at all. Later subverted when he gives up on trying to save her from her chimera form and decides to go back to the East instead.
• Lower-Deck Episode: Kabru's team, another party of adventurers who don't know as much about monsters and are a bit inept, features in some chapters. Their party was wiped twice, once with treasure bugs who paralyzed/stunned the entire group and they would've been possessed by spirits had Marcille not prayed over them, and again when a small, teasing argument between Kabru and Rin over humanoid mermaids caused them to be ambushed and killed by piscine mermaids. Ultimately Kabru's other party members become Put on a Bus to a degree and he becomes a Deuteragonist caught up with the Canaries.
• Lower Half Reveal: The Lunatic Magician captures Falin Touden in Chapter 29; as he says he'll give them a new shape to replace their "inconvenient" body, their lower half starts to bubble with magic. When they reappear in Chapter 37, it's as a giant chimera with a feathered dragon body in place of their legs.
• The Magic Goes Away: Subverted. After the defeat of the Winged Lion, Pattadol voices her concerns that this may cause magic to disappear from the world as the entity it was a part of is the source of mana used to fuel it. However, it's pointed out that the Lion was just a personality connected to the energy that made up the mana, which will still remain after it dissipated. Conversely, it is also stated that magic may change in unknown ways now that the persona is gone but they aren't sure how yet.
• Magic Staff: Staffs that conduct Mana are common among mages, though they can still use magic with improvised tools or none at all. Marcille crafted her staff Ambrosia out of living wood and vines; in magic-rich areas, it forms new sprouts.
• Mana: All magic is powered by an invisible, but tangible substance called mana, which is present in the environment and in all living things. It's actually a form of extra-dimensional energy leaking from a realm of infinite energy. On the surface and in regular animals, mana is only present in low quantities, but in dungeons and monsters, mana is present in much higher quantities, making spells much more powerful when used in dungeons. Monsters differ from regular animals in part because they derive much of their energy from mana, and more powerful monsters can only survive in deeper levels of a dungeon where the ambient mana is much higher. Using mana requires significant training; those not used to it or that over-exert their mana capacity can experience a nauseating side-effect known as "mana sickness". Elves and gnomes are the races with the greatest mana capacities, while dwarves and half-foots have the lowest.
• Man-Eating Plant: In the second chapter Marcille is attacked by some of these. Laios saved her, then asked whether being wrapped up by a parasitic plant's vines felt good or not. Later on, they cook their fruit into a tart. Notably, only one such plant (resembling a pitcher plant with teeth) actively eats its victims; one species is a parasitoid which implants its seeds inside the victim, while another simply strangles its prey with tentacle-like vines and using the decomposing corpse as fertilizer.
• Medicinal Cuisine: When Marcille runs out of mana and is injured trying to deal with a water elemental, Team Chef Senshi prepares nutritious and iron-rich grilled kelpie liver to restore her strength until someone with healing magic can come by to repair her wound. After the other members of the party manage to kill the elemental, reducing it to mana-rich water, Marcille tries drinking it to restore her mana, but is convinced to let Senshi use it as the base for a stew first, under the logic that nutrients are easier to absorb if eaten with food.
• Mega Dungeon: While the concept of "dungeon" is a nebulous idea, most of the story is centered around the dungeon that was once the Golden Kingdom, a region that turns out to be the size of a small country.
• Metaphorgotten: The party's options for food either involves hunting and cooking monsters, or laboriously setting traps for docile animals. As Laios puts it, "a duck isn't going to walk by carrying a green onion" (i.e. "there's no such thing as a free lunch") but he gets excited over the notion of the dungeon having "dire ducks with a man-eating green onions!"
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body:
  • Ghosts on the third floor have lost their sanity from being without their bodies for too long and are hostile, trying to possess people in a confused attempt to return their flesh. Ghosts on the fifth floor were more recently alive and haven't "yet" lost their sanity, so may still be communicated with, albeit with difficulty. In the final chapters, ghosts freed from the dungeon swarm around Laios, and Yaad says they're a bit confused from having been without bodies for a long time but are happy and want to share their plans for his coronation.
  • Laios's ideal monster is an enormous multi-headed chimaera. When he becomes Master of the Dungeon, the demon grants his desire to become that monster. While some of his own traits remain - when he reveals himself to people he strikes several dramatic poses, clearly thinking that he's cool - he also doesn't recognize his old party members or take any care not to harm them. The Winged Lion certainly doesn't believe he quite has human-level intelligence, but talks to him mockingly anyway.
• Mondegreen Gag: Shuro is later revealed to be Japanese-like warrior whose name is Toshiro, but the Western-like cast misheard it.
• Monster of the Week: The anime adaptation is structured like this, with each episode (usually) being split into on average two segments focusing on a different monster or dish.
• Mood Whiplash: Chapter 67 probably broke a few readers necks in its sudden tone change as it goes from a cute and wholesome scene of Monster!Falin enjoying a giant helping of curry and taking a nap, to Laios sneaking up on her and brutally strangling her to death.
• Mouth To Mouth Force Feeding: Played for laughs when the orc captain helps to heal the wounded party. She force-feeds the unconscious a grotesque Healing Potion made of ground-up frog legs, tentacles, herbs and other unknown ingredients, and it does seem to revive them a bit. When Marcille's turn comes up, she desperately tries to convince the captain that she doesn't need any medicine... but is too weak from mana loss to stop her from getting the same mama bird treatment.
• Mundane Utility:
  • What's the best thing to do when you encounter a fire-spewing trap? Use its fuel and flame, perfect for deep frying! Find a guillotine trap? It's great for cutting up the meat of large monsters!
  • Golems are creatures made of earth moved by magic to protect certain parts of the dungeon. They're also great places to plant vegetables, especially since they can take care of themselves and maintain the good quality of the soil.
  • Senshi's cooking pot was originally a shield made of adamant. Having no need for a shield and being more interested in cooking, Senshi uses his shield as a pot instead. He takes advantage of the adamant's heat spreading properties for the mundane task of cooking good meals. Not to mention his cooking knife made of mithril. He also used his axe as a spit to roast the basilisk with.
  • Marcille gets petrified by a cockatrice at one point. While her team tries to find a way to cure her, they use her as a pickle press. She is very angry about this when she gets turned back to normal.
  • So you've found some mushrooms that can transmute seemingly anything into something similar, up to and including species? Use them to get some variety in your dumplings!
  • Monsters will never harm residents of the Golden Kingdom, so the kingdom members use monsters as livestock and for other everyday needs. Laios dreams of building a self-sufficient monster-based society like this, and succeeds to some extent when he becomes king, with the additional use of being a natural deterrent for hostile nations.
• Mushroom Man: Walking mushrooms are one of the weaker monsters present in the dungeon and come in many, many shapes, including giant forms and changeling variants. Apparently, they rival dragons in popularity among all monsters.
• Mythology Gag: The cover of chapter 50 has the main characters in the exact same poses they were taking as on the cover of volume 1.
• Named Weapon: Both Laios and Marcille named their respective weapon. Laios named his living sword "Kensuke" and Marcille called her staff "Ambrosia".
• Nightmare Fetishist:
  • Laios admits in the first chapter that he's always liked and been fascinated by monsters. It's part of the reason he wants to eat them and see what they taste like.
  • There are whole communities of people on the surface who are interested in monsters. Walking mushrooms and dragons are apparently two of the most popular types.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
  • Senshi is a dwarven dungeon survivalist, golem farmer, Supreme Chef, Team Dad.
  • Izutsumi is a ninja, chimera, Cat Girl, warrior retainer.
• No Body Left Behind:
  • Thoroughly averted, since the party needs to harvest the corpses in order to get ingredients. This includes draining the blood, deboning them, etc.
  • Senshi's backstory ends with the last two members of his original dwarf party getting into an argument outside an enclosed room, a fight ensuing, and only one coming back having harvested meat from a supposed griffon that attacked and killed the other member before he was able to kill it. After cooking the griffon meat for Senshi, he wandered back out of the room to urinate and never came back. Senshi was too terrified to find out what happened, and when he finally mustered up the courage to go out of the room, nothing was left except a helmet, a shield, a pickaxe, and some scraps of clothing. In this case, it's less that "no body was left behind", and more Senshi took so long to check that monsters ate every bit already.
  • When Marcille performs an explosion spell on a dungeon rabbit, it's far more powerful than normal due to having absorbed more mana than usual, and only leaves a smoking crater behind. This is a problem, because they need to collect the meat of the rabbits, so Marcille can't use explosion spells to defeat the rabbits.
• No Full Name Given: Senshi, Marcille, Chilchuck, Namari, Kabru, Thistle... there are more characters known by only one name than there are those with full names. Many of these had their surnames revealed in side material.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: Shuro's crush on Falin and some very light Ship Tease between Marcille and both Touden siblings aside, there is no romance in the story. Even at the end, there are no hints of any of the characters getting together.
• Nobody Poops:
  • Averted. There are toilets scattered round the dungeon, which Marcille comments on as making a real difference since otherwise the third floor with its stone floors would be a foul place. They're maintained by Senshi. He uses them to collect fertilizer for his golem fields.
  • Played for Laughs in an omake. Chilchuck's super sensitive hearing (unfortunately) makes it so he can clearly hear the other party members when they go to the washroom, although this is normal to him and he doesn't care. However, he finds it strange that Marcille is absolutely silent when she goes to the washroom. He's come up with the theory that she uses a spell to teleport the excretions from her body (Marcille insists that's not the case, but it's not revealed what really is the case either way).
• No Name Given:
  • Zon's son or Zon's little sister are left unnamed in the story. The Adventurer's Bible gives their names as Bahay and Leed respectively.
  • The Lord of the Island, as well as its Shadow Lord, are unnamed.
• Nonhuman Humanoid Hybrid: The World Guide/Adventurers' Bible mentions that dwarves and gnomes can hook up and have fertile descendants, unlike humans and elves whose hybrids are sterile. This seems to indicate a close relation between the races.
• Non-Mammalian Hair: The piscine-type merfolk have hair despite being more closely related to fish than mammals. Later subverted when it turns out to actually be water plants rooted to their scalps.
• Noob Cave: The first few levels of the dungeon. The flora, fauna and traps are mild enough that only total beginners tend to get wiped out there.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Early on, Chilchuk claims to have once gotten caught by a trap that spits out hot oil. He says it was "worse than dying instantly," and Marcille agrees that it was awful to watch... but the incident gets no further elaboration from there.
  • Near the very end, when the entire cast is eating chimera Falin's dragon meat dishes, the Elf Queen calls Pattadol and asks how it tastes. When told the food tastes good, the queen mentions she ate something similar once a long time ago, but it tasted really bad (much to Pattadol's concerned confusion). It is not elaborated on what this "similar" thing was.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Tall-man kingdoms consider it a status symbol to a member of a long-lived race, usually an elf, in the royal court, usually as a chamberlain or advisor. It doesn't matter to them who the elf is (in Thistle's case, he was taken so young as a child he doesn't even remember his original name or who his family was), just having any elf standing around is good enough (since most long-lived races tend to see members of short-lived races as naive children and don't give them much consideration).
• No-Sell: Marcille's incredibly explosive spell does absolutely nothing to the kraken. Turns out she just hit the wrong spot.
• Obviously Not Fine: Marcille telling the others that she is "the picture of good health" after being exposed to the scream of a mandrake. Her eyes are pointed in opposite directions.
• Older Than They Look: Sort of a racial trait of all halflings in this setting. They lack the stout proportions of dwarves and gnomes, which, paired with their short stature and baby-faced features, makes most of them look like human tweens at the oldest. The only exception seems to be a few older or unhealthier individuals, who tend to take on sort of a gaunt, Smeagol-ish appearance.
• Once per Episode: Team Touden encounter a monster, Laios squees over it, they kill it, Senshi cooks it into Food Porn, Marcille freaks out over eating it. Then Volume 4 comes around...
• One-Steve Limit: A peculiar case with a race name. Gnome is both the name of a humanoid race, and the name of the earth elemental, leading to a scene where Marcille notes that "a gnome crawled out of a gnome".
• Only Mostly Dead: There's some kind of hard limit on how long a body can lie around before being revived, but the magic to do so seems plentiful and non-costly, at least in the dungeon itself. In fact, it seems to be an aspect of the dungeon itself, it cannot be done outside a dungeon.
  • This is addressed by ex-party member Namari, who explains that losing even 1/13th of your body permanently (i.e. disintegration) causes resurrection magic to become far less reliable - and being turned to ash renders you permanently dead to all but the greatest clerics. Heaven forbid you get shattered after you're petrified - every piece must be gathered up.
  • It's also addressed even further in that meat of some kind is required for any kind of resurrection that involves either purely skeletal remains or heavily rotted remains - immense amounts of calories are needed for the body to both reform and get back to working order. As such, goat or pig meat is used. This also means that deep dungeon resurrections of such a kind are nigh impossible for this reason and one other:
  • While souls are chained to bodies after death, the bonds weaken over time, creating spirits. However, the moment a spirit is made manifest, resurrection becomes totally impossible as there's no longer any connection between soul and body. Falin was barely hours or days away from becoming a spirit. Marcille's envisioning of the bonds keeping her soul tethered to her skeleton is that only one decrepit bond remains, necessitating the elf's use of forbidden Blood Magic.
  • Supplementary sketches state that resurrection is Cast from Calories, so part of the process of preparing for a dungeon-delving expedition is bulking up as a precaution. If one is revived with too little body fat, they may come back with muscle loss or organ damage, or they may fail to come back at all if the victim was especially thin. Being hungry right after being brought back from the dead is normal.
• Our Demons Are Different: Demons hail from a plane of infinite mana and appear in dungeons (most of which were created by the Precursors to contain them) to feed on mortals' desires. More complex and rare desires are more satiating, so "I want to be rich" isn't as powerful as "I want to live the life I could have had if I hadn't made mistakes". As the mortal indulges their wish, a dungeon forms around them and grows steadily larger and more intricate. Eventually, the demon consumes all of the mortal's desires, even things like the need for food or sleep, and breaks free to the surface to wreak havoc.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Various types of dragons, of different sizes and strengths, live below the earth in the titular dungeon. The Big Bad’s Dragon is a large, powerful red colored dragon with no wings. They're also said to be basically invincible with the except of a soft spot under their jaw.
  • The Dream Stealer "Shin", which resemble small clams, are said by Laios to be another type of dragon, much to Marcille's disbelief (this is a nod to their mythological origin of being dragons shapeshifted into the form of clams).
  • Chapter 69 shows off the various different species of dragons and their abilities. Aside from the red dragon and the Shin, there's green dragons (which have wings and love treasure), wyverns (which are smaller and have wings as forelimbs), white dragons (which are furry and have ice breath), the aquatic leviathan, the cave-dwelling wyrm that spits poison gas (and resembles a huge giant salamander), and eastern dragons, which can fly without wings and create storms.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Dwarves spend their time mining and digging holes underground, they have a clan-based social structure, and have a long lifespan. Males have long, unkempt beards, while females can grow whiskers and just shave them off. Both genders are short and stout compared to humans. They also have high interest in ores, gems, and minerals and their technology is vastly ahead of other races, but their magic capacity is the worst of all races. Senshi is an exception since he likes cooking better than mining. Namari, a female dwarf, is highly versed in metals and weaponry. They tend to be physically stronger than the other races, but their stamina is rather poor, meaning they aren't great with prolonged fights and need to rest more often than the other races. Somewhat atypically, this means they also don't tend to wear much armor, as it compounds their stamina issues. Incidentally, halflings think they’re good looking, as they basically look like ultra-manly halflings.
• Our Elves Are Different: Elves here have Pointy Ears and round androgynous faces, live much longer than standard humans, are shorter on average, and specialize in magic. They're considered universally beautiful by tallmen, but hideous to orcs. Physically, they tend to be one of the weaker races, though. Other races tend to dislike them; the fact that the elves don't have much consideration for other races' shorter lifespans doesn't help. It's noted that when elves take people to their homeland, since they live for centuries, they will take their sweet time interrogating their prisoners. Even if said prisoner is innocent of any crimes, the process takes so long they will often be elderly when finally set free. Short-lived races also have a stereotype about good "light elves" and bad "dark elves"; while literal dark elves (as in, elves with dark skin) do exist, supplementary sketch notes that there's no actual distinction between elf skin colours (although it is also stated that elves with obsidian skin are relatives of the Elf Queen, and thus next in line for the throne). It's also noted that dungeon exploring parties with elves are rather rare; the only ones we see in the story are Marcille, and a second named Fionil, and it's stated in the latter's character profile that she's not supposed to be an adventurer, she was sent to monitor the area around the dungeon, but disobeyed, as well the fact both of them are actually half-elves, meaning there's no adventurer in the whole story who is a full-blooded elf.
• Our Fairies Are Different: Fairies are diminutive, flying elf-like beings used as essentially living walky-talkies by the elves — they're capable of receiving and transmitting the voices, facial expressions, and mannerisms of people to other fairies, which gets surreal if multiple people are trying to talk into one fairy at once. They seem to be sentient, or at least to reflect the feelings of the people they belong to, but are never shown speaking on their own. An omake in the Daydream Hour compilation reveals that they're homunculi straight out of Paracelsus's writings, grossing out Marcille when she learns what it takes to make one.
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: Gnomes are second only to elves when it comes to magic. Their ears are higher up on their heads than other races, they have proportionately large hands, are they are about the same height as dwarves, but more slender (they can also interbreed with dwarves to produce fertile offspring, although this never comes up in the story), and have an average lifespan only second to elves. They also apparently can communicate with nature spirits and they consider elven magic to be too strict and clinical. Many wear a stereotypical Phrygian cap.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Goblins have so far only been seen in Imagine Spots, but it's confirmed that they do exist as a distinct demihuman race, and seem to resemble ugly, brutish humanoids.
• Our Humans Are Different: In an omake it's specified that elves, dwarves, gnomes, ogres, and halflings all fall under the umbrella of "human" in this world (while human humans are called "tallmen"). This is determined by the fact they all have the same number of bones, while other races like goblins, kobolds, and orcs do not and this counts them as "demihuman". However, this is only a Western concept in-universe. In Eastern countries there are only two groups of sapient species (humans and ogres/oni), and the ogres are the taller ones, so humans there are just called humans. Apparently it can be a source of confusion to Eastern visitors in Western countries.
• Our Kelpies Are Different: A Kelpie appears in Chapter 14, Kelpies resemble horses but are blue-green in colour and have a mane made of kelp, they've got a fish's tail and teeth sharp enough to crack through a giant crab's shell. The one shown is treated as a pet by Senshi, who's named it Anne. Anne unfortunately turns out not to be as tame as he thought and attacks him the moment he tries to ride her, forcing him to put her down. As with all monsters killed by the main party, the Kelpie is cooked into several delicious meals such as a meat grill and a stew. Kelpie fat is a prized soap making ingredient and it's suggested that their internal organs can be used as makeshift flotation devices.
• Our Kobolds Are Different: Kobolds are a race of humanoid dogs who live underground and have heightened senses of smell and resistance to poison. The only kobold character in the story is Kuro, a member of Kabru's party. Due to their differing vocal anatomy they tend to have trouble speaking the common tongue. Kabru describes kobolds as inherently cruel and bloodthirsty, with Kuro a rare exception, but this is all but outright stated to be prejudice rather than fact (he comes from a village where kobolds and humans fought each other constantly over resources).
• Our Mermaids Are Different: There are two types of merfolk. The first is human-type merfolk, which look like traditional mermaids. They can sing enchanting songs to lure adventurers into the water. The other is fish-type merfolk (mermen), which wield tridents and look like fish with human arms. They're more fish than human though, since they hatch from eggs and spend their juvenile stage looking like regular fish. The two species are apparently unrelated, as a mermaid happily eats a juvenile merman in a side-chapter. It's ambiguous whether either type is actually sapient, however.
• Our Nymphs Are Different: Dryads' main bodies are their actual plants, and their humanoid selves are actually their mobile flowers. They're also monosexual, as there are male and female flowers. Pollinated flowers later turn into pumpkin-like fruits with human faces on them.
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: Only female ogres have been seen in the story so far (Tade from Shuro's party, and Marcille when she turned into an ogre by changelings), but they appear to resemble very tall and muscular Horned Humanoids that are based on Oni rather than Western ogres, and possess Super-Toughness and strength. They are by far the largest of all the human races. According to an omake, they are only found in the eastern regions, but even there they are a Dying Race. It's also stated they can produce fertile offspring with tall-men, but this never comes up in the story.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Orcs here are Proud Warrior Race Guy. They tend to be big and barrel-shaped, and vaguely boar-like, with pig noses, hoof-like feet, bristly fur, and small tusks (supplementary material states their apparent horns are actually implants). While their unsavory reputation as savage raiders is both justified and not as clear-cut as it appears, they value courage, strength, and honesty and dislike cowardice. Senshi is on relatively good terms with the orcs who live in the dungeon, which in turn make them treat the party relatively well. Especially considering orcs captured Senshi as a prisoner when he was young and he cut a deal with them, translating dwarven writing in exchange for lessons in survival, and so became friendly with them. They have different standards of beauty than other humanoid races; according to them, elves are hideous. Orcs often keep company with doglike wargs and feed them humans to keep the humans from being resurrected, but wargs are actually somewhat intelligent and choose this partnership rather than being domesticated.
• Our Werebeasts Are Different: Werebeasts in this universe are the result of a human getting their soul bound with some beast-like monster, and sigils tattooed across their skin allow them to turn into a humanoid beast at will rather than being locked in one form like other beastkin. The author's notes provide a more detailed explanation of how they work in this world, since the explanation is light in the actual story.
  • Werewolves are the most common type of beastman because the physical requirements are loose, the transformation isn't painful, and your personality usually remains unchanged. That said, beastman-fighting arenas generally have a popular "alpha" werewolf, and wolf beastmen tend to congregate together even in human form (like wolves in packs). A direct comparison image shows they tend to be more hunched, elongated, and bestial in proportions versus the kobold race (also humanoid canines).
  • Werebears are by far the most powerful, able to take out a werewolf in a single hit, but the physical requirements to bind a bear's form to a human makes them the rarest type of beastman, and it's also the most physically taxing. Most werebears are forced to retire early from the fighting arena, contributing to their rarity. That said, choosing to bind to a smaller bear species like a sun bear can bypass the physical requirements, but it's also less impressive.
  • Weretigers are second only to werebears in strength, but generally have fighting prowess to make up for the slightly lower level of strength. Weretigers are very popular, but the feline transformation changes your personality into an aggressive and antisocial loner, so it's mentally taxing to be one. They're also not quite as tough as their reputation suggests.
  • Wererats are almost always half-foot beastmen because that's the only beast small enough to bind to their body size. They don't have much fighting strength, since they're just rats, and are extremely uncommon because they don't have much utilitarian purpose; in fighting arenas they mostly just entertain the audience.
  • Weredeer are also shown in one sketch, but not much is said about them, except that the back feet are cloven hooves and the front are clawed hands; when going on all fours, the weredeer walks on its knuckles, like a gorilla.
• Pathetically Weak:
  • In the first chapter, the Touden Party encounter a group of newbie adventurers fleeing in abject terror, with one already knocked out, from a single walking mushroom, The Goomba of the setting. Marcille, a Squishy Wizard with no combat skills, easily kills the walking mushroom in one blow by bonking its cap with her staff as it runs by.
  • Only slightly more competent is the party they see on the second floor, which includes Donni and Fionil, adventurers who struggle tremendously against basilisks and man-eating plants, which the Touden Party find rather trivial. Unlike the newbies on the first floor they pop up several times, tenacious but inept. In a large battle towards the end, Donni struggles with normal sized walking mushrooms... but it does at least take several of them.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Corpse retrievers are so important for Dungeon Crawling that when Kabru's team finds some corrupt corpse retrievers who generate extra business by deliberately getting adventurers killed, they methodically massacre them and dump the bodies somewhere unrecoverable.
• People Puppets: During the fight with the dungeon rabbits, Marcille ends up having to use the bloodied corpses of her friends as familiars by necromancing them (which is highly illegal but, well, drastic circumstances...) and using them as bait to draw the rabbits out by having them copy her movements. It's both darkly funny and rather disturbing, taking a huge emotional toll on her.
• Physical Attribute Swap: Team Touden steps in a circle of changeling mushrooms that makes them all swap races. While they enjoy their new bodies' physical capabilities at first, the party finds the experience insufferable after a while and try to figure out a way to swap back. Notably, the mushrooms can also do things like change a gargoyle into Manneken Pis.
• Pig Man: The orcs in this series resemble humanoid pigs, including have mottled pinkish skin, short snouts, upward-curving tusks, only walking on two-toed feet, and orc children having striped bodies.
• Pimped-Out Dress: When the party reach the Golden City, the tailors there make one of these for both Marcille and Izutsumi.
• Place of Power: Dungeons are magical ecosystems that draw Mana in from outside the universe. The lower levels are progressively more mana-rich, enhancing spellcasting and allowing more powerful monsters to exist there. One such monster tries to attack an upper level and nearly collapses from mana starvation.
• Plant Hair: Piscine-type merfolk attach water plants to their heads and store their eggs inside.
• Plant Person: Dryads are combinations of this and actual plants. Their main bodies are plants, but their flowers are humanoid and can move around. They're also monosexual, as there are male and female flowers. Pollinated flowers later turn into pumpkin-like fruits with human faces on them.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • The elves are very well aware of the existence of demons and how they use dungeons to lure potential victims to them, devouring their desires to become even more powerful. However, they've covered up this fact so that they have a monopoly on the information and they don't want any other race finding out, lest they try to find a demon themselves. However, this secrecy means that Laios and his party have absolutely no idea what they're dealing with when they encounter the Winged Lion.
  • A minor example is when Senshi discusses how he always has too many vegetables to use whenever he harvests from his golem farms, so he set up a trading post that relied on good faith, allowing any passing adventurers to pay what they want for the vegetables collected there. He stopped when people started stealing the money left behind, but Marcille and Chilchuck guiltily think to themselves that's why the chest there always had money in it, making it clear a lot of adventurers didn't realize it was a trading post.
  • Part of both of the Touden Party's initial encounters with Kabru's party. Both times Kabru and his team mates were already knocked out or dead, first by treasure bugs and then by mermen. They never found out that the "treasure" they discovered included bug monsters that knocked them out, so they initially assumed Laios and his party stole the treasure from them while they were out, and then they stole their food while they were dead. The party did steal from them both times. With the treasure, they ate the insect monsters and Marcille and Chilchuck carelessly discarded the actual treasure mixed in, not realizing it was real. This seems to be leading up to some sort of angry confrontation between the two parties - in fact Kabru's party braved a floor they weren't ready for and encountered the mermen because they wanted to catch up to the Touden party. However, once they actually meet each other face-to-face (consciously for once), Kabru correctly guesses that Laios' lack of guilt means the "treasure" must've been some sort of trap and it was a misunderstanding.
• Portal Cut: It's possible to escape a dungeon quickly by placing an enchanted paper or similar flat surface, like a painting or a scroll, on a wall and climbing through it to a prepared aboveground enchanted paper. Similarly someone who is outside and in that room can climb through to enter that part of the dungeon. However, it's noted in supplementary material this only works when the aboveground paper is in an enclosed room, as the magic involved temporarily turns that room into an extension of the dungeon, but only that room. If the seal is broken while a person is halfway through the paper, such as by someone breaking a window or opening a door in the aboveground room, the person will be sliced in half (opinions differ as to whether it's possible to revive the half of the person still in the dungeon; elvish and tallmen sorcerers say 'no', gnomish ones say 'yes').
• Portal Picture:
  • When the party is starving, Laios jumps into a living painting to try and eat the food depicted there. It works, but when he jumps back out, the food disappears from his stomach and he's left hungry again.
  • One variant of teleportation works this way, sending people who walk through the picture to the location depicted, a specially prepared sealed room. However, if the room is not sealed, say by opening (or breaking) a window, the spell doesn't work.
• Power Tattoo: It's stated in supplementary material that some magic users tattoo arcane symbols on their bodies to strengthen their spells, like a conduit. Since different symbols represent different types of magic, the tattoos therefore make it obvious to other magic users what sorts of magic this person specializes in, so some people include completely cosmetic additions or gibberish symbols to disguise the real runes.
• Power-Up Food: At one point, Marcille runs out of mana and eats soup made out of an undine (which contain a large quantity of mana) to replenish it quickly.
• Power Profit Potential: Corpse retrievers are subsidized by the local lord to go into the dungeon and revive dead adventurers with healing magic, from whom they also charge a resurrection fee. Though there is a bit of a corruption problem, as seen when one group of corpse retrievers tries to provoke a conflict between the Kabru and Touden parties so they can charge them for resurrection, and when that fails attack the Kabru party directly while disguised as fishmen.
• Precursors: Untold millennia before the story began, there was an advanced and prosperous ancient civilization that flourished using the limitless wishes granted to them by demons. This civilization fell to ruin by the same demon-granted magic, leaving only scattered tribes of caveman-level survivors, because someone wished for it to happen. Some of the Lost Technology of this ancient civilization still exists and is coveted on the black market, but it's forbidden to possess it (even researching ancient magics is subject to heavy censorship) by elves and dwarves because they want to prevent any chance of what happened to the precursors happening again.
• Proportional Aging:
  • Shorter-lived races mature faster and longer-lived races mature more slowly. Chilchuck is in his late twenties, but he's the equivalent of middle-aged for a half-foot and he has three adult daughters (the first of which he had at only 13). Meanwhile, the rapid aging of half-foots and tallmen is downright frightening to elves, which have a lifespan nearly ten times as long.
  • Hybrids between races mature at unpredictable rates. Half-elves live up to a thousand years, twice as long as pure elves, and may mature as rapidly as their shorter-lived parent only to stop aging in their middle age, or they may age completely proportionally and still be children at one hundred years, or their development may come in fits and starts. Marcille is only 50. A doppleganger of her father explains that she started to talk very young but it was many years before she could walk, and she was twenty by the time she lost her baby teeth, but she seems older at his funeral and basically full grown as a thirty five year old in magic school.
• Public Execution: The Lunatic Magician executes members of the Golden Kingdom who had helped Delgal escape to look for help. He beheads them in front of the rest of the villagers.

Tropes Q to Z

• Race Against the Clock: The protagonist's goal is to save Falin from the Red Dragon. However, it's pretty much guaranteed that she's already dead; what they intend to do is resurrect her, which they have a limited window of doing so before Falin's body is digested to the point that she can't be revived. They don't make it in time, because the dragon's metabolism was accelerated due to being actively moving about instead of hibernating as they assumed, and they have to resort to black magic to revive her.
• Rapid-Fire "No!": Senshi reacts this way when Team Touden encounter a griffin. Unfortunately, this ends up attracting the griffin's attention and it proceeds to swoop down and carry the poor guy off.
• Reconstruction: One of the joys of the manga is taking the whole concept of Dungeon Crawling and examining how it could be made to work realistically, from its socioeconomic implications to monster ecology to the simple question of "what separates a 'dungeon' from a regular abandoned mine, fortress, etc." Then it takes that and starts extrapolating how dungeon crawling fits in on a broader geopolitical scale...
• Red Herring:
  • The box that Chilchuck noticed during the mimic chapter turns out to be just that, a normal box. The real mimic was the much larger box in the corner.
  • During the doppelgänger business, one of the Marcille's states that she has mostly gotten over her issue with eating monsters, after having eaten all sorts of things like merfolk eggs. Laios realizes she is the doppelganger Marcille not due to that - the real Marcille doesn't know she ate merfolk eggs - but due to the real Marcille being careless enough to pour out boiling water, an action that earlier in the story nearly got her killed by an angry undine.
• Rewatch Bonus: Many, many idle instances of dialogue and minor details become much more significant on a second read, even before the series is finished. For example, from the very first chapter, there's a background instance of Chilchuck and Marcille acting doubtful when Senshi says he's been living in the dungeon for a decade. From Laios' thoughts on chimeras to Anne the kelpie to the Elite Mook living armor, there are many things that become much more important as the story goes on.
• Riddle for the Ages: Played for Laughs in an omake. As a half-foot, Chilchuck has very acute senses, which means he hears everything that happens when his party members use a rest stop. Since it's normal for him, he doesn't consider it weird or gross, but what is weird is that Marcille is absolutely silent going to the washroom. He suspects she uses a spell to teleport waste products out of her body. An aside has Marcille adamantly deny this idea, but it's not specified what the real reason is.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The dog form of dream!Laios that Marcille sees, much to his irritation since he had imagined himself as a badass wolf.
• Rocket Jump: Laios sits on Senshi's indestructible pot while Marcille activates a detonation spell underneath it in order to get on the Red Dragon's head.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: A rare manga example; the Dungeon Rabbits have the force necessary to break a full-grown Dwarf's neck in a single kick, while simultaneously cutting through the neck with a bladed foot for good measure, but a single thrown knife from Izutsumi can kill one instantly, even if it doesn't hit a vital organ. The problem comes from a pointed deconstruction of Conservation of Ninjutsu; there are far more rabbits than there are members of Laios' party, and that quickly gets reduced to just Marcille, who is the only one with neck protection.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Downplayed; even though the world is clearly based on Dungeon Crawling and there's the occasional mention of monster levels, nobody ever talks about stats or refers to the world as anything other than completely real. Despite this, some concepts slip through (though explained by in-universe logic):
  • It is elaborated upon that some RPG elements, such as resurrection, only apply within the confines of the dungeon itself and don't work in the world outside of it. One of the proposed theories in-universe being that death itself is not allowed inside the dungeons and that souls are chained to their bodies after death, eventually becoming zombies if not treated quickly enough.
  • The food has unquantified "stat blocks" roughly displaying how much of certain nutrients they have, in keeping with the manga's theme of the importance of a balanced diet.
  • The way the dungeon shifts around has some elements of Roguelike dungeon crawlers in how it operates: certain rest stops appear when needed, the dungeon can't rearrange with more than it already has or obtains, and the frequency of monsters changes depending on how much power flows through the dungeon at the time. Chilchuck even works out a pattern in the dungeon's shifting despite its initial seeming randomness. However, this is explained by the dungeon being shaped according to the will of the Dungeon Lord, as well as the desire-granting properties of the Demon's magic allowing basic desires like shelter and respite to be fulfilled.
• Running Gag: During the final arcs of the story, multiple characters come to the conclusion that the Dungeon powers may be evil and that nobody should become a new Dungeon Lord. They dramatically reveal this to others only for them to already have realized it.
• Samurai Ponytail: Shuro, an adventurer from the East that fights with samurai armor and techniques alongside his loyal retainers, has a long ponytail to match the archetype.
• "Save the World" Climax: What started as a party rushing to rescue their old cleric before she gets digested by a dragon ends with that same group taking down a demon before it can devour the entire world.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Shuro and Namari both leave Team Touden after the Red Dragon attack at the beginning of the series. Shuro intends to return to the dungeon to rescue Falin with a party of his retainers, while Namari, who had been considering leaving anyway, simply moves on to other work.
  • Kensuke flees during the battle with the Red Dragon. Chilchuck finds it again a few chapters later.
  • After he learns that killing the Red Dragon put a giant target on his and the party's backs, Chilchuck briefly tries to find some way to trick Laios and Marcille into giving up on Falin and leaving the dungeon for their own good. He fails and decides to stay with them anyway despite the increased danger.
  • Happens again with Shuro after he and his party face down chimera!Falin and, later on, he loses his fist fight with Laios. Believing he's lost Falin forever, he tells the rest of Team Touden that he intends to go home to the East and never return to the Island. However, he does stick around to the finale.
• Sea Serpents: Kabru's party encounters one, which resembles an enormous finned snake. They're also venomous, with poison strong enough to knock out a whale and instantly kill a human.
• The Secret of Long Pork Pies: Senshi's greatest fear is that he had to eat another member of his former mining party to survive, though it's ambiguous whether the miner who fed the meat to him lied about it being griffin or not. Laios speculates that the meat may have come a similar-looking but still different monster, a hippogriff; the team eventually finds out this was the case when they transform some griffin meat into hippogriff meat with a changeling ring.
• Serious Business: Dragon scholarship is so in-depth that even the monster maniac Laios feels out of his depth when talking about them. The literature on walking mushrooms, one of the most common and weakest monster types, is said to be equally extensive.
• Ship Tease: Marcille with both of the Touden siblings, albeit the interactions with Laios tend to be more one sided on her end.
  • In an omake where Laios tells the orc captain that female orcs are still quite attractive by human standards, he accidentally offends by coming across as ogling the orcwives, and frantically tries to backpedal by saying that tallmen like him can't get enough of elf ears! Marcille is visibly uncomfortable.
  • The Toudens know the most about her personal history and past.
  • Following Fallin's initial resurrection, Marcille gets incredibly excited and they even bathe together, during which Fallin arguably makes a pass at her (which Marcille kind of clumsily stumbles away from).
  • She teaches Laios basic healing, but because he's a newbie without a magic focus like a staff he has to get hands on and touch whatever he heals. Starting with a cut that requires him to cup the side of her face, which gets him quite flustered and afraid of making things look weird.
  • Marcille blushes when she thinks Laios is going to compliment her appearance in a noble woman's dress after Chilchuck laughs at it.
  • Succubi take the form of their victims' "ideal person", which can be romantic or otherwise. Laios's approaches him as Marcille. He resists it, unusually, until it adjusts its shape and poses as a monster version of Marcille. Before that, he was again worried about how it would look to the party if they found out.
  • Chapter 85 has Laios follow a textbook example of saving Marcille in a Damsel in Distress scenario: he scales a tower wall, heroically vaults over the balcony, and frees Marcille from herself. Cue Cry into Chest.
  • Several of Marcille's life changing choices have been motivated by her attachment to Fallin and she puts a large portion of her value as a person on this relationship. Part of her character arc involves attempting to grow beyond it.
  • In chapter 92, when she thinks she's going to drown, her last thoughts are of Fallin and Laios.
• Shocking Defeat Legacy: The Utaya dungeon breach is remembered as one of the Canaries' most disastrous campaigns, in which their attempts to seal a dungeon in the eastern desert resulted in the monsters escaping into a nearby town and slaughtering its inhabitants. Kabru, the town's Sole Survivor, is haunted by everything he witnessed there, and many of the Canaries are terrified that the situation on the island could turn out like Utaya, if not worse. The Adventurer's Bible elaborates further, adding that so many squad members either died in the tragedy or resigned in its wake that the Canaries are now severely short on manpower, and that hearing about what happened was what pushed Mithrun to return to active duty, as he felt that he should have been there to prevent it.
• Short-Lived Organism: Half foots live for fifty years on average, and their lives run proportionally faster. Chilchuck, nearing twenty-nine, is middle-aged or close to it (despite his childlike looks) and considering retirement. He has three daughters who are all grown adults. However, half foots do sometimes, rarely, reach a hundred years of age.
• Shout-Out: One end-of-chapter short is about Mimics, who in this series are basically giant hermit crabs that live inside chests, and how young Mimics will hide inside smaller objects like jars or pots. The final one shown is living in an upside-down helmet with its spider-y legs sticking out that Marcille destroys by blasting it with a very flamethrower-like fire spell.
• Shovel Strike: Senshi takes down three earth golems using a shovel. Appropriate as he's using them as gardens for growing vegetables!
• Shown Their Work: A lot of the tidbits about monsters are derived from real folklore and mythology.
  • Marcille's mandrake harvesting method was how mandrakes were said to have been harvested mythologically.
  • In an omake, Marcille discovers how fairy familiars are made and is disgusted, and later is horrified to see the Canaries using and touching them. The process involves fermenting and distilling a vapor out of seminal fluid and horse manure, which then becomes a tiny translucent shape which must be fed blood every day for forty weeks. This is very close to the "real life" alchemical method for creating a homunculus which was recorded by Paracelcus, except that his recipe involves keeping it in a horse's womb.
  • While Bicorns being an impure counterpart to Unicorns is made up, the idea that their favorite food is good husbands is similar to Medieval satirical works describing them as eating faithful husbands.
• Sibling Team:
  • Laios and Falin Touden, brother and sister dungeon crawlers.
  • There's also Kiki and Kaka, twins and the warrior duo of their party.
• Sick Episode:
  • After battling an angry undine, Marcille runs out of mana and becomes very weak. She's bedridden for a while and the rest of Team Touden, plus others, have to find a cure. Their solution is to make the same undine into soup and let her drink it since undine are full of mana.
  • Another one occurs when they fight a Cockatrice. Happens twofolds; having just learned how to use magic, Laios tries it out but suffers from Mana Sickness as a result and ends up taken out of action. Just as the rest of them stumble upon a Cockatrice. Because they lack Laios as a tank and fighter, Marcille ends up getting bitten and turned to stone. The remainder of the chapter is Laios and Senshi trying to figure out a way to cure her.
• Sigil Spam: The image of a winged lion is all over the dungeon.
• Sirens Are Mermaids: Mermaids (the type that appear more human) in this setting can sing songs that hypnotize those who hear it to drag them into water. Apparently they dislike others joining on their song, as Laios finds out when he tries singing along.
• The Smurfette Principle:
  • Marcille is the only female member of Team Touden (after Falin is eaten by the Red Dragona and Namari leaves, both in the first chapter) until Falin is saved and, later on, Izutsumi joins the party.
  • Shuro's team is an inverted example with him being The One Guy in what's otherwise an Amazon Brigade.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil:
  • Seems to actually be part of the dungeon ecosystem, with powerful mid-level bosses preventing deep-level boss monsters from forcing lesser species further up and overrunning the easier levels. The trope is discussed at several points, namely with how the first act of a Lord of the Dungeon is to place an incredibly powerful monster at the first floor, only for it to die from lack of mana and the Lord realizing why so many dungeons start off with low-level monsters like walking mushrooms.
  • Also holds true of the story. Initially, the objective is to kill the Red Dragon, the largest and strongest monster yet discovered in the dungeon. It's an extremely dangerous animal, but the party could've defeated it at the very beginning if they hadn't been weakened by hunger. When the dragon's dead, the dungeon's master, the Lunatic Magician, takes center stage. He's an elven sorcerer who can control the dungeon's structure and contents at will, including the Red Dragon, and is an intelligent and actively malicious enemy. After he's dealt with, the story turns to the Winged Lion, an Eldritch Abomination who the Lunatic Magician had kept sealed as the source of his powers. The Winged Lion is the dungeon, and his plans will spell The End of the World as We Know It.
• So What Do We Do Now?: After the demon is finally defeated and the characters prepare to eat the dragon portion of the Falin chimera to resurrect her, the story gets more introspective as it examines what the various protagonists could do now that the adventure is at an end.
  • Mithrun is hit by this the hardest since his will to live was driven entirely by his desire related to hunting demons. Since demons are gone forever, it means the desire is gone with it and he loses the will to live. Kabru and the other Canaries are able to invigorate him by pointing out he can still gain new desires and now that he never has to worry about demons again, he can get some hobbies to enjoy instead.
  • Senshi decides he wants to go solo for a while and travel around the world, although he still visits the other characters from time to time.
  • Chilchuck had already planned on retiring from dungeon-delving and becoming a locksmith before the story began, but now that The Island's dungeon has ceased to exist, he decides to put that off for a while to help other half-foots of the area find new jobs.
  • Marcille initially agreed to be taken back to the elf nation by the Canaries to serve her time for illegal use of ancient magic, however Laios is able to convince the Elf Queen to have Marcille become the Golden Kingdom's scholar of ancient magics.
  • Laios is made the new king of the Golden Kingdom by overwhelming approval, a task he finds exhausting, but still made a lot easier by Kabru becoming his (very enthusiastic) consigliere, and Yaad (whose Uncertain Doom hasn't come as yet a year later in an epilogue chapter) being his consultant.
  • Izutsumi is shown paralyzed by indecision now that, for the first time in her life, she's no longer being told what to do by others and is free to do whatever she wants. It's left ambiguous what she ends up doing, but it's indicated she still maintains regular contact with the other party members.
  • Zon, Leed, and the other orcs that previously dwelt in the dungeon are shown to have become normal citizens of the Golden Kingdom. Pattadol would like to pardon the convict Canaries she was in charge of, but we don't know whether that happened or they went back to jail to serve out their sentences. The Elf Queen asks Pattadol how she feels about becoming a diplomat. A post series omake shows Pattadol having tea with Marcille, suggesting that she has indeed become her nation's representative.
• Spikes of Doom: Many of the dungeon's traps are either spike pits or spikes that shoot up from the floor.
• Spontaneous Generation: Some monsters are altered animals or their descendents, but not all. It's indicated that dungeons spawn monsters naturally as they evolve and grow; the older and bigger a dungeon gets, the more numerous and more powerful monsters get generated (although monsters can also breed naturally). In fact, spawning monsters out of nowhere is one of the chief abilities granted to lords of a dungeon. Mages are also capable of creating a living familiar from organic matter (like meat and vegetables), although the necessary spell is difficult and requires a lot of resources.
• Spot the Imposter: In chapter 39, the party is infiltrated by shape-shifters and they have to determine who is real before they fall asleep (because the shape-shifter will kill and eat the real one). While they're able to determine several of them as fake by obvious physical differences (including all of Laios'), the last three copies Laios has to figure out by their behaviour alone.
• Spot the Thread:
  • Laios manages to figure out Senshi's last copy because it says it took all that he could rather than all that it needed while collecting ingredients from the dungeon, which went against Senshi's sentiment of trying to keep the dungeon's ecosystem in balance, he figures out Chilchuck's last copy because it sat on a random crate without thinking, while the real Chilchuck is extremely cautious around containers in dungeons because they very often contain dangerous traps or monsters, and he figures out Marcille's last copy because she doesn't know she ate merman eggs and dumped out a pot of boiling water without thinking, when earlier, doing this angered an undine that almost killed her. But in a comedic twist, he realizes because of this carelessness that this was probably the real Marcille.
  • Unscrupulous corpse hunters cast an illusion spell on Kabru and his party that gives them the appearance of monsters in an attempt to trick them into killing each other. However, Kabru is able to deduce that the "monsters" are his party members purely by their subtle Character Tics, and quickly sees through the illusion, and then turning the tables on the corpse hunters.
• Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting: The story takes place in a fairly grounded, low-fantasy take on this sort of setting (for example, there are no grand metaphysics at work in the world, adventurers exist but RPG mechanics do not, magic is generally small-scale and practical) but otherwise doesn't do anything revolutionary with it. That way, the reader needs minimal preparation before being introduced to the central conceit: what if you cooked and ate every monster you defeated while Dungeon Crawling?
• Stock Video Game Puzzle: Marcille inadvertently creates a complex Rendezvous Puzzle for herself when she animates the corpses of the rest of her party and the dungeon rabbits who attacked them. All of the bodies move along with her, but are in different positions, meaning some might get stuck on a tree or shrub while trying to move along with her. Then she realizes she has to get all of them through a narrow door. We don't see her solve this but it's implied it takes hours.
• Succubi and Incubi: The party is attacked by a whole horde of succubi, with the monsters assuming forms that make the attacked drop down their guard. They are essentially mosquitoes with Glamour, though it is said that proper succubus demons may exist.
• Summon Magic: Creating monsters out of nothing is one of the chief powers possessed by a Lord of the Dungeon, since what's a dungeon without monsters to protect it? However, this gets complicated fast because monsters need to eat and breed like normal animals, and stronger monsters can only survive long-term in the deeper parts of the dungeon, so the task of a new Dungeon Lord quickly becomes establishing a balanced, self-sustaining ecosystem from scratch if they don't want to spend all day re-summoning monsters.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Falin has them. Laios too, and it becomes this trope when he starts learning healing magic.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • The party, despite being highly motivated and not having to carry weeks' worth of food, are unable to progress quite as fast through the dungeon as other teams because they have to spend plenty of time butchering and preparing the carcasses of the monsters they eat as well as foraging for other ingredients. So, even though they encounter Kabru's party having been wiped out on the third floor, said party is ahead of them on the fourth when they find them (wiped, again); and the Floke party encounters them on that same floor despite a later start.
  • The adamantine cookpot is indeed able to withstand dragon fire without melting. But it wouldn't be any good as a cookpot if being exposed to fire didn't make it hot—too hot to keep using as a shield, as it turns out.
  • After discovering that the living armor is actually a type of bivalve mollusc, Laios and Senshi are both enthusiastic about trying to cook them. Trouble is, it's a newly discovered species, so they're not sure how to safely eat them, or what will taste good. Grilling and frying work out well, but Senshi's attempts to steam the ones in the helmet in their shell tastes rather bad, despite this method working for clams and the like. This is quite the deviation from most Food Porn-based series, where a Supreme Chef is almost never seen making something that isn't delicious.
  • A post-ending omake has Laios imagining that all the friends and allies he's accumulated over the adventure will help him run the Golden Kingdom. Only to cut to reality to show he's surrounded instead by random complete strangers from distant countries as his advisors (plus Yaad). Marcille points out none of them know anything about politics, so their assistance wouldn't be of much help, even if they wanted to help (since the job is rife with corruption and conflict).
• Synchronization: If a familiar is killed while their mage is connected to them, there's some negative feedback. Just how much appears to have something to do with the mage's skill at making and using them. Marcille (competent but definitely no expert) seems to feel a sharp pain when one of her familiars is destroyed, while Fleki (a specialized expert) seems to have gotten the equivalent of a severe concussion and was rendered comatose with blood flowing from her nose.
• Taken for Granite: At one point Marcille is turned to stone by a cockatrice. The party use her as a pickle press while they try to turn her back. Unlike most examples of this trope, the effects are temporary but still takes a long time to wear off naturally and they obviously can't afford to wait.
• The Talk: After the fight with the dryads, Senshi, apparently mistaking Chilchuck for a child, attempts to give him the talk. (It should be mentioned that Chilchuck is married and has multiple kids.)
• Tastes Like Chicken: Basilisk. Considering it looks like an oversized rooster with a snake for a tail, makes some sense.
• Teleportation Sickness: Justified with dwarves. Their inner ears are more sensitive than most, so the abrupt shift of a teleport gives them a nasty case of nausea and vertigo. Namari goes straight to bed after a teleport to sleep it off.
• Tempting Fate: Played for Laughs in a post-story omake. Marcille thinks her job as magical advisor for the Golden Kingdom won't be much work since Laios' curse already keeps all the monsters away, so there won't be many magical threats. Right after saying this, she discovers the castle is crawling with countless familiars (primarily from the elven nation) pretending to be animals that are attempting to spy on Laios (or worse).
• That Was the Last Entry: In an omake, Laios shows Marcille a book written by someone who ate various types of walking mushrooms. Marcille says the last entry had better not be him eating a poisonous one. It isn't – he became a Matango.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Strangely, Laios has one on the cover of the first volume.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Chilchuck throws Senshi's mithril knife, the only weapon that so far had any success, with perfect accuracy and devastating results into the eye of the Red Dragon. This move is a key factor in the victory, but he gets taken out of commission soon after.
• Title Drop: While not happening every time, most episodes of the anime cap off with commentaries about enjoying food as allegories for enjoying life as a whole, describing them as the meaning of "dungeon food" (A.K.A. Dungeon Meshi, the Japanese title).
• Toilet Humour:
  • Marcille remarks how all the toilets in the dungeon are so well maintained... only to find that Senshi has been maintaining them by using the waste for fertilizing his golem crops. She's disgusted, but Chilchuck does point out it's exactly what normal farmers do aboveground anyway.
  • The omake where the purifying ability of a unicorn's horn is demonstrated, as well as the opposing effect of a bicorn's horn. The unicorn horn turns the water of the dungeon's fountain clear and drinkable, but the bicorn horn turns it into putrid-smelling sludge. Laios has a sudden realization where the dungeon gets its water from... and Chilchuck and Marcille start beating him up because they did not want to know.
  • In another omake, Holm explains to Kabru how he feeds his pet undine, which eats mana. The mana can come from any source, but as a water sprite, it prefers liquid sources of mana, such as the bodily fluids of people (with the implication Holm has already fed his undine a lot of bodily fluids). Mickbell and Kuro are then seen taking a refreshing shower underneath the undine, none the wiser, while Kabru tells Rin not to join them.
  • One omake involves Chilchuck and how his sharp ears pick up...everything that happens when the party takes a break. Of course, he's well used to that sort of thing so it doesn't bother him. What weirds him out is that Marcille makes absolutely no noise whatsoever in the toilet.
• Token Wizard: Marcille the Wizard is Team Touden's only magic user.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • The newbie party that Team Touden run into on the second floor are almost completely wiped out by a basilisk. When their leader is running from it, he turns his back and it kicks him with its poisoned spurs. Laios remarks that turning your back on a basilisk is asking to be killed. Needless to say, the last two members only survive because Laios and Senshi save them.
  • Kabru's party find a box of treasure and immediately start playing with the coins and wearing the jewelry. This despite the fact treasure bugs are a well known dungeon hazard. They all end up paralyzed and have to be rescued by a team of corpse hunters.
• Total Party Kill:
  • In the beginning, the party loses all their supplies, is hungry, and is not in the best condition to fight the Red Dragon. Said monster would have wiped them all if not for Falin's sacrifice to distract it and cast a teleportation spell on the rest of the party.
  • Prevented again by Falin shortly after she was resurrected. Senshi accidentally detonated the Red Dragon's fuel sacs, and Falin's quick reflexes and new-found powers saved the party yet again.
  • Subverted when the party fights the Lunatic Magician. He defeats Laios's party and throws them into a pitfall trap; however, they are rescued before trap crushes them.
  • Before getting some character development, this frequently happened to Team Kabru. They later find out that one gang of Corpse Hunters had been following them hoping to scam more money out of them. When that fails, the Hunters cast an illusion spell on them hoping they'd kill each other in the confusion. Kabru and co make short work of the hunters after the illusion is lifted.
• Tragic Monster: Ghosts and zombies. See Was Once a Man.
• Tropaholics Anonymous: In a post-ending omake, Pattadol sets up a support group meeting of former dungeon lords, as many have been left with deep emotional trauma. Marcille goes to the meeting, only to find simply having the desire to style her hair taken away was miniscule compared to what the others have to suffer through in the aftermath, with most still pining for the demon like a lost love. Mithrun points out that the demon coddled and soothed them, providing them with their every whim, and having all that suddenly wrenched away was extremely painful; he and her are lucky to have people who can support them after their period as dungeon lords.
• True Art Is Angsty: In-universe example. An omake on Nightmares has the group pondering why they give the victim predominantly bad dreams and not good ones, discussing a researcher who went out of his way to find the answer to this question. It turns out that there are plenty of good dreams as well, but the victim themselves unconsciously compels the Nightmares to create a higher proportion of bad dreams, particularly with long term exposure, because they're more stimulating to the mind than good dreams.
• Two Girls to a Team: Team Touden after Falin is rescued from the Red Dragon; and later after they lose Falin again, Marcille and Izutsumi.
• Underdogs Never Lose: Averted completely. Less skilled parties tend to end up wiped out while experienced teams venture further down and manage to come back alive.
• Under the Sea: The fourth level of the dungeon is home to a huge lake-like pool of water, along with a bunch of aquatic monsters. Adventurers usually have to cast a water walking spell to navigate it.
• Unequal Rites: An omake in the World Guide explains that magic is separated into an elf school and a gnome school. Both involve commanding tiny elemental spirits, but elvish magic is about compelling them with precise instructions, while gnomish magic beseeches the spirits and makes polite requests. Elven magic produces consistent results, but gnomes view it as disrespectful to the spirits; gnomish magic is easier on the caster and can be more powerful than elven magic (if the spirits are feeling generous), but elves look down on it as primitive. Eventually, the two races went to war, and found that spirits don't care about ideology; magic killed both sides just the same.
• Unicorn: One of the numerous monsters present, but unusually, its horn is located on the tip of the snout like a rhinoceros, rather on the forehead. It's said in the world guide that unicorns have fierce, wild natures and only soften around virgins. The citizens of the Golden Kingdom keep some as livestock and riding animals, but their horns have been cut shorter. There's also an opposite counterpart known as a bicorn, which (as its name suggests) has two goat-like horns. In an omake, it's stated that a unicorn's horn can purify poison from water, while the bicorn's horn adds poison.
• Unicorns Prefer Virgins: Played with. Unicorns are drawn to virtue and can be tamed by innocent virgin maidens, but bicorns — black horses with two goat-like horns — love immorality and eat virtuous husbands. Laios reasons that they can be tamed by corrupt adult males, and the party tries to catch one by behaving sinfully so that they can get close, but they fail to take it alive when it senses Chilchack (who the party assumed was the necessary corrupt adult) and tries to eat him. It turns out that the state of his marriage is both less and more complicated than he pretends.
• Unseen Evil: An omake shows that Thistle initially attempted to guard the entrance to the Golden Kingdom, after sinking it into a dungeon, by placing the most powerful and terrifying monster in existence in front of it, but it's only shown as a shadowy, vaguely humanoid silhouette (it fails because the mana level near the entrance of a dungeon is too low for such a powerful monster to survive). A What If? sketch also shows an evil dungeon lord Laios doing the same thing with the same unseen monster at the entrance of the dungeon (apparently all dungeon lords try the same thing).
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: When the party finally rematches with the Red Dragon, they strategize to best kill it with their limited numbers and equipment, using Senshi's adamantine pan to shield themselves from its fire until it runs out of fuel, and then luring it under a large bridge which Marcille will collapse on top of it, forcing the dragon to the ground and allowing them to strike its weak point on the throat. The plan immediately goes awry when Laios accidentally flings the pan away before the dragon uses up all its fuel, because the fire caused the pan to become too hot to hold. They manage to trap the dragon anyway, but it turns out to be stronger than expected and immediately busts free from the rubble. They're forced to improvise on the fly after that.
• Utility Magic: Some magic serves the same quality-of-life purpose as basic equipment, like spells to Walk on Water (and repel it, keeping you dry) and magic circles to heat a cooking pot.
• Was Once a Man: The zombies, walking skeletons and ghouls are the re-animated corpses and ghosts of adventurers who couldn't be revived for various reasons.
• Wham Shot: In chapter 65, when Marcille tells the Lion that she wishes that all of the spoken races could share the same lifespan and asks if he would be capable of making that happen, his eyes suddenly turn into the same eyes that the Demon Goat that possessed Mithrun had, making him look much more ominous and showing that he is likely just as dangerous as the Demon Goat was.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: When Thistle summons a horde of different dragons to take care of the Touden Party, one of the dragons is a many-headed hydra, with a panel even showing it in focus. It disappears completely by the next chapter and is never mentioned again, even in supplementary material which gave a lot of extra information on the dragon types.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • Briefly discussed by Laios and Chilchuck about fish-type merfolks. Laios argues they're closer to fish than they are to humans; therefore it's all right to eat them. Chilchuck is still turned off by their overall human-like features, especially since they're intelligent enough to use tools. In an omake though, a human-type mermaid readily eats a fish-type merfolk without hesitation.
  • Discussed again when Laios comes up with a solution to saving Falin by eating the dragon parts of her. Laios quickly gets caught up trying to figure out how they're gonna devour the several-tonned size dragon portion of Falin while everyone else is clearly disturbed by his idea.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Chilchuck telling Marcille to quit pressuring Namari to rejoin their party since abandoning her current employers would wreck her reputation as a hired adventurer.
  • Shuro gives Laios a pretty massive one when he learns that they revived Falin using black magic. He admits that in the same situation, he might have done the same thing, but Laios's blithe attitude about it plus everything else they did infuriates him.
• When Trees Attack: In Chapter 1, one of the monsters Chilchuck remembers is some kind of evil looking walking apple tree.
• Wishplosion: Under the effects of the Winged Lion, Marcille isn't being controlled by it, but her desires do get out of control. When isolated, she keeps wishing for things and have them materialize around her. The party uses this to create a path towards her in the void. In chapter 86, she mentions that not only are her desires maximized, but she's lost her desire to not want things.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Apparently even the most well-intentioned dungeon masters start going insane eventually.
• The Worm That Walks: Living Armors aren't empty husks controlled by a mage, as the party finds out: they're mollusk colonies that grow metallic shells and join together to form a gestalt entity. (The mussels are muscles.)
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Senshi buys spices and ingredients, but sees little value in anything that isn't directly related to cooking. He sorts through a heap of treasure, separating out the edible treasure bugs, and when Marcille and Chilchuck ask if they can throw the others out he says yes, only mentioning offhand afterwards that those were actual pieces of treasure. Gets worse in an Omake, where Laios reveals that the bugs they ate were highly sought-after specimens for collectors, possibly worth more than the treasures they were impersonating. Chilchuck and Marcille were not amused.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears but Team Touden have finally got Falin back, yaaaay! Oh wait, she's been spirited away by the Lunatic Magician and is now trying to kill them. Also she Came Back Wrong and Shuro intends to get all of them imprisoned (at best) for their unwitting part in it. Also, the Lunatic Magician, a far more dangerous enemy than the Red Dragon, is out for their blood. Ouch.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Whenever Team Touden completes their current objective, something happens to complicate things and they have to travel even further into the dungeon's depths to put things right.
  • Team Touden's first goal was to recover Falin's remains from the Red Dragon's stomach and resurrect her. Much time passed before they were able to finally defeat the Red Dragon and Marcille had to resort to forbidden blood magic to restore Falin's body using Red Dragon flesh in order to resurrect her. Because of this, the Lunatic Magician Thistle later transforms Falin into a monstrous chimera and the party then had to find and defeat Thistle in the dungeon's deepest level in order to eventually free Falin from Thistle's control.
  • After Laios barely defeated Thistle, the Canaries show up not long after, intending to seize Thistle's spellbook by force, uncaring of Team Touden's goals. Afraid that the Canaries would kill her, Marcille hastily accepts the Winged Lion's offer to become the new lord of the dungeon, which quickly takes on a new layout. Team Touden now has to find both Falin and Marcille in a new dungeon, with the Canaries pursuing them as criminals!
  • Once Marcille is finally subdued, Laios is then tricked into becoming lord of the dungeon and gets his body possessed by the Winged Lion. They then have to stop the Lion from completely destroying the barrier between the world and the dungeon, and when that failed, the barrier between it and the Infinite before the world is totally consumed.

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Tis finished!

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