Place · Book 1, Dungeon Crawler Carl

The Dungeon

The eighteen-floor structure that replaces the surface of the Earth at 2:23 in the morning, into which some thirteen million people descend: a maze of quadrant-sized squares, safe rooms, tutorial guilds and boss lairs, run as a broadcast for an interstellar audience and collapsing a floor at a time on a timer.

Segment appearances

Chapter 1 — The transformation
Chapter 2 — The staircase
Chapter 3 — Da Tutorial Guild
Chapter 4 — The character sheet
Chapter 5 — Inventory and the ratings panel
Chapter 6 — Donut talks
Chapter 7 — The Royal Court
Chapter 8 — Rats and Scatterers
Chapter 9 — The Polish McDonald's
Chapter 10 — 4,148,111
Chapter 12 — Six tiers of bosses
Chapter 14 — The premiere
Chapter 15 — Mapping the first floor
Chapter 18 — The blast
Chapter 20 — Frank Q
Chapter 21 — Bitchmeat!
Chapter 22 — The encampment
Chapter 23 — Painting over the signs
Chapter 25 — No gods here
Chapter 26 — Six and a half hours
Chapter 27 — After the arena
Chapter 28 — The green room
Chapter 29 — Odette off air
Chapter 30 — Floor two
Chapter 32 — The pedicure kit
Chapter 35 — Dragged out by a cat
Chapter 36 — Zev
Chapter 37 — The janitors
Chapter 38 — The Rage Elemental
Chapter 39 — The recap
Chapter 40 — Bomb Chicken
Chapter 41 — People buckets
Chapter 42 — The Maestro's show
Chapter 43 — The Maestro explains himself
Chapter 44 — What Donut overheard
Chapter 45 — The kobold boss chamber
Chapter 46 — The dungeon groans
Chapter 47 — 124.8 trillion
Epilogue — Epilogue: Odette's couch

Arc

Named and explained in the first three chapters: eighteen floors under the surface, the first three a tutorial designed to drown crawlers in loot and kill them, floors collapsing on a timer (ch. 1–ch. 3); just under 13 million entering, and under 10 million left when it seals (ch. 4). The first floor is a condensed Seattle in a grid of squares (ch. 15); the second is cinderblock and grubs (ch. 30); the third onward, everyone says, is where it gets strange. Zev's parting hint (ch. 44): floors three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen and eighteen exist at once and are one linked setting.