Motif · Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade

The Syndicate

The interstellar government that owns Dungeon Crawler World and licenses seasons to corporations like Borant; the source of the rules, the common language everyone is suddenly speaking, and — according to a first-floor tutorial guide — the seeding of Earth's culture from outside long before the collapse.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 1 — The vice principal's office
• Chapter 3 — Quasar
• Chapter 19 — Miss Beatrice
• Chapter 20 — Viva la revolución
• Chapter 21 — CrawlCon
• Chapter 32 — The Ultimate Training Room
• Chapter 33 — Crawling Through the Ages
• Chapter 36 — Swole
• Chapter 41 — The Society for the Eradication of Cocker Spaniels
• Chapter 42 — Warrants
• Chapter 60 — The raids

Progression

Rules that protect inventory but not the crawler (ch. 1); a sub-minister and a tenth-floor citizenship (ch. 3); warrants and franchises, prison as a market (ch. 42); Club Scolopendra and the council's procedures (ch. 53); liaisons as dissenting sheriffs and frozen courts (ch. 59). Its council forbids suing the AI (ch. 60); it preserves cocker spaniels (ch. 41).