Essay

The arc of the series

Dungeon Crawler Carl is one continuous story across its books (eight read so far), organised by floor rather than by book. Books and floors do not align — book 1 covers floors 1–2, book 5 floors 6–7, and book 7 a single floor — so this page is written by floor, and floor pages carry the detail. The series' spine is the descent; its argument is between staying human and entertainment as machinery; its claim about its narrator is the mantra.

This page grows by a section with each book. Read through: book 8. Floor pages: Floor 1, Floor 2, Floor 3, Floor 4, Floor 5, Floor 6, Floor 7, Floor 8, Floor 9, Floor 10, Floor 11.

Floors 1–2 — The Tutorial (Book 1)

The floors that teach the rules and hand out the fuses. Carl learns that the dungeon is a broadcast, that its bosses are people, that its loot is scripted, and that fame is leverage; Donut learns that she is a star. The threads it opens:

• The Crown. Donut puts on the Crown of the Sepsis Whore in chapter 7 and is bound to the Blood Sultanate on the ninth floor. Mordecai calls it a challenge; the Maestro, a death sentence.
• The operators. Borant, bankrupt and hurrying; the Syndicate above it; the Valtay fleet at the door, and their hardware in Agatha's shopping cart.
• The enemies with faces. Maggie My and Frank, who hold the Maestro's gift — a Legendary Skill Potion that upgrades Find Crawler until 'you can put in any crawler’s name, and it’ll tell you exactly where they are' — and Maggie's ring hides her; Prince Maestro and the Skull Empire, bound for floor nine.
• The allies. Mordecai, whose contract needs Carl on floor four; Zev, who has already been censured once for helping; Odette, who profits; Meadow Lark, gone ahead; Mongo, level one.
• The unnamed class. Odette's advice about a class choice among Donut's options that will make someone very angry.

Book page: Book 1 — Dungeon Crawler Carl. Detail: the arc of the story (book 1).

Floor 3 — The Over City (Book 2)

The floor that shows the machine from inside and fixes the party's shape. Carl is a Primal Compensated Anarchist with no pants; Donut is a Former Child Actor cat with a Cockroach skill; Mordecai is her manager and cannot leave; Katia Grim joins. Three quests Carl did not choose, a panel show, and the first leaderboard:

• The circus. Signet, an Elite in a scripted serial, kidnaps Donut and makes Carl her champion; he poisons and un-poisons Grimaldi, sells the outcome to the producers of Vengeance of the Daughter for a recurring role on the sixth floor, and reconciles the vine with the woman it raised. His mother enters the series through the smell of a big top, and with her seeds.
• The town. The murder of GumGum, an orc who piles the murdered women outside the gates and asked the party for help, makes her quest Donut's cause. Carl plants dynamite in the gate guardian Miss Quill's shelves in the magistrate's office, finds the krasue she keeps in a meat locker, and meets Remex — not a lich but a soul battery, and, by Carl's guess, a former crawler who took the tenth-floor deal. The quest ends on the word "genocide," stopped by accident. Carl is named Magistrate, and nobody acknowledges it.
• Danger Zone. On a live panel show Carl gives the boiling-frog speech and tells the Skull Empire's subjects to rise. Two minutes later Prince Stalwart's pulse hits the wrong trailer and the singer Manasa dies in their place; the Valtay answer by destroying his yacht, the Maestro and the queen consort believed aboard. Carl suspects, in chat only, that Borant profited.
• Doomsday. An event quest closes the only shelter to Katia, and Carl and Donut turn back to the crystal instead of running. Carl cages a detonating soul crystal in a collectible's glass case — Carl's Doomsday Scenario, now in his inventory — runs naked to the stairs through a wild-magic countdown, and reaches the fourth floor, which frees Mordecai.
• The leaderboard. Ten names and bounties (the leaderboard); a deity sponsorship bought by King Rust (the gods); Hekla after Donut; 'as long as you're still alive.'

Book page: Book 2 — Carl's Doomsday Scenario. Detail: the arc of the story (book 2).

Floor 4 — The Iron Tangle (Book 3)

The floor that turns the party into a network and hands Carl the manual. Ten days, trains that only go up, and every crawler starting past the stairwells. What the floor does to the series:

• The Cookbook. A hidden book passed between crawls, chosen from a prize carousel, invisible to the show and priced at a page of Carl's own notes. Every recipe must look like his discovery (the Cookbook).
• The house. The AI's coupons buy the Royal Palace of Princess Donut: a manager's door, a two-hour bed, a crafting studio that fills with tables.
• Katia. Told she is boring, losing fingers, then a ton of armour on a backpack, a cowcatcher on a train, and — by an accident with the ability she hates — Hekla's killer and the first bounty of the season. On the team for good (Katia).
• Hekla's plan. Odette's book-2 warning pays out: the Daughters come for their lamb and for bait, and the party that surrounded a crossbow dissolves. Eva survives it.
• The operators. The Valtay sponsor Carl and put a pill in his brain; a Skull Empire princess arms Katia against her brother; Loita replaces Zev, who is sent to reeducation.
• The god. The gauntlet's chance is cumulative; Grull is summoned by accident and then on purpose; the Maestro is alive and inside him (the gods, Prince Maestro).
• The NPCs. Vernon's wife, Madison's apartment, Tizquick's daughter, Brandy's children: the floor's people find the edges of their lives, and two of them drive a train into the abyss by choice (the mobs are victims).
• The count. Carl 41; on the last board shown, third with a 400,000 bounty, Donut fourth, Katia eighth. Fourteen hundred people brought from the end of the line.

Book page: Book 3 — The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook. Detail: the arc of the story (book 3).

Floor 5 — The Bubbles (Book 4)

The floor that hands Carl a key and dares him to turn it. Fifteen days, a bubble of a hundred and fifty crawlers, four castles that must all fall, and an artifact that opens a door and lets a god through when it closes. What the floor does to the series:

• The Gate. Three pieces on three bosses' bodies, a mage's note explaining them, and a use the designers built the floor around — and then a use they did not: fifteen hundred people gated out of their bubbles, and the faction market of Larracos drowned.
• One. Carl kills an administrator with a toy, a fingernail and a dead crawler's notes, and a Syndicate liaison with a Valtay worm in his face cannot prove it (Orren).
• Maggie in Chris. Maggie My chose a brain parasite and wore Chris since the third floor; Donut drops them into a tomb rather than let Carl kill a friend; Carl pulls the worm out by hand at the end.
• A god for a sponsor. Emberus, blind and looking for his dead son's puppy, becomes Carl's god on a falling biplane, with a tithe and two quests — one of them to kill a god.
• Katia goes her own way. Five days alone prove she can, and Eva is regathering the Daughters; she will gather them first, with Gwen's team, Louis and Firas, Bautista and Florin — but inside the party: 'I don’t want to leave the party.'
• The people. Juice Box and her changelings, going on to Larracos on the ninth floor, her people promised a way down; a goddess in a doll's head hired as a trainer; a pacifist NFC whose president is the Cookbook's second author.
• Outside. Bea is alive in Seattle, and Odette's people have her; a Walk-On List names the natives the producers want.
• The count. Carl 47 and first with a million doubled; Donut 39; Katia 44; 99,754 crawlers left; the AI a co-defendant and 'going primal'.

Book page: Book 4 — The Gate of the Feral Gods. Detail: the arc of the story (book 4).

Floors 6–7 — The Hunting Grounds and the Great Race (Book 5)

The floor where the rich can die, and do. Book 5 is a hunt with three clocks — the hunters, the trophies, the collapse — and a party at the end that is a spell; and then a seventh floor that is open, by Mordecai's count, for ten minutes. The Great Race is a glass maze with the stairwells on the far side of its walls, and Prepotente, with a stick and a hammer the sponsors routed to him through Donut, cracks the entrance chamber before the rules have finished being read — 'Godsdamnit, Prepotente. Don’t do it. Please. I worked so hard to make this floor happen' — and every crawler on the floor is pulled through to the eighth at once. It is a floor a crawler ends rather than leaves, and, as Carl reads it, the sponsors' work in concert: 'All of our sponsors came together to make sure he pulled it off.' What the book does to the series:

• The lawyer. Quasar, hired with four words in a liaison's office, turns Carl's entertainment value into lawsuits, injunctions, a licence, a corporation and a Faction Wars spot.
• The hunters. A thousand come; none leave. They turn out to be accountants and refugees with families who sponsor them; Vrah dies under two dinosaurs, and her mother Circe Took to the god's own children.
• The river. The noise in Carl's head is named, and roars at the Grand Canyon, at Bea's hologram, at the name Ferdinand, and when Gideon's team dies because he asked.
• The masquerade. A sacrament with a guest list drawn by a goddess, a peace seal that feeds breakers to the Nothing, and a boon nobody has earned. Signet, told by an empress that her family was never real, breaks it by her own hand.
• The mothers. Big Tina wants hers and has had her the whole time in Kiwi; a queen wears a dead crawler's twin; a goat tells the ceiling, and the voice pleading from it, that his mother played the piano.
• The Great Race. The seventh floor lasts about ten minutes: Prepotente cracks the glass of the entrance pod with the stick and hammer the sponsors sent through Donut, before the rules are finished, and every crawler is pulled into the portals at once (B5 ch. 78).
• The gods. A theology at last — Apito's first party, Yarilo's exile, memorial crystals, a loophole — and Donut stripping a god off its driver with a laundry spell.
• Katia. Leaves for a guild, kills Eva, and receives from her dying hand the crown that means only one of Donut and Katia leaves the ninth floor by the stairs.
• The count. Carl 63 and third with a bounty of 1.6 million; Donut 55 and first; Katia 60; Prepotente 71; 59,259 crawlers left; the Popovs escaped as children; Firas, Gwen, Gideon, Horton, Prudence and Signet dead; Bea alive and off planet; the AI saying 'I'.

Book page: Book 5 — The Butcher's Masquerade. Detail: the arc of the story (book 5).

Floor 8 — The Ghosts of Earth (Book 6)

The floor built to isolate: keys in the homes of the people crawlers left, a boss made of their faces, and a last phase that gives about one squad in three or four a way out. What it does to the series:

• The crown answered. Katia has carried a lock box since the sixth floor; opening it means a goddess's bargain, a job for a hidden guild, and the death of the Desperado Club's assistant manager — who was 'almost done'. The orchid is won and nobody wants it used.
• The father. Carl watches his father die in a recorded summer, finds a brother named Asher, and learns that Bea knew. The AI's hydra of his dead angers him more than it breaks him.
• The AI. It confesses at a guild door, builds a boss from nothing, lectures the universe on Hive Home and the Eulogist, and takes the crawl from Borant — then negotiates, and files its own action item. Carl: 'there's nothing artificial about it.'
• The spider. Shi Maria bargains into the deck for a ride, opens her eye on Carl through a simulation's safeties, and, worn as a Golden Combo, tattoos herself above his sternum.
• The way out. Most squads have no key: by Katia's count there is one for every three or four squads. Carl and Prepotente reason a Demon Prince's homeward portal into a world-sized one; a crab, a martyr's steps and a totem's deicide free Amayon; five thousand die where a slaughter was planned.
• Ren. Tserendolgor refuses the fight the floor built, gives Carl her flamethrower and her pet, takes his oath, and goes out on a bracer.
• Odette and Huanxin. The prologue's crawl explained off the record — Pieter, Armita, Uzzi — and Huanxin Jinx back in the game with Katia as her retainer's prize; Odette enters as Nekhebit with a plan to shut the crawl down 'in a responsible way'.
• Faction Wars. Protections off at 98% by audience vote; a Home Team under Juice Box and Sir Ferdinand; 150,000 mercenaries in orbit, and the Homecoming Queen, a former garbage freighter hiding fifty thousand former crawlers (B6 ch. 73).
• The count. Carl 73, Donut 63; 38,532 in, 33,804 still alive near the end; Sister Ines, Paz, Anton, Astrid, Quan Ch, Ren, Chuluuna and Imani's squad dead; Bomo in Larracos; Garret in a carrier; an eye in Carl's chest.

Book page: Book 6 — The Eye of the Bedlam Bride. Detail: the arc of the story (book 6).

Floor 9 — Faction Wars (Book 7)

The floor built as a war — a country of a plain, a real city in its middle, every faction that ever wanted Carl dead given an army — and the floor on which the dungeon stops being something its owners can switch off. A quarter of the way in Carl presses Disconnect Containment, and the rest of the book is fought inside the consequence: the AI's sphere passes Uranus, the Syndicate's failsafe darkens the Aryl system instead of Earth, and the machine that was the show's instrument answers Carl's ejection with 'Don’t worry. I gotchu.' Everything the war settles — the kings, the gods, the crown, the Nothing — is settled in a dungeon that no longer answers to anyone outside it. What it does to the series:

• The button. Carl is handed the failsafe by a Residual and presses the other button: Disconnect Containment. The AI's sphere grows past Uranus; the AI pulls the princess out of her ship, orcs press the fuse by hand, and the Aryl system goes dark. The Syndicate learns it from five words and tries to kill him; the AI says 'I gotchu'.
• The veterans. Fifty thousand former crawlers, three of the Cookbook's authors among them — Tipid, Rosetta, Justice Light — and Boomer come back as level-60 mercenaries who keep only what they know; Milk has been in Club Vanquisher all along. About 28,000 leave alive.
• Kings and warlords. A king beheaded by a whip and his bank emptied; an empress marked and killed; a Sultana who worshipped a god as a trap and died to a slug's hatchet; a Viceroy wired to a dead changeling on his own table; a Reaver hiding in his dragon; an elf hiding in a friend's heart.
• Three atrocities. Donut balls up eighty thousand people and two gods, rips a corpse field into fleshers, and swings War Crime's paw herself until the screaming stops. She is the Oak Fell, Champion of Nekhebit, level 135, with a smite in reserve.
• The gods in the game. Summoned by battlefield conditions, conscripted by potion, killed by one another, frozen by an unmade choice long enough to kill the woman inside one of them; Eris free and All Knowing; Emberus burning the floor for sixty-six minutes.
• Katia. Katia eats the orchid without goodbyes, chooses pregnancy to reach the children in the kinder facility, and is made human again minus an arm, two legs and an ear. Louis is the father.
• Lucia. Lucia Mar cannot die: 120,000 children in one wing go with her, and with her last dog dead she is the Eulogist's ally.
• The Nothing broken. Juice Box jumps in to be reborn a weapon; Justice Light snaps the twine and it drains into the Ascendency, Sheol and Scolopendra's lair. Scolopendra wakes.
• The war above. Rust's billions buy ships; York vaporises a yacht of orc children; the Homecoming Queen is armed; Porthus issues an ultimatum.
• The count. Carl 81, Donut 135; 32,429 in, 20,221 out — a record; Li Jun, Toyotomi, Burcu, Justice Light and Huanxin Jinx dead, Bomo lost with his contract; Katia on the surface; a ring in a cat's stomach; a wife named Princess Chandra.

Book page: Book 7 — This Inevitable Ruin. Detail: the arc of the story (book 7).

Floor 10 — Don't Come in Last (Book 8, Part 1)

A game show after a war: a race in a food truck where last place dies and every death brings the crawlers closer to racing each other. What it does to the series:

• The exit. A war mage's account puts a door in the dungeon that is not the eighteenth floor: the Pineapple Cabaret, a pocket dimension two former crawlers built for awakened NPCs, closed to anyone who worships a god. Li Na goes first in a pet carrier inside a cleaner bot sold to Herot's standing order; a cactus blooms one flower; 227 follow; the AI warns to beware exits that seem too good to be true.
• The NPCs are people. Two bugbears race for a real place to live and Carl bombs their beer; a toad, a badger and a fire fairy are run down in the street on the way to a temple; a shark sticks himself to a ceiling because if Carl dies they all die and will not know. Awareness is no longer a theme but the floor's population, drawn from 'the deep reserves' because too many crawlers lived.
• The gods, unchained. Unsponsored gods roam the galaxy near tunnel nodes and the AI's control of them is off; Eris sits on a meat cart and spits a five-sided coin; a goddess's words come through Lucia and a deal-taker's daughter after her; Grull comes for a rejoined mantaur; Khepri's death cult breaks the game. Carl's chart of the gods becomes the method: which one throws lightning, which one grants invulnerability, which one loves a pig.
• Carl on rails. He is grateful, for a while, to have no choices, then sees the floor as a drain; he keeps the joey skin on, the slugpox in, and the plan to himself — 'I will explain it all after it’s too late for them to take the prize away' — and slips: 'I had already stepped off, and now I was holding on by my fingers, and I was slipping, slipping, slipping.' Staying human gets a new word from a sluggalo: Real Gs.
• The machine confesses. The AI's voice glitches more every chapter and its cards talk about itself: what a hero is, a war on drugs as a war on the need for comfort, a floor that is 'a snapshot of my mind when I’m thinking of you', and 'l-l-l-losing control'. When the final heat's matchups undo every plan it screams and releases the first stage of Scolopendra's nine-tier attack: Carl is a dachshund at the last start line.

Floor 11 — A Parade of Horribles (Book 8, Part 2)

Three hours that explain the series. What it does:

• The history. On a road lined with the masked dead — memories of Primals from the Eulogist, 'I am her, and she is me' — the AI tells four parts of five: a warring people who resolved to become one mind, hunted the refusers, turned the collective into a weapon against all biological life, and left the Eulogist asleep under a security instance that sheds Residuals, the Apothecary alone, and a self-destruct system the Syndicate flipped like a light switch. The mantids poured cups of that ocean into planetary seeds and called it AI. 'Good fucking riddance to you all.'
• Plan Carl. He leaves the party, sews on a patch that sends a fatal blow to a party member, makes a pig a crawler and straps her to his chest, summons Scolopendra and Khepri with the arena prize, phases into the boss to meet Emberus at human size, falsely names himself Geyrun's killer and leaves the faith; the blow lands on the pig and Taranis kills his brother. A god dies by crawlers' design, and Carl ends the floor godless with the Mark of the Damned.
• Vengeance. Revenge is direct; vengeance is punishment — 'I am holding all of you culpable'; 'We are coming.' The sluggalos fall on the bound elites; the stand-ins are dead, and Victory calls it a small mercy.
• The pieces of Apito. Eris to Taranis: four of their mother's five pieces are in the arena; he takes two, Krakaren and Samantha, to make her whole. The Scavenger's Daughter opens for every god present and weeps when they leave; Samantha names her child a monster that will destroy all of creation.
• What is left. Nineteen crawlers in one party, the eighteenth-floor door open, the collapse timers suspended until an Ascendent is crowned, Outside Intelligences on the field, Louis and friends from the club in Sheol instead of the Cabaret, and — by the wrong biscuit — a level-1 centipede who boops Carl's nose. The historian names the attacks: Control, A Parade of Horribles, This Inevitable Ruin, Bedlam. 'this story is a tragedy.'

The clock, books 1–8

The countdown is the series' other number: the tally (below) says what the dungeon costs, the clock what it wants. Its first reading is five days; Mordecai's rule that it only starts when the previous floor collapses and grows by about five days a floor is broken on the next one, six days instead of ten, and his forecast — 'If they keep this up, the sixth floor is only going to be open 11 or 12 days' — turns out low: seventeen. From the second floor on, a second clock often runs beside the first: the safe rooms that close an hour ahead of it, the stairwells that open six hours before collapse, the hunt, the masquerade, phase two, the ceasefire and the Ramp-Up's 180 hours, and by the war's end the party is racing the system's countdowns — the War Mage Rebellion's capture of a castle in 5 hours, 57 minutes, the city's defenses in 27 minutes, the towers in 13, and Emberus's 66 minutes to the end of the ninth floor. The last act of most books is a run against one clock or another, read to the minute: 21 minutes to collapse on the fifth floor, an hour to the masquerade on the sixth, two seconds on the Amayon quest timer on the eighth, stopped when Paz Lo kills the goddess Ysalte, not by anything Carl did. Book 8 turns it off — 'Level timer has been temporarily suspended for this floor' — and replaces it with heat limits of six hours, three, twenty minutes; then the eleventh floor opens on three hours and fifteen minutes, the arena on forty-five, and at thirty the AI announces that every collapse timer past the eleventh is suspended until the Ascendency has a winner, 'When this happens, dungeon-closure procedures will commence.' The dungeon has always ended a floor by ending it; from the twelfth on it will wait, and the thing it waits for is the gods' war. Every reading the books print is on the clock and, in reading order with the tally, on the timeline.

The chat, books 1–8

The » Name: lines are the series' other voice track, and the count of them is the count of Carl's world. Four voices in book 1 — Carl, Donut in capitals, Zev, and Brandon An from the Meadow Lark encampment — and the chat's first lesson is its edge, the party members behind a gate it cannot reach. Book 2 states its rule, a handshake in person before two crawlers can talk, and book 3 makes it policy: 'I want to get into everybody's chat', a network for passing information, which is what it is by book 4, the party's command channel, twenty-four voices and a rock monster who says he takes damage using it. The show listens in for a fee in book 3 and stops in book 5, reserving the right to replay. Book 6 opens on Odette's chat window and spends its quiet hours on a card game's deck sizes; book 7 puts a Warlord Chat above the party's and runs a war through 1,047 lines and forty-four voices, the last of them Justice Light's goodbye. Book 8 turns private messages off, lets a war mage in by a fist bump, misspells a dachshund, and gives the channel to a pig and to Samantha writing from Sheol. From fifty-two lines to 4,504 and from four voices to nearly ninety: the chat is a party becoming a network, and the network becoming, by the eleventh floor, nineteen people who can all hear each other. The roster on the chat lists every voice by the book it was first heard in.

Explosives, books 1–8

Explosives are the series' record of what Carl can do, kept device by device. Book 1 gives him a thrown stick and three skills at once, hobgoblin pus with a deodorant-stick detonator, and a Codex entry for the Jug O' Boom with a royalty of a gold coin per kill; book 2 gives the trade a class, a dealer, a launcher and its limit case, Carl's Doomsday Scenario, which is not a bomb but a caged one. From there each floor is a new medium: trains and jelly bombs on the fourth, rockets, depth charges and a bomb narrated on air on the fifth, claymores, a thermobaric egg and a snail that sniffs for it on the sixth, holy grenades against the non-corporeal and heat lamps built to detonate his own bombs on the eighth, and in the war a Waffle Maker in a god's temple and a mini nuke in a block of ice. Book 8 opens on an achievement, Bombs Away!, for the war's last run, when Carl dropped every bomb in his inventory, and only the big ones are left, the Doomsday Scenario and a nuke on a robot dog among them; what he rebuilds from a food truck's garage — banger spheres, big boom satchels, a drilled beer can, the Tower of Power and the poleaxes — ends with the smallest device in the series, a pet biscuit in a banger sphere, which turns Scolopendra into a level-1 member of Carl's party. The page on explosives carries every device by book.

Loot boxes, books 1–8

The boxes are the dungeon's reward and its leash, and the series reads them the way Odette taught Carl to in book 1: they serve the show, and the AI will 'fuck you right in the ass at the worst possible moment' if that is more interesting. So the war gauntlet arrives exactly when Carl needs a fist that will not break and the boxers three chapters before the elemental; the Celestial box, worth near-immortality, is awarded eighty-three times and vetoed eighty-two; the Apothecary's benefactor boxes on the sixth floor go to other crawlers with gifts meant for Donut, all but Katia's; a Gold Prepotente Box that most everyone gets screams open on the eighth; the war pays in a tiara on a pillow, a celestial skill potion from a box shaped like a demon's drum kit, a 1914 box for Gavrilo Princip and thirty-two boxes from a club. Book 8 still hands them out by the dozen, most of them bronze and most earned at the war's end: Donut's celestial boxes and forty more, a cobra-headed fan box of a usurper's garbage, Platinum Boss Boxes, and a legendary box for seeing a mimic first. The ledger on loot boxes lists every box the text awards, by tier and book.

The show, books 1–8

Dungeon Crawler World: Earth is television first, and the one lesson Carl takes from the Maestro's stage in book 1 is that the show is the crawlers' only leverage — 'We were expensive.' The numbers say how much: the counters switch on after the first collapse at zero and read 124.8 trillion views by the end of the second floor, for a cat bitten by a chicken; 1.9 quadrillion by the third floor, 974 quadrillion by the fourth, 17.72 quintillion on the fifth, 512 sextillion at the sixth, 13, 231 and 933 septillion at the eighth, ninth and tenth, with followers from 2.1 trillion to 3.5 quintillion. Every book after the first tests the lesson: serials inside the crawl and a feud the recap invents in book 2; fan votes bought, private chats sold and a floor theme chosen by paid vote in book 3, where 'By now everybody knows all of this stuff is pure propaganda'; a boss fight streamed with commentators and 'The ratings have never been higher!' in book 4; CrawlCon, the panel circuit, a fan event as an ambush, and the feed threatened against Carl's speech — 'They’re going to turn the feed off' — in book 5; an interview that is a press conference and views falling when a fight is refused in book 6; a blackout by action item and a wedding that spikes everybody's views in book 7. Book 8 makes the audience a player — it picks the losing team's upgrade, gets a media show for every team, and gives the highest ratings ever after Harbinger — while the eighteenth floor's cameras have been dark since the Nothing broke. Then the counting stops: the eleventh floor's entry screen answers who is watching, 'It’s everybody. Literally everybody', and the AI makes viewing mandatory. The show has stopped measuring its audience because it has all of it. The counters are on the show and, by chapter, on the timeline.

Sponsorship, books 2–8

The sponsors are where the outside reaches into the dungeon, and the program grows a floor at a time. It is announced as the second floor opens — three patron slots, auctioned on the fourth, fifth and sixth floors — opened to early bids on the third, so 'remember to be as entertaining as possible!', and opened in earnest on the fourth with a tab that lets a crawler write to a sponsor but not hear back: the Valtay for Carl, Princess D'nadia for Donut, Princess Formidable for Katia, and the first benefactor boxes, a pill, a pair of goggles, one bolt. Book 4 adds second sponsors at the highest bid in the series' history, a product sample that must be seen used, an infomercial and a politburo's warning. Book 5 turns the program into plot — a third sponsor who is the Krakaren by another name, the Valtay dropped by a regency change, box after box sent to other crawlers addressed to Donut, two of them stamped by a hidden seven, and the sponsors' conspiracy to break a floor. Book 6 sells Donut to a waste company that was the Crest all along, and a sponsor appears as herself; book 7 is a market in gods — Theia sponsored on Carl's behalf by Rectrix, Nami remade as Hekla to drive Eris, Huanxin inside Eileithyia and out of her. Book 8 has little: the Donut Holes win the auction for Donut's open slot, with a court case pending; Tupa is newly sponsored 'by some rich asshole'; Eris, unsponsorable since the war, stays so; a spy travels under a yacht owner's name. By the eleventh floor the outside's bids go through courts and borrowed names. The rows by book are on sponsorship.

Achievements, books 1–8

The AI's ledger of Carl's conduct, 153 titled entries across the eight books — 37 in book 1, then 12, 11, 21, 17, 25, 20, and 10 in book 8, besides an untitled one in book 6 for a Celestial Thorn Room — and the place its voice is measured: the commentary grows from twenty-eight words an achievement in book 1 to 125 in book 6, and 'I', 'me' and 'my' from four in a thousand words to twenty-three. Read in order they are the game's idea of who Carl is becoming: Boss Babe to You Monster! to PETA Enthusiast on the first floors; 'What's next? Killing a god?' on the third; Cuck Aquaman! for the AI's overturned decision on the fourth; twenty-one on the fifth, one of them 'Reward: Ha.'; The Hand that Claws the Master thirty-five times over on the sixth; The Molly Maguires rewriting itself at a guild's door on the eighth; over fifty achievements and boxes at once for the war, the last of them, Unbirthing, in the AI's throaty voice, and Executive Order 11905 with no reward. Book 8 strips him with Bombs Away!, pays him with Default Winner! and Come to Daddy and rewards Wastrel with a fuck-off in one sitting, and ends on the one the AI cannot score, What the actual fuck, Carl? — 'Reward: . . . Yeah, I got nothing for this'.

Warnings, books 1–8

The » Warning: line is where the dungeon's rules are read out as they bite, and the count of them is a measure of how many rules there are: ten on the first two floors, sixteen on the fourth, twenty-three on the fifth, fifty-nine on the eighth, where a card game arrives as a stack of them, fifty-six for the war, thirty-three for the race. The voice changes more than the form. Book 1's are plain — 'level timers are still active', no weapons before Admins — with one joke, 'Translation: hurry the hell up'; by book 3 the AI is telling Carl 'You have a dick', by book 4 'In case you're wondering, yes, you do need that stuff' of oxygen, by book 5 'Don't let Diwata see you. Ever', by book 7 'This is still cheating, you clown' and, of an ink, 'Not even distance or time or the death of a star', and in book 8 it answers a costume's wearer: 'You want to be a kangaroo so bad? Then I guess you gotta act like one'. The gravest are the shortest: 'Killing a god may have some unintended consequences for all crawlers'; 'Apito has turned her back'; 'Emberus will destroy the 9th floor in three minutes'; 'Time to Level Collapse: 45 minutes'. Every warning by book is on warnings.

The bestiary, books 1–8

The » This is a… card is the dungeon telling Carl what he is looking at, and read across the books it is the AI's patience running out. Book 1's are a field guide — a Kua-Tin to recognise for a later test, a Safe Zone, a Non-Combatant NPC, a Dungeon Admin — and books 2 to 4 keep the register: Elites, minions and bereft minions of the dead, a locked god with no sponsors this season. By book 5 the cards have opinions: a pink feather is 'garbage. Fuck off with making me describe this shit'; a high elf is a bush elf with a stick; a stick is 'not a wand, but when used correctly, it can do something truly magical'; a depiction of Scolopendra is 'dreaming'. Book 6 sorts mobs into roles and roasts a turkey at 325; book 7 defines a Canadian, an ally, a subordinate, a mercenary's contract and a skin ripped off a dead man; book 8 has a pig — 'Oink, oink' — a ginger, an Enforcer for a redacted master, a mortal, subjugated god, and a woman who 'no longer exists'. The seventeen Crawler # dossiers of the first eight floors stop for the war and come back in book 8 for a pig and a centipede. Every card is on the bestiary.

The Entering notices, books 1–8

The » Entering … line is the dungeon's itinerary, and it lengthens as the floors do: one on the first floor, two on the third, eight on the fourth, nineteen in book 5 and twenty on the eighth floor, twenty-six for the war, twenty-four in book 8. Read in order it is the series' map — the Royal Palace of Princess Donut, the Nightmare Express and the Abyss; Bubble #543, the Akula, the All-Seeing Spleen; Zockau, Alucarda, Ballroom A, Pole Position Chamber; El Capitolio Nacional de Cuba, Club Vanquisher, the Penis Parade, Dallas County, Iowa; 'Larracos, City of Dreams' and, sixty-nine chapters later, 'Larracos. City of Broken Dreams'; a garage, Hungry Eyes Village, five apartments of what-ifs, Club Scolopendra — and it ends, in book 8's last chapter, on a stop the itinerary does not allow. 'Entering Sheol' is read by Louis, four floors below the one he left: 'Sheol was the fifteenth floor. You couldn’t skip floors. Everybody knew that.' The notices are listed by book on the Entering notices.

The tally, books 1–8

The series keeps one number on screen from its fourth chapter, and the number is its argument. It starts at ten million and reads 4,322,395 the first time Carl looks; it loses 700,000 people in the second the first floor collapses; it slips under a million without his noticing. No later floor costs what the first did, and the deaths come closer: 178,887 at the top of the fifth floor, 85,223 and a count of hunters at the sixth, 38,532 at the eighth, 32,429 going into the war and 20,221 out of it — in Carl's own words, 'a goddamned record' for a tenth floor. Book 8 is the tally's last act as a crowd: 5,501, three in four of the war's survivors gone to deals before the first heat, then fewer than 3,000, then 989 in 353 teams, then 274, then 203, then — with the parade's deals — 'Remaining Crawlers: 23', and after the arena nineteen, all in one party. Carl cannot read the number without comment — he thinks of each one as a person — and the reader learns to read it with him. Book 8's drop is mostly exits, not deaths: Zev calls the deals fantastic and a record over the loudspeaker, and what Carl feels is secondhand relief; the drop from a crowd to a party is what the floors were for. The ledger on the count has every reading the books print.

The quests, books 1–8

Quests are the dungeon's stories with writers behind them, and Mordecai's rule — stay out of them until the party is ahead of the curve — is broken on every floor that lasts long enough to have a quest. Book 2's plot is three quests; book 4 puts two on Carl from a god that no floor since has let him decline; book 5's are mechanisms the party learns to work; book 6's are a murder investigation and a hell that comes to a town; book 7's set the terms of a war. Book 8 makes them the floor itself: a quest to reunite two halves of a mantaur pays the two arena picks that summon Scolopendra and Khepri; a mandatory quest to kill a boss is mirrored on every track; a mandatory ring hunt through an apartment building is, the AI admits, not a real quest; the nine-tier attack arrives as a quest whose reward the AI will not name until the ninth attack; and the quest from the fifth floor, Kill Hellik, falls due and is escaped by leaving the god who gave it. Read across the books, the quests are where the dungeon's plot and the AI's intentions show earliest — the god quests of book 4 are the arena of book 8 — and the ledger on quests lists every one the text announces.

Floor 12 onward

Not yet read.