Dungeon Crawler Carl

by Matt Dinniman

Every man-made structure on Earth collapsed simultaneously. Buildings, bridges, homes — all crushed flat. You survived because you were outside. Now a staircase descends into the ground, and a cheerful voice promises fame and fortune to anyone brave enough to enter the dungeon.

76 characters, locations, and items in this world codex.

Characters

• Carl — Ex-Coast Guard mechanic turned humanity's most-watched dungeon crawler — a man fueled by spite, explosives, and the desperate refusal to let alien cor
• Princess Donut — A pampered housecat uplifted to sapience by the dungeon system — now the galaxy's biggest celebrity, a devastating spellcaster, and absolutely certain
• Mordecai — A centuries-old Skyfowl changeling trapped in corporate indentured servitude — the most knowledgeable guide in the dungeon and the most reluctant mana
• Katia Grim — An insecure art professor turned shape-shifting Monster Truck Driver — quietly lethal, fiercely protective of NPCs, and slowly discovering she's brave
• Mongo — A Jurassic Park-sized velociraptor who serves as Princess Donut's loyal steed and the dungeon's most improbable mascot — feathered, earthquake-causing
• Zev — A two-foot-tall fish alien navigating corporate politics to keep her clients alive — a pragmatic producer who bonds with Donut over Gossip Girl and ri
• Odette — A former dungeon crawler turned galactic talk show host — self-interested, brilliant, and more self-centered than the thing at the center of the galax
• Prepotente — A goat uplifted to bipedal sapience who became the dungeon's highest-level crawler — arrogant, lonely, and secretly terrified that the only friend he'
• Hekla — An Icelandic psychiatrist transformed into a seven-foot Amazonian warrior — clinically detached, tactically brilliant, and willing to betray allies to
• Lucia Mar — A thirteen-year-old Ecuadorian street kid who might be three people in one body — oscillating between child, monster, and something that kills dungeon
• Imani — A quiet nursing assistant transformed into a skull-faced butterfly healer — religious, gossipy, and willing to scream and swing a sword when the peopl
• Daniel Bautista — A Filipino tiger-man Swashbuckler who commands a thousand beanie babies in combat — deeply religious, family-driven, and the kind of guy who brews tea
• The System AI — The dungeon's operating intelligence — a primal technology with a foot fetish, a circus obsession, and the cheerful malevolence of a game show host wh
• Yolanda Martinez — A petite nursing assistant who was quick to laugh and quicker to clean the blood off your face — the maternal heart of the early crawler group whose d
• Louis Santiago — An overweight Miami exterminator who drove his mother's van into the dungeon and turned pest control into a combat class — pragmatic, funny, and haunt
• Li Jun — A Chinese warehouse worker turned Street Monk with a smile that lights up rooms — gentle, loyal, and willing to sacrifice himself for the people Carl
• Zhang — A bald Chinese warehouse worker turned Earth Mover mage-tank — decisive, quietly romantic, and too respectful of Carl to tell him when his plans are i
• Cascadia — The Kua-Tin lead engineer running Earth's dungeon season — perky on camera, ruthless underneath, and one crisis shy of pulling the failsafe that would
• Harbinger — A towering Caprid liaison with a face full of bug eyes — a bureaucratic antagonist who fights Carl with regulations, surveillance, and the patient mal
• Ringmaster Grimaldi — A dwarf ringmaster transformed into a building-sized parasitic vine — a third-floor city boss who controls his dead circus family like puppets and ref
• Frank Q — A former ICE agent turned purple-skinned Blood Assassin — a ruthless player-killer consumed by grief for his daughter and the conviction that everyone
• Eva Sigrid — An economics professor turned four-armed snake woman assassin — ruthless, ambitious, and willing to kill every friend she ever had to climb one rung h
• Tserendolgor — A Mongolian former fashion model turned bipedal German Shepherd flamethrower specialist — fiercely loyal, brutally honest, and willing to exit the dun
• Maxim & Dmitri Popov — Russian twin brothers fused into a single dungeon entity — Bogatyr-class warriors who share a body, a combat style, and presumably a lot of arguments
• Miriam Dom — A vegan Italian goat farmer turned Shepherd-class healer — gentle, maternal, and the only person whose absence can send the dungeon's highest-level cr
• Emberus — The Sun and Ash God — a level 250 deity with a body of shifting volcanic rock, empty burning eye sockets, and the temperament of someone who solves pr
• Kina — A sea goddess who resembles a bottom-feeding sea urchin and is 'into some really weird stuff' — enigmatic, apparently harmless, and unsettling in ways
• Taranis — The thunder god and eldest divine sibling — father of war gods, husband to Apito, and host of the first Butcher's Masquerade, where gods settle disput
• Silfa — A plump, fifty-something Holistic Healer who followed Hekla because she had daughters to protect — obedient, expendable, and ultimately discarded by t
• Gwendolyn — A divine entity operating within the dungeon's celestial hierarchy — her exact nature shrouded in mystery but her influence felt through the crawlers
• Ji-hoon — A Korean crawler whose determination outpaces his reputation — quietly effective in a dungeon that rewards loud personalities, fighting for survival w
• Tyler Storm — A Weather Engineer crawler working the tomb-raider tunnels of Bubble 543 — died to a possession attack, proving that even specialized classes can't pr
• Bobby D.J. — A twenty-something Spy-class rogue whose trap-detection skill makes him irreplaceable — and whose teammates keep dying in front of him to keep it that
• The Krakaren — A parasitic hive-mind collective of shrieking tentacles that finances evil, sells snake oil, and gets stupider the more of them there are — the galaxy
• Ferdinand — An orange cat transformed into a level 100 Province Boss who rides an armored battle rhino — believes every thought in his chicken-nugget-sized brain
• Big Tina — A former ursine child transformed into a crowned allosaurus city boss — centuries of helpless rage made manifest as a dinosaur wearing a feather boa w
• Commandant Kane — Leader of the Dirigible Gnome faction in Bubble 543 — a level 55 commander who held a third of the Gate of the Feral Gods until something with claws h
• King Rust — The Orc monarch of the Skull Empire — an authoritarian father whose terrible decisions with his children create the political instability that nearly
• Princess Formidable — An Orc princess pushed down the succession line one too many times — responds to political marginalization by threatening to pull the failsafe and kil
• Rosetta Thagra — A former dungeon crawler turned crusading journalist — pale, pretty, perpetually nervous, and the talk show host who assassinated a king on her way to
• Magnificent Troy — An orc sports broadcaster in a suit and tie who announces boss fights while hammered — the dungeon's play-by-play man, committed to professional excel
• Orren — A parasitic worm in a glass bowl on a robot body who manages the Desperado Club — a Syndicate liaison with a vice principal's demeanor and a bureaucra
• Damien — A hair-covered Borant Corporation location manager who oversees dungeon floors with the detached professionalism of someone whose job is maintaining t
• Loita — A Kua-Tin PR agent who wears her Bloom party badge like a weapon — taller than Zev, more politically connected, and perfectly willing to trade up to b
• Mukta — A Kua-Tin PR administrator who replaced Zev and treated crawlers like livestock — cancelled Carl's TV appearance to broker a better deal, then got eat
• Agatha — A seventy-year-old shopping cart lady who is actually a Residual secret agent — invisible to cameras, impossibly under-leveled, and harboring a quiet
• Dr. Gracie — An MMA fighter and doctor who survived the first night through competence and died the second through bad luck — the Meadow Lark party's most capable
• Osvaldo — A Brazilian Ranger who put every stat point into Dexterity and became the dungeon's parkour king — direct, competent, and popular enough to make the l
• Sister Ines Quiteria — A Brazilian nun transformed into a bipedal Havana Brown cat — a Poet Laureate who charms with charisma magic and faces Donut's territorial wrath for t
• Tutorial Guide — A system-generated NPC assigned to orient new crawlers — helpful within strict parameters, cheerfully indifferent to your survival beyond them.
• Borant Corporation — The alien mega-corporation running the dungeon crawl — a failing entertainment conglomerate that collapsed Earth's surface and turned humanity's extin

Locations

• The World Dungeon — An eighteen-floor inverted megastructure carved beneath Earth's collapsed surface — a lethal game show broadcast to quintillions of alien viewers acro
• The Upper Warrens — The tutorial floor — a sprawling grid of torchlit tunnels and corridors beneath Earth's surface where thirteen million crawlers fight low-level mobs a
• The Over City — The first Volcano Storyline floor — a sprawling open-air cityscape of scattered villages and abandoned ruins beneath an artificial sky, where crawlers
• The Iron Tangle — A labyrinthine network of thousands of interconnected subway tunnels and trains — crawlers must ride the rails, fight through cars, and find hidden st
• The Hunting Grounds — An open-world jungle floor where alien tourists enter as hunters — the first level where outworlders can interact with and kill crawlers for sport and
• Faction Wars — A massive battlefield floor where nine alien-sponsored factions wage war for control of the capital city Larracos — crawlers are conscripted as expend
• Personal Space — A crawler's private customizable safe room — purchasable from the third floor onward, expandable and upgradeable, where safe room rules protect agains
• The Desperado Club — A multi-floor underground nightclub and resistance hub hidden within the dungeon — part casino, part black market, part strip club, all dangerous.
• The Great Race — A fairy-tale-inspired maze floor shaped like a Prince Rupert's drop — crawlers are pulled through hundreds of kilometers of branching tubes with no ba
• Halls of Ascendency — A Scolopendra-themed floor hosting the Celestial Ascendency games — one of the dungeon's deepest and most exclusive levels with only thirty-seven stai
• Scolopendra's Lair — The final floor of the dungeon — Scolopendra's domain at the volcano's base, a tourist destination for the uber-wealthy with only one stairwell exit t
• Safe Rooms — Scattered sanctuaries throughout every floor — violence-free zones where crawlers open loot boxes, rest, and access services, always marked green on t
• Stairwells — The only passages between dungeon floors — well-lit descents ending in massive double doors engraved with the Kua-Tin symbol, each a chokepoint of sur
• Borant Corporation Headquarters — The corporate nerve center of the Borant Corporation in the Borant System — a mining company turned entertainment empire producing the galaxy's most e
• Sheol — A liminal void beyond the dungeon's boundaries — the realm of the Nothing that leaks into the deepest floors as Scolopendra stirs and the Primal Engin

Items

• Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook — A legendary secret guidebook created by the System AI — passed between chosen crawlers across twenty-five seasons, invisible to producers and audience
• Carl's Xistera — A wicker-like throwing scoop from the sport of jai alai — Carl's signature ranged weapon that launches bombs, potions, and even severed heads with dev
• The Primal Engine — The ancient planetary power source grafted into Earth itself — older than the Syndicate, it underlies all dungeon technology and has begun exhibiting
• Loot Boxes — The dungeon's primary reward system — tiered containers of semi-random gear distributed by the System AI for achievements, ranging from common Bronze
• Dungeon Codex — The system's information interface — a heads-up display and menu system providing crawlers with stats, maps, inventory access, and AI-generated item d
• Enchanted Crown of the Sepsis Whore — Donut's signature tiara — grants intelligence and sepsis attacks but permanently places its wearer in the Blood Sultanate's royal succession on the ni
• Enchanted Mongoliensis Saddle — An enchanted torso-slot saddle fitted to Mongo the velociraptor — allows Donut and others to ride the Royal Court's feathered dinosaur steed into batt
• Soul Crystals — Elf-technology power sources fueled by actual souls — less stable than dwarven batteries, used to power monster generators, guard patrols, and dungeon
• Crawler Biscuit — A standard dungeon-issued food item with minor stat effects — one of many consumables that keep crawlers alive between the dungeon's brutal encounters
• Celestial Box — The rarest tier of loot box in the dungeon — only two thousand one hundred forty-five have ever been awarded across all seasons of Dungeon Crawler Wor

View full codex at Simulacra.Ink