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Generic event illustration for The Crawl
event

The Crawl

Dungeon Crawler World

The galaxy's blood sport, now surviving into an eleventh floor while an armed movement demands it be stopped.

Story so far

Faction Wars is over and the crawl grinds on. Roughly twenty thousand crawlers survived the tenth floor, so many that the Syndicate no longer has to offer decent exits, and Carl and Princess Donut both refuse the garbage on the table. Ahead of them lies The Eleventh Floor, Don't Come in Last, a race in chosen vehicles where finishing last strips away survival containment - and this, at least, is not a Battle Royale season.

Outside, the crawl has finally cost the Syndicate more than it earns. Porthus broadcasts an ultimatum giving the government until the end of the current crawl to meet demands that boil down to stop the crawl or else, and a militant organization is moving on Syndicate property across the known universe. Colonel Boomer is bringing the war out of the dungeon; Eris is loose outside it; a star system has gone nova without warning. The show is no longer bigger than the world watching it.

Role

The dungeon season whose continuation has become the galaxy's central political crisis.

Relationships

Carl — Continues into the eleventh floor rather than take a deal
Porthus — Demands it be stopped by the end of the current season
Syndicate — Runs it, and is now at war over it

Earlier in this series

Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings:

Sources — 9 recorded facts, by chapter
Chapter 2
  • The galaxy's most profitable spectacle, and — Paulie insists — a soul harvest with no purpose but greed.
Chapter 26
  • The lethal galactic gameshow Carl briefly holds the power to end from a gas-station floor.
Chapter 28
  • The dungeon deathgame, here reduced to a static trench war whose insipid rules the crawlers exploit and resent.
Chapter 31
  • The broadcast death-game whose eighteenth-floor faction war has become industrialized trench slaughter.
Chapter 36
  • The show itself, which one residual faction is trying to end permanently before controllable AIs make it impossible.
Chapter 48
  • The dungeon game itself, which Carl assumes will continue regardless of the galaxy's unfolding collapse.
Chapter 50
  • The dungeon crawl on Earth, one season in a long line that includes Aryl's battle royale.
Chapter 95
  • The dungeon's own ruleset, which supersedes faction rules and traps Louis on his floor.
Chapter 100
  • The galaxy's blood sport, now surviving into an eleventh floor while an armed movement demands it be stopped.
Character portrait