Table of Contents
What Just Happened
Sit down. I am going to talk for a while and you are going to listen, because the people who do not listen to this part are the people I do not see again.
Your planet was seeded a long time ago, which gave a corporation a legal claim on it, which they exercised. The surface is gone. Everything that was on it has been ground up and rebuilt into eighteen floors of dungeon, and you are standing in the first one.
This is being broadcast. That is the part people struggle with, so let me be plain: the mining barely pays for itself. The show is the business. You are the show.
Three practical things follow from that, and every rule below is downstream of one of them.
- The dungeon wants you to keep moving. Every floor collapses.
- The dungeon wants you to be interesting. Boring crawlers get nothing.
- The dungeon does not want you to be comfortable. Everything good has a catch attached.
Your Menu
You have been granted access to the Crawler Menu. Open and close anything by looking at it and thinking about looking at it. You can pinch pieces of it smaller and drag them around your vision to build a display you like.
No other crawler and no Mob can see your menus. Your Game Guide can see them, but only while you are standing inside the guild.
Notification types. Crawler notifications are yours alone. System messages go to everyone on every floor and may arrive in different voices. Floor notifications go to everyone on your floor. Anything you miss lands in the folder in the corner, which will blink at you until you deal with it.
Your hotlist is ten slots along the bottom of your vision. Put potions, spells, and anything you will want in a hurry into it, because fumbling through inventory mid-fight is how people die. Put your healing spell in slot one right now.
The Minimap and the Dots
The map only fills in where you have physically been, plus roughly twenty meters around you. Everything else is fog of war. Corpses show as X marks.
- Green dot. You.
- Blue dots. Other crawlers.
- White dots. NPCs. Your Guide is one. So are shopkeepers, saferoom caretakers, and the occasional Mob that has decided not to kill you today.
- Red dots. Mobs. Things that will.
- There are other colors. You will work them out.
Ranges are not equal. NPCs show up reliably within a couple hundred meters even through walls. Mobs do not appear until you are nearly on top of them unless you are holding that area's Neighborhood Map. Assume every hallway has something in it.
Your Stats
Five numbers: Strength, Intelligence, Constitution, Dexterity, Charisma. A typical adult human sits between three and five in each. Yours were set from what you actually were when you walked in, and for now they drift on their own based on your real condition.
You gain three stat points every level. You cannot spend any of them until the third floor, when you pick a race and a class. Until then they accumulate and do nothing. Yes, that is frustrating. No, there is no way around it. House Rule: The SystemAI Spends points for you until floor three where you will get them refunded.
Items and potions can move these numbers temporarily or permanently. That is the only lever you have before Floor 3.
Skills
Your skill list is enormous and most of it is garbage. Breathing. Walking. Operating a specific model of television remote. Filter the view down to skills you have at Rank 3 or better and you will get something readable.
Whatever you were good at up top came with you. Whatever weapons you were trained on, you are still trained on, which does you no good at all if you did not bring one.
Training. Your Game Guide does not train you. That is not the job. There are guildhalls scattered through the floors that will level skills for you, magic ones especially. Everywhere else, the way you get better at a thing is by doing the thing badly until you stop.
Magic and Mana
Your mana pool is tied to Intelligence. A crawler with three Intelligence has three mana, which means they can cast the basic healing spell (two mana) once and then think hard about their choices.
Mana refills roughly one point per hour on its own. Resting, saferoom food, and potions move that along faster. Plan around it, because running dry in a corridor is a quiet way to die.
Spells come from scrolls, tomes, and guildhalls. Some are attached to items instead, in which case they cost no mana but come with a cooldown.
Health, Healing, and Dying
Your health bar sits in the corner. The menu behind it breaks down by body area and lists every condition and debuff you are carrying.
- Healing is faster down here than up there. Minor injuries, infections, and old damage were cleaned up on the way in.
- Health ticks up on its own, slowly, based on Constitution.
- Potions have a cooldown, and it is not the same for everybody. Check yours before you need it.
- Going down a staircase to the next floor refills your health completely.
And this is the part I need you to hear properly, so I am going to say it once and then never again.
There is no respawn. There is no extra life, no checkpoint, no second attempt. When a crawler dies in this place, that crawler is dead, and the show moves on to somebody more interesting.
Dead is dead.
Loot Boxes
Boxes arrive in your inventory from achievements, quests, and Bosses. Most crawlers walk in with two or three. Six quality tiers, lowest to highest: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Legendary, Celestial.
- You can only open boxes in a safe area. Every guildhall is a safe area. Not every safe area is a guildhall.
- It is all or nothing. You cannot pick which boxes to open. When you open, everything opens, in tier order.
- Hoarding gains you nothing. Unopened boxes cannot be sold or transferred, so there is no tactical reason to sit on them.
- No box contains outright cursed loot. Unstable and damaged, yes. Cursed, no.
Benefactor Boxes are different and they only come from patrons. A Bronze Benefactor Box beats a Gold Adventurer Box, and the contents can include things that do not exist in the dungeon at all, like weapons from a sponsor's home world. You cannot get one before the second floor because you have no patrons yet.
Saferooms
Saferooms always show on your map, even through fog of war, as long as you get close enough. Getting to one may be very hard. Finding one never is.
Inside you will find restrooms, sleeping cubicles, and depending on the room, food, fountains, healing potions, screens, and a shop. Every saferoom has its own quirk. Each one is run by a Bopca Protector, who is short, sour, unhelpful about anything except the saferoom itself, and will not wash their hands.
The saferoom door will not open if there are Mobs outside it.
Read that again, because roughly one in nine of you is going to try to sprint to a saferoom with something on your heels, and the door is simply not going to work. You will arrive at a locked building with a Mob behind you and a very short amount of time to reconsider your life.
Nothing can attack anything inside a saferoom. The AI negates every attack made in a safe area. The Mobs know it and do not try. A Mob that tries anyway is teleported out the instant it swings.
Mobs can still get in, though. If you leave the door open they will wander inside. They will not be able to hurt you and they will not stay long, but they will absolutely trash the place before they go, and you will be the one living in the wreckage. Close the door behind you. Every time.
Crawler conduct is its own rule, and it has teeth. There is no violence and no stealing between crawlers in a saferoom. It is ironclad. Three strikes:
- First offense. You freeze in place for about a hundred seconds and receive an automated lecture on playing nice.
- Second offense. An hour.
- Third offense. You are stripped of every piece of gear you own and teleported into a mob nest.
There is no time limit on staying in one. The floor collapsing on your head is the time limit.
Guildhalls and Guides
Tutorial Guilds are seeded across floors one through three. Yours is where you are standing. Your Game Guide stays with you through the third floor and then the arrangement ends, because after Floor 3 you are not a beginner anymore and the dungeon stops pretending you need one.
Guides are contracted NPCs, usually former crawlers working off a deal.
What a Guide will do: explain the systems, read your menus, answer questions about how the dungeon works, and tell you when you are about to do something stupid.
What a Guide will not do: train your skills, come with you, fight anything, or tell you things they are contractually forbidden from telling you. There is a great deal in that last category and you will notice them going quiet.
The Clock and the Stairs
The timer in your vision is how long until this floor collapses with everything still on it. The only way to survive a collapse is to be on a lower floor when it happens.
- Staircases are not available immediately. They get populated partway through the floor. Until then your map will not show one no matter how far you walk.
- Once populated, staircases show on the minimap the same way saferooms do, even through fog of war.
- There are half as many entrances to each floor as the one above it. They get harder to find the deeper you go.
- Descending early is punished. Go down well ahead of the collapse and you are held in stasis until it happens. Viewers lose interest in a crawler they cannot tune into, and the recap will not feature you.
- The recommendation from the top is to descend no earlier than about six hours before the collapse. Cut it that close and you get a head start instead of a nap.
- You cannot go back up. Ever.
Mobs, Bosses, and Boss Battles
Mobs are the population of the dungeon. Some are intelligent, some are animals, some will talk to you, and a white dot can become a red one if you give it a reason.
There are six main kinds of Boss: Neighborhood, Borough, City, Province, Country, and Floor, in ascending order of how badly it will go. Floors one through three have no Province, Country, or Floor Bosses, but there are still Bosses on them built for groups larger than yours.
Neighborhood Bosses are the easiest to find and the easiest to kill. Once you have seen one lair you will recognize the next one on sight.
Boss Battle!
You have discovered the lair of a Neighborhood Boss!
Put your game faces on, ladies and gentlemen! Aaaand here. we. go.
When that announcement fires, the room seals. The door reforms itself even if you destroyed it on the way in, and glowing metal bars lock it into place. Music starts. You are not leaving until one side of the fight is finished.
What a Boss pays out:
- Persistent loot on the corpse, which stays where it falls. Any crawler who comes along later can take it, including a Neighborhood Map from a Neighborhood Boss.
- A Boss Box and an achievement, but only for whoever actually landed the kill. Bronze for a Neighborhood Boss, Silver for a Borough Boss, and up from there.
- A star after your name in every notification, one per Boss killed.
A Neighborhood Map fills in roughly a square mile of your minimap and makes every red dot in that area visible. It is the single most useful thing you can be carrying on a tutorial floor.
Stars, Skulls, and Other Crawlers
Examine any crawler and you will see their name, level, race, class, and two kinds of mark.
- Stars mean Bosses killed. One per Boss. These are good.
- Skulls mean crawlers killed. The label reads Crawler Killer and a number. These are not.
A skull is permanent and it is public. Everyone you meet for the rest of your life down here will see it before they decide whether to talk to you, and they will not know or care whether the crawler you killed had it coming.
Being Watched
Open the Ratings menu. It is four numbers and your Guide will tell you it is the most important screen in the game.
- Views. Someone watched you for about eight seconds. Does not help or hurt. A measure of how interesting you are.
- Followers. Someone bookmarked you and can look in whenever they want.
- Favorites. Someone gets live updates on your condition and a notification when you are in a fight. Viewers only get a limited number of these, so it means something.
- Patrons. Usually organizations, not people. They sponsor you by buying you boxes, and they are where the best loot in the dungeon comes from.
None of these move on the first floor. Floor 1 is closed to live viewers. Your numbers stay at zero until you descend to the second floor, and everything above is what happens after that.
What does happen on Floor 1 is the highlight reel. An edited episode goes out covering the opening of the season, and crawlers who make it into that premiere pick up billions of views overnight. You cannot audition for it. You can only do something worth cutting into it.
You need to stand out. You cannot simply kill the thing and walk away, you need to kill it with style. Get a catchphrase. Do something nobody else would do.
I finished my own crawl with thirty million followers and four patrons, and I want you to understand that this is the only reason I finished it at all.
Achievements
The system hands out achievements for anything it finds notable, which ranges from walking through the front door to killing something it did not expect you to kill. Most come with a loot box. Some are handed out purely to mock you and come with nothing at all.
You do not earn them by trying. You earn them by being worth a clip.
Things Your Guide Said Twice
- Read the description before you put it on, drink it, or activate it.
- Boxes only open in a safe area, and they all open at once.
- The saferoom door will not open with Mobs outside.
- You cannot flee a Boss fight once it starts. Decide at the door.
- Keep moving. The floor is going to come down.
- Be interesting or be forgotten.
- Dead is dead.
That is the tutorial. You are going to walk out of here and forget half of it inside an hour, and that is normal, and that is why I gave you the important parts more than once.
Try to make the third floor. Almost nobody does, and I would like to stop having this conversation with people I am never going to see again.
Player handout for the Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying Game by Renegade Game Studios; requires the core rules to play. Content compiled from the in-fiction tutorial explanations in Book 1 and rephrased for table use; no passages are reproduced. Unofficial Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG (Renegade Game Studios) Fan Material. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher. Not for resale. Intellectual story belongs to CritsNThings.com.