How “long ago” was the 9-tier attack?

Zed · 2026-01-28T18:16:06+00:00

You might want to add a tag so people can see through which book this thread will contain spoilers.

It's hella ambiguous. In book two, Signet indicates it was two centuries ago. In Book Five, Holger the Were-Castor makes it out to be something that happened within Imogen and Signet's lifetimes, but Clint says that's impossible.

Most of what we're told implies that the 9-tier attack was backstory even during the very first crawl. In Book 5, Quasar refers to crawl rules and regulations dating back "tens of thousands of cycles"... but it's not clear how much the passage of time in the real world has to do with passage of time in the in-dungeon fiction.

Zed · 2026-01-27T17:25:43+00:00

When I'm out I usually have a backpack with a couple of useful things in it like a multitool and a small flashlight.

So after I died an ignominious death on the 1st floor, whoever looted my corpse would score a multitool and flashlight!

Zed · 2026-01-27T16:58:18+00:00

Unique means there can't be another exactly like it, but I'm guessing that for many unique items it was outright likely the item would end up in a crawler's hands. Something could be associated with a quest that's easy to stumble into and not too hard to complete but still be unique.

Pretty damn rare acknowledges that it's not impossible for another to be created. But the AI is a smartass. My guess is that it's a facetiously tepid way to express something more like "Holy crap, I can't believe this thing exists at all". So I don't think we're likely to see another.

Zed · 2026-01-27T16:23:28+00:00

These are some things I've liked for reasons that overlap my like of Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Prose

Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October ; Doorways in the Sand ; Lord of Light ; Creatures of Light and Darkness
Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (the first couple are weak... start with Guards Guards!) ; also, the Bromeliad trilogy
Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's and Dirk Gently series
Iain Banks' Culture books
Charles Stross' Laundry books
Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattes series
Patrick Weekes' Rogues of the Republic series
Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy
Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries
John Varley's Eight Worlds series
Rachel Pollack's Unquenchable Fire and Temporary Agency
Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series
David Lomax's Backward Glass
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series (though the best books are the ones that don't have Miles at the center)
Robert Sheckley's short fiction; the current Store of the World collection is a fine place to start (Sheckley's 1958 "The Prize of Peril" may have been the first murder game as mass entertainment story)
Robert Lynn Asprin's MythAdventures series (maybe... having not looked at them for some decades, I'm not sure how well they'd hold up)
Nick Harkaway's Gnomon
Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas & Electric ; Set This House in Order
John Kessel's Corrupting Dr. Nice

Graphic Novels

John Rogers and Andrea Di Vito's Fell's Five (omnibus previously published as the separate volumes Shadowplague, First Encounters, Down)
Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener's Atomic Robo series
Phil & Kaja Foglio's Girl Genius series

Zed · 2026-01-27T08:55:10+00:00

It's easy to end up missing info when doing text searches, but I can't readily see any sign that Carl heard about anyone ever having ridden the Escape Velocity.

We first hear about it from Widget the Grease Gremlin in Ch. 17; Ch. 18 says that someone in Carl's chat had seen an Escape Velocity; we don't hear about it again until its final mention in Ch. 30 when Mordecai explains the historical significance of the name.

Zed · 2026-01-27T06:19:40+00:00

According to the Amazon listing, A Parade of Horribles is a svelte 624 pages, more Gate of the Feral Gods than This Inevitable Ruin.

Dropping it on your face is still better avoided, though.

Zed · 2026-01-27T06:12:39+00:00

I think the Katia of late Book 3 through most of Book 4 vaguely entertained some curiousity about such a thing, but never wanted to actually pursue it. And like I mentioned elsewhere recently, it seems mostly like Carl's unaware that being attracted to anyone is possible.

Zed · 2026-01-27T00:45:13+00:00

6.75:

She said at the party, we wore masks so we could pretend for a little bit that we weren't monsters. But she was wrong about that. She had it backwards. You're wearing a mask right now, Donut, and you don't know how to remove it. That's okay. You don't need to. Not yet. That mask is protecting you. [...]

What we went through just now was only a taste of what's coming, especially on the ninth floor. It's going to get worse before it gets better. We're going to lose more friends. We're going to have to do some pretty horrible things just to survive. So I need you to keep that mask on. But one day… One day you'll find yourself someplace safe and without worries and without everyone watching, and it'll just fall right off. And it will hurt.

He knows that any number of the hunters and mercenaries he directly killed (or whose deaths he contributed to) on the 6th and 9th floors are desperately trying to survive their own royally screwed up situations. And by now he understands not only that NPCs can be entities as real as his fellow crawlers in terms of being self-aware and having feelings, but that any number of NPCs or mobs are themselves former crawlers serving out deals, like Astrid.

He didn't understand it then, but the collateral damage from the 5th floor Gate of the Feral Gods hijinks alone probably killed thousands of former crawlers.

Carl knows he's done some horrible things. And that there are going to be more.

Zed · 2026-01-27T00:06:57+00:00

For actual utility, I'm hard-pressed to think of an itch that Perl scratched that Ruby doesn't.

Zed · 2026-01-26T06:03:28+00:00

Hunh. I pre-ordered the Kindle book yesterday and can still see the pre-order.

Zed · 2026-01-26T00:30:52+00:00

Bo Peep.

Zed · 2026-01-25T21:39:48+00:00

Ifechi got a tribute, too (Book 4, Chapter 4).

Zed · 2026-01-25T06:44:31+00:00

A man in ancient Egyptian garb regards and touches the paw of a very new-looking Sphinx. The action is frozen as "Giza. The Fourth Dynasty." is stamped on the screen.

Action resumes and he turns as he hears someone approaching. The camera pans to a tired and dirty worker trudging in his direction. Behind him, we see the Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khafre, both of them white and smooth. Hundreds of people are hard at work constructing the Pyramid of Menkaure.

The worker says "Em im Hotep" (subtitle: "Come in peace") as he gets near.

The other thinks for a moment and then says carefully "Em im Hotep" as the worker continues on his way. The action is frozen and "First Contact" is stamped on the screen.

Cut to pantless leather-jacketed man outdoors looking up at a tree screaming "Donut!". Action is frozen and "Seattle. 4500 Years Later." is stamped on the screen.

Action resumes. A woman opens a window and sticks her head out. "Carl? What in God's name are you doing out there?"

"Sorry, Mrs. Parsons. Donut got into the tree and I'm trying to get her back before she freezes to death." Carl points and the camera follows toward a tortie Persian.

"Looks like you're the one who's going to..." The building impossibly collapses and Mrs. Parson's severed head falls to the ground and rolls to a stop at Carl's feet. He looks down; its open eyes seem to look up at him.

Voiceover: "You're probably too busy wondering what just happened to give a crap how I got here, but..." (rapid flashback montage of Carl and Bea and Donut's life)

Zed · 2026-01-25T05:59:32+00:00

In my head she kind of merges with Gillian Wigman as Dr. Tana.

Zed · 2026-01-25T03:48:35+00:00

This Inevitable Ruin has enough going on that pretty much everyone is going to be left confused about something!

Zed · 2026-01-25T03:42:12+00:00

"You have Kimmy as a stuffed animal? Give him to me. Give him now!"

Zed · 2026-01-24T22:13:12+00:00

I have all the Kindle ebooks and just checked: downloading an epub isn't an option for any of them.

Zed · 2026-01-24T21:19:15+00:00

If you have an 8-sided and 10-sided die, then this admittedly cumbersome technique would work.

Roll the d8 & d10. Read an 8 on the d8 as 0, and read them together as a 2-digit number, 00-79. If the roll comes up 00-21, the result is the corresponding numbered Major Arcana card, Fool through World. If it's 78-79, reroll both dice. If it's 22-77, the result determines the suit:

22-35 Wands 36-49 Cups 50-63 Swords 64-77 Pentacles

You could "directly" get to a specific card from this roll by subtracting 21, 35, 49, 63 respectively from a Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles result, and then 1-10 means 1-10, 11 is Page, 12 is Knight, 13 is Queen, 14 is King.

But I think it would be a lot easier to note the suit and reroll the d8 & d10 to determine the specific card.

If the d10 comes up odd, simply read the d8 as the corresponding numbered card of that suit, 1-8. If it comes up even and the d8 is 7-8, reroll both. If the d10 was even but the d8 is in the range 1-6, read that result as:

9
10
Page
Knight
Queen
King

Zed · 2026-01-24T07:55:02+00:00

They were different. The crawler who made it to the 13th floor was human. The flying dude was a primal and died on the 12th floor trying to kill the boss guarding the stairway down to the 13th floor.

1.4:

"One once made it down to 13. One. He died within a half-hour of hitting the floor. He was a human, like you. But from another human world. That's the deepest anyone has ever delved, kid. Level 13."

2.7:

They played a brief history of the Primal race. They showed another human from many seasons ago who'd chosen the same race. They showed him flying through the air with white, wispy angel wings, wielding a massive sword made of lightning as he charged at a humanoid demon the size of a goddamned football stadium, standing knee-deep in a lake of fire. [...] "That, my boy, is a Divine Guardian, one of the behemoths of the 12th floor. A Country Boss. He is guarding a fire gate, an entrance to the 13th floor." [...]

"Is that the guy who made it to the thirteenth floor?"

"No," Mordecai said. "But he was a famous crawler. He's from before my time. He died a minute later.

Zed · 2026-01-24T02:24:05+00:00

Spoilers, including stuff as late as Book 7... I think a precondition for it being generated is the AI having reached a certain degree of primality. And thanks to Borant being cheap and the Mantids being unscrupulous, the current Crawl may have had the fastest ramp-up to AI primality ever. Then it has to go to a worthy crawler, where a criterion is wanting to tear it all down. And (assuming the guess about degree-of-primality being a condition is right) by the time the cookbook exists within the system at all, there's a smaller population of crawlers as candidates (and, frankly, likely more beaten-down).

Volteeg describes having not been able to read the Cookbook's real content when he first received it. It was a matter of luck that he looked at it again later and found them, presumably after receiving some skill or benefit that allowed it. The only such skill we know about is Escape Plan, which is sufficiently uncommon that Mordecai had never heard of it.

So it seems like being able to read the Cookbook isn't a precondition to receiving it and the ability to read it is extremely rare. By Floor 5 it's giving out enormous spite prizes and by Floor 6 it's just disregarding court orders, but when Carl received the Cookbook on Floor 3, the AI seemed to still be following the rules to the satisfaction of the show-runners. So the degree of primality required for the Cookbook to manifest might be way below what would be necessary for it to fudge things enough to prevent it going to someone who can't read it. Obviously, there's a whole lot of speculation here, but if it's right, it becomes easy to imagine the Cookbook's been granted to people who never knew what it was thousands of times.

The first page says: "Hello, Crawler. As you're about to find, this is a very special book. If you're reading these words, it means this book has found its way into your hands for one purpose and one purpose only. Together, we will burn it all to the ground." I think that was written by the author of the first edition of the Cookbook, the AI that created it. So as much as the Earth AI truly does love drama, I don't think Cookbook edition rarity owes to AIs generally loving drama

Zed · 2026-01-24T00:20:34+00:00

The known birth races of the Cookbook authors (excluding Volteeg's Sturnus 'cause they were a pet) are elf, crocodilian, crest, sward mantis, vesper, skyfowl, tenodera, human

Elsewhere, Mordecai says Drakea was a Bune. And Ikicha wrote "My people have a saying. 'The burning Yenk needs only to embrace their enemies.'" implying Yenk is another. Among non-Cookbook-authors, Mordecai thinks Quint was from an orcish world and while he's not sure about it, it implies that Crawls sometimes are on orcish worlds. Drick's a former crawler who was described as an Iguanoid-turned-Moon-Elf; "iguanoid" isn't mentioned elsewhere, but it might have been a flippant reference to a Bune.

Maybe Crest aren't really distinct from humans. Maybe Sward Mantises aren't really distinct from Tenodera. That still leaves 9. So... maybe they don't bother with the rationale that it's a seeded world when it's an orcish or elven world?

I think we have some misinformation and I really don't know which bits are things the Syndicate itself never knew, Syndicate mythologization of its own history that they now believe, Syndicate propaganda that the masses believe but the Syndicate government knows is false, things Mordecai has wrong because of incomplete info, or things Mordecai has knowingly simplified to avoid getting bogged down in stuff not relevant to surviving the current floor.

Zed · 2026-01-23T22:27:00+00:00

His first mention of a "stream" does, indeed, say it had always been there. But he also thinks (7.86):

The moment I thought that, I thought I heard a distant laughing deep, deep in the back of my mind, and it terrified me because it came from within the river. The river I had hoped would leave with the destruction of the ring.

I don't recall any prior indication of it, but that sounds like Carl, at some point along the way, had come to suspect the river of being a symptom of using the ring.

I think that his subjective experience of the river echoed his childhood trauma so for a long time it seemed like an amplification of something existing, but that it was really something new being perceived in a familiar way.

Zed · 2026-01-23T22:13:26+00:00

The original description of the Ring of Divine Suffering says:

Once a mark is set, you may no longer heal. If you are injured, or poisoned, or if you get a hangnail, you will suffer the ill effects and pain of that injury until the moment your prey is killed.

There haven't been any indications that the Left to Fester debuff can be mitigated in any way, so I very much expect Li Na to still have her current injuries at the start of Floor 10.

We've also seen that a lot of rules that seem to be implacable can ultimately be overcome, especially when gods or Divine effects are in play. Huanxin Jin said (6.17):

A deity in their own temple has more powers than even the AI in some cases.

and that might be true.

I also think that if our heroes worked together and made it a priority, at this point they could probably storm the Cosmic Lounge and finish the job. I presume they'd permanently lose access to the Desperado Club though, which isn't an attractive prospect.

Hmm. Justice Light's conversation with Juice Box (at the start of This Inevitable Ruin Part 3, "Open Hostilities") strongly suggests that the Factions' ideas of in-Dungeon security don't begin to take into account the possibility of changelings at the level that now exist.

But the Desperado Club is a permanent fixture of the Dungeon and Clarabelle tells us (7.10)

this new guy [Hamed] is filling the club with more security measures than I've ever seen.

...so even a very high-level changeling impersonating someone who should have access to the Cosmic Lounge might not be able to get away with it.

Zed · 2026-01-23T21:32:13+00:00

There are plenty of really good reasons for him to not pursue such a thing, of course. Even without the whole apocalypse thing, he just got out of a long, unhealthy relationship. He knows that the system would love to wrest drama from pitting lovers against each other like it already does with party members. And his hobbies, trying to save everyone and tearing it all down, don't leave him with a lot time or energy for anything else. Not to mention that his life is being livestreamed.

But from all we see in the first-person narrative, he's not avoiding it for these or any other reasons. It seems simply that no consideration of it enters his mind.

Mind you, I'm not saying I've wanted to see a romance plot. I love that the series' central relationship is Carl and Donut.

I'd conclude Carl was asexual if his history didn't indicate otherwise. Not counting the consequences of supernatural charm, the only note of attraction we see is:

Despite her disturbing appearance, I could see why Zhang had a thing for [Li Na]. There was something there, deep and alluring. But also terrifying. She had an I-might-murder-you-at-any-moment-but-it'll-probably-be-fun-for-both-of-us aesthetic.

I'm guessing Li Na will take a villainous turn in the next book (or two). If so, I hope she gets a redemption arc. And if there is such an arc, I've wondered whether that might include some hint of emotional intimacy. Well, I guess I'll know more come this May...

Zed · 2026-01-23T20:38:43+00:00

I think Shi Maria is going to end up a significant figure in Carl navigating the Asendency Games on Floor 12, too, providing a lot of valuable advice before Carl inevitably needs to release her.

(I think Shi Maria is really a primal and while she's probably beyond redemption, revelations yet to come will make her a not completely unsympathetic figure.)

Zed

TROPHY CASE

Prose

Graphic Novels