Every floor remembers. Every death writes a line. Below — the history behind the stones, the heroes who brave them, and the things that wait in the dark.
Long before your first step into the dungeon, there was the Rift. A tear in the sky that lasted three days and nights, and left behind the thing every map now calls the Shardrealm — a vertical wound in the world, cut seventeen floors deep.
The dungeon isn't natural. Nothing in it quite is. The walls remember shapes that no stonemason carved. The torches never need lighting. The shop on every third floor is always open, even when you know for a fact the shopkeeper hasn't gone home between your visits.
Adventurers come for the usual reasons — gold, glory, the kind of relic that makes a king pay attention. But the dungeon keeps a list of its own, and what it wants from each descent is different. Some make it to the last door. Most don't.
You will.
Probably.
· Playable Heroes ·
Once a royal guard of the fallen capital. Now she descends each dawn, convinced her liege still breathes beneath the seventeenth floor.
Speaks little. Carries a bow older than the Rift itself. Nobody has seen him eat, but his quiver is always full by morning.
Child of a star that fell during the Rift. Their spells smell of rain. Their staff answers to a name no one remembers giving it.
Nobody has heard her come in. Plenty have heard her leave — usually with something that used to be theirs. Two knives, no questions, and a habit of standing exactly where you aren't looking.
Older than the oak he leans on, and the oak is very old. Nobody sees him fight much — they just notice, afterwards, that nobody in his party died.
Kept the crypt-keys of the old Arcanum until the Rift woke everything under them. She did not run. She asked the dead, very politely, whose side they were on now.
Found the wolf half-frozen in a snare that wasn't hers, and cut him loose. He has not left her side since, and he has never let anything else get close enough to try.
He knows a song for every tavern, every road and every monster in it. The monsters rarely get to hear the last verse — by then the party he's playing for has already finished the job.
He swore to stand between the dark and whoever was behind him, and he has never once checked who that was. Usually it's a party of adventurers. Once it was a very surprised goat.
Her workshop has been rebuilt four times, twice from the foundations. She calls each explosion a finding. The village calls them Tuesdays, and keeps its distance — which, she says, is exactly the point.
He keeps the lantern lit in the last chapel before the crypts. When the dead climb the stairs, he goes down to meet them halfway — it saves everyone the trouble, he says.
· Know thy enemy ·
The first thing to come at you, every time. Floor one, rooms two and three, low-light corners — wherever you're not looking.
Goblins are the dungeon's middle management. They don't belong here any more than you do — something herded them in decades ago and forgot to tell them they could leave.
A skeleton was someone. The dungeon doesn't let you forget that — kill one and the bones look, briefly, like they're trying to apologise.
Imps were the first real clue the dungeon wasn't just a dungeon.
The dungeon does not have a rat problem. The dungeon *is* a rat problem, and rats are how it tells you.
The slippers are not a joke. The slippers are evidence.
Calling them interns started as a joke and stuck because nothing else fits. They show up to floors they're not assigned to, do half the work of the thing they're supposed to be, and clear out the moment something larger walks in.
Floors with water bring the drowned. They never come up dry — the water that runs off them is not the water from the floor, and we have tried, multiple expeditions, to see where it ends up. It doesn't pool. It doesn't evaporate. You walk past where one stood ten minutes ago and the stones are dust.
Orcs are the only enemy in the dungeon that look like they're meant to be there. Heavy armour, real weapons, the gait of something trained. They don't ambush. They wait, in formation, in rooms wide enough to swing.
A wraith is what the dungeon does when it can't decide whether something should be there. It's *almost* a person — outline, gait, sometimes a weapon — but the closer you look, the more the edges disagree with themselves.
The robes are uniform. The chants are uniform. The pay is, by all recovered ledgers, terrible.
Bigger than it has any right to be. Floor four onward, and only in rooms where the air smells wrong. The beetle eats whatever the dungeon's discarding, which on a bad week is a lot.
"Retired" because the bandages are coming off in a way they shouldn't be, and because the mummy itself doesn't seem in a hurry to stop you anymore. It still hits hard. It has decades of practice. But the swing is on a clock, and the clock is winding down.
The name comes from where the first survivor saw one — sitting on the headboard of an abandoned bed, on a floor that had no business having beds. She watched it watch her for a full minute before either of them moved. The bed is still there. The harpies still roost on it.
Intern because somebody senior used to do this, and the senior isn't on any of the floors anymore. The intern is — bag of bones' worth of student debt and a borrowed staff — and is doing it wrong, but doing it.
The iron knight is what an orc grows into, if an orc could decide to stop being an orc and become furniture. Plate from collar to boot, no visible eyes, swing telegraphs that take a full second and a half because the thing inside that armor is very heavy.
"Fire elemental" was the working name and it stuck even after the first one went out. What's left is mostly ash, with a memory of burning, and the memory does the actual damage.
The bell is the warning. The plaguebearer rings it themselves, which is generous — the dungeon doesn't owe you a tell, and most things in here will not give you one.
Black, fast, four-legged, and not consistently any of those. The void hound ducks in and out of corners that the geometry of the room doesn't support — adventurers report watching one disappear behind a wall that turned out to be six inches deep.
The Golem lives on floor three, in the cave. It will have been there before you arrived and it will be there after you leave, regardless of how that leaving goes.
Floor six. The only boss that waits.
HP 1400 · ATK 50 · boss
The Lich is the only thing in the dungeon that has read the patch notes.
“Descend.
Die well.
Rise again.”