Dungeon Core Chat Room (Literature)

Unnamed Core: Hello?
Immortal Spring Of Certainty: Well hello what's this.
Xero: Why haven't you set your name?
Amy: How haven't you set your name? I thought it was a requirement to advance.
Abe: I'll name you. Listen from now on your name is "Abe's little bro" write that down.
Xero: 😄

A new dungeon core awakens underground, told by the [System] that its purpose is to "regulate mana and challenge those who enter you". It might eventually need to find more purpose in life than that...but at least it has friends to help!

Dungeon Core Chat Room is a dungeon core LitRPG posted on Royal Road, and is complete, though with occasional side-stories being added.

Dungeon Core Chat Room contains examples of:

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A - M

Aerith and Bob: Putting aside the eclectic names of the Cores (which mostly resemble chat room handles, so you have Abe and Amy mixed with Bringer Of Serene Eternity and Ze Mad Doctor), this setting has a lot of fantasy names mixed with comparatively mundane ones. Taking an example from Innearth’s crystal dwarves, his first one was named Onyx, then the next three siblings were named Ilmenite, Rutile… and Steve. Note: this isn’t Innearth’s weird naming scheme, each of the crystal dwarves chose their own name.
Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: This becomes the goal of Innearth and his dungeon friends. More accurately, their goal is to help others ascend by raising a mortal's strength enough to ascend into godhood in order to provide the existing gods with much needed reinforcements against the demon forces they face. They eventually succeed with Tom the dungeon reviewer, who ascends in their mega dungeon.
Back from the Dead:
- A sufficiently powerful priest can resurrect the dead if they can repair the body before the soul has dissipated, but there is generally some degradation of stats.
- The dungeons devise an alternative setup to enable safer Level Grinding against demons, incorporating ambrosia, which doesn't require a priest and doesn't lose any stats because it heals the soul as well as the body — but it is addictive.
Bait-and-Switch: The dungeons prepare their ball-shooting monsters for the ranged target practice event... and then, when it starts, the moderator announces that the targets are in fact each other's monsters.
Phantasmal Patterns: Probably should have mentioned but it's SO MUCH MORE AMUSING FOR ME THIS WAY.
Become a Real Boy:
- When a dungeon monster levels up or ascends, their bodies change in various ways, often becoming more "natural" looking in the process. One example is Innearth's snakes, which go from a long tube (with occasional decorations like rings) to having actual scales.
- Innearth's crystal dwarves have a degree of sapience built in, making them very helpful crafters and runesmiths, but if they gain enough experience and ascend, the system hiccups and turns them into organic beings, a mixture of dwarf and kobold. Innearth considers them to be his children, even more so than his other ascended monsters.
Beware the Nice Ones: Amy is perhaps the most cheerful dungeon core you will ever meet and loves all her adventurers and takes great steps to reduce deaths. She also has some of the most terrifyingly brutal monsters of the group, such as giant octopi that can fill a room with barbed tentacles.
Beyond the Impossible: Innearth once created a special snake that had special illusion powers. When it evolved and ascended (later being dubbed the Illusion Wurm), its illusion powers became so effective that Innearth could no longer easily sense it, even when it was within his direct influence.
Blinded by the Light: Innearth's desert floor has an artificial sun, intended to blind adventurers. However, since light mana wasn't working well enough, he built it with laser mana, and instead of merely blinding, it can melt sand into glassy puddles.
Blue-and-Orange Morality:
- Dungeon Cores have an... odd morality when compared to most sapient creatures. While most of them aren't actively trying to kill the adventurers that delve them, they generally aren't that concerned when one of them does die, even treating it like entertainment at times (Amy being a bit of an exception, possibly swinging too far in the other direction). The reveal of the Dungeon Cores' true purpose (basically to exist and clean up mana pollution) also shows that this mindset was somewhat intentionally cultivated: Dungeons that are too violent wind up being put down by adventurers, while Dungeons that get too attached to specific mortals can become depressed when said mortals die, often resulting in the Dungeon committing suicide.
- This also extends to their creations. Most Cores seem to treat their monsters as toys, something to experiment and play around with, and ultimately are expendable, since the Core can ultimately make more of them. This changes a bit if something unique was used in their creation, or if the monster ascends and gains sapience, since they're no longer quite as "expendable" as the Core can't replace it so easily (if they can at all), with some growing more attached when that occurs. Innearth, for example, has arranged wars between his fodder monsters for his own amusement, takes better care of his ascended monsters (viewing them as closer to pets), and sees his crystal dwarves (who already have a bit of sapience even before they ascend) practically as his children.
Boring, but Practical:
- Doc's elite anti-demon monster uses a massively powerful tier 12 core to... Generate and shoot bullets. Since demons are resistant to magic but vulnerable to kinetic force, it works.
- Of all the exotic effects that can result from infusing different types of mana into different materials — Abe loves "explosion mana mixed with melted phosphorus making a green explosive boom that spilled a caustic green radioactive mana everywhere" — an alloy with a higher boiling point is not very exciting, but it has immediate applications in making magma-based monsters and levels hotter.
- During the "Round Robin" dungeon games event, Innearth doesn't rush to retrieve the unique exotic materials on the playing field, he just prints a dozen of his standard snake template — not even an advanced elite version, until he has established his defences. No doubt the materials could do some very interesting things, but he would first have to fight past their defenders, then get the materials back safely despite the risk of being ambushed by competitors, then figure out what the exotic substances can do and if they're actually useful. His snakes, on the other hand, are solidly effective scouts and attackers that he knows how to efficiently use.
Boss-Altering Consequence: Innearth designs the overall boss of the void lab, and includes three other rooms that will allow adventurers to fight mini-bosses in order to disable some of its capabilities. Defeating the giant laser turret will stop the boss from using lasers, passing through the zone that's literally sinking into acid to reach the controller will stop the boss from using acid, and breaking through many layered barriers to reach the shield generator will disable the boss' shields and ability to lock doors. (It's all artificial, the boss isn't truly harmed by any of that, but the idea is to paint a picture.) There are actually twelve lesser rooms to disable all of the boss' capabilities and render it helpless, but the rooms eventually regenerate, so reaching them all in time is its own challenge.
Chekhov's Gunman: Throughout the story, we get multiple excerpts from Tom, an adventurer and dungeon reviewer, offering critiques and praise to the various dungeons he visits (in the same way one might write a review for a travel brochure), including the cast of dungeons we follow. We even see him in person later in the story, and he's shown to be very powerful (and he's implied to be much Older Than They Look thanks to being a high level adventurer). In the final main chapter, he's ultimately the one to succeed in Innearth's "cultivation" experiment, becoming a new god and the ally that the old gods desperately needed in their conflict.
Crack in the Sky: Innearth tests integrating other materials with the fractal dimension of cosmic void material, and finds that the other material must be solid. Ice works, but water doesn't. Using ice and then melting it breaks space around it, leaving visible cracks that only slowly heal.
Crystalline Creature: The majority of Innearth's monsters end up incorporating living crystal in some fashion, often even launching spikes of it at enemies. His crafting dwarves are entirely made of crystal.
Curb-Stomp Battle: Innearth expects a hard fight when he has to build a monster from stone mana to fight one using mist mana. But instead of an insubstantial foe attacking from all directions, he finds himself facing an entirely corporeal toad that merely breathes clouds of obscuring mist. His carefully designed tank promptly squashes it.
Cursed Item: To attract adventurers to his out-of-the-way location, Innearth resorts to creating armbands that carry a mild compulsion to visit him, and can't be removed, then having his friends set them up as trapped loot. He does at least give the armbands useful effects as well, not wanting to alienate people by screwing them over with worthless gear. When he starts getting regular delvers, he completely forgets about these armbands, and so is a bit embarrassed when a bunch of these cursed adventurers all show up after a long and harrowing journey. He makes sure the curse is broken, and that the adventurers are given good loot and a unique title for their trouble, as his own way of apologizing.
Dangerous Forbidden Technique: The gods designed the current system of leveling up to replace cultivation with something easier, safer, and universally accessible. However, cultivation theoretically allows for much faster growth, at the cost of risking madness, mutation, Power Incontinence, or sudden death from a lack of self-control. It's also possible to use demonic mana to disconnect from the [System] and potentially grow stronger, but not only does it have the aforementioned drawbacks, it also requires Heroic Willpower to avoid Demonic Possession. Innearth uses a mixture of both cultivation and the leveling system (with the latter to build an adventurer's base before using the former to push them into a "second ascension") to speed up the process of making a god, wanting a more direct hand in the goal rather than simply waiting for a seemingly inevitable result.
Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Occasionally a Dungeon Core may start to feel vaguely unsatisfied with life, with the process of growing and running a dungeon no longer feeling as fulfilling as it once did. They may start to feel melancholic, sometimes even suicidal, as the lack of an obvious purpose or goal wears down on them. It's later revealed that the "purpose" of the dungeons is basically to keep the cores occupied, as they were only ever meant to clean up mana pollution on the planet, with their sentience being an unintended development. Those who discover this either commit suicide or look for a larger purpose to dedicate themselves to; in the case of Innearth, he decides to help raise at least one mortal to godhood, in order to help fight demons, with the aid of his friends.
Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Rakata the dragon tries to fight off a 15-kilometre-long demonic void whale, using time manipulation to attack it at Super-Speed for a linear half-hour until he's exhausted, then babbling at Innearth to close the portals and cut off the facility before it can break through into the world. Innearth tries to reassure Rakata that everything is under control, while his prepared defences make short work of it; the demonic whales are par for the course at this point.
The Dividual:
- Early on, Innearth figures out how to make a “soul bond” between two of his monsters that lets them share a mental connection. His first use of this is between a spider monster and a bat monster, the spider serving in a melee role while the bat serves as ranged support, the mental bond making them both incredibly effective when fighting as a pair. The downside of this bond is that when one of the pair is killed, their surviving partner goes into a suicidal Roaring Rampage of Revenge that doesn’t end until the grieving monster is put out of its misery. Innearth is a bit disturbed by this but doesn’t stop using the technique due to how effective the soul bond is, though he does consider putting in a “kill switch” so that the survivor doesn’t have to suffer.
- During a brief “crazy” period, Innearth replicates this soul bond and takes it to another level with an eight-headed hydra, each head having a bond to a separate monster. When one of those monsters is killed by a demon, the grief-stricken surviving hydra head develops an intense hatred of demons, while all the hydra heads perform a ritual spell that ties their lives and their companions’ lives to each other, effectively making them immortal unless all of them are killed, so that none of them would have to experience that type of grief again.
Divine Conflict: The gods have been caught in a millennia-long war with the demons of the Void to stop them from devouring reality. They were initially winning, until the unexplained loss of one of their best fighters shifted the balance, leaving the remaining gods to need to devote all their time and energy to the war just to maintain a stalemate, to the point that many mortals wonder if the gods even still exist. Thankfully, the efforts of Innearth and his friends to create a new god succeed with the "second ascension" of Tom, giving the gods enough of a reprieve that they can take shifts in interacting with the world again, with the promise of more gods on the way.
Does This Remind You of Anything?: There's a mini-arc where it's discovered that Bringer of Serene Eternity, who had been slowly losing some of his enthusiasm for his work, has been on the receiving end of griefing and harassment from various cores mocking him through the chat for things like his name and his love of aesthetics, to the point that he changed his name to Fated Eternal Design after ascending to Tier 3 in an effort to avoid them. This bears a strong resemblances to cases where young or creative minds find themselves bullied and mocked by online trolls, becoming increasingly miserable and losing the love they had for their former passions. So some that have either experienced this first hand, or saw a friend suffer through it, might have found it cathartic when FED's friends rallied behind him and responded to this bullying by sending their most lethal monsters against the lead griefer, through a portal they snuck in through a trade. Bonus points for using FED's monster designs as a basis for extra karmic retribution.
Door Dumb: One of the events in the dungeon games is making monsters to act as adventurers. One of the obstacles that Innearth’s team spends the most time on is an unlocked door because their monsters don’t have hands and the dungeons have never needed to know how to open a door before. They ultimately settle for destroying it.
Dungeon-Based Economy: Once Innearth gets attention from the wider world, a city quickly springs up around him, harvesting and trading his goods, as well as crafters selling their wares to support the delvers.
Dungeon Bypass: Abe gets tired of competing with other cores in the puzzle challenges, and proposes to his friends that they just launch an all-out offensive and smash everyone else instead. Minutes later, the four-way battle is over.
A Dungeon Is You: There are hundreds of dungeon cores, all over the planet, each able to manipulate mana and space within their territory. Gaia creates them to clean up the flow of magic.
Dungeon Maintenance: Given that this is a story following sentient Dungeon Cores, it's unsurprising that much of the focus is on how they grow and manage their dungeons (including monster design, layouts, creating loot for rewards, theming, trying to automate as much of this as possible, etc.), interspersed with more casual chats about the importance of aesthetics and just wanting to show off their newest creations. Some of this goes into considerable detail as well, with monster creation in particular usually involving the various limbs, organs, abilities, mana affinities, and so on.
Eldritch Location: It's not all that difficult to enter the void, it's just very dangerous, mostly because it's full of demons, and any unattended matter will be gradually twisted into more demons. The space has more than three dimensions, which the dungeons can work with but always feels somewhat "off", and results in so much extra density of space that multiple dungeons can affect the same area. Creating materials and monsters there is affected, too; monsters can be brought into the void, but any monsters created there, if brought back into the world, will go mad and attack everything in a frenzy, just like demons. Also, the spatial oddities make it the basis of most long-distance portals. Doc also considers the whole place a fascinating research opportunity.
Elemental Powers:
- Magic is this setting is often defined by the types of mana that can be used. There's the classical four elements — Fire, Water, Earth and Air — as well as more esoteric elements like Space, Mental, Eternity, etc. However, the mana types can also get very specific, bordering on Overly Narrow Superlative. For example, there's Sword Mana, Deep Abyss Mana, Forgetfulness Mana. Basically, if it exists, even conceptually, there's probably a mana type for it.
- An excerpt from chapter 85 explains that the system seems to categorize these elements into ranks (Rank 1 is the most basic elements like Earth and Fire, Rank 2 is stuff related to living like Kinetic and Life, Rank 3 is more universal concepts like Time, Space and Void, and Rank 4 consists of cosmic elements like Fate and Luck, domains that usually can only be accessed by gods). There are also higher Ranks, but so few people reach those ranks that they're rarely recorded. However, the rules for these categories are broken so often by one-off cases where an individual can access an element well above their supposed tier, or where they do things with an element that they shouldn't be able to, that trying to list everything properly is near impossible.
- Dungeon Cores have to pick a starting affinity — beginning with Fire, Water, Earth or Air, or some combination of them — which will dictate which elements will be easier or harder for them to manipulate. As the Cores go up in Rank, they gain additional affinities, with some being locked behind certain requirements or achievements. For example, Innearth chooses Earth as his starting affinity, then later picks up affinities in Crystal, Void, and Cosmic Void as he advances.
Entertainingly Wrong:
- Questlines are one of the few ways dungeons can communicate with adventurers, and adventurers are not really prone to questioning them. Combined with a well-designed space, this can lead to adventurers believing things that are patently (and provably) untrue, such as a dungeon area that has existed for maybe a few years at most being the remains of a millennia-old forgotten civilization.
- Early on, Innearth believes his dungeon and monsters to be of normal size, with the narration implying that they're actually on the smaller end of things. It’s only when Innearth receives his first sentient explorer that he (and his friends) learn about this mistake, as they realize that his “human” is, in fact, a dwarf, and that Innearth’s corridors would actually be incredibly cramped for anyone taller. Innearth bemoans the fact that he now needs to remodel practically his entire dungeon while his friends (after having a chuckle) try to comfort him.
  Innearth: …I think I have to rip up half my dungeon guys.
Even Evil Has Standards: Demons are so horrifically dangerous that when the System issues a quest to kill demon cultists that might summon one, even nearby necromancers will typically respond.
Experience Points: They exist, it's just usually not stated by the System. Innearth does get a specific listing of how much he'll receive when the dungeons successfully kill a tremendous demonic whale, including options for exactly how to apply it.
Fantastic Nuke: Combining Fire, Explosion, and Entropy mana will create Nuclear mana. Even Abe doesn't recommend trying it. His dungeon is, of course, highly fire-resistant, but nonetheless, his first experiment in binding nuclear mana to a tiny chunk of material vaporised a large portion of his territory and nearly reached his core.
Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Based on the various excerpts at the start of most chapters, not only does this world have sentient Dungeon Cores and a bevy of various fantasy races, it also has ancient cults and secret societies, medieval weapons and tools interspersed with modern technology (or at least the Magitek equivalent of it), gods, and at least one magical MegaCorp.
Forced Transformation: Amy is fond of creating transformation diseases that change adventurers into another species and then make them search for the right cure. She shows Innearth the description of one she's made that instantaneously turns them into a rabbit hybrid, and is cured by eating raw meat from a predator — but eating rabbit-appropriate foods like grains and carrots will worsen it. On the bright side, curing the disease gives a degree of permanent resistance to transformation effects.
Foreshadowing: Shortly after a city is built near Innearth's dungeon, they install a "mana sewer" that deposits the runoff from the various magical experiments and works into his dungeon, with a message that references someone or something called Gaia. This triggers a racial quest to clean up the mana pollution, and Innearth notes that doing so feels almost instinctual to him. It's later revealed that cleaning up mana pollution is what dungeons were made to do in the first place, with Gaia being responsible for their creation.
Fountain of Youth: Fated Eternal Design combines eternity mana, which can slow time, with ambrosia, which heals, and is able to create potions that slow aging. Which in turn means more time to gain levels, which slows aging further...
Functional Magic: There are various ways to use magic, and they do have rules — but it turns out that the rules arise ad hoc from how dungeons and sapients have attempted to use them before. After mastering circuit-based magic to an unusual degree, Innearth finally gets dissatisfied with how complex and unintuitive it is, and begins painstakingly constructing new circuit languages that are intentionally designed to be simple, consistent, and extensible.
Gargle Blaster: The dungeons' combined experiments in brewing actually kill one of the dwarven taste-testers — but it might overlap with Too Dumb to Live, since "the drink that did him in had melted every cup they had tried to contain it in and had been lapped sizzling off the melting floor." Innearth persuades Amy to add healing potion stations to the testing area after that.
Genius Loci: As you might expect, Dungeon Cores have a high degree of control over their area of influence, even if it takes time to implement.
Go Mad from the Isolation: Played with. Innearth isn't truly isolated, as he can speak with his friends over chat whenever he wants, but his dungeon's remote location means he doesn't get any adventurers delving him, leaving him antsy. His brief taste of having proper adventurers during the Dungeon Games only makes him want adventurers more, and the lack of visitors seems to start driving him crazy, constructing different personas for practically every floor he has (and he has over a dozen by this point). The most notable symptom of this is his "whimsy" floor, which populates with bizarre creations with little of his careful thought present. However, this seems to quickly disappear when Innearth starts receiving adventurers regularly thanks to Doc's portal network, to the point he casually dismisses the personas he made for himself, which disappear with such ease that Innearth wonders if he was just playing pretend at going crazy. The only sign any of it was genuine is his whimsy floor, which Innearth quickly starts treating as an Old Shame and keeps out of the way of his regular dungeon, though some of its elements are reused, particularly the resident hydra which he uses as a guard against the demons spawned from the portal network.
"Groundhog Day" Loop: Thoroughly deconstructed in one excerpt, which tells the story of a worker caught in a loop that ended with an explosion killing the worker before restarting. This loop was three seconds long. The worker did everything they could think of to try and avert their fate, but nothing ever worked. By the time the loop stopped (which was as random as how it began in the first place), the worker had become a gibbering mess from experiencing an inescapable hell one million times, later trying to start a cult worshiping "Pax" before he was killed due to trying to summon his "god" (or rather, a demon, triggering multiple extermination quests from the system).
The moral of this tale is simple.

Some fantasize about being stuck in a time loop. It's always romanticized as a way to practice your skills endlessly. A way to grind to overpowered lengths – an eternity focused on advancement. Some dream of the removed consequences – nothing they would do would matter in such a world…no crime they commit would stick, for everything would be undone once again.

Real time loops are things of madness. Paradox mana seeps in chaos – it inevitably breaks your mind. Space has a place that embodies its madness counterpart – the void. But time has a moment that embodies its madness. The negative miracle. The fluke accident that should never happen. “The impossible moment”.
Handmade Is Better: Zigzagged. When Dungeon Cores are just getting started, they have to build all their monsters manually, every limb, organ, etc. As they advance, they gain access to tools like the ability to create schematics and "print off" monsters from them, saving the Cores a considerable amount of time by creating monsters in bulk to populate their dungeons. However, these printers have a mana cap for the schematics used, so if a Core wants to create a stronger monster (usually their bosses), they have to do so manually. On the bright side, these schematics can be edited and improved upon, so the Core can easily use one as a template or inspiration and just work on it from there.
Have You Seen My God?: One of the excerpts goes into detail about how there's debates about why the gods' presence isn't felt anymore, with one theory (espoused by their followers) saying they're still around but simply don't respond for various reasons, a second theory (coming mostly from skeptics) claims that the gods probably never existed and their silence is proof, and a third theory (raised mostly by people who have lived a long time to the point they may have personally met the gods) say they did exist but may now be dead, raising the question of what could have killed them. The truth is a mix of the first and third theories, the second being completely wrong; the gods did, and still do, exist, but they are caught up in a war against the demonic forces of the Void, and the loss of one of their best fighters has left the conflict in such a stalemate that the gods literally don't have the time to speak with the world, lest they lose more stars and worlds.
Hidden Depths: Pretty much all of Innearth’s friend group.
- Abe is an explosion-happy dungeon whose monsters are all capable of detonating. He also puts a surprising amount of thought into his set-ups and makes sure to impress on his ascended monsters that they are not expendable.
- ZeMadDoctor toys around with demons and other highly dangerous concepts, but is perhaps the most cautious of them all.
- Amy is an absolute sweetheart… who designs brutal challenges and deadly diseases for fun.
- “Bose” is overly dramatic and a Large Ham, but he is also an amazing friend with a keen attention to detail who will absolutely gush over how amazing someone else’s creation is.
- Brutality Queen may lean a bit heavily into “Survival of the Fittest” and value strength over most anything else, but she is a solid friend once won over.
Inevitable Mutual Betrayal: Innearth and his friends agree to a truce during the Dungeon Games "Round Robin" event, ie they won't turn on each other until they've eliminated everyone else.
ZeMadDoctor: ...I would prefer not to make a fake truce and then have it be broken later...
Abe: come on bro. A truce is sacred! I wouldn't throw away our continued friendship for a brief chance to win some stupid event. You know me.
Innearth: ...You know doc maybe you have a point.
Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Demons are highly resistant to most magic, but can be harmed by physical force (although they are still fast and strong). A simple gun is more effective against them than fireballs and lightning bolts. The nuclear harpoon designed to kill giant void whales has a filter designed to convert most of the light and heat and radiation into kinetic force, allowing it to blast a kilometers-long whale to bits.
Lensman Arms Race: One of Innearth's first few delving parties struggles with a group of undead monsters, but after winning, they receive an amulet that lets them channel life energy into a weapon, which would make fighting undead much easier. Then Innearth upgrades and armors all of the undead with "unlife" materials.
Give the adventurers a weapon to fight the undead and then give the undead a way to block the weapon. Ah…perfect.
Lethal Chef: The dungeons have a cooking competition, just for fun, although they don't really have a sense of taste and thus don't properly understand what they're doing. "Charred and salted" or "boil it in alcohol" is about the extent of their culinary knowledge. Amy, however, takes the cake, by accidentally turning her crab into a deadly virus instead of soup.
Level Grinding: Ultimately, the largest obstacle to obtaining godlike power in the [System] is simply the fact that experience requirements scale with level, and experience rewards scale with danger. The rule of thumb is that for every hundred levels, only 1/1000 as many will reach it. The highest level individuals tend to be fairly risk-averse, which keeps them alive but means that levelling further is a very long slog, so long that many die of old age before getting far. Innearth sets out to cut the process shorter by reintroducing cultivation to adventurers so he can make a god to join the fight against the demons.
Lightning Bruiser: In preparation for serious exploration of the Void, with the resulting demon confrontations, Innearth builds a very special elite boss monster, taking weeks to layer reinforcements and weapons and optimizing its efficiency with everything he's learned. On its test run, the "roach knight" goes through his previous anti-demon boss like a scythe through grain, in less than a minute, and later takes down three powerful demons at once in less than five seconds.
Mad Scientist:
- ZeMadDoctor named himself that for a reason. He has some expertise in undead, but his primary specialty is summoning and studying demons, just to learn more about them. Ordinarily, summoning a demon is something that young cores often do by accident when experimentally mixing incompatible mana types, and it's usually fatal, as the demon shrugs off everything they can throw at it and devours their core. Doc summons them into controlled environments routinely. The first thing he ever said to Innearth was "Is the body you want to reanimate Fresh?" Despite his oddities and sometimes brusqueness, however, he is generally helpful and cooperative, willing to share what he knows with his fellow dungeons.
- Innearth considers using a combination of life mana and kinetic mana to influence adventurers to visit his dungeon, but the literature says that's a horribly dangerous combination. So he asks ZeMadDoctor about it, and sure enough, Doc has worked extensively with it, confirming that it's very bad but providing a list of no less than seven stable materials that he's made from it.
- From a mortal perspective, even more "normal" dungeons can seem amoral and crazy. Amy, who is probably the kindest and gentlest of the group, cheerfully and supportively leads her friends through an engaging workshop about creating virulent plagues.
  Amy: To start off we are going to make a simple necrosis that spreads through human touch. Nice and simple. Does everyone have their disease starter?
  Innearth looked down at the stone bucket with an "Innearth <3" on it. Looking around, everyone had a similar bucket with their names and a heart written in dungeon script along the side.
Master of Illusion: Innearth's special illusion snake, the "Illusion Wurm". On top on having the power of Invisibility, the Wurm can project an illusion of herself away from her true body, misleading her enemies (and even her allies) and leaving them open to a sneak attack. After ascending, her ability to deceive the senses becomes so potent that Innearth has significant trouble finding her even within his influence. Please note that Dungeon Cores are Genius Loci with almost total awareness within their influence, so the Wurm can evade a being that's near omniscient within its domain.
Master of None:
- Specialising in more than one mana affinity at once tends to come with hefty penalties, and specialising in every type from a tier is essentially crippling oneself by taking huge penalties on higher tiers later. It's generally more effective to pick just one affinity, take a penalty to one other type, and be neutral toward the rest.
- Steve the crystal dwarf struggles to make a tier eight item and unlock the brewing system. His best effort is a staff that boosts eight different mana types, but only reaches tier 7. Innearth points out that most mages can't use that many types of magic, and he could provide larger bonuses and make something more useful if he focused on just one type, like fire magic.
  Only certain mages that used fire magic would be able to use it but I’m sure you could have increased the effect from 50-100% plus 20% to 200% even higher. I think…I think that’s why the item is rated lower. Because it's too general and not specialized enough to be strong.
Meaningful Rename: The core in Innearth's friend group that most likes to play the role of a wise and mysterious figure is fond of giving himself a fancy (if possibly pretentious) name, sometimes incorporating one of their mana specialties. They initially named themselves Immortal Spring of Certainty, then changed their name to Bringer of Serene Eternity after discovering the existence of Eternity mana (which he was very excited about), then finally changed their name to Fated Eternal Design. The last change had more of a sad reason for it, as it was done partly in an effort to avoid some griefer Cores that had been harassing poor Bose/Fed, though thankfully his friends managed to put a halt to that by sending some very dangerous monsters through one of Doc's portals, possibly killing the main griefer, which none of them are bothered about.
MegaCorp: A Magitek-based one. ManaCorp is a massive corporation focused on researching magic and how to make tools with it, and apparently very successful at it based on the various excerpts seen at the start of the chapters (implying they're responsible for a large amount of the Magitek in the setting, though they're not above doing some very dangerous tests and seem to consider their employees largely replaceable. Imagine a modern business themed around magic, with the kind of reckless approach to R&D and (lack of) care for their employees that you might in companies like Aperture Science.
Mirror Match: Innearth builds a chamber where delvers face a crystal golem copying their own skills, to test their worthiness to proceed. (But it melts down upon attempting to copy a delver hundreds of levels higher.)
More than Three Dimensions: Travelling outside the normal three spatial dimensions takes you to the void, where demons live (and prey on visitors). With the right preparations, though, it's possible to survive there and beat the demons back; ZeMadDoctor is particularly knowledgeable about the subject.
Mundane Utility: Void mana materials can destroy anything they touch. They're commonly used to make toilets that eliminate waste.

N - Z

Narrative Filigree: Each chapter starts with a short preamble, presented as various In-Universe documents (travel logs, excerpts from texts, diary pages, etc). While a few of these might be relevant to the main characters (usually reports on when they're first found), and some may foreshadow certain individuals or plot elements that may become relevant in the future, most of them are about unrelated people living across the world, showing how people live in an RPG Mechanics 'Verse and in general making the world feel more lived-in.
Nigh-Invulnerability:
- Innearth finds that he can still absorb void bricks altered by the demonic whale, but no amount of physical force can affect them. His first use is to try making better armor from them. Unfortunately, they revert to normal if brought back into the world.
- It takes much longer to saturate cosmic void material with exposure to the Void, but it then exhibits similar indestructibility and doesn't revert. Innearth armors his core with a box made from it, but first has to claim the box, otherwise it cuts off his control over his own dungeon. A dragon sent to inspect his dungeon for possible madness cultivation is taken aback to discover that it literally can't touch his core.
  Rataka: Makes me want to just raze the place — since when have dungeons had stupid indestructible materials.
No Ontological Inertia: The most efficient way to spread a magical disease is to create a monster that will constantly produce it, but as Amy explains, doing so will entangle the monster with the disease, such that killing the monster cures all the sufferers.
Amy: If you make multiple monsters you can spread it out so all of them have to be destroyed to cure it...but that also weakens it in general.
Nuclear Option: In Chapter 91, Doc, Abe, and Innearth collaborate to make a nuclear harpoon cannon to hunt the kilometers-long demonic whales. Abe can create the nuclear-mana materials, Doc's kinetic affinity provides propulsion and converts the radiation into pure kinetic force for better effectiveness against demons, Innearth makes cosmic void plating to assist penetration. The System glitches out at the unprecedented situation of dungeons directly killing that:
Error met while distributing combat experience.

Error log: Dungeons are not equipped to use combat experience. Experience to be applied to trap or monster used to deal damage.
Trap manually activated, non living variation. Combat experience to be ignored.
Error: ' demon whale bounty' tenet prevents combat experience from being lost while killing high level demons and superseding 'non combat cultivation for' tenet.
Obvious Rule Patch: It didn't occur to the Dungeon Games host in advance to ban demon summoning, as he didn't assume any core would be that crazy. ZeMadDoctor, however, makes a speciality of that sort of thing, and has a demon rabbit guarding his base, so the host has to issue a rule update banning it and requiring it to be put down (to Doc's grumbling).
"Open!" Says Me: Neither Innearth, Abe, nor Fated Eternal Design made their delving monster capable of opening doors — so they instead blast and ram their way through.
Abe: How you’re supposed to open doors as far as I’m concerned.
Our Dragons Are Different: In this setting, dragons are not a singular species, but rather any magical creature that has reached an incredibly high level, with their appearances varying considerably (for example, the first dragon Innearth meets is covered with feathers instead of scales, and has hooves for feet). Each dragon is incredibly powerful, with one usually being strong enough to wipe out a small country uncontested, and they usually serve as the system's enforcers whenever the world is threatened by a force that the "mortal" population wouldn't be able to handle, such as an extremely dangerous magical plague or if a dungeon has gone mad.
Outside-Context Problem: Basically what makes demons so dangerous is that their abilities do not conform to the logic of either the world or the system. On the other hand, they’ve been a problem for so long that there is at least some basic information to build off of.
Paralysis by Analysis: In Chapter 3, "Indecisive Earth"/Innearth chooses his name after receiving the "Indecisive" title in Chapter 2, after spending 5 hours agonising over his first choice of elemental affinity.
OG: Hey, noob if you're seeing this you probably need a push.
Power at a Price: A start-of-chapter excerpt mentions that it's relatively easy to make magic potions with powerful effects. What distinguishes master alchemists is the amount of work they put into neutralizing the many side effects that are likely to result.
That's why witches are shunned. Sure they can fly on a broomstick after drinking a potion made on their kitchen countertop but really, is the green skin worth it?
Powers as Programs: One of the biggest weaknesses of using the magic circuit system created by Dungeons is that it can’t be easily used to transfer skills from one monster to another due to both the complexity of the circuits and how much each one is tailored to an individual monster, meaning that attempts to transplant a circuit usually just cause it to break. Innearth, after becoming a master at circuitry, actually figures out a solution to this by inventing “skill organs”, organs inlaid with specific skill circuits that aren’t as dependent on the monster, allowing them to be transferred with relative ease.
Proud Warrior Race: Innearth is baffled by the first orc party who enter his dungeon. They always match their numbers to the number of opponents, holding back any extras, and they charge straight through traps that they could have avoided. When an orc is lost in the throes of combat, they cheer, but when one gets sneak-attacked by an invisible snake, they set out on a vendetta to kill the snake at all costs.
Pyromaniac: Abe loves explosions. Most of his monsters don't survive long, but even the ones that do, are pretty much guaranteed to self-destruct when killed.
Read the Fine Print: Some of the terms and conditions on the ManaCorps 9001 food preserver are reasonable enough, such as the instruction not to keep magma cheese inside. However, the declaration that purchasing it voids the warranty...
Reassigned to Antarctica: Krill is sure that his "promotion" to managing a branch in the middle of nowhere is actually a punishment, but he still intends to make the most of it, lest he be made a beta-tester instead...
Recursive Ammo: During the dungeon games, Innearth assaults Abe's bomb launcher with a giant crystal spear that splits into fifty smaller spears just before impact, wrecking the launcher's material delivery tubes and growth chambers.
Reincarnation: Early on, Innearth comes across the remains of a dungeon core that was killed by a demon and the lava-based floors it had made before dying. Later, Innearth uses the shattered core as materials for a super-boss in a shared space with his friends and the resulting boss has dungeon-like control over its area and memories of lava despite there being none in the space it controls. It doesn’t remember being a dungeon core though.
Required Secondary Powers: Part of what makes Yggdrasil so hard to grow to full multiple-kilometre size is that it doesn't have any innate protection from collapsing under its own immense weight, growing so high it lacks enough air, digging its long roots into the planetary mantle and igniting itself, or using up all available nutrients and starving. Those things all have to be worked around manually.
The Reveal: When Innearth feels that he's lacking purpose, he meets the conditions to unlock a website that tells him the true purpose of dungeons. They were created by Gaia to filter and clean mana on the surface, and their sapience is essentially accidental and incidental. All they really need to do is exist, and everything they've built on top of that is just finding ways to keep themselves busy so they don't commit suicide out of boredom. However, there is one possible higher purpose that they could take on: to help create a new god for the fight against the demons.
Simple, yet Awesome: While the higher-ranked mana affinities might be more advanced and have more potential than their base counterparts, that doesn't mean the Rank 1 and 2 affinities are weak by any means. One excerpt notes that, in terms of pure power in combat, the rank 1 Fire and rank 2 Sword affinities are some of the most common and potent for adventurers — if you pump a regular sword with enough Sword mana, for example, you might get a blade that can cut the top off a mountain in a single swing.
So What Do We Do Now?: In the epilogue, a group of dungeons focused on creating a new god are taken aback to learn that they've been beaten to the punch. Reactions vary; one wants to keep trying and make a better god, one leaves to rethink its goals, some just want to keep talking about what has happened.
Soul Jar: Innearth's crystal gnome helps him design an amulet that captures the soul of its wearer when they die, and transfers it to a facility where they'll be revived with ambrosia.
Stalker Shrine: Innearth gets a little obsessed with following a low-level solo adventurer he (incorrectly) calls "Craig", collecting various mementos of Craig's exploits within Innearth's dungeon like remnants of one of his first traps, some unexploded bombs he had to leave after being caught off-guard, and the severed head of a crystal snake with his blood on it.
Strength Equals Worthiness: Brutality Queen won't even talk to people who fail to impress her with their monsters' strength. Innearth passes, but finds her attitude both intimidating and abrasive, which keeps their relationship distant despite their mutual friend Amy. They start getting along better after working together in the Dungeon Games, including impressing her by winning a building contest.
Stuff Blowing Up:
- You know a story is doing something right when it has giant demons being blown up with nuclear harpoon cannons.
- This is practically Abe’s raison d’etre — literally everything he makes for his dungeon is designed to either explode, make something else explode, or both. He does draw the line at taking up a Nuclear affinity after an experiment for a tiny amount of matter with Nuclear destroyed a significantly large part of his dungeon, with Abe’s core only itself narrowly avoiding destruction. He does take up making Nuclear mana again for the team’s nuclear harpoons for demon hunting.
Suicide Attack: Abe briefly — and accidentally — jumps to the top of the Battle Royale scoreboard by having his contestant explode so violently that it kills everything nearby (with a poor longevity score but a massive kill ratio making him the early leader).
Abe: ...so that's what that material did.
Summoning Ritual: Summoning demons is unfortunately quite easy. Mixing Life and Death mana will do it (although there are other ways). This is one of the classic mistakes made by young dungeons, and is usually fatal, as demons are considerably more powerful than the tier of monster used to summon them, and are extremely magic resistant. Innearth later learns more about why it works; the mixture produces a twisted fourth-dimensional soul, which sticks out into the void where demons live, and acts like a beacon, giving them a path into reality.
Sure, Let's Go with That: Craig assumes that Innearth hasn't spoken to him until he successfully uses a cultivation pill because Craig needed to work it out himself. Actually, Innearth was simply busy and forgot.
A Taste of Their Own Medicine: "Ace" harasses FED by having several friends offer fraudulent and dangerous trades. FED's friends then get together and strike back by trading him a monster that secretly contains a portal, and using it to dump a full-blown assault force on him.
Technician Versus Performer: Innearth and Bose had a bit of this dynamic early on in the story when it came to dungeons. Innearth (the Technician) was more focused on the mechanics of his monsters and his dungeon, optimizing them for their roles with little regard for how they looked, while Bose (the Performer) paid far more attention to the aesthetics and the "story" behind his dungeon and its creatures, even maintaining his "performance" in the chat room, which annoyed Innearth and caused him to dislike Bose when they first met. This becomes more downplayed over time, as Innearth starts to see some of Bose's points (helped by the fact that Bose is actually very skilled at making monsters, with most of Innearth's early creations unable to even touch one of Bose's wraiths without knowledge of its weak point) and takes some of his advice, though Innearth still generally favors function over form.
Tempting Fate: After several iterations of building defenses and integrating more dungeons into the shared void space, Innearth comments that it's seeming easy, and Abe shouts at him for raising flags. Then a tremendous void whale turns up, with its eye alone larger than the roach knight, and eats most of their work, including several of their expensive elite boss monsters. As they try to pick up the pieces, Innearth blithely comments that at least things can't get any worse.
Abe: ...I hate you sometimes.
Tournament Arc: Early in the story, Innearth and his friends participate in the Dungeon Games, an event held specifically for Dungeon Cores every 10 years, where they compete in events like monster races, battle royales, item crafting contests, and so on. Cores can participate in as many events as they want (so long as they have enough Pure mana cores to pay the entry fees), and any that perform well enough are invited to the final event: a massive island that they can claim as a temporary dungeon that they can shape as they please, even cooperating with other Cores, with the main benefit being that it can help younger Cores get some much needed experience. The outside is utterly unaware of these games, only knowing that a mysterious island appears once every 10 years and then vanishes, providing mid-level adventurers with a rare and possibly unique experience and a chance to grow quickly.
Weak, but Skilled: "Craig" is not very strong in a straight fight, but he delves quite successfully using bombs, tripwires, ambushes, entangling and poisoning monsters. Innearth is fascinated by his progress.
When Trees Attack: Innearth designs a rose by experimenting with tier 3 mana types, bearing thorns that disintegrate things on touch and a black-hole-like attraction effect to suck adventurers into it — then realizes that he's basically created a boss monster by accident.
Who Wants to Live Forever?: After reaching tier 8, Innearth finds a site composed of nothing but recordings of dungeon cores committing suicide because of how bored they are with their own existence.
World Tree: Yggdrasil mana affinity allows the production of "Yggdrasil heartwood", flexible and improving mana channelling and yet much stronger than steel. Theoretically it should be possible to grow a tree from it, but between its extreme nutrient requirements, the amount of space needed, the risk of penetrating into the planetary mantle and burning it, etc, no one has succeeded before (and picking up the affinity at all is quite rare.) Brutality Queen takes Yggdrasil mana affinity at rank 4, and with extensive collaboration and preparation, the group makes a tree that can survive, protected by the best armour they can devise, along with extensive runic magic, and fertilised with demonic void whales. It gives bonuses to all magic usage in the vicinity, as well as providing an ecologically safe way to dispose of demon remnants.
Wound That Will Not Heal: Blood mana can inflict wounds that resist blood clotting and standard healing processes.
Yin-Yang Clash: Dungeon Cores, especially the younger ones, are heavily discouraged from combining directly opposing elements with each other, especially the higher ranked or more esoteric elements. While some combinations can produce powerful results, more often it just leads to a dangerous (if not fatal) outcome for the Core. The most infamous example is mixing life and death mana, as it produces demonic mana, which is all that's needed for an actual demon to form, spelling the end for many unlucky or unwary Cores.
You Are Not Alone: The final message of the "Meaning of life" website is that other cores know what you're going through — because reaching a place without hope is the requirement for accessing the page, and they've been there.
And remember. We understand. We know exactly what you are going through and we want you to know you aren’t alone.
You Do NOT Want to Know: The disclaimers on the "Meaning to life" website are very clear that the knowledge inside can be harmful, that even the author doesn't want to tell anyone, and that no one who is happy, or even just curious, should proceed. Only those who have already lost all hope and have nothing to lose should learn the secret. Namely, dungeons were created by Gaia to purify mana simply by existing, and have no higher purpose. Sapience was an accident. Everything else they do is merely to distract themselves from boredom and nihilism. But theoretically, it may be possible for them to help ascend additional gods to aid in the fight against the demons.
You Got Murder:
- Innearth and some friends deal with a cyber-bully by persuading him to accept a traded monster — carrying a portal anchor, which is then used to bombard the target dungeon with explosives, poisons, unstable materials, and even a high tier demon. The bully teaches Abe a bunch of new swear words before going ominously silent.
- Innearth is targeted with a trade that is almost a murder attempt, since the core responsible knew that the material was much more dangerous than the trade description suggested, and that it had killed multiple cores before (thus the lack of any negative reviews). But when Innearth narrowly survives his initial testing and complains, the core insists that it didn't actually lie and it will still pay him as agreed for his experimental results.
Zerg Rush: One of the cores in the Dungeon Games uses the original Zerg Rush strategy, spawning a crowd of cheap, weak, but fast monsters to quickly attack cores that haven't managed to establish their defenses yet. It's initially successful in knocking out several of them, but had to neglect its own defense in the process, and is eventually clobbered by a single stronger monster.

Indecisive Troper: So what exactly are you designing your pages for?
Immortal Spring Of Certainty: Isn't it obvious? They are my Undying Legion. Once I get some readers in me they shall spread my name far and wide as a wiki of impossible obstacles.
Abe: Hey you chose a name. Not quite as good as "Abe's little Bro" but I like it. Swol.

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