Literature / This Used To Be About Dungeons

This Used to be About Dungeons is an completed slice-of-life adventuring story, published on Royal Road by Alexander Wales, that features complex characters, realistic interpersonal relationships, thoughtful problem-solving, novel world-building, and occasionally dungeons.

Alfric arrives in the remote village of Pucklechurch, looking to gather a party and start Dungeon Crawling in the local area. He has big plans and firm ideas about how things should go, but there's a lot of history he's not comfortable telling. And the people he gathers up have their own lives and issues going on — sometimes with even more going on than they themselves knew about. There's old enemies, old friends, new challenges, and always dangers. Facing the world together has a way of building lasting friendships, though...

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This Used To Be About Dungeons contains examples of:

A-L

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Mizuki tests out a sword entad and discovers that it can extend and contract, even collapsing the blade entirely, while remaining strong and lightweight, which is handy but nothing extraordinary. Then Alfric actually tries out in combat. Where it cuts through anything — even items that were nigh-indestructible before — like melted butter. Turns out that its sharpness increases with its length; at nine feet long, it can casually cut through walls with minimal resistance.
• Adventure-Friendly World: Dungeons are ubiquitous, having been set up far in the past to keep natural magic from getting too out of control. Occasionally they need to be cleared out as a way to vent the power they accumulate, providing a valid if niche career path. It's pretty common for young people to try dungeoneering, but few have the temperament and inclination to keep at it after the first few.
• Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: Humans in this world find it odd to light things on fire to cook food, since heatstones exist.
• Always Chaotic Evil: All creatures generated by dungeons are afflicted with dungeon madness — a condition that makes them forego everything else to try to kill humans on sight if they detect the presence of any. Dungeon madness is incurable, meaning that even if these creatures were sapient, it's okay to kill them on sight. Things get fuzzier when one finds eggs or newborns, which are not necessarily subject to this rule.
• And That's Terrible: The concept of a landlord is utterly alien to Mizuki, and the system is discussed as odd and unfair. (Though admittedly, they're discussing a system where the landlords have no obligations at all to maintain the property.)
• ...And That Would Be Wrong: When Mizuki wants to use an Overguard family entad to change their dog's colour, Alfric warns her that his mother will yell at her if she does — then informs her that the dog's favourite colour is purple.
• Arc Number: Six. There are six gods, each with six groups of six groups of six chosen ones to serve them, and the basic unit of land is called a hex, which is roughly 6 miles in radius. A notable break from this pattern is that the limit for party size is five.
• Arranged Marriage: Of a sort. Chrononauts are routinely pacted to produce children together, due to the nature of chrononaut inheritance: two chrononaut parents will have chrononaut children, but no other combination will. The arrangement doesn't require marriage, and with the right entads it doesn't even require physical contact, but Alfric doesn't want to have even that much to do with Lola, nor does he want her raising any child of his. Still, it's important, because chrononauts provide the world with their best line of defence against existential threats.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: The creatures in dungeons are almost universally affected by a "dungeon madness" of unknown origin, causing them to unrelentingly attack intruders, even to the point suicidal efforts. A standard way to exploit this is to create a choke point to limit the number able to attack effectively, with the added benefit of Collateral Damage. The most dangerous enemies are the ones who are able to overcome this instinct and wait until a good moment to strike rather than run in heedless of tactical considerations.
• Awesome, but Impractical: In the time period the story takes place in, magic weapons are a dime a dozen and not terribly useful. They'll still sell reliably to resellers, but unless it's a world class specimen it won't be for very much.
• Blood Knight: Discussed by Alfric, whose father loves to test himself in combat, but his mother dislikes it — yet his mother is possibly the most proficient Dungeoneer in the world. Alfric himself seems to take more after her, finding more satisfaction in the win than the fight, but he thinks it would be better if he enjoyed combat more.
• Body Horror: The dungeons procedurally generate their contents, including living things. They will usually stick close to real life animals in most respects, or at least assemble them from recognisable parts of real animals (sometimes repeated too many times, like a 100-foot-long goat), but sometimes a creature will just be too weird to survive more than a few minutes and will die before a dungeoneering party encounters it.
• Boring, but Practical: Everyone goes into dungeons hoping to find a rare entad that will make them rich, but by far the most common way to turn a profit is to extract raw materials or sell matching sets of mundane items created by the dungeons. Consequently, the most important entads to have are not the ones that shoot fireballs or spectral blades, but the ones that enable easy storage and transport of goods.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": An in universe example. According to the world's magical census system, people who make magic items are counted as cobblers, magic item maker being a comparatively new profession that post-dates the establishment of the system.
• Cats Are Magic: Or at least, they're one of the rare dungeon spawned creatures that can propagate outside of dungeons without special conditions. Same thing with chickens and tomatoes.
• Chekhov's Gun: The book entad that writes down anything spoken near it is crucial to how the party finally get evidence against Lola, and the ring that turns the wearer into stone was key to keeping her from undoing the day.
• Chest Monster: Libraries are relatively rare in dungeons, and the books can generally be sold, which, if there are enough of them, can be quite lucrative. Pity about the flying book-shaped monsters that lurk among them, ready to beat you with their spines and give you nasty papercuts.
• The Church: The temples have a complicated relationship with their gods and clerics, being more of a professional organization rather than something sanctioned by the gods. The gods themselves don't really care what form their worship takes, so long as it is in keeping with their individual ideals. It is entirely possible for a cleric to never step foot in a temple, or even be actively hostile to them, and still be in good standing with their god.
• The Clan: Chrononauts can only come from members of three families, and only if both parents are from one of those families. This has led to a strong tradition of arranged marriages to keep the ability alive and a fair accumulation of wealth. There are about 700 of them at present, with some generous government funded programs in place to encourage them to reproduce.
• Cool House: The Overguard family home in Dondrian looks like a fairly normal home from the outside, but inside it is a sprawling mansion that has rooms in a dozen neighboring hexes thanks to the glut of magic doors the family has accumulated over the years.
• Courier: Cartiers are people who use various entads to rapidly transport goods. Xy, the "local" cartier to Pucklechurch, has the Super-Speed to run over ninety miles per hour; with a good tailwind, she can run across water.
• Cow Tools: Dungeons are littered with them. Some can be repurposed and used as tools with little effort, some are poorly designed but recognizable, and some are just incomprehensible mashups that can serve no conceivable purpose.
• Crazy-Prepared: Everyone knows that Alfric likes to plan and prepare, but when they need to spend an extended time in a dungeon, they're still a little taken aback by just how thoroughly he has stocked their extradimensional garden — and by the fact that he's bought vent stones powerful enough that they could all get enough air to breathe if something goes wrong in the dungeon.
  Hannah: There's such a thing as being too prepared. But it's a discussion for another day.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The issue of the wizard-sorcerer rivalry is that it massively favors the latter, as the sorcerer can simply unravel any spells or magical constructs the wizard is using, even killing them on the spot with that alone. The only recourse wizards have to avoid suffering a curb-stomp battle is to invert it, killing or otherwise incapacitating the sorcerer way outside their range, before they can see an attack coming and counter or retaliate.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Alienists. Turns out binding spirits from beyond your reality is just a tad dangerous. The only reason it isn't officially suppressed is because accidents usually only kill the practitioner who screwed up, and the messier side effects are self limiting.
• Dispel Magic: Sorcerers can unravel magical constructs, and even subvert the resulting energy to their own use.
• Dissimile: Low level dungeon monsters are commonly compared to fighting three raccoons. After their very first monster, as thick as a barrel and proportionally long as a snake, with a hundred legs and large enough pincers to crush someone's skull, Mizuki insists that it wasn't similar at all.
• Druid: Becoming a druid is simple: a woman just needs to give birth alone and keep the child several miles away from other humans for the first three years of their life. As you might imagine, druids are pretty rare. Isra is a particularly noteworthy case, as her mother died in childbirth and she was raised by her father, ignorant of her differences from others.
  • Known druid abilities include knowing the next day's weather, controlling the weather, seeing through an animal's eyes, knowing which plants are safe to eat, an awareness of all nearby plant and animal life, and the ability to talk to and control plants, animals, and natural phenomena such as rocks and puddles of water.
• Dungeon-Based Economy: Not entirely true, but they do provide a lot of magical items and material conveniences. Discussed at one point — the dungeons are mostly unregulated and untaxed because the flow of goods from them is too useful in too many ways to add barriers to the process.
• Dungeon Bypass: The Overguard Maneuver is highly risky, and should never be tried without chrononaut support, but it's effective in cutting a dungeon run short. You equip one party member with every kind of protection and mobility entad you can, put everyone else in dimensional storage of whatever kind is available, then charge through the dungeon, straight past the monsters, just looking for the loot. Or, when Alfric actually uses it, looking for the exit. You may end up with every monster in the dungeon chasing you at once, but if you're fast enough, then you can loot and leave before they catch you. If you're not that fast, you can at least save a lot of time by fighting them all at once. (Which is dangerous in its own way, but means that you can go wild with Area of Effect and limited-use attacks, and possibly even take advantage of Collateral Damage.)
  The Overguard Maneuver had been an invention of Alfric’s great-grandfather, who was an extremely enthusiastic dungeoneer and also an idiot.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The dungeon interiors are produced the moment a group enters. Each one has a unique layout that changes from group to group, but will tend to play on certain themes and features found in the hex. They often appear to have an open sky, but there's nothing on the surface.
    Alfric: It's a little false, half-created world.
  • One example that's eldritch even by dungeon standards is an exact copy of a theater hundreds of hexes away, apparently pulled directly from Verity's mind — which isn't supposed to happen — and accurate to every detail. Even Alfric, who has studied dungeons for most of his life, is a little creeped out. They suspect a god was involved, possibly more than one.
• Extra Eyes: Dwodo look more or less human except for their eyes. They're easily interchangeable between individuals and serve as a marker of station - the more eyes, the higher the dwodo.
• Eye Scream: For dwodo, who can transfer eyes between each other quickly and painlessly, forcible enucleation is the equivalent to a very large fine. For humans, who are subjected to the same fate if found guilty of some significant offense against the dwodo, it's not.
• Fantastic Racism: Mostly regarding types of magic so far.
  • Sorcerers aren't able to produce their own magical potential and have to use what is already present. Usually this means harvesting another mage's workings, gaining them a reputation for coming in out of nowhere and wrecking carefully constructed spells.
  • Chrononauts are often viewed with suspicion due to their ability to reset events, even among other chrononauts. They have a confusing reputation for both caution and recklessness. Alfric is very sensitive about his reputation and honour as a result, and his family has impressed upon him the importance of cultivating honesty, because trust is a precious commodity for them.
• Fantasy Pantheon: The gods are based on various mathematics concepts.
  • Bixzotl, God of Copies ^note  aka God of Repetition and Sameness
  • Garos, God of Symmetry ^note  aka God of Order
  • Kesbin, God of Nothing ^note  aka God of Division, Subtraction, Secrets, and Silence
  • Oeyr, God of Emergence ^note  aka God of Asymmetry, Disorder, and Rules
  • Qymmos, God of Sets ^note  aka God of Categories, Information, and Knowledge
  • Xuphin, God of Infinity ^note  aka God of Addition and Increase
• Fourth-Date Marriage: This is standard practice for one of the world's ethnic groups. You find someone you like, propose to them, then have a long engagement.
• Functional Magic: Magical materials from the dungeons can be used to make "ectads", which are standardised and repeatable pieces of magic, such as plates that speed up plant growth, or crystals that create water until a specific pressure is reached. ("Entads", however, are unique items randomly generated by the dungeons, and can't be reproduced.)
• Gayngst: One of the jobs of clerics of Garos is to cut down on this, particularly in smaller communities. They have a reputation for homosexuality thanks to a few passages of their holy book, but it's not universal.
• Glass Cannon: Discussed between Mizuki and Kell; both wizards and sorcerers tend to either kill a monster in one shot (but with limited ammunition), or not be able to fight effectively at all. Kell is able to challenge several dungeons solo, which is very dangerous, and he has moderate success, but he couldn't clear them all out and loot everything not nailed down; he had to retreat whenever there was something he couldn't one-shot.
  Kell: Most things will die to a single beam of concentrated power, or a blast, or whatever else I have configured.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Overguards taught their children the value of reputation and the importance of not making accusations without proof, but those lessons were calibrated on the assumption that children will push boundaries. When applied by dutiful rule-follower Alfric, the result is choosing not to report Lola's misbehaviour until he has the equivalent of a smoking gun, even though there would have been enough evidence long before that for someone to rein her in.
  Alfric: I did tell you about Lola.
  Ria: No. No, you did what we had taught you to do and coached your words carefully, doing your best not to spread hearsay or to give voice to rumors. You didn't know what was actually true, and you didn't want to do reputational damage. What we heard from you was the weakest possible version of the story, and that’s because of how we raised you and what we taught you about what's appropriate information to pass on.
  Harmon: Your mother and I are in agreement that in this instance, the lessons we taught you did not serve you well.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Chrononauts have an innate ability to go back a day and reset time, although with a few caveats. While they are only aware of the times they personally reset, the guild communication system can be used to pass short messages between individual timelines. The exact number of times one of them can repeat a day is dependent on the individual, with 12 being noted as extraordinary, and there is a complex order of precedence that governs the order the resets apply when multiple chrononauts are involved. Generally they'll try to stay out of each other's way so they don't have to worry about it, but when they coordinate their efforts, passing messages between lower-priority and higher-priority chrononauts, they can potentially keep the same day playing out for years.^note The maximum number of repeats is the sum of all the chrononauts involved, so three coordinating chrononauts with limits of three, four, and five, could theoretically repeat a day twelve times.
• Gutted Like a Fish: Mizuki is unsure for a while about what she can do with a local aetheric mood of "discordance", but she's eventually able to cast a spell that makes all of the target's internal organs fall out.
• Harmful Healing: As a cleric of Garos, God of Symmetry, Hannah can easily fix many minor injuries by simply mirroring an undamaged part of the body. However, in a fight she has darker options available, like mirroring a severed limb or other serious wounds, and no matter someone's outside appearance they'll never have symmetrical intestines — or heart ventricles. All of the gods have their own version of this, like doubling a person's blood for Bixzotl, God of Copies, giving someone cancer for Xuphin, God of Infinity, or straight up deleting a person for Kesbin, God of Nothing.
• Hidden Elf Village: Cate is trying to set one up in her living demiplane. She had tried once a hundred years before the story, but it didn't go well and she put the survivors on a tropical island with minimal support. She learned some lessons and the second attempt is going better, but she has difficulty accepting advice and has to be threatened into establishing normalized relations with the outside world.
• Horse of a Different Color: Horses don't exist in this world, and finding an animal well suited to being ridden is a long standing dream of many dungeoneers. The most common riding animals are birds that have been magically enlarged, but their limitations make them unsuited to carrying full grown humans. Draft animals are mostly lizos, a breed of large lizard that were found in a dungeon, although at least one nation is mentioned to use cats.
• How Do I Shot Web?: Entads don't come with manuals, so some playing around is usually required to figure out what they do and how they work. Form will usually correlate to function and it's generally regarded as safe, but sometimes there will be flowerpots that shoot city-destroying lasers, or cauldrons that will automatically homogenize anything put in them — anything, including scrubbing brushes and the hands holding them.
• Innocently Insensitive: The casual suspicion and disdain of chrononauts lands differently after the reveal that Alfric is one.
• I've Never Seen Anything Like This Before: And when it's Alfric saying that he's never heard of a dungeon producing a copy of a theatre that Verity was worrying about performing in, despite no such thing existing anywhere in the hex, suggesting that it was somehow drawing from her mind, you know it's serious.
  Alfric: The dungeons don't pull things from a person's mind, they're not like a dream.
  Verity: I influenced the dungeon.
  Alfric: That's not how it works.
  Verity: It's the Ellusifé, the exact theater. The place that’s been on my mind. I’ve performed there twice and will again. What other explanation could there be?
  Alfric: I don't know. It's odd.
• Kill It with Fire: Pyros are responsible for clearing out bad dungeon escape events. No points for guessing their main tool. They're a popular bogeyman, but they haven't had a full scale mobilization in decades.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: This sort of effect is almost unheard of and what few examples exist are supposed to be strictly limited in scope. Cate having an entad that allows for near perfect, reversible, memory removal from an unlimited number of people is highly worrying to the rest of the world and contributes significantly to the strong military response against her.
• Last of His Kind: A sad reality for Bastlefolk - humanoids created by the dungeons - is that they're often found as singletons or sets of closely related siblings and there is no way for a viable population to become established, except perhaps with extensive (and hideously expensive) entad support.
  • Cate is the last dragon in the world (that she knows of). She manufactures sightings every now and then in the hopes that another dragon will hear about it and come to investigate. So far no luck.
• Loophole Abuse: A big part of using entads is finding ways around their limits, often with the help of other entads, such as combining an extra-dimensional rock, a magically mobile chest, and a flying helmet to jury-rig mass transit. All but one of the party members take off all their metal gear and put it into the chest, then get into the rock's extra-dimensional space, the rock gets put into the chest by the last person, and the chest follows after the person wearing the helmet.
• Loyal Phlebotinum:
  • There's a small chance that an entad will bind to a party or individual, making its special properties unusable to others. This is a mostly random process (though somewhat more likely to occur when someone carries a specific item out of the dungeon) that pays absolutely no attention to how useful the item might be, so sometimes a set of bracers that doubles the strength of its wearer will bind to the party's wizard. If a party disbands, their party-bound entads will permanently lose all of their magic, although individually-bound items will still work as normal.
  • This loyalty is taken further by a chest that binds itself to the party, then follows party members around on little legs. It doesn't take instructions, but its movements can be directed by moving people in the direction they want the chest to go (and anyone inside the chest doesn't count, so you can climb in and get carried to the other party members).

M-Z

• Magitek: Many real life conveniences, like refrigerators and hot running water, are replicated using magic items scrounged from dungeons.
• Meaningful Name: The bulk of the story takes place in the town of Pucklechurch, puck meaning a mischievous spirit and church in this case referring to the massive, distinctly out of place cathedral the town is built around. In the past there was a leyline going through the area, but it shifted shortly after its discovery, strangling the town's prospects in the metaphorical crib. The church was almost finished anyway, so they decided to go through with the construction, even if it was vastly outsized to the town's actual needs.
• Missing Child: Kali, a bastlefolk being raised by Alfric's aunt, goes missing in the second book. It seems to be linked to a series of other mysterious disappearances that have occurred over the last few months in a nearby city.
• Mobile Maze: The Herbury Meadows dungeon turns out to be this, when the party opens a door and discovers that the room on the other side isn't what was there before. It quickly becomes apparent that rooms shift approximately every five minutes, accompanied by a loud noise reverberating through the dungeon, and that there are potentially hundreds of rooms. The one saving grace is that open doors aren't affected, so it's still possible to clear an area. And it stops shifting once they manage to kill the boss at the centre of the maze — leaving only the question of whether the maze is actually in a solvable state afterward.
• Most Writers Are Human: In-Universe. It's clear that the Editors (a group of mysterious godlike beings that can change the rules by which the world works) are, or once were, human — party communication requires a voice, teleportation requires making a gesture with three fingers with your hand, the way the dwodo society works doesn't mesh with the hexal administration system at all, etc. It's an open question whether the Editors used themselves as a frame of reference or explicitly wanted humans to reign superior.
• Mugging the Monster: When the party is out on the town for the evening, they're accosted by someone who takes an interest in Mizuki, doesn't want to take "no", and ends up challenging Alfric to a duel. However, Alfric had borrowed some family entads to ensure everyone's security, and proceeds to utterly demolish him within seconds.
  Alfric gave a brief nod, and exploded into magic. When the wisps of blue smoke cleared, he was coated in a black armor with thin lines of gold, holding a sword that was six feet long with a gentle curve, gleaming in the streetlights. He'd grown by an extra two feet, towering over everyone around them.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Sorcerers can sense the local aether, as part of their ability to cast spells from its ripples. Just as important as Mizuki's spellcasting, however, is that she can spot entads as a result.
  • Priya has run over two thousand dungeons in her life, and one of the entads she owns is an axe that bursts into flames when exposed to a heat source. She uses it for making tea.
  • Symmetricalization is a sacred act that brings clerics of Garos closer to their god by miraculously imposing order on the world. The fact that it also lets them mend chipped cups and torn clothing is just a bonus.
• The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: The Editors, a secretive group of immortals who created the dungeons, codified classes, and established many of the systems that keep the world so peaceful and orderly today. The Editors continue to tweak these systems, but they require cooperation from mortal nations to enact their brand of magic, and operate under certain restrictions nobody else fully understands. They're generally seen as Benevolent, but some question the motives of these unelected overseers.
• One-Time Dungeon: Major part of the setting. Every dungeon can only be entered by a given person once (per given timeline, anyway), which essentially gives a hard limit to an adventurer's career. This and the fact that some of the things keeping society afloat (like, say, the main source of clean drinkable water) have to be sourced from the dungeons necessitates a steady supply of dungeoneers.
• Permanent Placeholder: An in-universe example. At its founding no one could agree on a name for the country the story takes place in, so they just went with a temporary placeholder name until a good alternative could be put forward. 500 years later, the country of Interim is a world power with a slightly embarrassing name.
• Permanently Missable Content: Once a party leaves a dungeon, they can never enter it again, so it's important to ensure that they're prepared before they go in, with enough gear to reach and carry all the treasure they might find. Deciding whether to fight a difficult boss, or walk away and possibly miss out on valuable loot, is always a tough call, too.
• Pesky Pigeons: Dondrian is plagued by "day owls" which serve a similar role, despite literally being selected to be as unobtrusive as possible.
• Procedural Generation: This is the way the dungeons work, drawing inspiration from the world at large and the surrounding location specifically to generate locations, monsters and loot. On closer inspection, it can often be clearly seen that the generation is purely random, driven by an algorithm than an intelligence — books in libraries are filled with gibberish, a kitchen has a toilet right in the middle of it, some monsters are generated nonviable, etc.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear:
  • Subverted by Alfric's father, who makes use of a necklace that grants him the effects of any entads placed on a certain mannequin (which stays at home). He's effectively wearing over forty entads at once, without having to look ridiculous or risk losing them.
  • Alfric gets his hands on an amulet that defies this as soon as he can, which changes the look of all gear currently on to fit a singular ostentatious style. The problem being that this style doesn't look very good on him, according to his party-mates.
  • It's noted that this is a problem that most adventurers suffer from, because their gear is generated by different dungeons and therefore has very different visual styles, and altering the way entads look is incredibly expensive.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The party members are all a little out of step with the rest of their peers in one way or another. Justified, as Alfric was specifically looking for such people since they would be more likely to upset their lives to go dungeoneering.
  Alfric: I have a team.
  Lola: Oh, well, your team, yes. A musician who couldn't hack it, an inept sorceress, a zealot of what has to be the least worthwhile god, and an untrained archer? And you, naturally, who fits in with them somehow.
  Alfric: Yes. They're my team, and if you ever want to speak with me again, do it by letter. I'm done with you.
• Reality Warper: Sorcerers are a minor version, with an emphasis on Warper. They're able to affect the magic around them, but they can't produce any on their own and need some pre-existing magic to work with. This makes them generally unpopular with other mages whose workings they harvest and alter. Mizuki also discovers that if she's not careful, she can actually damage other magic users by drawing too much out of them.
  • Verity has traces of this, apparently unconsciously influencing the dungeons that generate when the party goes through the door.
• Renovating the Player Headquarters: The party all chip in in different ways to fix up Mizuki's neglected Big Fancy House.
• Ret-Gone: Most clerics can use their god's area of expertise for harm. A cleric of Kesbin, God of Nothing, can make something disappear — your heart or liver, or possibly your entire body. An archbishop of Kesbin can make it so you disappear retroactively.
• The Rival: Lola set herself up as one to Alfric after she took over Vertex. The moment he establishes himself with a new party she moves the team to be near him and stir up trouble. The rest of her party aren't exactly on board with the plan once her motives come to light, and the party dissolves in less than a week.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Downplayed, with the only overt RPG elements being the dungeons and their loot, a party and guild system (mostly used for ease of communication), the world being divided into hexagonal areas that you can teleport between, and vaguely defined "elevations".
• Schizo Tech: The general tech level seems to be on par with a European country some time in the 1700s or 1800s, right on the cusp of industrialization, but then you have dungeons throwing out magic items that make it possible for things like instant two way communication, powered flight, and, apparently, oat meal as a common breakfast food.
• Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: Chrononauts are allowed to govern themselves and there are no laws regulating their abilities. For the most part their practice of "disclosure" is enough to keep things honest... officially, anyway. This might change after Lola's little attempted-murder spree brings formal attention to the matter.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: A previous civilization had a habit of sealing dangerous creatures in stone circles rather than killing them, for unknown reasons. The party finds one after a dungeon monster copies traits from it.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: One of the jobs of Chrononauts is to serve as an early warning system in case of natural disasters or dungeon breakouts. They're only able to go back a day, but it's far better than nothing. They can also be privately hired as insurance for dungeon delves (you get a message at the start of the day to warn you if it would end disastrously), but they charge exorbitant rates - a six month stint at it is enough to outfit an entire dungeoneering group with top tier entads and support teams.
• Slice of Life: The story is much more down to earth and character driven than the author's more well known works, with the plot largely concerning the drama and day to day practicalities of setting up a new adventuring group.
• Small, Secluded World: Several varieties pop up throughout the story.
  • Entads that produce extra-dimensional spaces are fairly common, and at the upper end could contain entire cities.
  • With proper preparation, dungeons can be turned into one. There are some people desperate enough to do it, with a few historical examples which made it long enough to have multiple generations born in the dungeon.
  • Then there are demiplanes. They're miles-wide masses of barren extra-dimensional land that with the right mix of entads and effort can be coaxed back into a semblance of life. There are also living demiplanes that are actively expanding into the Wilderness, a half-real world vaguely related to the dungeons. Each one is connected to a dragon and the demiplane dies if the dragon does.
• Socialite: The Society, a group of rich people in Dondrian.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Dungeons get more powerful from nearby magic, be it from mages, magical items, or natural features of the environment, making it easy to find one of an appropriate level. Just starting out and need a relatively risk free test of your abilities? Find an out-of-the-way town and clear out the nearby dungeons. Have some experience and looking for something more lucrative? Head to a larger town or find an area naturally high in magic. Repeat as many times as you like, with the main complication being that you can go into each dungeon only once. They will also get harder from a person increasing their elevation.
• Suicide Attack: The party encounters a swarm of batlike creatures that swoop down from the ceiling with such reckless abandon that they splatter themselves on impact. They're quite dangerous, but can be defeated merely by dodging them — if there weren't hundreds of them.
• Superpower Lottery:
  • Entads usually have functions that are somehow related to their forms, but that's only a rule of thumb, and they can still be quite unpredictable. There's a cautionary tale in dungeoneering circles about a flower pot that was activated by tapping the base twice, and turned out to produce an immensely powerful laser beam.
    Hannah: The first time it was fired, nigh on a hundred people died, though it did get undone.
  • As a fun tradition, the Overguards serve dinner by bringing out an array of seventy-eight entads — cups, plates, bowls, cutlery — with assorted food-related effects, and leave it to the guests to figure out how to operate them. They range from creating homogeneous liquids, to keeping food at a perfect temperature, to creating a full meal that can only be eaten by taking sequential bites of everything in proportion. Mizuki has great fun with them, while Alfric has the advantage of prior experience and makes sure he gets a good combo. There's a mercy rule if someone just can't seem to get a decent meal, though.
  • While some magics are a learned skill (like wizardry) or can be acquired reliably (chrononauts are born only to two chrononauts), others are given at birth completely at random (like sorcery).
• Sword and Sorcerer: With her magic being powerful but very dependent on the environment, Mizuki tends to swing between killing most monsters herself, vs feeling like she's not contributing, depending on the dungeon. Alfric, on the other hand, is consistently at the front, effective against most monsters, and shielding the others, but sometimes just not capable of taking on something big.
• Taken for Granite: This is the effect of wearing a ring entad that the party finds in a dungeon. Fortunately, the effect ends as soon as the ring is taken off. Which makes it the perfect way to disable Lola and stop her from resetting the day.
• Team Pet: Lerial the herb dragon and her brother and sister. They're from the first dungeon eggs the party found and raised.
• Teleportation: There's a simple spell that allows for instant teleportation to the center of a hex. In addition, entads provide various styles of this, and they're quite valued by dungeoneers wanting to visit many dungeons in a short time.
  • Alfric buys a dagger that can transport the last person cut by it, to its location, once per day, along with quite a lot of carried items. They generally leave it in a temple at home, and then use it to get home from dungeons, figuring that if they need serious healing, that's the best place to land.
  • The party finds a wardrobe that opens a portal to a random (but vacant and safe) location within a selected adjacent hex, 66 times per day, so they set it up in Pucklechurch with a tollbooth. It becomes quite popular, to the point where Alfric has to raise prices to ensure it doesn't get used up too quickly each day.
  • Alfric's father can carve statues of people and then use a wand to make the original and statue swap places, over any distance. It takes a while to set up, but the statue can then be reused, and a block of wood is often easier to transport through other entads than a person is.
  • Magic doors are a recurring staple for entads, and common enough that the Overguard family was able to turn a normal house into a sprawling mansion just from the ones they kept for themselves.
  • Kell has an amulet that can bring him and a passenger to it, twice a day — and a slingshot that lets him accurately throw the amulet up to fifty miles.
• Unequal Rites: Wizards and sorcerers have a long history of enmity, which has a lot to do with wizardry being centered on gathering power and assembling magical constructs, while sorcery is about draining existing power sources and subverting existing constructs.
  "Yeah," said Mizuki. She pointed at his necklace, which was half-hidden by his long shirt. "Right there, I could undo that and force the energy — the pool — out into your chest. Pow. Through the heart."
• Utility Party Member: Clerics get some magic effects relating to their god. For example, a cleric of Garos can symmetricalize things (which includes restoring an arm if your party member lost it, or making an enemy lose another arm — the harmful use of these effects is called a hex). Clerics of Qymmos, God of Sets, can't heal or hex, being the only cleric utterly useless in a straight-up battle, but they could potentionally be useful in a dungeon to identify threats and valuables — and are straight up vital out of the dungeon, being the only accessible source that can reliably identify all there is to know about a given entad.
  • Successful enough dungeoneers tend to set up something called a counterparty, which is a party made out of utility party members, focused on providing the main party with transportation, resources, selling the loot, etc.
• Uterine Replicator: Entads that serve the function are incredibly rare and in demand. If Alfric's mother hadn't personally found six of them she almost certainly never would have been given access to them to gestate her own children.
• Walking Spoiler: The fact that Alfric is a chrononaut is pretty fundamental to his character and rather hard to talk around given the gender distribution of the party.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Entad abilities are random, and mostly not very useful.
  • Mizuki is excited about a spoon that can change its size and shape at the owner's will, but as Alfric points out, at most it will replace a few other spoons.
  • She also tries out a gauntlet that hums with power waiting to be unleashed, practically begging her to point her palm at something and let out a blast of power that will...turn the target bright green.
  • Hannah finds a handkerchief that can be tied around a scratch to stop it from bleeding, but it's not actually healed, and will start bleeding again as soon as the handkerchief is taken off.
  • Alfric and Mizuki test out a needle that gets you tipsy if you're poked with it, though she's more affected than he is.
    "Why would you poke yourself with the needle twice?" asked Isra.
    "Oh no," said Mizuki. "They don't seem to understand the word 'testing' anymore. Do you think that's what the quill did? Because you wrote down 'test', and —"
  • The lute that makes fingernails and hair grow longer is not only unhelpful, it actually gets hard to keep playing it due to the long fingernails.
    Hannah took a moment to clip her nails and left her hair long for the time being. Long hair wasn’t a particularly strong boon, but it felt like they had run across it a few times.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: After encountering a dungeon species with behavior that suggests possible sapience, Mizuki is uncertain about the morality of butchering their way through them all. Alfric indicates that the consensus on the subject is that there's not much that can be done about it; even if they really are thinking creatures (which isn't at all certain), they're nonetheless hostile due to the dungeon madness, and if left to their own devices they'll be unmade when the party leaves the dungeon.
  • Complicating things is that sometimes they're created as infants who aren't affected by dungeon madness and can be safely reared outside the dungeons. They're made as haphazardly as anything else from the dungeons, and tend to have large gaps in their natural cognition, with less than 1 in 1000 capable of functioning on their own as adults. Alfric has an aunt who abandoned her career as a dungeoneer to care for such people - called Bastlefolk - and even she admits it's a messy and complicated subject.
• White Mage: Clerics of Garos and Oyer are the most well known for healing, but all of the gods have blessings that can be leveraged for the purpose, such as Bixzotl removing scars by copying healthy skin, or Kesbin removing fluid buildups or toxins. There are few injuries a full team of clerics working together can't overcome.
• With This Herring: The Overguards have a very strong belief in self-sufficiency, so when Alfric sets out on his own, he doesn't get outfitted with much. He has a mildly magical sword, boots that slightly increase his stride length, and a small amount of money, but that's about it. Meanwhile, the family home and vault are filled to bursting with magic beyond most people's dreams. Alfric agrees with the philosophy, however, and feels like being loaded up with overwhelmingly powerful items for low-level dungeons would ruin the experience.
• Zerg Rush: Hordes of small animals or insects are one of the harder things to defend against in dungeons, but are thankfully rare. For all his preparations, Alfric's plan for dealing with an insect swarm is to simply abort and lose the dungeon. The party's first death is to a swarm of hundreds of tiny birds that can be crushed like mosquitoes, but have sharp enough beaks to penetrate thin armour and take a tiny bite from someone's face.

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