Shared lore across the roguelike, the deckbuilder, and the town sim. Canonical facts live in the Lore Bible — this page is the browsable version.
Three hundred years ago, the Order of the Pale Flame built the dungeon’s seal. Below the seventh level they found something ancient, patient, and very large — they called it the Dungeon Heart for lack of a better term. They placed the Sunstone — a fragment of daylight, solidified through methods that took the Order forty years to perfect — above it. Sunlight is the one thing the Heart cannot absorb or become; the light was the lock.
The mistake: sealing the Sunstone underground, away from the sky, weakens it slowly. The light bleeds into the surrounding stone over time. The Order did not account for this. Three centuries later, the seal is failing, the Heart is no longer dormant, and it has spent that time “testing the light.”
A second, older creation myth — who actually dug the crypt, predating the Order entirely — survives only as scattered scroll fragments. The two myths are deliberately not reconciled: the point of the older myth is that the Order’s story isn’t the whole picture.
Answer to neither of the other factions. Travel the seam between the surface’s dusk and the dungeon’s permanent one. Leave small warm stone discs as markers, speak in an untranslated cipher. Will trade with anyone; follow no one. Native to the Abyss (floors 10+) in a way no other faction is.
Three-centuries-old order of Keepers who built the original seal and have spent every generation since maintaining it, re-sealing it, and quietly failing to hold it. In practice: bureaucratic, guilt-ridden, still sending expeditions that don’t return, still filing reports about it. Their sigil is a sun-and-flame emblem.
Older than the Order’s charter, though nobody — including the Council itself — will say how much older. Ledgers, inventory tags, and stamped notations turn up throughout the deeper levels, cataloguing things nobody has since dared retrieve. Running hook: “Item 43,” an inventory entry that is never explained and never crossed off.
Guardians of the boundary between the sealed places and whatever’s below them. Where the Order seals, the Thornwatch watches. Rivals of the Order by slow institutional grudge, not open conflict — the Order seals what the Thornwatch believes should be watched, not shut. Mostly gone quiet by present day: patrols that don’t come back, boundary stones found toppled.
Below the ninth gate. Not built by anyone. Duskwalker territory. Where the Dungeon Heart’s influence is most directly felt.
Sealed alcoves, Pale Flame wards, Thornwatch boundary stones — broken. The oldest part of the dungeon that was built.
Worked stone, collapsed halls. Someone built here, long ago, and someone else came looking for them.
Where delvers are recruited, outfitted, and sent down — introduced by Delve: Between Descents. The name refers to a doorsill: the threshold the Thornwatch swore to guard. All four factions’ surface logistics converge here, but it has no named characters of its own — infrastructure, not a story location.
Cave and burrow. Feels like an accident of geology. Rats, bats, goblins.
First of the tier bosses, guarding the passage out of the Warren.
The thing the Sunstone was sealing in the first place. Final boss of the roguelike.
Guardian of the boundary into the Abyss.
Deep-Abyss guardian; the Order’s own records about it are incomplete on purpose.
A title passed to whoever survives to claim it, not a single fixed identity.
Warren-tier. The most common thing to die to, and the least dignified.
Warren-tier. Poison over brute force.
Warren-tier. Travels in mud-crowned little hierarchies.
Ruins-tier. Armor outlasted the person wearing it.
Ruins-tier. What’s left of someone who came looking, and didn’t leave.
Crypt-tier. Regenerates faster than most parties can commit to putting it down.
Crypt-tier. Old enough to remember when the Crypt was still called something else.
Crypt-tier. Mira Voss’s last warning was about these.
A surveyor by trade, source of the main Chronicle. Mapped 6–7 levels before “the geometry” stopped making sense. Died sometime after leaving the final Chronicle fragment beside the Heart — his arc watches his party die one by one, and ends with a note asking whoever finds it to finish what his order couldn’t.
Her note warns that wraiths “cannot be killed, only avoided.” One of several names that recur across scroll fragments and inscriptions without ever becoming a full character — a rumor more than a person.
Carrying the Sunstone to the surface, it dissolves into light and spreads outward — the seal is undone the way it should have been from the start.
The “complete the story” ending, worth a +1000 score bonus.
A mercenary, non-heroic alternative (+500 score bonus). Not everyone who goes down is trying to save anyone.