The Origin of the Crawl
The closest the series comes to explaining why the crawl exists, lectured by Circe Took at CrawlCon: long ago the original council nations accidentally tripped the “primal engines,” setting off a chain reaction that overpopulated the galaxy with biological overgrowth and scattered primal elements across pre-seeded worlds. The dungeon crawls became the mechanism to collect those primal elements and beat back the overgrowth, and the Hive, foremost at reverse-engineering primal technology, won the right to field-test macro-AI-controlled enhancement zones, which a Syndicate subcommittee then formalized. Circe frames the Indigenous Species Protection Act (which shields seeded-world natives) as a threat to all life; the historian Sydnee scoffs at her version.
Book 5 appearances
- Chapter 33 — Circe Took’s CrawlCon lecture: the council nations tripped the primal engines, overpopulating the galaxy; the crawls collect the scattered primal elements and cull the overgrowth.
- Chapter 38 — Edict gives the dark version: “finding the stars was the worst thing that ever happened to my people”, expansion to the point of oblivion. The primals understood too late; the kua-tin call this slow doom the “Great Consensus.”
Related entries
- The Syndicate (Character)
- The Dark Hive (Circe’s Mantises) (Character)
- Circe Took (Character)
- CrawlCon (Event)
- Edict (Character)
Browse
- All Dungeon Lore & Know-How
- Everything debuting in Book 5, Chapter 33
- All of The Butcher's Masquerade