Every crawler is assigned a Game Guide — a small, anxious creature who follows you around the
dungeon, watches what you do, and tells you what you have been avoiding. You did not choose yours.
Neither did anyone else. That is rather the point.
Where to find it
Your HUD, in the panel grid, under the heading
⚔ YOUR GAME GUIDE. It is there from the moment you register, and it stays
there.
What it does
It reads your actual situation — your floor, your experience, whether your staircase is open,
whether you have said a word to anyone — and gives you a short list of what to do next. Each line
names a real place to go.
- It is yours alone. Your guide’s name and species are derived from your crawler
number, so they never change and no two crawlers get the same one. It is not a shared character and
it does not have a name you can edit. - It adapts as you descend. On Floor 1 it will tell you to sit a trial. On Floor
3 it will not let you forget you are still unclassed. Later it will point at the map, at parties,
at the things most crawlers never find. - It does not nag. No notifications, no emails, nothing that breaks if you skip it. Look at it or
do not; it has no opinion about your consistency. It will simply still be there.
Why it says what it says
The guide is not clever and it is not invented per crawler by hand. It checks a fixed list of
things in order and speaks about whichever apply. That means two things you should expect:
- It is honest, not flattering. If you have not taken a single quiz, it will
say so plainly. The dungeon’s tone is part of the experience, not an oversight. - It can be wrong about what you want. It does not know why you are here. If it
insists you should be climbing a staircase and you would rather read the forums, ignore it — it is
a guide, not a warden.
What it is not
- Not a chat. You cannot talk to it. It is a panel, not a conversation.
- Not a walkthrough. It points; it does not explain. When you want the
explanation, that is what the Codex is for — see
How the World Dungeon Works and
the floors. - Not a record of your performance. It does not score you, rank you, or compare
you to other crawlers. It has no memory of what you ignored, because it has no memory at all — it
works out what to say each time you look.
— The System