Gods, Worship and the Ascendency: Dungeon Crawler Carl Lore Guide

Grull’s name on a weapon

Carl’s war gauntlet improves his stats and attacks without taking away his bare-knuckle bonuses. Hitting a worshipper of Grull has a 1.5 percent chance of turning the target into the god. Mordecai says equine creatures are often associated with Grull, but Carl cannot reliably identify every worshipper by appearance.

Equipping the gauntlet does not make Carl a follower of Grull. He can trigger its dangerous effect simply by striking the wrong opponent. Mordecai also reminds him that a creature’s assigned place in the dungeon may have little to do with the person’s life before it.[1]

The Oak Mother and competing religious readings

Apito, the Oak Mother, has contradictory religious traditions. Mordecai says some portray winged men as her food, while others describe them as blessed or protected. The 201st follows the protective version, allowing skyfowl to serve its cult. Its members also believe in an approaching apocalypse and use that belief to justify sacrifices.[2]

The Oak Mother’s possible sponsor

Odette warns that Carl’s gauntlet could attract attention from Grull’s sponsor. She suspects King Rust is involved, but does not know for certain.[3]

Summoning Grull

During the Gore-Gore encounter, Carl’s repeated attacks with the gauntlet begin a countdown to Grull’s arrival. The boss dies before it finishes. In the later Iron Tangle battle, Grull successfully manifests at level 250 and is invulnerable.

The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook describes willing, forced and accidental summons, all of which require a physical vessel. Some gods are NPCs; others have divine bodies that wealthy sponsors can operate during the Celestial Ascendency. When Grull appears in Yard E, the announcement identifies his sponsor as Prince Maestro, whose face and voice he uses.

Mordecai explains that this involuntary manifestation lasts for the god’s level plus the host’s level: 250 plus 40, or 290 seconds. Another summoning can move Grull into a new vessel without waiting for a cooldown. After Grull kills the Mimic Rex in Yard E, Carl uses that rule to send him to the Abyss. Grull is displaced rather than killed.[4]

Nekhebit and Apito in an item’s history

A crossbow’s description tells the story of a worshipper who abandoned Nekhebit for Apito, the Oak Goddess. A curse fell on the worshipper’s descendants, explaining the weapon’s history and its guardian’s hostility.[5]

Worship is a choice with unequal obligations

After seeing Grull, Carl receives the option to worship him and declines. A later Cookbook entry describes Sinjin’s obligations to Kuraokami: daily offerings of ice and a ban on killing while wearing metal. Obedience earns boons, while disobedience risks a smite. Azin notes that this was Sinjin’s final entry and recalls another god making a crawler’s blindness permanent.

Worship contracts differ between deities. A crawler must understand the particular offerings, restrictions and punishments attached to the god they choose. The Cookbook’s authors also warn that a sponsor’s wishes can complicate dealings with the deity.[6]

Emberus is searching for Orthrus

Orthrus is a young gate guardian who belonged to Emberus’s dead son. His innocence protects his mind from the Nothing, but he can still be physically hurt. After he is released onto the bubble floor, Emberus searches in the wrong place and endangers crawlers in his efforts to recover him.

Carl becomes an Emberus worshipper so he can redirect a Celestial Grenade and summon the god to Orthrus. Emberus recognizes the dog and takes him away. Carl receives temporary invulnerability during the encounter, but Donut is badly burned by the heat.[7]

Carl’s Emberus contract

As an Emberus acolyte, Carl must not harm fellow worshippers or use Hellik-blessed equipment. He owes daily blood offerings, five percent of his looted gold and service on church quests. If he goes thirty hours without access to a temple, he can make the offering at his personal-space shrine.

Carl gains immunity to the Burn effect and a ten percent chance of inflicting it with physical attacks. He also receives double experience for killing Hellik’s followers, map markers for temples and worshippers, access to Club Vanquisher and a boon every five consecutive days of worship. Burn immunity does not protect him from every kind of fire damage.

Emberus orders Carl to identify his son’s murderer before attempting the eighteenth floor and to kill Hellik before reaching the twelfth. The god suspects Hellik, but Carl has not established who committed the murder. Refusing church quests can bring a smite.[8]

Diwata’s enemies and the damage done to a shrine

Destroying a shrine improperly weakens its deity. After Lucia kills worshippers, Carl separately desecrates a shrine and receives an Apostate Box. Its reward marks him as an enemy of Diwata’s church.

The resulting tattoo cannot be hidden by a cover-up sleeve. Diwata’s followers attack Carl outside Club Vanquisher, and some dryad settlements become dangerous for him to enter. The mark grants 25 percent extra damage against those followers, alongside another 25 percent from his Emberus allegiance. Removing it requires killing Diwata or her chosen. Safe-room rules still apply to anyone who attacks him there.[9]

Circe and Diwata

During a raid, the last hunter in the town reaches the temple and becomes Diwata’s vessel. Carl later learns that he was Vrah’s brother and was sacrificed to cure her. Diwata leaves without attacking Carl. Later, a sustained birth spell keeps her manifested longer than usual; Mordecai believes maintaining it reduces her strength and limits her other spells.

Diwata remains an immortal level 250 manifestation during the masquerade’s final cage fight. Donut uses Laundry Day to remove the armor from Circe, her mortal controller. Circe dies, while Diwata returns to the Halls of Ascendency.[10]

Conflicting divine histories

Samantha describes gods changing bodies and sex, and calls the children of gods and mortals demigods. She places Diwata within Apito’s indirect lineage. Katia questions whether Samantha’s rules about reproduction and registration apply equally to every species.

Imogen says Apito determines the masquerade’s guest list and punishes anyone who breaks its peace. The threat of divine punishment helps enforce the rules of the gathering.[11]

Odette sponsors Nekhebit

Odette announces that she has sponsored Nekhebit and will suspend her show to enter the Celestial Ascendency. Footage shows an egg being returned and the vulture-like goddess reascending.

Nekhebit enters as a principal deity rather than another god’s retainer. Odette’s sponsorship gives her a role in the contest, but the goddess can also appear without Odette personally controlling her body.[12]

Devotee benefits still leave Carl vulnerable

Baptism by Fire raises Carl to Emberus’s Devotee, the highest rank he can reach without becoming a Cleric or Paladin. His tithe increases to ten percent. He gains protection from ambient heat and lava environments, although direct contact with fire or lava can still hurt him.

Self-Immolation lets Carl produce and control Sheol fire for up to three seconds once per day. It uses divine grace instead of mana and remains dependent on his obedience to Emberus. The flames can ignite clothing and nearby objects, so using it can still injure him indirectly.[13]

Ysalte and Amayon

Amayon manifests through the snake Madre. The quest describes a demon lord displaced after his brother’s betrayal, and Samantha identifies him as a prince of Sheol. He resists Ines’s control enough to begin opening his own portal instead of casting the charm she wants.

After Louis kills Ines, Ysalte arrives to avenge her worshipper. Mordecai recognizes the feared Semeru goddess, and the system identifies her Nebular sponsorship. Her sponsor, Pontifex Ynotte, is not piloting her during the encounter. Her aura turns potions into vinegar when they are handled or consumed.

Removing Amayon’s outer shell reveals his level 600 true form. Ysalte’s Enslaved mark remains, however, and she plans to take him back to the Ascendency as her retainer.

Ysalte summons Paz during the battle. Katia equips and directs him in an explosive attack that kills the goddess and frees Amayon. Paz’s equipment is later identified as carrying the Bolt of Ophiotaurus, although the scene does not fully explain how the attack overcame Ysalte’s stated invulnerability.

Amayon offers information about Emberus’s son in return for help killing his three brothers. Carl supplies the souls and power he needs to open a portal, but Amayon still refuses to guarantee the crawlers’ safety. The spell’s effect on the floor creates their opportunity to escape.[14]

Worship connections and private temples

Carl learns that worship creates an invisible physical connection to a deity. A Bijou fairy carries it through the temple network. Most worshippers cannot touch or use this connection, but some light gods grant Travel the Path, allowing travel along it. A traveler can become trapped if the line breaks.

Theia and Khepri can bring prospective worshippers into private temples through recruitment rites. Because Carl sponsors Theia, he considers her a less likely refuge for Vinata. His pursuit leads to Khepri’s temple, where the god is present and Vinata has laid an ambush.

The temple allows summons that would normally be restricted on the floor. The battle spreads through connected realms and draws in more gods. Hellik denies killing Emberus’s son, accuses Apito of corruption and directs Carl toward Scolopendra.

Carl becomes a friend of Hellik’s church, ending its followers’ automatic hostility toward him. Emberus nevertheless orders him to kill one hundred Hellik worshippers before Floor Twelve, as well as Hellik himself. The temple battle also gets Carl permanently banned from Club Vanquisher and most temples.[15]

Divine items and compulsory sponsor attendance

Victory explains that divine items usually apply the strongest version of a shared proximity bonus rather than adding duplicate effects together. Relationships between specific gods can create exceptions.

During Faction Wars, a proposed ban on divine summoning fails. A different motion passes, requiring a summoned god’s sponsor to pilot the deity personally. Sponsors are automatically recalled and cannot send substitute drivers, exposing them to fights they might previously have avoided.[16]

Eris and the captive witnesses

Eris’s Bear Witness immobilizes exposed people who are susceptible to it. Carl resists through Mind Balance. Bring Forth the Witnesses disrupts long-range teleportation for an hour. The gathered witnesses cannot act but remain immortal during the ceremony; removing that protection before freeing them could leave them crushed or suffocating.

The war mages trade the Gate through the Midnight Market for four powerful potions. They use Hell-Kissed Conscription to eject Tami from Eris and seize control of Eris and Yarilo, with casters disappearing as the ritual is performed. Carl waits while a Flesher kills Tami, then destroys the resulting creature to stop her becoming a war mage. Eris survives her sponsor’s death.

In the epilogue, a visitor at an off-world waystation identifies herself as Eris and changes Zander’s tentacles. How she reached the waystation remains unexplained.[17]

Gods continue acting beyond a sponsor’s departure

Taranis protects Penelope, a pig whose curse makes certain NPCs fall in love with her. Anyone who harms her risks his anger. At this stage, Penelope is an ordinary animal rather than a sapient dungeon participant.

Eris offers Carl protection if he worships her and cooperates with Akuma. She wants the Ascendent throne. Her arrival triggers a random effect from the Scavenger’s Daughter patch, making a nearby temporary effect permanent. Imani later confirms that Jacobus is permanently summoned and can no longer be used as a card.

During Grull’s confrontation with Corcunda, Donut uses Laundry Day to eject the Maestro. Grull remains present and condemns Corcunda for losing faith, acting independently of the sponsor who had been driving him.[18]

The Scavenger’s disputed family

Rosetta recounts competing traditions about the old gods, exile and the World Tree. One describes Nekhebit as the Scavenger Mother of Mothers, with Apito, a son and a centipede among her children. Other traditions give Scolopendra different identities and portray the Scavenger’s Daughter as either an original mortal or a future usurper.

The conflicting stories leave the Daughter’s identity unresolved. Apito’s memorial crystal is another mystery: her death has not been established, yet the crystal exists. It remains uncharged and reacts in ways its owner cannot fully explain.[19]

The arena kills Emberus without solving his son’s murder

In the arena, Carl falsely tells Emberus that Khepri helped kill his son. He then removes his Emberus ring, renounces his worship and claims to have been the other killer. He still does not know who committed the murder; the accusations are meant to provoke a smite.

Donut uses Lucia’s Loop-de-Loop trap to swap places with Penelope. Outside beside Khepri and Taranis, Penelope gains temporary invulnerability from Kina’s kneepads. Inside Scolopendra, Donut shoots Emberus with the Bolt of Ophiotaurus, removing his invulnerability, and pins him with a Danforth bolt. Carl’s Lucky Shot redirects the smite to Penelope. Donut uses Puddle Jumper to take herself and Carl back outside.

Penelope appears to die at Taranis’s feet, but her invulnerability keeps her alive. Believing Emberus has killed her, Taranis strikes him with lightning before his fifteen-second vulnerability ends. Carl later retrieves Emberus’s memorial crystal. His former worship tattoos become raised scars called Mark of the Damned. The trap kills Emberus without solving his son’s murder.

Khepri’s proximity gives Carl temporary protection through the Scavenger’s Daughter patch, but Donut remains vulnerable. Eris’s arrival triggers another effect that swaps nearby crawlers’ inventories. Using Carl’s unfamiliar inventory, Donut selects the wrong biscuit and turns Scolopendra into a speaking crawler. Taranis takes Krakaren Prime away alive. Neither arena boss is killed.[20]

What the Ascendency can now decide

The parade presents Lamashtu as a mortal, subjugated god at half her former level. Her description says that killing her master would restore the powers she has lost, while another subjugation would transfer control of her to a new master.

After the arena, the AI opens the exit on Floor Eighteen and suspends collapse timers beyond Eleven until the Ascendency has a winner. Carl plans to prevent anyone from winning until the people still inside have escaped.

The survivors reach Floor Twelve. The AI says it controls the tunnels and former crawl systems and will continue expanding, with the Ascendency winner gaining power over it. Its possible contestants now include more than the usual deity sponsors. Eris warns that killing gods on Twelve will have real consequences. Tourist drivers remain protected within the original enhancement zone, but the AI says they will be vulnerable if they leave it. The contest has not yet been decided.[21]