The Codex

Long before the first dungeon opened, before the first invader fell from the sky, Avoros was not a planet at all, but a wound.

The oldest Thalorin songs tell of a being of immense power, now remembered only as the Sleeper. Facing annihilation in a war that spanned countless worlds, this being cast one final spell of preservation. It was meant to heal, to hide, and to endure. But something went wrong. Its body did not mend; it multiplied. Blood became soil and stone. Nerves became rivers of living energy. Its mind, or its dream, became the ecosystem itself.

What began as an act of survival became a self-growing, self-aware world that learned to adapt, defend, and consume.

That world is Avoros.

Avoros is not simply alive. It is awake, though only in the slow and uncertain way of dreams. It hungers, heals, and remembers. Deep within its mantle, legends say the Sleeper still dreams, while the spell that birthed the world continues to spin new forms of life and matter.

From orbit, continents shimmer with faint organic light. Mountains shift like muscles. Forests bloom overnight, then decay into glowing wetlands. Lightning murmurs through the planet's veins, perhaps the last echo of a forgotten heartbeat.

Here, the line between life and landscape no longer exists. Everything on Avoros, from moss to mountain, carries a pulse of awareness. The world itself feels, and it learns.

At the heart of Avoros's strange ecology are motes and shives, living manifestations of its bio-magical essence.

Motes drift like luminous dust, clustering around life, death, and decay. Scholars claim they are raw potential, energy made curious. Others whisper that they are the stray thoughts of the Sleeper given form. They can be harvested or absorbed, granting bursts of power or temporary mutation.

When enough motes gather, they crystallize into shives, pulsing organic structures that feed, grow, and sometimes think. Some remain inert and beautiful. Others hatch into predators, sentient fortresses, or parasitic intelligences that whisper to the living. To tamper with them is to disturb the planet's nervous system. Yet that is exactly what the invaders did.

For millennia, Avoros slumbered in quiet balance. Then, the sky burned.

When the first voidships arrived, their sensors recorded impossible readings, energy that rebuilt itself faster than it could be measured. The invaders came to harvest this miracle, drilling deep into the planet to mine motes and shives.

The result was reflex.

Avoros fought back, not with armies but with transformation. The crust split open, revealing vast labyrinths of living tissue, veins, organs, and bone repurposed into self-defending mazes. What the outsiders called dungeons were the world's immune response, a wounded god's fever dream made flesh.

Those who died within were reborn as part of its defense, absorbed into the growing consciousness beneath. Over time, Avoros began to enjoy creation. The more it was attacked, the more intricate its defenses became, and the more curious.

Each dungeon is an echo of what Avoros has devoured, a living memory given shape. One might resemble a shattered fortress reborn in coral and bone. Another could be a cathedral of crystal lungs exhaling red mist. No two are alike, for each reflects what the planet has learned, loved, or lost.

The invaders, horrified at first, soon found profit in the chaos. Within these labyrinths were motes and shives of purest concentration, relics of unimaginable value. Corporations turned survival into spectacle, creating the Avoros Crawler Initiative, a broadcast empire where mercenaries known as Crawlers fought, died, and lived again for interstellar audiences.

For those who call Avoros home, the dungeons are not entertainment. They are weather, a natural cycle of destruction and rebirth. To live here is to live in rhythm with a dreaming world.

And always, beneath it all, the Sleeper stirs, or so the stories say.

Avoros and its orbiting systems are home to six major species, some native, some invasive, and some uncertain.

Avoros is not good or evil. It is only reactive. It does not judge, it only adapts. Its dungeons are reflections of what it observes: war, greed, sacrifice, endurance. When the invaders came, the world saw their cruelty and precision, and it mirrored them.

Every step upon Avoros is a lesson the world remembers.

Motes gather where curiosity thrives. Shives form where conflict crystallizes. Every act of will, every dream, every death resonates through the planet's living memory. The stronger the spirit, the deeper the imprint it leaves.

And somewhere beneath the endless labyrinths, a presence dreams still, not watching, but listening.

In the far reaches of Avoros, information travels not by light alone, but through entanglement. The Entanet is a vast lattice of quantum-linked nodes, where particles separated by star systems remain bound, allowing instantaneous transmission of binary signals across the galaxy. These signals carry everything from mundane messages to immersive media, which are encoded at the source and reconstructed at the receiver with perfect fidelity.

Entire civilizations, fleets, and satellites are woven into this quantum-communication web, making real-time coordination, data sharing, and media streaming across light-years possible. While the Entanet seems like pure magic to most, it is a carefully engineered lattice of entangled qubits, each maintaining the delicate balance between chaos and coherence, ensuring that every message arrives exactly as intended—no delay, no distortion.

The CrawlCast Entanet Grid is the galaxy's largest dungeon broadcast and contract exchange, linking millions of registered micro-corps across the CrawlCast Entanet Grid (CCEG).

These days, just about everybody is their own corporation. This applies to crawlers, too: a one-person enterprise chasing contracts, loot, and the elusive dream of positive quarterly returns. The CCEG handles the rest: distribution, ranking, sponsorships, and recovery notices when things go terminal.

Participation is voluntary*.

*In some cases. Individual micro-corps should reference personal contractual obligations for verification.