Outside of a dungeon, my reaction to seeing a cockroach suddenly scurry across the room usually involved a panicked jump and a fearful yelp. Not only were they large and swift, but my mind knew them to be gross bugs that inhabited gross places. I felt strongly enough about said grossness that it helped drive my instinctual revulsion.
I had similar feelings for most any creature that scurried, actually.
With that background, you can understand why I was ecstatic to learn that my second dungeon gate ever was a “Roach Run.” Their perfectly linear structure–hallway, room, hallway, room–made them simple to crawl, and every monster was a giant cockroach. That was it. The whole dungeon was a repeat of the same kinds of encounters over and over.
Living in the northeastern corner of the country meant we didn’t have the climate for giant cockroaches to survive a winter outside of gates, so all of my experiences with giant cockroaches were secondhand, like videos from the southwest where they thrived and were regular pests like rats were for us.
Giant roaches dropped small mana crystals, but few crawlers were willing to pause to carve them open and extract the loot. There were too many bugs and too much chaos.
So a Roach Run became a run in the literal sense. All that mattered in this dungeon was getting it over with. I didn’t know what kind of gate this was until I arrived for the cull, by the way.
At 3 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, I stood on a bike path in front of a rustic door and frame. The captain for this crawl, a pudgy man in his 30s, handed out rolls of duct tape to the other six CDM employees there for the cull.
“Tape every sleeve, hole, and pocket in your clothes. You don’t want a roach diving in for an unscheduled game of pocket pool.”
“Dude, you’re kidding me,” a man my age complained. “This is a Roach Run?”
“Yep,” the captain answered.
“Fuck my life.”
That was the moment I and everyone else except for the captain and the guard learned what kind of dungeon gate this was.
Abandoning a run after you already committed would drop you to the bottom of the priority list for future voluntary culls, which meant even fewer XP opportunities. Megan told me she heard of people who were shadowbanned from culls for tardiness and last-minute cancellations. Nobody would say they were formally banned, but they also never got picked to go.
If cullers knew ahead of time what kind of gate this was, they would do what the original crawl team did when they stepped inside and saw it was a Roach Run: Turn right back around because fuck that.
Therefore, the CDM put volunteer cullers like me in a corner. If you didn’t suck it up and get through the Roach Run, you would suffer in different ways later.
“Anyone dropping out?” the captain asked, looking around at our mismatched group.
No one answered. I did, however, notice that the captain and the guard taped their sleeves and pants in two places, not just one like the rest of us. I scrambled to get my roll of duct tape back to follow suit. If they thought they needed two layers of defense against clothes-invading roaches, I might as well do three.
“Leave the bow,” the captain said to me when he saw my gear. “You’ll always have a bug to hit, and you’ll be swinging your arms to keep them off you. If you’ve got a sword and shield, maybe you’ll kill something in the process.”
When I was back with the group a few seconds later, the captain continued.
“This run will be a permanent pincer attack, so whether you're backline or frontline, you’ll be busy. Only one line moves at a time. The lead line will fight forward and then call when it’s time for the followers to close the gap. The lead doesn’t move again until the followers are in position. Kinda like an inchworm. Most of you here haven’t done a Roach Run, so here’s a big piece of advice: just keep fucking swinging and try not to think about how much farther we might have to go. Swing and move. Swing and move. Do that, and we’ll be out of here faster.
“Last thing: see these bags?” The captain held up what were essentially Ziploc bags the size of suitcases. “As soon as you’re out of the gate, strip down everything, put it in one of these, and seal it. Take as many bags as you need, but bag everything but your underwear. Stuff it all in a freezer when you get home, and leave it there for 36 hours. Guides will say 24, but roach eggs are resilient bastards. If anyone tells you 12, never let that person in your house because they’re a dirtball.”
There’s no light in a Roach Run gate, by the way. I wished the captain had mentioned that before we went in so I could mentally prepare. I had a headlamp like you’re supposed to, but the tone of the run felt far more nightmarish in the dark. With the limit in visibility, judging the distance we traveled wasn’t possible, and roaches endlessly pouring out of the shadows was unnerving.
The advice to keep swinging helped me through a few moments where I felt too overwhelmed to fight. Hearing those words in my mind kept my arms moving until the challenge passed.
The largest roach I saw was three feet long. Most came in around two and a half.
Normal-sized roaches coated the dungeon as well. They didn’t provide XP when you killed them, but they were even more active in the dungeon than terrestrial varieties, which is to say they were really fast and their bites hurt like a mother.
Eventually, we hacked our way to the boss room. The captain went in to fight it while the rest of us held our position and fought the horde. The boss was an even more giant cockroach. And fighting it looked like doing battle with an angry pickup truck that could fly, from the few glimpses I managed at least. A minute later, the captain was back in our formation, and we repeated the movement process all the way back to the gate.
As soon as we got outside, we stripped down and bagged our clothing and armor as instructed. I learned my lesson from the goblin gate and packed plenty of towels and wipes. I wasn’t remotely clean when I drove home, but I wouldn't have milky green roach guts soaking into my seat either.
Before I started my car, though, I checked my character sheet.
Dorion Carmino
Class: Archer
Level: 2
XP Progress: 7/200
Str: 4
Dex: 5
Con: 4
Int: 3
Cha: 3
Abilities: (none)
Traits: Ranged Accuracy
Spells: (none)
I gained a level. Me. My first level. I really needed to get home and shower at least twice before work, but I was too excited to wait.
I accepted the level up. That gave me three stat points to allocate and three archer abilities to pick from. Any ability I didn’t pick would remain available as I leveled, so if there were two abilities I wanted from a level-up, I could pick up the second when I gained another level later.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
I opened the unlock menu and read my options:
Power Draw
Class: Archer
Type: Ability
Cooldown: None
Duration: Instant
Holding a full draw with your bow for 3 seconds activates Power Draw, adding a +10% bonus to damage to that arrow. Holding any weapon other than a bow in a fully retracted position for 3 seconds adds a +5% bonus to damage for that strike. This ability does not affect accuracy.
Hold the Line
Class: Archer
Type: Trait
Cooldown: None
Duration: Perpetual
Remaining rooted in place for 5 seconds activates Hold the Line, adding a +10% bonus to damage and a +10% bonus to damage resistance. Bonuses expire when you move.
Improved Reload
Class: Archer
Type: Trait
Cooldown: None
Duration: Permanent
Gain a +5% bonus to the speed with which you nock an arrow. All other weapons gain a +2.5% bonus to the speed of their draw.
I froze. I had read half a dozen books on build-crafting to prepare for this very moment, but now that I could actually commit to stats and unlock choices, I worried my plan wasn’t the right one. These decisions were permanent, and I would get maybe fifteen of these decisions across my career if I was lucky.
I decided choosing now would be a bad idea even if I stuck to my original plan. I was coming down from the crawl, and I was exhausted. That was not the headspace for making grand life choices.
I closed my system profile.
When Nathan came home, he paused at the kitchen table. “Why are all the vegetables on the table?” he yelled.
I hopped off the couch and leaned into the kitchen. “I’m sorry. I needed freezer space. I’ll replace everything that goes bad. Promise.”
Nathan looked suspiciously at the refrigerator. “What’s in the freezer now?”
“Everything I crawled in this morning. Had my first ‘Roach Run’ today, and they told us to freeze our stuff to make sure we didn’t bring live dungeon roaches into our homes.”
Shivering involuntarily, Nathan said, “I don’t want to talk about cockroaches. I’m glad you’re safe, but I call ‘permadeath’ on this one.”
“Permadeath” was our conversational safe word.
We said "permadeath" when one of us wanted to drop a topic immediately and not bring it back up. In general, ragging on each other was the cornerstone of our friendship, but neither of us liked when a bit went too far or bullseyed a soft spot.
“Not a problem,” I replied. “I don’t want to talk about it either.”
“You’re home way earlier than usual.”
“They let me out an hour early because of what kind of run I had this morning.”
“That’s nice of them.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I put in our usual pizza order if you’re cool with that.”
“Aw hell yeah. That works for me.”
“And… Uhh… I leveled up.”
Nathan’s eyes and smile grew comically large. “Dude! Congratulations. I’m sorry if I put a damper on your celebration just now with permadeath.”
“No, you didn’t.”
He stepped forward and hugged me. “That’s so freaking cool. How different does a stat change feel?”
“Yeah... I’m too scared to pick something.”
“I’d be freaked too,” Nathan admitted. “There’s no penalty for waiting, right?”
I shook my head.
“Then wait, but I do want to hear about it when it happens. Want to watch something?”
“I do, but I can’t. I’m going to hit the build guides in my room. If I don’t hear the pizza guy, tell me. Do not pay for it again. Hear me?”
“Sure.”
I shut my door and sat down to replan my build from scratch. For people who don’t use the system very much, this is often a bit confusing: a class is the job or character type you get at birth. A build is the total sum of all your system choices.
The system usually offered the same general pool of abilities in varying orders for levels 1 through 10, so planning a build was commonplace. A single stat point is a big deal, and choosing an unlock is even bigger. In the case of some builds, a few minor differences in your choices can change how you crawl.
A stealth archer build, for example, required an early investment into dexterity to increase your chances of getting the right unlocks later. Yes, the pool was generally the same, but enough variations in options existed that relying entirely on random chance was a risk. For a few rare builds, stealth archer being one, crawlers had figured out the connection between the dex stat and the appearance of key abilities like Noiseless Step and Silent Arrow.
At any rate, I had four conventional build routes to take if I didn’t multiclass:
- Stealth Archer - Uses a Backstab-style bonus to deliver hard-hitting attacks from the shadows and is weak and slow in a slugfest.
- Dex Archer - Invests in everything speed so that their movements and attacks are a blur, but that comes at the expense of power.
- Power Archer - Stacks abilities exclusively to buff single attacks at the expense of attack speed and general mobility.
- Marksman - Does extreme damage with attacks delivered from an extreme range but is weaker in other situations because of the minimum distance requirements for some of their bonuses.
Dex and power archers were the most common paths for crawlers and had a little bit of room for personal preference and flair in ability choices.
Stealth archers and marksmen often struggled in dungeon crawls because the nature of the encounters didn’t fit their specializations. There was rarely enough freedom to properly stealth, and the sight lines were rarely long enough for the marksman-specific abilities to trigger. People who chose those kinds of builds typically went military or focused on hunting the wilds. Usually the former.
My original plan was dex archer because I liked the idea of being agile and hated the idea of standing in place for long periods of time, which was what power archer builds were based on. For example, Hold the Line increased damage if I stood in place long enough and was a prerequisite for more such unlocks later. I didn’t like the idea of making myself an easier target.
I knew I would never have the money to multiclass, but I couldn’t help but read through those builds as well. These were the most popular multiclass options for archers:
- Spellbow - Adds a caster class to increase an archer’s versatility and imbue their arrows with various bonuses and effects.
- Dexer - Adds the fighter class to turn the agility of an archer into the foundation for a hack-and-slash machine.
- Part-Time Assassin - Adds the assassin class to create an even more specialized stealth or power archer who incorporates poison buffs. The build was called “part-time assassin” because a pure assassin could unlock a lot of the same benefits if you started with the assassin class in the first place.
- Infiltrator - Adds the rogue class to further specialize in sneak attack damage bonuses and may take skills like lockpicking and acrobatics for utility reasons.
- True Stealth Archer - Adds the rogue class to fully develop the stealth skills of a stealth archer, gaining access to abilities not available in the base archer class.
- Hunter - Adds the ranger or druid class to unlock nature and animal-related abilities.
- Church Kid - Adds the cleric or priest class to make what was essentially a cleric who was exceptional with the bow.
Spellbow and hunter were both appealing to me. Using magic was just plain cool, and I liked the additional versatility a caster class would afford me. Hunter was a solid survival choice for both the dungeons and the wilds.
The B, A, and S-rank dungeons could be dangerously large at times, so someone who could navigate intuitively and more readily sense nearby monsters was incredibly useful. And the wilds were the wilds. Any nature-affiliated class had a big survival advantage if you intended to hunt beyond established borders. I did not intend to do that, by the way, but I liked having options when possible.
Reading through the multiclass variants made it hard not to be a dreamer. Objectively, I knew I wouldn’t have enough money to multiclass at level 10, even with the most optimistic perspective of my career prospects and financial management abilities. Yet, giving up on that idea now, at level 1, felt defeatist in a way I couldn’t stomach.
Admitting that I couldn’t succeed was the same as failing in my mind, so acknowledging that I wanted something like Spellbow and then not allowing myself to pursue it was painful.
After redoing the reading and looking at my options for most of the night, I was even less sure about what I wanted to do with my level-up.
Nathan ended up paying for the pizza, by the way. What an asshole.
