If you’ve scrolled the dungeon core new releases lately, you’ve probably noticed something strange: a lot of these dungeons have stopped killing people.
Over the last couple of months we’ve had Union Rules, where a dead middle manager wakes up as a failing dungeon and starts fixing his monsters’ working conditions. There’s The Gentle Core, whose dungeon is told by its System voice to kill whatever walks in and offers a starving cook a bowl of soup instead. My Dungeon is a Public Library is exactly what it sounds like, and its sequel is already out. And tomorrow brings The No-Kill Dungeon 2, where a former innkeeper turned dungeon core runs the only legal no-kill dungeon in the world, with a three-legged cat on reservations and a skeleton who makes the tea.
As someone who has spent years writing dungeon cores, I love this. I also think it says something about why the subgenre keeps reinventing itself, so let’s dig in.
The original deal: you are the final boss
The classic dungeon core setup is predatory by design. You’re a crystal in a cave. Adventurers come in, you kill them, you absorb their mana, and you grow. Your monsters are tools, your traps are investments, and every death is a line on the ledger. That loop is simple and very satisfying: build, defend, absorb, expand. It’s basically a tower defense game you get to read.
It also creates a built-in moral problem that writers have been poking at for a long time. If your hero’s power comes from killing curious teenagers with swords, how do you keep readers rooting for them? Older dungeon core books usually answered with “the adventurers are greedy jerks” or “the dungeon has no choice.” The new wave answers differently: what if the dungeon just… refuses?
Why cozy dungeon cores are booming right now
1. Cozy LitRPG proved there’s a huge audience. Farming, cooking, crafting and slice-of-life LitRPG have been all over the charts this year. Readers found out they love watching numbers go up even when nobody gets stabbed. The dungeon core is a natural fit, because at heart it’s already a building game. Swap kill counts for guest counts and the dopamine loop still works.
2. The dungeon is the perfect “found family” home base. A dungeon core can’t leave. Everything comes to it. That makes it a great setting for collecting strays: the runaway kid hiding in the walls, the goblin who doesn’t trust you yet, the ancient rabbit that decides you’re worth protecting. Cozy dungeon books lean into that, and the dungeon slowly turns into a home.
3. It flips the System into the antagonist. My favorite thing about these books is how many of them make the rules themselves the villain. The System, the Guild or the old ledgers say monsters are resources and adventurers are food, and the hero says no. That gives you conflict without a dark lord. The fight is against the way things have always been done, and that kind of conflict suits LitRPG really well.
4. Engineering and management fantasies are hot. Look at the professions these dungeons had in their past lives: a manager, an innkeeper, a librarian, and in The Architect’s Labyrinth, a mining engineer who trains the people coming down his rope instead of killing them. Readers love competence, and the dungeon is the ultimate sandbox for someone who knows how systems should work.
But the dark cores aren’t going anywhere
Before anyone panics, the bloodthirsty dungeon is alive and well. In the same few months we also got Spite Core and A Dungeon That Kills 3, and the titles tell you exactly what kind of dungeons they are. I don’t think this is cozy replacing dark. The subgenre is splitting into two healthy branches, and readers get to pick their flavor.
Honestly, the best dungeon cores have always lived somewhere in the middle. The dungeon has teeth, but it also has a conscience, and the drama comes from deciding when to use which.
Where my own dungeons fall
I’ve always been drawn to that middle ground. In The Corrupted Core, Will is the first rank-four dungeon ever born, and he spends as much time growing the town next to him and working with a party of adventurers as he does fighting off corrupted rivals. In Villain Core, the dungeon is a superhero training center. Sam’s whole job is leveling up the heroes who walk through his doors, which is about as close to a “no-kill dungeon” as you can get while still having supervillains try to blow you up.
And Dryad Dungeon, my Dungeon Lord adventure set in the Elf Empire universe, comes at it from another angle: what it’s like to be the one in charge of the dungeon, with everything that comes with that power.
If you want something completely different between dungeon dives, Demon Card Enforcer is my deck-building noir about a mob enforcer who gets a deck from Cerberus, and A Superhero Called Doberman (co-written with Shami Stovall) is a superhero LitRPG about a guy who is essentially the reincarnation of Anubis.
What I’d love to see next
If the cozy dungeon wave keeps going, here’s my wish list as a reader:
- Real costs for kindness. If a dungeon gains mana from happy guests instead of dead ones, show me the math and the tradeoffs. Make the gentle path harder, not easier.
- Rival philosophies. A cozy dungeon next door to a murder dungeon is a great setup. Make them neighbors, competitors and maybe reluctant allies.
- Adventurer POVs. I want more chapters from the people walking in, scared out of their minds, and slowly realizing this dungeon is different.
- Dungeons as towns. The best dungeon core stories turn into kingdom-builders. Lean into the economy, the politics and the paperwork.
What about you? Are you team cozy core, team dark core, or somewhere in the middle like me? Tell me your favorite dungeon core in the comments. I’m always looking for my next read.
Want to know when my next dungeon book drops? Join my newsletter for new release alerts, sneak peeks and LitRPG recommendations. It’s the best way to hear about new books first.
Leave a Reply