Hazard | Glowfic Constellation

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Parent Setting	Guiding Hazard (Manhwa)
Owner	red
Description	Sometime in the seventies, "dungeons" started appearing all over the world: black circular portals leading into dangerous pocket dimensions which contain (and occasionally release) monsters and kidnap people (sometimes via monsters, other times via magic), making them go through harrowing experiences of various levels of lethality. Dungeons have "cores", often but not always guarded by stronger monsters than their normal ones, and destroying a dungeon's core will also destroy the dungeon. If a dungeon isn't destroyed, it will eventually disappear, and then after some time it'll reappear somewhere else, more powerful and dangerous. At the same time, a small fraction of people started getting superpowers. Those people have been called "espers", and are often sent into dungeons to help rescue people and kill the dungeons. However, using powers causes espers to accumulate "backlash", negative effects that are in some sense the "opposite" of the esper's powers which increase in intensity and/or quality with increased power usage and which will, at the high end, kill the esper. The only way to fully get rid of accumulated backlash is by hanging out with another esper you're "compatible with", where by "hang out" we mean "physical proximity" and "touch" and "fluid exchange", in increasing order of effectiveness and efficiency. Compatibility is a function of how well the concepts behind the espers' backlashes "complement each other" or "cancel each other out", plus a small component related to how much you'd rather have the other person's backlash than yours, and another smaller component for how well you'd get along as people, at least theoretically. It feels nice to touch someone you're compatible with, even if you're not actively guiding each other in the moment, and nicer the more compatible you are and the more you're touching them. It doesn't feel nice in a sexual way, nor in an intrinsically addictive way, but rather in a generic "want more of this" way. Coupled with the fact that it gets rid of backlash, has a pretty strong psychological effect. Nowadays, there are institutions all over the world dedicated to coordinating dealing with dungeons and/or organising espers for whatever jobs they might be interested in doing. In-depth Details Dungeons Dungeon portals aren't transparent, they're black and fully opaque and you don't know what you're going to find until you're through. They're always mostly circular but the edges crackle in a red lightning-like effect which turns green when a dungeon's core has been destroyed. More powerful/older/repeat dungeons have bigger portals. Portals are floating above the ground, and the larger the portal, the farther up it is. When you step out of a portal, you are gently floated back to ground level. Unclear what happens when you step in, it has been Conveniently Offscreen. WiFi and other electronic signals can't go through a portal. If a cable is pulled through, signals will be interrupted at the boundary. Electronics will (usually) work fine once you're through, though. Cores have not been described onscreen. They tend to be basketball-sized objects and typically "easily" identifiable but what they actually are isn't known. There is a lot of variance. More powerful dungeons often have decoys of their core. Those aren't easily distinguishable from the true core, but precognition powers can give you a hint. Cores aren't necessarily physical; psychic dungeons will sometimes have psychic cores that can only be destroyed by psychic powers. Dungeons won't lock you in a room with no way to reach their core. The core might be difficult to access due to being underwater or in a lava pool or along the fourth dimension, but it will always be "possible to reach them" from the portal, for a certain value of that. Occasionally cores will be inside the dungeon's boss monster. After a core is destroyed, the dungeon will start to fall apart, but it won't immediately close. The exact amount of time that takes has not been onscreened and probably varies, but it's somewhere between 5 and 20 minutes. Dungeons are always "thematic". You'll have an abandoned castle-themed dungeon with zombies and skeletons, or a psychic plant-themed dungeon with dryads that eat your dreams, or stuff like that. Themes are always "memetically relevant" to humans. Monsters will be golems or centaurs or slimes or flying sharks, they will typically not be "extinct fish #1927 which looks exactly like a modern fish". They will be something you can write a story about. New/non-repeat dungeons will sometimes be inconsistent with their themes, or bad at applying them evenly and well. Once a dungeon has disappeared and reappeared somewhere once, it will usually have streamlined its vibe a lot based on what it's "learned" from its first go-round. Further reappearances tend to not change much more beyond that, though. The average dungeon is weak and boring, clearable by a medium-sized group of trained and armed non-espers. This is not known for sure in-universe but dungeons "feed on" emotions/"narrative situations". They are set up to cause those situations, and absorb "energy" from them. This is typically achieved by kidnapping people but occasionally just by things happening near a dungeon portal or its monsters. Each dungeon has an emotion/narrative situation that it feeds on of its own, they're not all looking for the same things. This individuality drives most of the thematic differences between them. Dungeons have a "range" from their portal that determines how much they can affect and where they can feed. They can also feed from things happening near their monsters, but monsters' feeding range is much narrower. More powerful dungeons have a wider range. Kidnapping can happen via monsters leaving the dungeon and physically dragging people to the portal, but sometimes people vanish from where they are, a portal appears under them, etc. Nightmare, the most powerful dungeon on record, kidnaps people by making them vanish from thin air, usually but not always while asleep. Dungeons will usually delay killing people so that they can feed on them. This can extend to preventing people from dying of something that should have killed them. For example, there is a dungeon that feeds on "people being cooked alive" and the emotions linked to that, and so the people it feeds on stay alive far beyond the point at which the burns ought to have killed them. It "costs energy" for a dungeon to appear, and it needs to at minimum recoup that cost before it can reasonably vanish. A dungeon that vanishes without being killed but that didn't manage to recoup that cost will usually die in "pupation" and never come back. For this reason, dungeons tend to favour places with high population density. They will not appear right near a farm with five people in it and no one else for miles around. A good rule-of-thumb is that at least one dungeon will appear almost every day in almost every city of more than 400 thousand residents (i.e. there are about 0.25 dungeons appearing per day per 100 thousand people). Since more powerful dungeons have a wider range they can feed/kidnap people from, they will occasionally appear somewhere more out-of-the-way to be more difficult to find. They have some insight into the world before appearing, and can "choose" where to appear to some extent. Their strategies vary, but since they feed on narratives, they will aim to appear places where they can make those narratives happen more easily, and kidnap people who are more affected by them. They get better at this over time, after reappearing a few times and trying things out to understand how to get what they need. Dungeons are continually kidnapping people over time. The more common/weaker dungeons will kidnap something like six people on the day they emerge and then about three more people per day for as long as they stick around (which, when they're not killed, will be about a couple of weeks). This implies that the expected number of kidnappings in the lifetime of the average person in the world is 1.25. Since dungeons prefer denser places, people living in big cities will probably be kidnapped multiple times in their lives. Dungeons cannot use the energy they "ate" immediately; they can only digest and metabolise it after they vanish to reform. Anyone who's inside a dungeon when it vanishes or dies is gone forever. Unclear what happens then. Dungeons don't stay around for very long. Two months is about the cap, with the typical range being between one and three weeks. After vanishing, it usually takes them at least a year to reappear. Not even Nightmare can reappear sooner than a handful of months after disappearing. Dungeons can have effects beyond what monsters can do. For example, a dungeon can passively give people near its portals hallucinations, or cause some emotional states directly. Doing so is usually not worth the cost, though; if they do that, it'll typically be to feed on something related or adjacent to the emotion, rather than the emotion itself. They can have non-Euclidean space, occasionally but not usually change their layouts live (the cheapest way to do this is by having "modules" that are periodically swapped around and reconnected, like the way The Binding of Isaac's levels are created), and so on. Occasionally materials from dungeons are useful and have magical properties or industrial applications. Some materials have "conceptual affinities" which can be used as batteries or conduits for espers' powers. Sometimes dungeons will have tech themes and those have influenced humanity's technological progress, both by directly producing bullshit tech and by providing tech that humans have been able to reverse-engineer. Dungeons have some measure of "agency" and "reactivity", but it's unclear if they are individually sentient/sapient or being controlled/puppeteered by something else or extension of the will of something else. Monsters usually have individual wills from their dungeons' but those wills are almost always aligned with their dungeon's goals. Occasionally dungeons puppeteer their monsters directly. Esper powers that can interact with minds directly will often detect minds in the monsters but there has been no verified record of someone identifying a "dungeon overmind" nor a mind inside a dungeon's core. When a dungeon dies, monsters outside it are depowered. Occasionally that means they die, fade away, or melt (such as for monsters that are golems or slimes or what-have-you), but occasionally that means that they become smaller, weaker versions of themselves. This has occasionally thrown out monsters that become docile (or at least non-hostile) and, sometimes, sapient. For example, a monster that was a giant winged venomous cat became a sapient winged housecat with no venom when its dungeon died. It did not have any clear memories from before its dungeon died, and it was able to speak the language of the place the dungeon was in in the accent of people from that place (but it was illiterate). Despite all of this, evacuation can often be a pretty bad idea. As an example of why, trying to evacuate the surroundings of Nightmare has made it quietly vanish and immediately reappear elsewhere in the world, and caused more deaths than average. Espers Approximately one in 50,000 people are espers. Esper parents are more likely to have esper children than baseline, but it's not clear by how much. It's not a huge amount, though, less than 1% conditional chance (plausibly less than 0.1%), and the powers aren't guaranteed to be as good as the parents', or good at all. People become espers between ages 16 and 23 (there have been like three people who got powers at age 24 and all of them had various reasons why that might not count, like being preemies). The median age of awakening is about 19, and the distribution is right-skewed, with awakening at age 17 being a lot more common than at age 21. That is often called "awakening" or "manifesting". Espers are all healthier, fitter, more symmetrical, and generally have better physical attributes than non-espers. In general, they are approximately as healthy as a person their age could theoretically be. They will also have slightly enhanced senses, enough to (for example) be able to hear the other side of a phone conversation reasonably clearly if the phone's volume is loud enough for a non-esper to be able to hear. Espers also often get unnatural "anime" eyes and/or hair. The colour will always be something that the esper will like having, even if they wouldn't have decided on it in advance or realised they'd like it. This is not known for sure in-universe, but esper powers are manifestations of a "conceptual kernel", and their backlashes are in some sense an inversion of that kernel. It is not always straightforward to know what this kernel is by just looking at the powers and backlashes. Those concepts do not need to intuitively match natural categories human beings can describe in few words. For example, a certain esper's conceptual kernel can be in the intersection of "self-control" and "cold" and "solidity", manifesting itself as a power to reinforce their body and to conjure and telekinetically control ice coupled with a backlash that makes them overwhelmed by "hot" emotions such as anger, impulsivity, and lust. Powers are completely random. Glowfic characters might often have ones that match their personality due to attractors and/or the authors just wanting them to, but in general there is no connection between a person's personality or circumstances and the power and backlash they get. As an immediate consequence of using their powers, espers accumulate "active" or "acute" backlash, which is the one with the symptoms most directly related to their conceptual kernel. Then, that active backlash starts to settle, over time, into "rest" or "chronic" or "delayed" backlash, which can include no or only milder versions of their active symptoms but always includes fatigue, pain, and general damage to the body. For example, the rest state of the backlash of the esper whose active backlash is "hot emotions" includes being "on a hair trigger", so even if they are not acutely backlashing right that moment, it is very easy to rile them up. As another example, an esper whose active backlash is "depression" settles into less severe depression even without guiding. Guiding will get rid of active backlash first, then start to work on chronic. Even if an esper never accumulates enough active backlash to be killed by it, sufficient amounts of rest backlash will kill them. The progression of symptoms may vary but the mental image of HIV, autoimmune diseases, or cancer is in the right ballpark. Backlash symptoms can be supernatural in nature, but usually only to a very modest extent. "Persistent low core temperature" is at the high end of how supernatural they can get. All espers can guide all other espers, but unless you're reasonably compatible with someone it can be really inefficient. Espers therefore can't actually be truly "incompatible", in that sense. However, if the backlash concepts of two espers are more like each other than unlike each other (e.g. an esper whose backlash is related to solidity and another whose backlash is related to loss of movement), touching them feels bad rather than nice, and people use the word "incompatible" to describe that even though they can still guide each other. In theory it is possible for an esper to be unable to guide another if their concepts match exactly. This won't actually happen naturally but e.g. AU versions of the same character with the same powers meeting would be as incompatible as it is possible to be, and thus not guide each other. Touching each other would also feel absolutely awful, in that situation. Active backlash symptoms get worse (in intensity and/or kind) the more backlash you accumulate in a short time. For example, the esper whose backlash is persistent low core temperature might get their temperature getting lower and lower. An esper whose backlash is losing movement ability will lose movement of more and more limbs, then potentially eventually move on to an inability to breathe. Backlashes will never leave permanent damage if they're managed properly (both via guiding or with mundane medical attention). Hypothermia is at the high end of how directly deadly a backlash can be. Something like "direct cell damage" or "cancer" would be too deadly to be a valid backlash. It is never necessary to use esper powers (as opposed to guiding) to properly manage someone else's backlash. Espers guide each other most effectively when their backlash levels match each other more closely. An esper that is currently carrying zero backlash will still be able to guide their partner, but less quickly and efficiently than if they had accumulated more backlash to match. This means that it is sometimes a good idea to use your powers while guiding. The "fluid exchange" element of guiding isn't just about sex, and other fluids such as blood also count. However, the guiding potency of body fluids falls very rapidly with time outside the body, with the best-case scenario for how long they stay useful being a couple of minutes. When espers awaken/manifest, they go through a week (on average) of really, really bad active backlash, which does not sublimate into rest backlash. It is often called "hell week", and will frequently be one of the worst experiences of an esper's life, if not the worst. Symptoms start accumulating and ramping up over about an hour, stay stable for the duration of awakening, then ramp back down to nonexistence. Guiding can ameliorate the symptoms but the amount of backlash the other esper would need to be carrying to actually be able to get rid of the symptoms altogether would be almost impossible to maintain/survive. It would also need to be continual, since as soon as guiding stops the symptoms would begin to accumulate again. In theory, if two people with perfectly complementary and maximally compatible backlashes are awakening at the exact same time, they could guide each other's symptoms away if they spent the whole week together. Extremely rarely, if someone who is carrying amounts of backlash sufficiently extreme to completely "eat" someone's awakening backlash meets someone who is going to awaken and who would be compatible with them, the person will immediately awaken and skip hell week, while the more senior esper will be immediately guided of that amount of backlash. Powers will come in all at once at the end of hell week. If the esper will have a new eye colour, it'll come in gradually over the week. If they'll have a new hair colour, it'll start growing that week but will not grow any faster than regular hair so might take a while to replace the prior hair entirely. By far the most important dimension of compatibility between espers is how well the concepts expressed by their backlashes complement each other. For example, the esper described above might be very compatible with someone whose conceptual kernel is related to "being a fire that can't be put out" and whose backlash is hypothermia. This may cause espers whose actual backlash symptoms look like they're not at all complementary to nevertheless be compatible, if they happen to be expressions of complementary concepts. Compatibility does not need to be symmetrical. It is possible for one esper to guide another much more than vice-versa. For example, someone whose backlash is agony would be well-guided by someone whose backlash is sensory deprivation but not vice-versa. This can make groups with more than two espers guiding each other in a rock-paper-scissors fashion possible. For example, someone whose backlash is being overstimulated could be added to the pair of espers above: overstimulus cancels out sensory deprivation, agony cancels out overstimulus, sensory deprivation cancels out agony. There is no such thing as a power that is always active in the background, costlessly; all power usage causes backlash. Some powers may be triggered reflexively, but that just means that the esper will be reflexively accumulating backlash. For example, an esper whose power is that no one can get to them in any way they don't want to be gotten to (so they can become selectively invisible to any senses, intangible, etc) may decide they cannot be reached by psychic powers and so whenever someone tries to use psychic powers on them they will start racking up backlash. No permanently supernatural effects can be created by esper powers. Any supernatural effects will necessarily eventually run out. Pemanently natural effects are possible, but can be pretty expensive. A conjured sword can stick around, but not a flaming one (unless it's just a regular sword coated in oil you set fire to). It's the difference between making something hover at eye level with teekay versus having placed it on a shelf at eye level. Not all possible superpowers are valid esper powers. In general, "pure utility" powers (like tech powers/tinkers) don't exist. "Biological tinker" powers extra don't exist. Panacea (from Worm) is not a valid power, and most possible versions of "Panacea-lite" powers also aren't. Healing powers do exist, but anything that goes too far beyond "just fixing" people will balloon in backlash cost and require intentionality and some detailwork. "Meta" powers that interact directly with other powers also don't exist. You can have a power interact with another indirectly, though. For example, "being immune to damage from powers" isn't valid but "being immune to fire damage" is even if that means you'll be immune to damage from an esper with fire powers. The power level of the setting is reasonably low; Lee Tae-gun is one of the five most powerful espers on the planet. General setting details The modern day of threads in the setting tends to be somewhere between the mid 2020s and the early 2040s, but usually not explicitly specified. The original continuity of the setting is in the ambiguously mid 2030s, with a fifteen-minutes-into-the-future vibe. When dungeons first appeared in the 70s, it was not obvious that that wasn't the end of the world. A large fraction of the population died, and it took a long time for humanity to get its shit together. This means that present-day humanity does not have the kind of world population that you'd be able to project from real life to that time. Most modern powerful repeat dungeons are from back then; nowadays humanity is much more on top of killing dungeons early and keeping them from repeating in the first place. Manhwa divergences This setting is based on a Boys' Love porn manhwa called "Guiding Hazard", but there have been very many changes from the source material. Setting elements that are the same The names of various characters and organisations: Lee Tae-gun, Min Woo-young, Kang Jaeha, Quasar Guild, Lucid Guild, and Nightmare. People manifest personal superpowers in their late teens/early twenties. Power usage accumulates negative side-effects known as "backlash". Guiding requires physical proximity and is improved by more/closer touch and fluid exchange. Portals to dungeons appear in random places and espers go into them to destroy them. Espers in Korea and Japan are organised into guilds. The general "fifteen minutes into the future" vibe and tech level. Setting elements that were modified Backlashes are not power-specific nor supernatural; instead, they are just a general cloud of malaise, pain, hormonal imbalances, and general damage, with a minimal amount of individual variation in how those express themselves. Lee Tae-gun's backlash is canon but is chalked up to hormonal imbalances. Espers don't guide each other. Instead, there are "guides", people whose power is specifically guiding espers and nothing more. Those also vary in power level and have "ranks" just like espers. Guiding compatibility still exists, but it's mostly ineffable (except for there still being a component for personal compatibility). Guiding potency is dictated almost exclusively by the guide's power level, and the "guiding people at a distance" effect is the kind of thing an S-rank guide can do and has nothing to do with their relationship with any given esper. There exist some very few people who have both esper powers and guide powers. "General utility" powers, such as e.g. creating tech out of dungeon materials, exist. Things that were worldbuilt on top of canon Various details about the tech level, including the way power batteries and automation of power usage (such as teleportation) work. Hell week. The internals of how guilds work. Everything about every country outside Korea and Japan, including things like the existence of agencies (as opposed to guilds). The impact of espers and dungeons in world history, including the fact that they appeared in the 70s and caused the collapse or near-collapse of society in many places.

Info

Parent Setting

Guiding Hazard (Manhwa)

Owner

red

Description

Sometime in the seventies, "dungeons" started appearing all over the world: black circular portals leading into dangerous pocket dimensions which contain (and occasionally release) monsters and kidnap people (sometimes via monsters, other times via magic), making them go through harrowing experiences of various levels of lethality. Dungeons have "cores", often but not always guarded by stronger monsters than their normal ones, and destroying a dungeon's core will also destroy the dungeon. If a dungeon isn't destroyed, it will eventually disappear, and then after some time it'll reappear somewhere else, more powerful and dangerous.

At the same time, a small fraction of people started getting superpowers. Those people have been called "espers", and are often sent into dungeons to help rescue people and kill the dungeons. However, using powers causes espers to accumulate "backlash", negative effects that are in some sense the "opposite" of the esper's powers which increase in intensity and/or quality with increased power usage and which will, at the high end, kill the esper. The only way to fully get rid of accumulated backlash is by hanging out with another esper you're "compatible with", where by "hang out" we mean "physical proximity" and "touch" and "fluid exchange", in increasing order of effectiveness and efficiency. Compatibility is a function of how well the concepts behind the espers' backlashes "complement each other" or "cancel each other out", plus a small component related to how much you'd rather have the other person's backlash than yours, and another smaller component for how well you'd get along as people, at least theoretically.

It feels nice to touch someone you're compatible with, even if you're not actively guiding each other in the moment, and nicer the more compatible you are and the more you're touching them. It doesn't feel nice in a sexual way, nor in an intrinsically addictive way, but rather in a generic "want more of this" way. Coupled with the fact that it gets rid of backlash, has a pretty strong psychological effect.

Nowadays, there are institutions all over the world dedicated to coordinating dealing with dungeons and/or organising espers for whatever jobs they might be interested in doing.

In-depth Details

Dungeons
- Dungeon portals aren't transparent, they're black and fully opaque and you don't know what you're going to find until you're through. They're always mostly circular but the edges crackle in a red lightning-like effect which turns green when a dungeon's core has been destroyed.
  - More powerful/older/repeat dungeons have bigger portals.
  - Portals are floating above the ground, and the larger the portal, the farther up it is.
    
    When you step out of a portal, you are gently floated back to ground level. Unclear what happens when you step in, it has been Conveniently Offscreen.
  - WiFi and other electronic signals can't go through a portal. If a cable is pulled through, signals will be interrupted at the boundary. Electronics will (usually) work fine once you're through, though.
- Cores have not been described onscreen. They tend to be basketball-sized objects and typically "easily" identifiable but what they actually are isn't known. There is a lot of variance.
  - More powerful dungeons often have decoys of their core. Those aren't easily distinguishable from the true core, but precognition powers can give you a hint.
  - Cores aren't necessarily physical; psychic dungeons will sometimes have psychic cores that can only be destroyed by psychic powers.
  - Dungeons won't lock you in a room with no way to reach their core. The core might be difficult to access due to being underwater or in a lava pool or along the fourth dimension, but it will always be "possible to reach them" from the portal, for a certain value of that.
  - Occasionally cores will be inside the dungeon's boss monster.
  - After a core is destroyed, the dungeon will start to fall apart, but it won't immediately close. The exact amount of time that takes has not been onscreened and probably varies, but it's somewhere between 5 and 20 minutes.
- Dungeons are always "thematic". You'll have an abandoned castle-themed dungeon with zombies and skeletons, or a psychic plant-themed dungeon with dryads that eat your dreams, or stuff like that.
  - Themes are always "memetically relevant" to humans. Monsters will be golems or centaurs or slimes or flying sharks, they will typically not be "extinct fish #1927 which looks exactly like a modern fish". They will be something you can write a story about.
  - New/non-repeat dungeons will sometimes be inconsistent with their themes, or bad at applying them evenly and well. Once a dungeon has disappeared and reappeared somewhere once, it will usually have streamlined its vibe a lot based on what it's "learned" from its first go-round. Further reappearances tend to not change much more beyond that, though.
- The average dungeon is weak and boring, clearable by a medium-sized group of trained and armed non-espers.
- This is not known for sure in-universe but dungeons "feed on" emotions/"narrative situations". They are set up to cause those situations, and absorb "energy" from them. This is typically achieved by kidnapping people but occasionally just by things happening near a dungeon portal or its monsters. Each dungeon has an emotion/narrative situation that it feeds on of its own, they're not all looking for the same things.
  - This individuality drives most of the thematic differences between them.
  - Dungeons have a "range" from their portal that determines how much they can affect and where they can feed. They can also feed from things happening near their monsters, but monsters' feeding range is much narrower. More powerful dungeons have a wider range.
  - Kidnapping can happen via monsters leaving the dungeon and physically dragging people to the portal, but sometimes people vanish from where they are, a portal appears under them, etc.
    
    Nightmare, the most powerful dungeon on record, kidnaps people by making them vanish from thin air, usually but not always while asleep.
  - Dungeons will usually delay killing people so that they can feed on them. This can extend to preventing people from dying of something that should have killed them.
    
    For example, there is a dungeon that feeds on "people being cooked alive" and the emotions linked to that, and so the people it feeds on stay alive far beyond the point at which the burns ought to have killed them.
- It "costs energy" for a dungeon to appear, and it needs to at minimum recoup that cost before it can reasonably vanish. A dungeon that vanishes without being killed but that didn't manage to recoup that cost will usually die in "pupation" and never come back.
  - For this reason, dungeons tend to favour places with high population density. They will not appear right near a farm with five people in it and no one else for miles around. A good rule-of-thumb is that at least one dungeon will appear almost every day in almost every city of more than 400 thousand residents (i.e. there are about 0.25 dungeons appearing per day per 100 thousand people).
    
    Since more powerful dungeons have a wider range they can feed/kidnap people from, they will occasionally appear somewhere more out-of-the-way to be more difficult to find.
    
    They have some insight into the world before appearing, and can "choose" where to appear to some extent. Their strategies vary, but since they feed on narratives, they will aim to appear places where they can make those narratives happen more easily, and kidnap people who are more affected by them. They get better at this over time, after reappearing a few times and trying things out to understand how to get what they need.
  - Dungeons are continually kidnapping people over time. The more common/weaker dungeons will kidnap something like six people on the day they emerge and then about three more people per day for as long as they stick around (which, when they're not killed, will be about a couple of weeks). This implies that the expected number of kidnappings in the lifetime of the average person in the world is 1.25. Since dungeons prefer denser places, people living in big cities will probably be kidnapped multiple times in their lives.
  - Dungeons cannot use the energy they "ate" immediately; they can only digest and metabolise it after they vanish to reform.
  - Anyone who's inside a dungeon when it vanishes or dies is gone forever. Unclear what happens then.
  - Dungeons don't stay around for very long. Two months is about the cap, with the typical range being between one and three weeks. After vanishing, it usually takes them at least a year to reappear. Not even Nightmare can reappear sooner than a handful of months after disappearing.
- Dungeons can have effects beyond what monsters can do. For example, a dungeon can passively give people near its portals hallucinations, or cause some emotional states directly. Doing so is usually not worth the cost, though; if they do that, it'll typically be to feed on something related or adjacent to the emotion, rather than the emotion itself.
  - They can have non-Euclidean space, occasionally but not usually change their layouts live (the cheapest way to do this is by having "modules" that are periodically swapped around and reconnected, like the way The Binding of Isaac's levels are created), and so on.
  - Occasionally materials from dungeons are useful and have magical properties or industrial applications.
    
    Some materials have "conceptual affinities" which can be used as batteries or conduits for espers' powers.
    
    Sometimes dungeons will have tech themes and those have influenced humanity's technological progress, both by directly producing bullshit tech and by providing tech that humans have been able to reverse-engineer.
- Dungeons have some measure of "agency" and "reactivity", but it's unclear if they are individually sentient/sapient or being controlled/puppeteered by something else or extension of the will of something else.
  - Monsters usually have individual wills from their dungeons' but those wills are almost always aligned with their dungeon's goals. Occasionally dungeons puppeteer their monsters directly. Esper powers that can interact with minds directly will often detect minds in the monsters but there has been no verified record of someone identifying a "dungeon overmind" nor a mind inside a dungeon's core.
  - When a dungeon dies, monsters outside it are depowered. Occasionally that means they die, fade away, or melt (such as for monsters that are golems or slimes or what-have-you), but occasionally that means that they become smaller, weaker versions of themselves.
    
    This has occasionally thrown out monsters that become docile (or at least non-hostile) and, sometimes, sapient. For example, a monster that was a giant winged venomous cat became a sapient winged housecat with no venom when its dungeon died. It did not have any clear memories from before its dungeon died, and it was able to speak the language of the place the dungeon was in in the accent of people from that place (but it was illiterate).
- Despite all of this, evacuation can often be a pretty bad idea. As an example of why, trying to evacuate the surroundings of Nightmare has made it quietly vanish and immediately reappear elsewhere in the world, and caused more deaths than average.
Espers
- Approximately one in 50,000 people are espers.
  - Esper parents are more likely to have esper children than baseline, but it's not clear by how much. It's not a huge amount, though, less than 1% conditional chance (plausibly less than 0.1%), and the powers aren't guaranteed to be as good as the parents', or good at all.
- People become espers between ages 16 and 23 (there have been like three people who got powers at age 24 and all of them had various reasons why that might not count, like being preemies). The median age of awakening is about 19, and the distribution is right-skewed, with awakening at age 17 being a lot more common than at age 21. That is often called "awakening" or "manifesting".
- Espers are all healthier, fitter, more symmetrical, and generally have better physical attributes than non-espers. In general, they are approximately as healthy as a person their age could theoretically be.
  - They will also have slightly enhanced senses, enough to (for example) be able to hear the other side of a phone conversation reasonably clearly if the phone's volume is loud enough for a non-esper to be able to hear.
  - Espers also often get unnatural "anime" eyes and/or hair. The colour will always be something that the esper will like having, even if they wouldn't have decided on it in advance or realised they'd like it.
- This is not known for sure in-universe, but esper powers are manifestations of a "conceptual kernel", and their backlashes are in some sense an inversion of that kernel. It is not always straightforward to know what this kernel is by just looking at the powers and backlashes.
  - Those concepts do not need to intuitively match natural categories human beings can describe in few words. For example, a certain esper's conceptual kernel can be in the intersection of "self-control" and "cold" and "solidity", manifesting itself as a power to reinforce their body and to conjure and telekinetically control ice coupled with a backlash that makes them overwhelmed by "hot" emotions such as anger, impulsivity, and lust.
  - Powers are completely random. Glowfic characters might often have ones that match their personality due to attractors and/or the authors just wanting them to, but in general there is no connection between a person's personality or circumstances and the power and backlash they get.
- As an immediate consequence of using their powers, espers accumulate "active" or "acute" backlash, which is the one with the symptoms most directly related to their conceptual kernel. Then, that active backlash starts to settle, over time, into "rest" or "chronic" or "delayed" backlash, which can include no or only milder versions of their active symptoms but always includes fatigue, pain, and general damage to the body.
  - For example, the rest state of the backlash of the esper whose active backlash is "hot emotions" includes being "on a hair trigger", so even if they are not acutely backlashing right that moment, it is very easy to rile them up. As another example, an esper whose active backlash is "depression" settles into less severe depression even without guiding.
  - Guiding will get rid of active backlash first, then start to work on chronic.
  - Even if an esper never accumulates enough active backlash to be killed by it, sufficient amounts of rest backlash will kill them. The progression of symptoms may vary but the mental image of HIV, autoimmune diseases, or cancer is in the right ballpark.
  - Backlash symptoms can be supernatural in nature, but usually only to a very modest extent. "Persistent low core temperature" is at the high end of how supernatural they can get.
- All espers can guide all other espers, but unless you're reasonably compatible with someone it can be really inefficient. Espers therefore can't actually be truly "incompatible", in that sense. However, if the backlash concepts of two espers are more like each other than unlike each other (e.g. an esper whose backlash is related to solidity and another whose backlash is related to loss of movement), touching them feels bad rather than nice, and people use the word "incompatible" to describe that even though they can still guide each other.
  - In theory it is possible for an esper to be unable to guide another if their concepts match exactly. This won't actually happen naturally but e.g. AU versions of the same character with the same powers meeting would be as incompatible as it is possible to be, and thus not guide each other. Touching each other would also feel absolutely awful, in that situation.
- Active backlash symptoms get worse (in intensity and/or kind) the more backlash you accumulate in a short time.
  - For example, the esper whose backlash is persistent low core temperature might get their temperature getting lower and lower. An esper whose backlash is losing movement ability will lose movement of more and more limbs, then potentially eventually move on to an inability to breathe.
  - Backlashes will never leave permanent damage if they're managed properly (both via guiding or with mundane medical attention).
    
    Hypothermia is at the high end of how directly deadly a backlash can be.
    
    Something like "direct cell damage" or "cancer" would be too deadly to be a valid backlash.
  - It is never necessary to use esper powers (as opposed to guiding) to properly manage someone else's backlash.
- Espers guide each other most effectively when their backlash levels match each other more closely. An esper that is currently carrying zero backlash will still be able to guide their partner, but less quickly and efficiently than if they had accumulated more backlash to match. This means that it is sometimes a good idea to use your powers while guiding.
- The "fluid exchange" element of guiding isn't just about sex, and other fluids such as blood also count. However, the guiding potency of body fluids falls very rapidly with time outside the body, with the best-case scenario for how long they stay useful being a couple of minutes.
- When espers awaken/manifest, they go through a week (on average) of really, really bad active backlash, which does not sublimate into rest backlash. It is often called "hell week", and will frequently be one of the worst experiences of an esper's life, if not the worst.
  - Symptoms start accumulating and ramping up over about an hour, stay stable for the duration of awakening, then ramp back down to nonexistence.
    
    Guiding can ameliorate the symptoms but the amount of backlash the other esper would need to be carrying to actually be able to get rid of the symptoms altogether would be almost impossible to maintain/survive. It would also need to be continual, since as soon as guiding stops the symptoms would begin to accumulate again.
    
    In theory, if two people with perfectly complementary and maximally compatible backlashes are awakening at the exact same time, they could guide each other's symptoms away if they spent the whole week together.
    
    Extremely rarely, if someone who is carrying amounts of backlash sufficiently extreme to completely "eat" someone's awakening backlash meets someone who is going to awaken and who would be compatible with them, the person will immediately awaken and skip hell week, while the more senior esper will be immediately guided of that amount of backlash.
  - Powers will come in all at once at the end of hell week.
  - If the esper will have a new eye colour, it'll come in gradually over the week. If they'll have a new hair colour, it'll start growing that week but will not grow any faster than regular hair so might take a while to replace the prior hair entirely.
- By far the most important dimension of compatibility between espers is how well the concepts expressed by their backlashes complement each other.
  - For example, the esper described above might be very compatible with someone whose conceptual kernel is related to "being a fire that can't be put out" and whose backlash is hypothermia.
  - This may cause espers whose actual backlash symptoms look like they're not at all complementary to nevertheless be compatible, if they happen to be expressions of complementary concepts.
- Compatibility does not need to be symmetrical. It is possible for one esper to guide another much more than vice-versa.
  - For example, someone whose backlash is agony would be well-guided by someone whose backlash is sensory deprivation but not vice-versa.
  - This can make groups with more than two espers guiding each other in a rock-paper-scissors fashion possible.
    
    For example, someone whose backlash is being overstimulated could be added to the pair of espers above: overstimulus cancels out sensory deprivation, agony cancels out overstimulus, sensory deprivation cancels out agony.
- There is no such thing as a power that is always active in the background, costlessly; all power usage causes backlash. Some powers may be triggered reflexively, but that just means that the esper will be reflexively accumulating backlash.
  - For example, an esper whose power is that no one can get to them in any way they don't want to be gotten to (so they can become selectively invisible to any senses, intangible, etc) may decide they cannot be reached by psychic powers and so whenever someone tries to use psychic powers on them they will start racking up backlash.
- No permanently supernatural effects can be created by esper powers. Any supernatural effects will necessarily eventually run out.
  - Pemanently natural effects are possible, but can be pretty expensive. A conjured sword can stick around, but not a flaming one (unless it's just a regular sword coated in oil you set fire to). It's the difference between making something hover at eye level with teekay versus having placed it on a shelf at eye level.
- Not all possible superpowers are valid esper powers.
  - In general, "pure utility" powers (like tech powers/tinkers) don't exist.
    
    "Biological tinker" powers extra don't exist. Panacea (from Worm) is not a valid power, and most possible versions of "Panacea-lite" powers also aren't.
    
    Healing powers do exist, but anything that goes too far beyond "just fixing" people will balloon in backlash cost and require intentionality and some detailwork.
  - "Meta" powers that interact directly with other powers also don't exist.
    
    You can have a power interact with another indirectly, though. For example, "being immune to damage from powers" isn't valid but "being immune to fire damage" is even if that means you'll be immune to damage from an esper with fire powers.
  - The power level of the setting is reasonably low; Lee Tae-gun is one of the five most powerful espers on the planet.
General setting details
- The modern day of threads in the setting tends to be somewhere between the mid 2020s and the early 2040s, but usually not explicitly specified. The original continuity of the setting is in the ambiguously mid 2030s, with a fifteen-minutes-into-the-future vibe.
  - When dungeons first appeared in the 70s, it was not obvious that that wasn't the end of the world. A large fraction of the population died, and it took a long time for humanity to get its shit together. This means that present-day humanity does not have the kind of world population that you'd be able to project from real life to that time.
  - Most modern powerful repeat dungeons are from back then; nowadays humanity is much more on top of killing dungeons early and keeping them from repeating in the first place.

Manhwa divergences

This setting is based on a Boys' Love porn manhwa called "Guiding Hazard", but there have been very many changes from the source material.

Setting elements that are the same
- The names of various characters and organisations: Lee Tae-gun, Min Woo-young, Kang Jaeha, Quasar Guild, Lucid Guild, and Nightmare.
- People manifest personal superpowers in their late teens/early twenties.
- Power usage accumulates negative side-effects known as "backlash".
- Guiding requires physical proximity and is improved by more/closer touch and fluid exchange.
- Portals to dungeons appear in random places and espers go into them to destroy them.
- Espers in Korea and Japan are organised into guilds.
- The general "fifteen minutes into the future" vibe and tech level.
Setting elements that were modified
- Backlashes are not power-specific nor supernatural; instead, they are just a general cloud of malaise, pain, hormonal imbalances, and general damage, with a minimal amount of individual variation in how those express themselves. Lee Tae-gun's backlash is canon but is chalked up to hormonal imbalances.
- Espers don't guide each other. Instead, there are "guides", people whose power is specifically guiding espers and nothing more.
  - Those also vary in power level and have "ranks" just like espers.
  - Guiding compatibility still exists, but it's mostly ineffable (except for there still being a component for personal compatibility).
  - Guiding potency is dictated almost exclusively by the guide's power level, and the "guiding people at a distance" effect is the kind of thing an S-rank guide can do and has nothing to do with their relationship with any given esper.
  - There exist some very few people who have both esper powers and guide powers.
- "General utility" powers, such as e.g. creating tech out of dungeon materials, exist.
Things that were worldbuilt on top of canon
- Various details about the tech level, including the way power batteries and automation of power usage (such as teleportation) work.
- Hell week.
- The internals of how guilds work.
- Everything about every country outside Korea and Japan, including things like the existence of agencies (as opposed to guilds).
- The impact of espers and dungeons in world history, including the fact that they appeared in the 70s and caused the collapse or near-collapse of society in many places.