The Butcher's Masquerade characters

Appears from the start

Entering the sixth floor, the Hunting Grounds, where off-world trophy hunters may legally stalk crawlers, Carl upgrades his class to Agent Provocateur and makes good on his pledge to hunt the hunters instead. Armed with the Ring of Divine Suffering, which converts marked kills into raw stats, he opens the floor with a massacre and spends it walking the line between strategist and berserker, all while lawyering the game's own bureaucracy through his new attorney.

Also known as Donut

Appears from the start

Carl's talking Persian cat and party leader, saddled this floor with the Legendary Diva class, whose singing-based spells collide with the fact that she cannot sing. Undeterred, she conquers towns by municipal politics, renames one Point Mongo, enters the floor-end gala's talent show and pet contest, and quietly plays a deeper political game with the crawl's alien owners than even Carl realizes.

First appears in chapter 2

Donut's bound manager, this floor compressed into a tiny, huggable pocket-bear body. His warnings, especially about the addictive Ring of Divine Suffering, and his long memory of the game's history anchor the party as the floor's politics turn lethal.

Appears from the start

Donut's full-grown pet dinosaur and mount, entering a floor that, for once, is home to wild packs of his own kind. As devoted to Donut and as enthusiastically violent as ever.

Also known as Katia Grim

Appears from the start

The party's doppelganger and top-ten crawler, entering the Hunting Grounds intent on shielding Hekla's former Daughters from Eva, a mission she knows will eventually take her out from under Carl's shadow and onto a path of her own.

First appears in chapter 5

A gentle giant of a crawler, an older Romanian woman who fights alongside her goat Prepotente. Turned into a vampire during the floor's chaos, she becomes the unwilling root of a spreading curse, and the way she chooses to end it becomes one of the book's defining tragedies.

First appears in chapter 5

Miriam Dom's companion: a talking goat and one of the crawl's most powerful and strangest competitors, devoted to Miriam with a child's totality. The floor's events push him toward both his greatest feats and his breaking point.

First appears in chapter 10

A mantis huntress of the Hive and one of the most lethal trophy hunters ever to enter the Hunting Grounds, collecting crawler heads as trophies. She marks Carl and Donut as her personal prey, and her contempt for her victims makes her the floor's most intimate enemy.

Also known as Tsarina Signet

First appears in chapter 13

The tattooed half-naiad Elite from the third floor, returned leading an alliance of were-kin and outcasts. Her father the high elf king is dead, her mother was murdered by naiad dissenters, and her half-sister Imogen now rules the high elves; her war for vengeance, the floor's scripted main story, entwines completely with the crawlers' survival.

Also known as Psamathe

First appears in chapter 17

The doll-headed half-soul of the sand goddess, now the party's screaming, bloodthirsty utility player: missile delivery system, scout, and saboteur. Her hunt for a real body threads through the floor, and being bolted to a hunter's trophy rack barely slows her down.

Also known as Queen Imogen

First appears in chapter 65

Queen of the high elves, Signet's half-sister, and host of the Butcher's Masquerade, the gala that closes the floor. Revealed at the party to be a repurposed human, the twin sister of the dead crawler Ifechi, she presides over the celebration under a celestial peace seal that forbids all violence, with a divine boon promised if the night ends without blood.