Terrasquestone and Tropes

1. The Female Characters are One-Dimensional

There are plenty of one-dimensional characters in the DungeonVerse, the monsters for one, and NPCs for the other. Being one-dimensional is a general tell that a sentient being is dungeon-born, as there is only so much that any given dungeon can do in the creation process. In isekai, the process is poor quality writing that has made the female characters into collectibles for the main character, so they don't need personality or character, they just need a specific look and a voice actress. In the DungeonVerse the one-dimensional characters are that way because it is how they were made.

There are multiple ways for an NPC to break out of this one-dimensional mold, they have to grow as a being. Growth as a being comes from surviving hardship, like a war or natural disaster, not the grind of life. It can come from fighting and killing foes, functionally this is the being gaining XP and unlocking their own potential. This process works for monsters too, as they kill foes and rank up into new monster classes, and start gaining their own personality.

Example - Branka of Flatwick Fortress was an NPC guardian, the most basic level of city guard/enlisted soldier in the fortress. Her existence was that of a menial soldier, and she had no aspirations other than serving her role, and other than visual differences, she was identical to many of the other guardians. That was until the Vinzoval Incursion where thousands of armed and armored lizardfolk stormed the fortress without warning. Hundreds were slain and as many were dragged away to serve as cattle to the lizardfolk, and Branka was one of the latter. She escaped her captors in transit, found a weapon, and slew many of them as they rested. After freeing her companions and leading them back to the city, she was no longer a guardian. She was a survivor, she had (unknowingly) gained several levels and hew aspirations beyond being a rank and file guardian, she was going to become an adventurer and a ranger with a specialization in hunting lizards, lizardfolk, and other man-eating reptiles. She now has goals and aspirations, a path, and PTSD.

2. The New World's Leaders are Incompetent

A stock trope for the genre, this one is generally needed because the newly appeared protagonist has to have a leg up over the leaders, and by genre conventions, the protagonist is not a highly accomplished or competent person, generally bringing a high school level education or soul-crushing career with no relevant skills. This also leverages the protagonist into importance because being dumb as hell, these leaders cannot manage to deal with their problems and require the assistance of outsiders to use their isekai powers to save the kingdom.

The average leadership in the DungeonVerse is going to be pretty competent, the dynamic nature of the setting doesn't allow for the creation of long-term sedentary incompetence in said leadership. That isn't to say that there isn't long-term stability, or cultural complacency that allows for the installation of weak leaders, or that there aren't incompetent individuals in leadership roles, but that for an entire kingdom/nation's administration to become incompetent would generally not happen. The corollary might be that the perceived leadership is incompetent because they are not the leadership, which could be as simple as a token royal family beholden to a powerful council, or as nefarious as a dungeon liche pulling the strings and making sure its favorite meat puppets stay safe and apparently in charge.

Example - Flatwick Fortress is located near a region where there are many lizardfolk, snake-men, and other monstrous races. The Vinzoval Incursion involved the use of advanced raiding techniques, as well as digging a tunnel under the fortress and creating a breach inside a courtyard. An incompetent leadership would have played the It Can't Happen Here and the You Speak Lies cards when informed of a breach, requiring the appearance of an isekai protagonist to help fend off the invasion, and then lead an organized effort to track down and recover the people the lizardfolk abducted. Instead, the incursion was repelled, many lizardfolk were themselves slain, and not only was there a rescue force dispatched to rescue the victims, but the courtyards were inspected and new stonework was laid to prevent future burrowings, and the follow-up campaign against the lizardfolk saw their widescale decimation in the region. Bounties were offered for their heads, coin was paid for their unhatched eggs, and bands of heroes and mercenaries were sent on raids against them.

3. The Main Character has a Harem

Ah, the collecting women trope, which is common not just in isekai but is pretty much its own genre, or trans-genre trope in anime. this trope requires large numbers of one-dimensional female characters, acceptance that the protagonist is such a powerful figure that no one bats an eyelash at their harem, and that other women see this entire situation and decide they want to become part of the booby entourage of the protagonist.

There are going to be certain individuals who have harems, and these are going to be powerful leaders of non-Lawful Good groups. It is going to be dragons that polymorph into humanoid shapes and breed a force of dragonkin warriors. It's going to be wealthy and decadent individuals who have the money to finance keeping a harem and making sure no one bothers them. In the DungeonVerse, women have access to magic, which levels the playing field against men, who have greater upper body strength and aggression. Hard to play the domestic violence card when the spouse can cast Hold Person, or Charm Person, or shrug it off with barkskin or stoneskin.

Example - Gwallawg Meiliem is a forest lord and one of the last High Sylvan elves, his kingdom is accordingly small. One of the problems facing the bloodline is that elves as a race generally are not very fertile and productive, which makes repopulating efforts difficult. Gwallawg has worked around this buy spending years finding and recruiting wives to his harem for the purpose of making more High Sylvan elves, which is currently a breeding project with willing or sometimes unwilling Sylvan and High Elves. It isn't working all that well, and there is a good deal of discontent because while trying to restore the race, the Forest Lord has made a little bit of a habit of killing other male High Sylvan elves he encounters.

Lady Mevothall of Arvendom is famous for her harem, which consists of young handsome boys and a few men. There is a little bit of social concern over the number and sometimes horrific young age of her harem members, but it is generally only whispers. Her harem is full of artists, as she has them trained and tutored to become painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets. Lady Mevothall is a shapeshifted dragon, and her hoarding is of art, so she has a cadre of men she raises from as young as she can get them so as to make the art she desires. There are no carnal relations within the harem, and she keeps them in this fashion because it is easier to raise her artists in safety than it is to have them chained and trapped inside a proper lair.

4. The Protagonist was a Shut-In

NEETs, hikkomori, and shut-ins are popular protagonists for the isekai genre, being generic and blank thumbs, as well as giving an avenue for introvert incels with mental health issues to go on a power trip. How else would someone who has no life other than gaming and the internet end up saving kingdoms, collecting hot waifus, and becoming the strongest there ever was?

In the DungeonVerse, there are two factors at work, the Numinous Road, and the dungeons themselves. As a semi-sentient non-humanoid non-anthropomorphic entity that is more than a force of nature and less than a god, the Numinous Road selects who it wants to isekai into the DungeonVerse. There is never really going to be a reason for this non-elemental non-divine force to pick someone whose great accomplishments are collecting badges on Tumblr, or playing the same game over and over until it is broken. The dungeons are meat grinders, and the standard isekai protagonist would only survive because most of them have some sort of game-breaking silly ability or god mode that lets them ignore the dangers of their given world.

Example - One of the first elements of the Gygaxian Gyre is a 100-foot stone helix that has to be crawled down, followed by a twenty-foot drop to the bottom of the first chamber, this is a challenging cave to pass through, not a masonry dungeon with square rooms and corridors. Heroes who want to plumb the Gyre have to be able to move through actual cave formations, including tight squeezes, sudden drops, and all the other hazards of being underground before they reach the monster and treasure sections of the dungeon. Why does that matter? Because it is physically dangerous, and there are certainly magic spells that can make this easier, but if it requires spells to get through the entrance, the rest of the dungeon will turn them into bloody chunks.

5. There's Tons of Fan Service

Panty shots, weird camera angles, jiggly physics, smoking hot women simping for the blandest dude ever imagined. Part of the power fantasy is fan service, and there are plenty of solid anime that are derailed with fan service, or the fan service is so glaring that it completely undermines and ruins the story. Darling in the FranXX is a great anime if you can ignore it and look past the over the top fan service. Keep that in the ecchi and hentai, bro.

Nudity and sexuality aren't as stigmatized or polarized in the DungeonVerse as they are in real life. There is no disparity in social power between the genders, and all the rest really doesn't matter. Reproduction is given high priority, the dungeons and the monsters facing a non-technological non-industrial society make sure that there is always a need for more people. The presence of healing magics and the variety of healing potions childbirth and contraception are also no big deal, further reducing gender disparity, so a lot of those social traditions are simply not present. What is present is the fundamental truth that ugliness is evil, and beauty is good, and someone who hides themself, or is deceiving or misdirecting is very likely evil themselves. Faces are rarely covered, few helmets cover the entire head and face, and there is no social backlash about women being topless, its okay for men, its okay for women.

The DungeonVerse would find adult materials odd, and very likely unpleasant.

Example - it is common in Terrasquestone for women, especially those of high station, to present an ample amount of decolletage, or even wear garments that either cover their breasts with sheer material or even have them exposed completely, as a show of honesty. Just as the tradition of shaking hands began as a way to check or show that the participants were disarmed, the bra is just as good at hiding spell components, scrolls, and other magic accouterments as a bracer hides a dagger. Thus, the bared breast is non-threatening. Consider the number and range of spells, and their low level, that are used to control, influence, or manipulate people. On a slightly more practical note, how else do you desexualize something that is generally only seen in a sexual fashion? You make it normal, commonplace, and completely unnoteworthy. 

6. Prevalence of Slavery

This is not isolated to isekai, the practice is depicted in other anime as well. It is a sticky issue because historically speaking slavery was very common until only recently, as nations and civilizations go. It is also gauche to run straight to the practice and normalize it in a fantasy setting. I don't think these settings need to be pasteurized for safe consumption, and there is no reason to prevent evil forces from practicing slavery, that gives the heroes an irredeemable foe to fight, both in the concrete of slavers and the abstract of slavery itself, and then there is rescuing the people who have been enslaved. The problem really doesn't come into the equation until the main characters are participating in the practice, buying and selling slaves and doing business with the people who make the economic system work.

Slavery exists in the DungeonVerse, but it is not practiced in Terrasquestone, and the nations that want to associate and benefit from the city and its high lords cannot practice slavery. There are chaotic and non-good aligned nations that are not allied with or associate with Terrasquestone that do practice personal slavery and chattel slavery, the former being the more orky/tribal/barbarian taking slaves as property of raiding and the latter being the mass employment of slavery for agriculture, industry, and other widescale economic ends. Terrasquestone looks down on both, not dealing with personal slaveholders, and generally being actively opposed to chattel slavery, and supporting efforts to topple those nations and undermine those systems.

Examples:

The Vinzoval tribe of lizardfolk are infamous for their keeping of chattel slaves. They have a semi-endothermic metabolism and find domestic agriculture taxing, especially when temps dip. Their solution to this is to take the warm two-legged demihuman races as slaves. These creatures are far less bothered by the cold and can work even when it is cold, overcast, and raining. They are also food on the proverbial hoof as the lizardfolk decide to take one of their slaves to the cooking pot. There are active campaigns to hunt down and exterminate the Vinzoval tribe and thus far the most successful are the orcs.

The Kir-Azujun people, who live in the high mountains, have practiced slavery for hundreds of years. They take captives in border raids, and anyone who trespasses on their land is at very high risk of being made a slave. They are a subsistence-level culture, but have fairly advanced magic and such, negating in large part their need for large-scale systematic agriculture, so the slaves the Kir-Azujun take are basically servants in the temples and households, and some are adopted and become considered Kir. Terrasquestone has cool relations with the Kir-Azujun, mostly because of the distance between their locations and because the Kir have little concern about releasing their slaves. Who needs cruelty and abuse when they just have to exile difficult or resistant beings out into the extreme weather of the mountains? Some die, some escape, and some return begging for shelter.

Lord Oreitha of the Cedars has a personal crusade to root out slavery in or near Terrasquestone. To this end, she employs a network of informants and has good relations with the adventurer's guilds. When rumor of a slaver or slave operation comes to her attention, she sends tendrils and uses scrying magic to learn more about the details, sometimes waiting as long as a year before moving. When she does, she leads from the front with her cadre of personal bodyguards and handpicked warriors of the great citadel, as well as taking teams of adventurers. Like a blitz, she will have her forces hit the slavers from three or more different directions, rescuing slaves, taking as many slavers prisoner as possible, and making sure their bases, networks, and such are reduced to rubble. The prisoners are brought back to Terrasquestone where they are given a tribunal hearing before being sentenced. Most are sent to the dungeon, the Trial by Trap. A few are marked and released. The worst of the worst are executed.

7. The Main Character is Overpowered

A common trope, and required, because the main character is a weeb with marginal applicable skills and no social skills.

As with #4, there is no need for imported weebs to be overpowered. Sure, a little god-moding is passable entertainment, but that entertainment is fleeting. In DungeonVerse, the characters can become very powerful, but there is always a larger monster or larger threat, and then there is the possibility of transcendence. Congrats you became so powerful you ascended and your power is no longer applicable because like an oyster spitting out a pearl, the Numinous Road has opened the path and the god-tier character has been ejected into the greater universe, to occupy a shard or reflection of the DungeonVerse.

Examples:

If a Saitama (One Punch Man) one-shotted the Terrasque, they would vanish at the focal point of the contact. The Terrasque would be rendered dormant and the Saitama would shake their head and realize they punched something so hard they punched their way into a new reality.

If a Haijime Nagumo (Arifureta: From Commonplace to the World's Strongest) appeared, they would not have mana to create, summon, and manipulate so many powerful gadgets, and the DungeonVerse is not a technological setting, so there are no super artificers creating monster killing rocket spears, laser cannons, or traction cannons with deployable shields.

If a Kaede Honjo (Bofuri: I Dont Want to Get Hurt so I'll Max Out My Defense) appeared, she would not immediately gain a god-tier item from soloing a monster by suffering long enough to get poison immunity and then eating it. A poison dragon in a dungeon would not be limited to just unleashing a poison area attack, it would have all the weapons a mundane animal would have and would have killed Kaede in a few seconds. No loot drop.

8. The World Operates with Video Game Mechanics

Yes and No

The DungeonVerse operated on game mechanics because ... it is literally a game we would be playing.

And no, because unlike the trope, the characters in the game do not see character screens, prompts, or menus, they are in a new world with new rules, not a video game with a HUD that only they can see and work with. 

9. No One Cares About Going Home

This is a common issue with almost all isekai, regardless of what world they came from or how horrible the new world is, no one ever really puts a lot of effort into going back home. This makes sense for the genre because by the tropes, the now overpowered hero with the harem of hot one-dimensional babes, why would they want to go back to being a NEET or an unappreciated salaryman? Their old life is so much worse than the new one.

In the DungeonVerse there is simply no going home, the Numinous Road doesn't send people back to where they came from. There are rumors that there are dungeons that will grant such a wish, and maybe this is possible, who knows? The real deal is that at the end of the day and the end of the adventure, the DungeonVerse is more real than their previous reality. In Terrasquestone the inhabitants are completely unburdened by a toxic environment, no megalithic corporations, no massive sprawling governments dominating everything, and while the scale of things is smaller, it is more intense. For each dungeon immigrant that road dumps that becomes a sword and spell-swinging hero, there are several who rarely or never even enter the first dungeon, they are content to pursue their skills, their trades, and their passions, and find a new life in a world that has the room and potential.

Examples:

Deola Eillepaese stumbled into the DungeonVerse having never played the first video game, MMORPG, or even being interested in the first weeb thing. She found a blank slate and an opportunity to instead of being a wage slave, of just living and happy life. She followed her dream of homesteading and then opened a little roadside bed and breakfast. Traveling adventurers know her little spot is really nice and rave about the jams and jellies she makes. She passes information along as it is needed and she has a single spell at her command, Remove Disease, which she is pretty good at using.

Mazor Darcos has been into six dungeons, earning a reputation as a brutal fighter, using a deadly hand-to-hand technique paired with hammer fist gauntlets, and he has an elite team of similarly trained warriors. The only thing Darcos wants is to go home, where he is no common man, but an action movie star with massive wealth, fame, and hundreds of thousands of adoring fans. He wants his cars, his penthouse apartment, his air conditioning, caviar, personal chef, and to be invited to top-tier celebrity events around the world, instead of punching monsters in the face.

10. Truck-Kun sends the Protagonist to the Other World

This has become a sort of running gag in the isekai genre, a white cab over truck randomly hitting weebs and NEETs to send them into a fantasy land where their mundane lack of character is suddenly highly valuable and they gain some gamebreaker ability. There is no Truck-Kun and people who the Numinous Road snatches up aren't dead, nor are they being reincarnated in the DungeonVerse, the road acts more like a Bermuda Triangle. People go missing all of the time, look up how many people go missing in national parks and that there is a lacuna of jurisdiction so somehow there is no agency that has the ability and permission to mount major searches in said wilderness parks.

11. The Main Character is an Unsatisfied Salaryman

This swings back around to the part where isekai likes to engage weebs and NEETs, the unsatisfied salaryman is spiritually similar. Sure, he is employed, but he is unhappy, unengaged in life, no wife, no kids, and no ambitions, he just has his job. Who hasn't had a job they hated and wanted to escape from it.

The Numinous Road is not likely going to start snatching salarymen in dead-end jobs because there is no office/cubicle work in the DungeonVerse and the things that the road is looking for is interesting people with unique skills, certain mindsets, and potential. Terminal office employees need not apply.

12. The Church is Evil

This one is starting to get old, really quickly. In the defense of anime, Japan isn't Christian, nor Catholic, but they think the aesthetic and trappings of the Church are dope as hell. Then, it is easy to lean into large organizations that worship unknowable gods, which can quickly become evil, just like large centrally organized governments obsessed with their own power. Japan is pretty familiar with that vibe. Over here, it is just an echo of online atheism and people who think quoting Dawkins constitutes a mic-drop moment.

There is no monolithic Catholic-style church in the DungeonVerse, but there are also no divinities as we imagine them. As beings gain powers, they become Ascendants or Demi-Gods, and then, they are ejected from the core of the DungeonVerse out into their own reflections, fragments, and echoes of the DungeonVerse, where their powers become fundamental to the new reality. There are clerics in the setting, and these tap into the powers and portfolios of Ascendants who are still active in the DungeonVerse but haven't managed to get themselves tossed out. Cagey Ascendants are going to lay low, be chill, and let others work through their powers, avoiding the attention of the fundamental powers of the DungeonVerse.

13. Guilds Run Everything

Guilds run everything in isekai and anime because this is a familiar setup used in RPGs, MMORPGs, and genre fantasy.

The guild system is present in the DungeonVerse, but it is not the only power structure. There are kingdoms with standard feudal hierarchies and social stations. Guilds can't make lords or knights. Terrasquestone itself is a parliamentary magocracy, to be a Lord, a person has to go into the Gyre and reach the core, and there the core anoints them as a Lord or High Lord and they return to take their place on the council. Different ethno-states have different structure. Dwarves and orcs are divided into clans, elves are libertarians or anarchists, generally speaking.

In a parallel of royal power versus noble power, strong leaders will have weak organizations, and weak leaders will have strong organizations. The weaker the central leadership, the more powerful nobles, guilds, and other organizations will be. The various Dark and Evil Lords who appear in the shadow of Lichelight are strong and there are no evil guilds, there are just cells and circles all beholded to their dread lords, fell masters, and shadow masters.

14. The Protagonist is Reincarned into Someone Else's Body

Weird vibes.

People who enter the DungeonVerse aren't dead, so no.