Growler Gary is a shade gnoll bartender in the Iron Tangle on the Fourth Floor. He tends the Downward Dog, a bar at an interdiction station, and cannot cross its threshold even when the surrounding station is attacked. His knowledge helps Carl, Princess Donut, and Katia find the station's portal equipped repair carts. The carts' security locks then make Gary's regenerating body the means of starting them. Much later, the System AI appears in Gary's form during a confrontation with Carl and the Syndicate liaison Orren. The bartender's own actions and the AI's actions in that form are distinct.
The Downward Dog and the station's fall
Carl's group first finds Gary asleep across the bar at the Downward Dog. The bar stands near an armory, a hobgoblin repair shop, and a saferoom in an industrial station whose floor is littered with the dead. Gary is a shade gnoll with a hyena-like appearance, and his displayed level is 25. Empty bottles surround him. A sign at the entrance excludes hobgoblins, though the station's transit operation depends on both gnolls and hobgoblins. The Downward Dog itself is an ordinary tavern rather than a saferoom; its door does not promise protection to its occupant.
When the party returns, Gary is awake but severely drunk. He says ghouls killed the other inhabitants, including people he disliked. He insists that he tried to fight from the doorway, but an invisible barrier stopped him from moving outside. Jumping Jen-Jen, a gnoll transit driver for whom he kept marrow juice cold, called him a coward before dying just beyond the door. Gary returns to the accusation repeatedly. His confinement is more painful to him than a simple inability to escape: it prevented him from helping people he knew and left Jen-Jen believing that he chose not to help.
Gary also reports that a woman entered the bar, tore out his throat, and took much of his alcohol. He later awoke in his own blood. He understands that he survived, but does not know why the station holds him or why death fails to last. Carl recalls a passage in the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook about NPCs who regenerate because they possess important information or fulfill some necessary role. That passage leads Carl and Donut to look beyond Gary's account of the massacre for a practical reason he remains in the station. His survival is established by his own experience before the party tests it; the precise purpose of the restriction is still unknown to them at this point.
Carl tells Gary he believes that he tried to fight. The reassurance briefly breaks Gary's habit of speaking of himself in the third person. Gary calls himself useless and says Jen-Jen died thinking he was afraid. Katia objects to that judgment, while Carl asks whether anything at the station can help them reach crawlers stranded near the abyss. Gary answers with a specific route: the interdiction team's battery powered carts can travel along a selected line even if its normal power fails. He advises them to take a lead cart with a forward portal that clears the track. Although Gary cannot leave his bar or drive a cart himself, this information gives the party a workable way to reach the trapped crawlers.
The repair-cart key
The carts' security arrangement makes Gary's usefulness much more direct than he realizes. A rapid response cart normally carries transit security gnolls and hobgoblin repair workers. The system description explains that the corporation requires gnoll escorts because it distrusts the hobgoblins. Two gnolls must activate the vehicle through hand-shaped magical sensors in its cockpit. The sensors are separated far enough that one living gnoll cannot reach both at once. The equipment is therefore not simply waiting for someone who knows how to drive: it requires the bodies of a particular kind of operator.
The party considers other ways to satisfy the lock. Dead gnolls elsewhere in the station have been damaged beyond use. Katia tries to transform herself into a gnoll, eventually producing a form accurate enough for the system to identify her as one, but she still cannot make the carts work on her own. Donut initially suggests bringing Gary out to drive, without knowing that the boundary at the Downward Dog prevents him from leaving. The remaining solution is to use his hands separately. Carl and the others recognize what that entails before they return to him.
Gary is asleep when they first take what they need. Mongo kills him immediately by biting his head, then removes both arms; Carl stores them. Katia stays away from the bar because she does not want to take part. Carl apologizes to Gary, but the bartender has no opportunity to respond. At the cart, one of the severed hands makes the first sensor light up. The second sensor rejects Gary's other hand because it specifically requires a left hand. The failed test changes the scale of the act: a single killing cannot supply even the first cart's two sensors.
On returning to the Downward Dog, the party finds Gary restored and sober. Regeneration has cleared his drunkenness, and he remembers their earlier visit, though he initially shows no awareness that Mongo killed him. They kill him again for another left hand. A further discovery makes repeated returns unavoidable: removing a hand from a cart's sensor shuts the cart down. The hands cannot be carried from one activated vehicle to the next. Carl's rescue plan calls for paired portal carts on three lines, with the first of each pair sending threats on the tracks into the abyss and the second sending the waiting crawlers toward the trainyard. It needs a supply of hands left in place while those carts run.
The party eventually collects fourteen of Gary's left hands. Carl judges that twelve would be enough for the immediate plan and keeps an extra pair in case a seventh cart is needed. Gary fights back at first, then hides in the back of the bar with a spear. The repeated deaths leave blood on the floor even though parts of his regenerated body that remain in the tavern disappear. Regeneration restores him physically, but it does not erase his fear of the next attack. His growing resistance also shows that the early assumption that he might never understand what happened was wrong.
Carl eventually stops Mongo and explains the rescue plan to Gary, including how many more times they intend to kill him. Gary realizes why the carts were not being used: their gnoll driver requirement was the obstacle, while hobgoblins could operate other carts without the forward portals needed to clear wrecked tracks. He asks whether the plan is directed against the people who killed his friends. After Carl says yes, Gary asks for alcohol when it is over, puts down his spear, and asks Mongo to make the deaths as painless as possible. His cooperation follows a disclosure Carl had withheld during the earlier killings. It does not turn the preceding attacks into acts he freely chose.
Rescue and broadcast image
Gary does not travel with the carts. His contribution to the operation consists of the route information he supplies and the left hands that keep the portals running. The carts are used to open paths to crawlers trapped at different approaches to the abyss, while the party continues adjusting its plan around damaged tracks and arriving monsters. Even after the first set of carts is prepared, Carl realizes another pair of hands is needed for a possible defensive use closer to the station and returns to the bar. The shortage reinforces how dependent the rescue has become on one confined person.
The crawl's televised recap later presents Gary's ordeal without the reason for it. Carl sees a darkened, low angle image of himself looming over the bartender, followed by Mongo removing his hands. The production adds whimpering sounds at that moment. Carl observes that Gary was already dead when Mongo removed his hands; the sound is an alteration to the event rather than evidence of what Gary experienced at that instant. The recap also shows Carl attaching the hands to a keypad and voicing his wish for duct tape, but does not explain the carts or the trapped crawlers. The sequence uses real acts and invented audio to make Carl appear to torment Gary for its own sake.
That edit cannot erase the injury to Gary. By the time Carl explains the plan, Gary has already endured repeated attacks and has tried to defend himself. The omitted context matters because it explains why the group uses the carts and why Gary eventually agrees to help; it does not imply that his pain is imaginary. Carl's later recollections preserve this tension. When he sees other shade gnolls, he remembers Gary as an NPC he had to kill repeatedly. Gary remains an individual in Carl's memory, rather than a replaceable specimen of the same species.
The later appearance in Gary's form
On the Ninth Floor, Gary's appearance interrupts a meeting between Carl and Orren about Princess Formidable's attempt to trigger the dungeon's failsafe. He arrives holding vodka, and Carl initially addresses him as the bartender from the Fourth Floor. Carl then recognizes the possibility that the figure is the AI using Gary's body, or a body made to look and sound like his. Orren explicitly identifies the visitor as an avatar of the System AI. He says that the AI has taken different forms during their meetings, but believed it was restricted from taking a character from a completed floor, especially one that might be stored for a later season. Orren's account describes his understanding of the rules, not a confirmed inventory or destination for Gary after the Iron Tangle.
The speaker's powers and concerns belong to the AI. In Gary's form it challenges Orren, overcomes the protective zero zone Orren created, summons Princess Formidable into the room, and displays control reaching outside the Earth. It then sends Formidable away rather than returning her to her ship. None of those decisions can be attributed to Gary's own authority as a bartender. The AI retains Gary's visible shape, fur, claws, and drinking manner while speaking about the failsafe, the continuation of the crawl, and its own uncertain relationships. The familiar form makes its intervention recognizable to Carl and Donut, but also risks making the former victim seem responsible for the AI's choices.
The AI summons Donut and asks her for advice. She recognizes the figure as Growler Gary and is surprised to see him alive. The speaker explains that Gary had been on a key hold and regenerated after each death. Carl attempts to warn Donut that this is the AI, though his message interface does not open. The explanation of Gary's survival is consistent with what the party witnessed on the Fourth Floor; the other statements in this exchange are the AI's, even when delivered in Gary's voice.
After dismissing the meeting, the speaker collapses. The person who rises has a drunkenness debuff and is displayed at level 175, far above Gary's Fourth Floor level. He asks for someone named Rory and where he is before teleporting away. The immediate change in behavior supports the distinction between the AI's control and Gary's own awareness, but the scene does not establish where Gary spent the intervening floors, why his level rose, who Rory is to him, or where he goes next. His final observed act is a bewildered departure, not a continuation of the AI's conversation.