The first thing you will see upon opening the library page will be a lot of options that may baffle you for the first few moments. Have no fear, we will take you through the initial confusion and into the happy confines of L-space (the latter term courtesy of Terry Pratchett).

The first menu is the simplest one. Click on the letter to view the story titles starting with it – or click All to view a complete list of stories, arranged alphabetically. Don't worry about getting a monster list that will hang up your internet connection – results are split into ten stories per result page for your convenience.

Secondly, you have the categories. At the moment, the Dungeon Library offers you stories in such categories as General, Historical, Dark/Angsty, Alternate Universe, Poetry, Romance and Humour. If you've dabbled in fanfiction, you have a pretty good idea of what kinds of stories belong in each of them. If you're still new – browsing a few stories in each will give you a good idea (and if you want a deeper explanation of the categories, they're elaborated on in the story submission guide, which gives advice on proper categorising of your works). Just in case - the numbers under each category name indicate the number of stories in them.

If those simple methods don't suit your tastes, you can do a more elaborate search via the complicated-looking filter below (the same filter will be displayed to you if you go to the Search page).

The first thing you need to know about the filter is that all conditions are cumulative (or, if you know programming logic, those are AND type conditions, not OR). So, for example, should you search for a story in Alternate Universe category, with an Expecto Patronum rating, set in Next Generation and with a present Violence warning, the results you will get for this search will only include stories that answer to ALL of the above conditions.

Two exceptions to this rule are tags and warnings. A search for multiple warnings (e.g., violence and profanity) will give you all stories that have at least one of the warnings you selected. Note, however, that this won't work for selecting some warning and 'None', as that condition is mutually exclusive and will only give you stories with no warnings.

The second exception is the tag search field. For instance, if you search for stories with tags 'potion' and 'wolfsbane', you will get all stories that have both of these tags in their taglist, as well as all stories with the 'potion' tags, plus all the stories that have the tag 'wolfsbane'. Tags are keywords used to make stories more easily found. If you've ever seen a blog – it's something like that, except there's no tag cloud here.

Lastly, once you get the search result, you can arrange the results alphabetically (by the first letter of the title), choose to display the oldest stories first, or the most recent ones on top.

All this sounds more complicated explained than it is to actually use it. So if you feel more confused than before after reading this, just close this guide and get to clicking!