#dungeon crawler carl

[hell-garden]

Me when I'm in the dungeons and this thing shows up and blows me to death with her lasers

[overheard-in-the-dungeon]

Odette: What is Donut to you?

Carl: The reason I get up every morning.

Audience: *oooohs and awwws*

Donut, at 5am bouncing around and pawing at Carl’s face: WAKE UP! WAKE UP! RISE AND SHINE CARL! WAKE UP!

[driver-kid]

(MAJOR SPOILERS UP TO DCC: BEDLAM BRIDE)

Finished this in a random one week sprint, this series gives me a lot of emotions. Cheers!

[autumnalfrost]

Maybe DCC is what will finally drag me out of horrible artist’s block. I love these two.

[whirling-ghost]

I'm here and I love this! I'm on book five so stopped some of your points when they got potentially spoilery. I don't care about Carl's strength stat! I care about his decisions. I care about the moment he realised there was no choice in the Meadowlark situation. I care about him and his gaggle of NPCs.

I am also concerned about the ending, even though I'm only halfway there. I joined the patreon and can see how fast chapters are/were coming out. is this sustainable? I don't know. does it get enough editing to nurture it to a satisfactory ending?

I have been afflicted with a terrible curse: tearing through a book series, and upon finishing, seeking out the fandom only to find that most of that fandom appears to be reading an entirely different series than I am, lol. I brought this on myself, to be clear. I think a big part of the mismatch is that it's a genre I'm not that familiar with and that I don't care about/for in and of itself, so I'm coming at it from a different perspective. Also, maybe I'm reading into things too much! But what can I say, a girl needs enrichment in her enclosure, and there's enough meat on this bone that I will be occupied for a while.

All of which is to say, I read through all seven books of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that are out to date (thanks, free Kindle Unlimited subscription!), and now I have a lot of thoughts and no one who cares about them ;____; I played myself ;_______;

This series is such a hard sell in general, because on the surface it looks like male power fantasy garbage, it's litRPG, and there's a decent amount of mildly obnoxious dude humor at first. But a) it's only slightly male power fantasy garbage, b) it's not tedious litRPG and in fact the genre evolves and shifts into more straightforward SFF the further in you get, which is clever on a meta level and also a relief, c) to the extent it is litRPG, it mostly isn't boring and annoying about it (no stat nonsense for the sake of stat nonsense), d) the mildly obnoxious dude humor is often genuinely funny and to the extent it is obnoxious, there's some in-universe reasoning for that.

Anyway, the premise is as follows: Earth is suddenly and devastatingly mined for its natural resources by aliens. This results in the death of billions: everyone who was indoors is instantly killed. Anyone who was outside gets a chance to enter the "dungeon", which offers a chance for the remaining humans to compete for an alleged chance at freedom and sovereignty if they reach the bottom floor, but it's basically The Hunger Games: a propaganda exercise that's meant to earn money for the aliens running it as a game show, only this is a dungeon crawling RPG rather than a Hunger Games/Battle Royale situation. No one has ever reached the bottom floor. The best result most achieve is to reach the tenth floor, where they can take a deal for some variety of indentured servitude.

Enter Carl, our hero, a former (late 20s? early 30s? don't recall his age, but somewhere around there) Coast Guard technician who is outside when it all happens because he chased after his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, a best in show tortie Persian cat. Carl and Donut enter the dungeon, Donut eats a magic treat and becomes a sapient talking cat, and the books follow their struggle to survive and fight back against the cruel and inhuman system they've found themselves in.

Tonally, the series is interesting in that it manages to balance a very bleak, dystopian premise with genuine hilarity and moments of legitimately heart-wrenching emotion. Also, this is not a "lone heroic super cool guy saves and fixes everything" kind of story. This series is interested in teamwork and community in dire circumstances, and the found family of it all is genuinely moving. As a whole, it's just bonkers entertaining. I love when I can tell the author is having a blast, and you can absolutely tell that Matt Dinniman is having an absolute blast.

Anyway, a list of things I enjoy about this series and/or a list of general thoughts, some of which include mild spoilers:

PRINCESS DONUT. i love her. this cat is amazing and hilarious. She's exactly like you'd imagine a prize-winning Persian cat named Princess Donut to be. also, to my delight, she gets to be a fully rounded character. like yes, she's hilarious and often comic relief, but she's also taken seriously, and Carl is absolutely Insane about this cat. He fuckin' loves this cat, and the cat loves him. Also, hilariously, she has higher stats than Carl at the beginning. (In fact, she mostly has higher stats than him throughout, so she's technically the party leader. Which is why their party is called the Royal Court of Princess Donut.)

Donut has A+++++ insulting skills. On multiple occasions, I have lol'd in horror and delight at her savagery. A favorite:

Rezan: Why does that cat always type in all caps?

Donut: WHY DIDN’T YOUR MOTHER DRIBBLE YOU BACK OUT ONTO THE TRUCK STOP BATHROOM FLOOR, REZAN?

lest this give you the wrong impression, Donut is a classy lady. She is a princess, after all. but also she is savage.

Carl! The books are mostly in first person POV, so we're in Carl's head for most of them, and he is a great example of an unreliable narrator. He'll seem fairly generic at first, but stick it out through, like, the first third of the first book and onward for the slow and steady reveal of his Tragic Backstory and also such exciting psychological and emotional issues as: Insane about Donut; claims he "doesn't like drama" while in actuality he is clearly Repressing Everything; secretly an idealist who wants to believe the best of people; deeply committed to protecting people; full of revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian rage; holy abandonment issues batman; simply Does Not See It when various ladies basically throw themselves at him; generally Barely Holding It Together at all times.

people on reddit, mostly: Carl's stats!! blah blah blah power stuff. me: okay, but why is Carl Like This. let's deep discuss that. Also let Carl have a little breakdown. As a treat.

these books are so wildly, delightfully anti-capitalist, lol. I poked around Reddit and tumblr a bit, but didn't see anyone discussing this series' politics, but that aspect is super interesting to me. The series is very, very concerned with revolution and resistance and the form those things take when very few options are available to the oppressed, plus the ethics of revolutionary violence.

The dungeon AI! This thing is Way Too Online in a gross dudebro way, but frankly, it's still funny with it, and the evolution of the AI's character is fascinating. Also, I regret to inform you that I do find it extremely fucking funny that the AI has a thing for Carl and his feet. This is wholly hypocritical of me: if Carl was Carla, and the AI made the same comments, I'd have bounced. But what can I say, comedy is about subversion, I guess.

PREPOTENTE. MY PRECIOUS WEIRDO GOATMAN CHILD. Prepotente was a goat; upon entry into the dungeon and eating a magic pet treat, he becomes a goat man type thing, and he spends much of the series as one of the most dangerous and skilled dungeon crawlers, along with his "mother", the shepherdess Miriam Dom. he's a total fuckin weirdo who screams a lot for no reason and i love him. he better fucking survive the series, i swear to god.

one running theme of the series that I love so much is that Carl does not give up on people, and he does not write them off. He often runs into fellow crawlers who, if he was being bloodlessly practical about things, he should have bailed on. They're people who aren't prepared, who haven't leveled up enough, who aren't likely to survive much longer. But he doesn't abandon them, and he doesn't assume they can't get better. He sticks with them and helps them, and they help him. It's about found family ;____; they all love each other so much ;______;

MORDECAI!!! he's a changeling skyfowl and the team's game guide and later manager, and is a former crawler who took a deal. This is supposed to be his last season in the crawl, before he's free of his indentured servitude. he is Dad Shaped. automatic dad. there is in fact something quietly devastating about his Dad Shapedness.

There's a whole super interesting thing going on with the dungeon NPCs, and how we start out assuming most of them aren't "real". unsurprising spoiler alert: they may have been created by/for the dungeon, but many of them are very much real, and once they realize the position they've been put into, they're pissed.

i truly have no real idea where the series is going with its running theme about parents and children, and the protection or lack thereof of children. Our most heroic characters are consistently shown protecting and caring for the NPC children, even when it's at great cost to themselves.

everything to do with the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, the secret book with writing from prior crawlers that Carl is given, makes me Emotional. I'm honestly shocked the whole Cookbook was never planned, and that it was a result of Patreon votes. It's hugely important in the seventh book, not so much on a plot level--I can see how Dinniman could have gotten to some of these same plot beats without it--but on an emotional and thematic one. There's something so affecting here about the continuity of resistance, of finding hope and strength in the people who came before you, of planting seeds you water with blood and that you may never get to harvest, and the sheer, furious love of the whole thing.

so apparently Dinniman is a pantser when it comes to writing. Clearly, he's having fun, and it's more or less working out so far, but it does make me concerned about his ability to stick the dismount. I saw in an AMA that he likened it to building a spaceship with legos versus building it with a plan, and that he has fun writing himself out of corners. That's all well and good, but some of the things I'm most interested in this series are the overarching themes, and it makes me wary of those themes not getting a proper payoff. I guess I should just enjoy the ride, and accept that there will almost certainly be many loose ends.

On a meta level, I find it very funny and ironic that when I took a look at the reviews for the seventh book, I saw some people complaining about the absence of the more "entertainment" and "game" aspects of the series: no interviews with the outside, no "character sheets" for Carl, fewer big fights for Carl himself to take on, the AI taking on a more active 'deus-ex AI' role. Because in-universe, the dungeon crawl is no longer entertainment. At this point, the crawl has become an actual war, and the game genre it takes on--4x strategy--reflects that. Carl and the crawlers' choices have increasing ramifications outside the crawl, where actual war is breaking out at least in part as a result of their actions. The AI intervening more and more often to put its finger on the scale is part of the conflict; it's fighting this war as much as the other characters are, if with still inscrutable motivations.

This is in fact one of the central conflicts of the series: to what extent is this still a game? Has it ever only been a game? The crawlers and NPCs are in fact fighting for it to not be a game: they're saying "my life is real, my suffering is real, and if you won't acknowledge that, then you're coming in here with us to fight and die too. Not just a game anymore, is it?" And on another side of the conflict, you have the AI insisting that this stay a game, something with rules and a narrative and at least an attempt at fairness, however much the AI manipulates those things.

It seems like there's something of a genre shift going on with this series. As a reader who's not particularly interested in or invested in litRPG in and of itself, I'm fine with it shifting to being more straightforwardly SFF, and in fact, I think that's an interesting and fun choice on a meta level: the more the crawlers and the AI break and change the game, the more the genre of the series itself shifts.

[alluphillnow]

Feeling like I stumbled across the DCC AI in this game changer episode tonight.

[watcherscrown]

I think crawler Carl and murderbot would get along but they would have nothing to talk about until it was time to manufacture a scheme so convoluted and insane that it should break reality. and it's all to save Some Fucking Guy

[luxfatale]

Samantha from DCC fan art commissioned by @soongtypehuman ✨

this piece took off a bit on reddit thanks to the very kind human who commissioned me! with their permission it’s now available in my shop!

[inkary]

Grand Champion, Breed Winner Regional, National Winner Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk

[rockitcupid]

1 year before the crawl

[ineedlelittlespace]

So, this seems to be the plot of every Dungeon Crawler Carl book so far. I love it.

[krippe90]

Found Family

[joehills]

Summer Reading Recommendation: Dungeon Crawler Carl books 1-7

Three trusted friends each recommended Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl series of novels to me, but the series stayed toward the back of my queue for almost a year because I found the name of its emergent genre, “LitRPG” unappealing to the point of avoidance. I started the first book about a month ago, loved it, and read the following six immediately. I refuse to recommend you a LitRPG series, because I don’t want this at the back of your queue when it belongs at the front.

After reading the first few chapters of book one, in which Seattleite shipyard worker Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s award-winning cat are drawn into an alien-built underground dungeon where video game rules are enforced, I realized the book is basically structured as a written Let’s Play for a non-existent video game. I counter-propose the term “Lit’s Play” and I will strongly recommend you Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl series of Lit’s Play novels.

The Dungeon Crawler Carl novels are full of well-grounded human characters coerced, tricked, or forced into comedically ludicrous scenarios with all sorts of bonkers aliens and dungeon NPCs. These situations are structured to condemn systemic exploitation in a way that feels to me like they could have been imagined by Kurt Vonnegut if he were young enough to have grown up reading Douglas Adams and playing D&D. The dialogue is snappy too, and if you enjoy books-on-tape, the narration and voice-work for the characters by Jeff Hayes is masterwork-quality.

If you’re dubious about whether this series is for you, here’s a few points I’ve noted that might encourage you to read it:

The first couple books introduce basic abilities, spells, and game mechanics that the characters try to find ways to exploit. Malicious compliance is king. As the series progresses, the equipment and abilities the characters gain access to and their interactions with other players compound to create new exploits that are increasingly wild and frustrating to their enemies—and delightful to readers like myself!

By book three, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, it’s also obvious that Matt Dinniman isn’t only a gaming nerd. He wanted to do a lot of research on trains, track gauges, subways, and other railroad technology, and shares his passion that subject in all sorts of fun ways in the Iron Tangle level of the dungeon. It makes me smile when folks are excited about their interests and Dinniman’s definitely add to the fun!

By book four, The Gate of The Feral Gods, it became clear to me that the series is heading toward Game of Thrones levels of complexity in terms of competing factions with internal strife squabbling about the problems they are most familiar to distract themselves from the shadows of emergent threats they deem impossible. Dinneman does a great job of grounding the external galactic intrigue to in-dungeon events, which keeps its presentation as goofy as everything else. If you appreciated how Bojack Horseman used animal puns to facilitate its unbearable dive into the crushing horrors of addiction and depression, you’ll love how Dungeon Crawler Carl cranks everything familiar and bizarre about game logic up to 11 in order to showcase the depravity of exploitative systems of government and commerce.

I won’t say much about the later novels, except that they rewardingly build on the groundwork of the first few books and escalate everything in ways that made me cackle throughout. After finishing book seven, I immediately restarted the first book, and I’m enjoying it thoroughly.

Strongly recommend.

[driver-kid]

I got into Dungeon Crawler Carl, I’ve been following through each hardcover release—and the lack of shitpost fanart demands a contribution.

(Thank god DCC wasn’t written by the time Brainrot language…right?)

[nex-kyit]

Finished reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. Man.....

Bonus Donut sketch below + some rambling that I don't think is worth its own post.

Finally, after all this time my years and years of drawing warrior cats is finally coming into use. Hm, I'm still not sure how I feel about Donut in the first piece, was looking at the wiki and it turns out shes black, orange AND white. Ah well, not used to drawing Persians, but I'm statisfied with this as my first attempt. Hardest part is getting the expression. When making WC art, I tend to anthropomorphise the face for expressions, but I tried to go a bit more realistic here. Not sure if it worked well here or not. As for Carl... yes I know he's missing a tatoo or two. I'm on Donut's side here, he has way too many.