A Crawl of One's One - Part 1 (Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG)

 

Full disclosure: I have been a paid contractor for Renegade Game studios, the publisher of the Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying Game in the past and hope to do more contract work for them in the future. You can find my full list of RPG credits here.

I started to listen to the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks at the end of 2025 at the suggestion of a friend... I'd heard a little about litrpg, and I had thought that it wouldn't be for me, much like I'd tried getting into several popular actual play series for RPGs and always bounced off of them—I enjoy running and playing RPGs much, much more than I like to watch or listen to other people play them and I figured that the Carl books would hit that same mental wall for me. I was wrong and I quickly burned through the first seven books and then listened to them a second time before the eighth, A Parade of Horribles, came out in May 2026, and at the time that I'm writing this, I'm on my third series listen... It's become a comfort read/listen, I won't try to defend it as high art, but it is fantastic for what it is and much more impressive than I expected as well as being surprisingly resonant. 

But this isn't a book review post, the rest of this post is going to be the start of a series covering my thoughts on prepping a Dungeon Crawler Carl Campaign. There will be major spoilers throughout, so this is your final warning. If you haven't read the books, give 'em a try. If you're not vibing with them when you get halfway through the first book, then you probably won't and as a former lit major who read many, many books I didn't like in college, unless you need to finish a book to pass a class or you're getting paid to or something, there's no reason to suffer when you could be doing other things. All to say, if you haven't read at least the first three books, Dungeon Crawler Carl, Carl's Doomsday Scenario and The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, you should go do that or be prepared to have major plot points of the series spoiled. 

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Also, before you click away or click down to continue reading, consider checking out my new blog page where I'll be listing upcoming events, like a chance to play in a Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG introductory one-shot or board game nights. 

Antagonist Relations - Upcoming Events.

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No ICE in Minnesota itch.io bundle

My silly one page RPG about throwing a holiday party for vampires, That Familiar Holiday Spirit, is part of the No ICE in Minnesota bundle on itchio...

You can get it and 1,438 other games for only $10 through March 13th 2026.

https://itch.io/b/3484/no-ice-in-minnesota

Pacing the Hunt - Desperation & Danger Storyteller Tips for Hunter: the Reckoning 5th Edition

A set of four Hunter dice, two orange regular dice and two black Desperation dice, showing the range of results with standard d10s underneath showing equivalent rolls.

One of the most obvious things that distinguishes the 5th Edition World of is the shift from standard d10s to ten-sided dice with icons that correspond to: 

• 1-5 = Blank/Failure
• 5-9 = Success 
• 10 = Potential Critical Success.

The basic mechanic is that players roll a number of dice equal to the sum of an Attribute, like Wits, and a Skill, like Investigation. They hope to get a number of successes (6+ on a standard d10) to match or exceed a target difficulty. A pair of critical results (10s) makes a critical success and each of those counts as two successes, so that a roll of 10,10,9,3,2 would be 5 success, one for the 9, two each for the 10's.

Each game has a set of special dice, used for Hunger (Vampire), Rage (Werewolf) and Desperation (Hunter) that add additional complications. For Hunter, the Desperation Dice have what would be the "1" side result in Overreach or Despair, while Vampire and Werewolf have their own thematically appropriate complications on both successes and failures.

In Vampire and Werewolf, the Hunger and Rage dice track an individual PC's Hunger and Rage, replacing the old Blood/Hunger and Rage tracks from previous editions. They serve as a Push Your Luck kind of mechanic where a player can risk getting more Hunger or Rage to fuel their supernatural powers—a mechanic which I find to be an elegant replacement to the mere resource tracks of previous editions.

What sets the Hunter Desperation Dice apart from Hunger or Rage dice is that they are tied to a track shared by the entire Cell (Hunter party) and not any single PC. This ties into one of the two Trackers that are unique to Hunter in the 5th Edition World of Darkness games, Desperation and Danger. This means that instead of individual players managing their Hunger or Rage, it's the Storyteller of a Hunter game who handles these important mechanics.

For a Storyteller new to Hunter, this can be tricky, the core rulebook has only a couple of pages covering the mechanic without much advice at all on how best to use them. It took me several months of running Hunter before I realized that it's best to think of them as tools for Pacing the Hunt...