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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SPOILERS AHEAD

NEW ACHIEVEMENT SPOILER WARNING: You've clicked through the spoiler jump in this post. You've either read the series or you've decided that you're not gonna whine if anything is spoiled for you.

NEW ACHIEVEMENT GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT: You're thinking about running a Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying campaign and you're reading a random online blog about how to maybe do it better, so you're not planning to totally half-ass this. Still, strap in buddy, get ready to listen to players whine about dice rolls and for the endless scheduling conflicts that are the bane of every game master's life. Remember, you signed up for this.

One of my in person gaming groups is currently in the middle of a Shadow of the Weird Wizard campaign, they've survived giant ticks and ettercap ambushes, but even though I love Shadow of the Weird Wizard, the follow up to the also excellent Shadow of the Demon Lord, I'm already looking forward to getting them onto the Dungeon Crawler Carl train (pun intended). A lot of this is just that the tone, or rather wild variance in tones of the Carl books and RPG are going to fit this particular group like a glove. It's a group of long-time friends who often get a little too goofy for horror games, but want something more serious than a really cartoony game. There are often characters with shticks that can feel out of place in a heroic fantasy RPG but that will fit right into the world dungeon.

But of course, being the kind of guy who thinks way too much about running games (see bio), I've been thinking about what my Dungeon Crawler World: Earth is going to look like. This is partly prompted by my own inclinations, but also partly by Justin Alexander's What Does It Mean To Play Dungeon Crawler Carl? article. I'm not going to rehash the article, but it reminded me of one of my most unpleasant Con experiences, a Firefly RPG game where all the PCs were characters from the game and one player spent most of the time insisting that everyone but him was portraying their characters wrong, which is to say not according to the canon in his head. I also really agree with Justin's point that if you simply drop characters into the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl as it is and the players have read the books, then there will be no revelations as players already know about the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook and all about the Skull Empire, or even about smaller things like the tenor of particular shows. Now, to the credit of the Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying game, they do include alternates for things like game guides and interview shows, but I think I want to go just a little further.

So, the challenge I'm setting myself is to identify the structures of Dungeon Crawler Carl so that I can run a satisfying game about a Dungeon Crawler World: Earth season where Carl, Donut, Team Meadowlark and the other characters from the books are absent—with Borant as the corporation still, but without the Dungeon Anarchist Cookbook, without the Skull Empire being the first major out of the dungeon antagonist... What I want is to figure out what I need to confidently run A Crawl of My Own.

It's not set in stone yet, but so far I'm sorted the following into Keep and Ditch buckets...

Keep	Ditch
Borant Corporation as the runners, this lets me keep several of the intergalactic plots and lets me use the Bloom as bad guys.	The top crawlers aka main characters of the novels. I want my player’s characters to be the main characters of our story, and I think having Carl, Donut, Katia, et al rattling around in the dungeon will distract from that.
Cascadia as the Executive Producer, which makes sense because until the later books she’s mostly just the “Kill, kill, KILL!” lady and keeping her gives an excuse to keep the floors largely the same even if I don’t use any neighborhoods from the novels.	Most named NPCs tightly tied to the main characters, like Odette and Mordecai, for much the same reason as the crawlers noted above.
The Valtay as the looming threat to Borant because it fits with keeping Borant as the show runners and if its not Zev that the characters are dealing with, then I can have the story go in a different direction.	The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook. Just having one of my players’ characters get the cookbook feels too easy and contrived, and also feels like it could make one character in the party feel too much like the ‘main character’. I want to figure out an alternate way to provide the kind of information the cookbook provides without using it.
Main dungeon mythology like Scolopendra, the main outline of dungeon history, including Residuals and former crawlers. To me, a lot of this seems like load-bearing parts of the overarching story and also like a pool I want to play in.	Dramas from the books, like Vengeance of the Daughter, as I am confident that I can come up with my own dramas to throw in so that players who have read the books get to play to find out instead of just acting along with a story they know.

Now the challenge is going to be figuring out what to create/swap in... Some of that I'm pre-planning, in place of the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, I have written in my notes DJ Damnation and Radio Free Crawl with the thought that multiple characters could get radios/earbuds that let them hear underground pirate radio signals kept hidden/encrypted from the viewers and show runners to let me pass along information in place of the Cookbook.

For factions, that will partly depend on the characters, if there are no Caprids, then I might not emphasize the Plenty as much (then again, I might). For other top crawlers, I'm tempted to have my players come up with two or three crawlers each in addition to their character. Not to stat them out, but just to give me a sentence long pitch, like "gas station attendant from Oregon who did aerial and fire-breathing as a hobby" or "Rural high school teacher who smokes like a chimney and writes schlocky horror novels under a nom de plume in his spare time." Then I can take those characters and have them evolve 'off-screen' for a floor or two before bringing them back in to fill out the ranks of crawlers in place of characters from the books. 

Expect more installments of A Crawl of One's One as I continue to prep and then start to run my own Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying Game campaign.