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Reading Thursday
Aug. 5th, 2021 01:11 pmDungeon Crawler Carl
Carl’s Doomsday Scenario
The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook
The Gate of the Feral Gods
All by Matt Dinniman; the first four books in the ongoing Dungeon Crawler Carl series (I have also read the first few chapters of the fifth book, which are up on royal road). This is LitRPG/GameLit, fiction that recreates computer RPG conventions not just with regard to plot and tropes, but with stats, upgrades, loot boxes, etc for the characters and wait, wait, where are you all going? Yes, there is a lot of it around (much on Kindle AU) and much of it is terrible. These are really good.
Part of that is the concept, which differs from many of the bog-standard fantasy RPG settings and avoids many of their pitfalls, but most of it is that Dinniman is a good writer (I think his background is horror shorts) and while he obviously loves games and gaming fiction he doesn’t neglect the story.
Which starts with a bang. Aliens show up and destroy every structure on Earth, and anyone inside them at the time. The few survivors - including Carl, who’d gone outside on a winter’s night in his boxers to retrieve his girlfriend’s pedigree Persian cat from a tree, and Princess Donut, the cat herself - are informed that the Earth is subject to a mining materials claim, and their only chance to regain control of the planet is to make it through an 18 level World Dungeon, created out of everything that’s just been destroyed (it’s unclear yet exactly what materials the aliens wanted, but they are apparently a very small part of the Earth’s total mass).
Obviously there are catches. Each level will collapse after a certain time period, killing anyone who hasn’t found the next stairway, there are boss fights, traps, puzzles, and enemies everywhere, no one has ever made it past level 13 (although from level 10 onwards deals are offered to dungeon crawlers so they can stop trying), and the whole thing is being televised across the galaxy for everyone else’s entertainment; viewers can also sponsor crawlers, and offer gifts that can help or otherwise interfere with their progress. And the AI that runs the dungeon is increasingly unstable…
After the opening it’s a bit slower while Dinniman establishes everything, but it soon picks up again. Princess Donut gets a legendary pet loot box for being the first cat in the dungeon, giving her a massive boost to her stats and the power to talk; she’s a delight of a character, still very much a cat ( her mortal enemies are cocker spaniels), and plays well against Carl, who starts off as a fairly standard “everyman” but has a lot more to him. He’s damaged by an abusive childhood and is accustomed to not depending on others, but he manages to build communities and boost other players (and, as of book 5, he hasn’t had sex with any of the many female characters he’s interacted with, or male for that matter), and as he becomes determined to break the gaming system and get revenge on those running it, there’s a developing tension with regard to what he has to do to accomplish this, and how many people he may have to hurt in the process that I find very compelling. This applies not just to the other crawlers but the NPCs, who are recycled between dungeons with artificial memories for the convenience and entertainment of viewers. And, despite all of this, these are genuinely funny books with some fantastic lines.
There is a lot of death and quite a bit of gore and gruesomeness, including body horror (but no sexual violence). My main criticism is that he does lean heavily on the “I have a plan but I won’t reveal it to the reader YET” - with a small nested flashback when all is revealed to show the set up - but it’s a fairly small objection, and I did like it when on one of these occasions what looked to an exceptionally cunning plan turned out just to be a slightly cunning plan with a bit of luck. The other criticism is that then I read the free samples of about twenty other highly rated LitRPG books and none of them did anything for me.
Book 1 gets the characters though the first two levels, and the subsequent books are one level per book. I don’t know how many books are projected. He also has a back catalogue of other LitRPG books that I am now eyeing up.
Carl’s Doomsday Scenario
The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook
The Gate of the Feral Gods
All by Matt Dinniman; the first four books in the ongoing Dungeon Crawler Carl series (I have also read the first few chapters of the fifth book, which are up on royal road). This is LitRPG/GameLit, fiction that recreates computer RPG conventions not just with regard to plot and tropes, but with stats, upgrades, loot boxes, etc for the characters and wait, wait, where are you all going? Yes, there is a lot of it around (much on Kindle AU) and much of it is terrible. These are really good.
Part of that is the concept, which differs from many of the bog-standard fantasy RPG settings and avoids many of their pitfalls, but most of it is that Dinniman is a good writer (I think his background is horror shorts) and while he obviously loves games and gaming fiction he doesn’t neglect the story.
Which starts with a bang. Aliens show up and destroy every structure on Earth, and anyone inside them at the time. The few survivors - including Carl, who’d gone outside on a winter’s night in his boxers to retrieve his girlfriend’s pedigree Persian cat from a tree, and Princess Donut, the cat herself - are informed that the Earth is subject to a mining materials claim, and their only chance to regain control of the planet is to make it through an 18 level World Dungeon, created out of everything that’s just been destroyed (it’s unclear yet exactly what materials the aliens wanted, but they are apparently a very small part of the Earth’s total mass).
Obviously there are catches. Each level will collapse after a certain time period, killing anyone who hasn’t found the next stairway, there are boss fights, traps, puzzles, and enemies everywhere, no one has ever made it past level 13 (although from level 10 onwards deals are offered to dungeon crawlers so they can stop trying), and the whole thing is being televised across the galaxy for everyone else’s entertainment; viewers can also sponsor crawlers, and offer gifts that can help or otherwise interfere with their progress. And the AI that runs the dungeon is increasingly unstable…
After the opening it’s a bit slower while Dinniman establishes everything, but it soon picks up again. Princess Donut gets a legendary pet loot box for being the first cat in the dungeon, giving her a massive boost to her stats and the power to talk; she’s a delight of a character, still very much a cat ( her mortal enemies are cocker spaniels), and plays well against Carl, who starts off as a fairly standard “everyman” but has a lot more to him. He’s damaged by an abusive childhood and is accustomed to not depending on others, but he manages to build communities and boost other players (and, as of book 5, he hasn’t had sex with any of the many female characters he’s interacted with, or male for that matter), and as he becomes determined to break the gaming system and get revenge on those running it, there’s a developing tension with regard to what he has to do to accomplish this, and how many people he may have to hurt in the process that I find very compelling. This applies not just to the other crawlers but the NPCs, who are recycled between dungeons with artificial memories for the convenience and entertainment of viewers. And, despite all of this, these are genuinely funny books with some fantastic lines.
There is a lot of death and quite a bit of gore and gruesomeness, including body horror (but no sexual violence). My main criticism is that he does lean heavily on the “I have a plan but I won’t reveal it to the reader YET” - with a small nested flashback when all is revealed to show the set up - but it’s a fairly small objection, and I did like it when on one of these occasions what looked to an exceptionally cunning plan turned out just to be a slightly cunning plan with a bit of luck. The other criticism is that then I read the free samples of about twenty other highly rated LitRPG books and none of them did anything for me.
Book 1 gets the characters though the first two levels, and the subsequent books are one level per book. I don’t know how many books are projected. He also has a back catalogue of other LitRPG books that I am now eyeing up.
