Dungeon Crawler Carl: A LitRPG/Gamelit Adventure

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For whatever reason, I just couldn't get into this book as much as the previous three. I ended up reading two complete books in the middle of this one (the new Hondo Jinx and the latest from Daniel Schinhofen). I finally forced myself to finish it late last night. Xanatos Gambit: A Mayor on the third floor is preparing for a massive ritual spell that will devastate the area. Kill them, and all the energy they've gathered will soon become unstable and incinerate the area. Disarm that, and the leftover energy will destabilize everything magical in a wide radius... Even Evil Has Standards: One of the few things that is actually banned from the crawls is using "collected" children or pregnant women as NPCs. (Although considering what's still allowed, that restriction seems a bit arbitrary.)

Enemy Mine: Carl and Donut join forces with Tsarina Signet to kill hunters. They're not exactly friends, and have been in conflict before, but they respect each other's skills and have a common enemy. Mongo's first reaction to Robot Donut is to bite its head off. Actually, Mongo does that to a lot of things. The Ring of Divine Suffering gives a permanent stat bonus every time you kill a designated crawler or "tourist;" that is, anyone besides an NPC. While not bad, it's not really worth the risk, since you can't heal until you kill them—meaning you're in serious trouble if they get away. But the bonus also increases as your total kill count increases. According to Mordecai, crawlers never actually benefit from the rings; instead, hunters kill them for the rings, then line up a few hundred enemies and kill them all one by one.

Disc-One Nuke: There are various spells and buffs that will make the first several floors easy when used properly. Only a few dare venture inside. But once you're in, you can't get out. And what's worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it's game over. In this game, it's not about your strength or your dexterity. It's about your followers, your views. Your clout. It's about building an audience and killing those goblins with style. Every aspect of the story is done well. Characters have depth and no one ever holds the "idiot ball". People act because they have reasons to, and events unfold logically, never because of plot demands. The world is unique and interesting, with quite some thought put into it. The premise is great. There's always some clever twist or surprise. The RPG system gets the job done without being excessive. And the humor! It's very rare for stories to actually make me laugh. It's usually just awkward or underwhelming. But this one does it for me, somehow.

Being a cat, she is rather vain, caring about how things look on her and being appalled if they do not look good. Donut does not like getting dirty or being hurt so she is more comfortable fighting from a distance with her magic. The Borant admin who gives patch notes ends every broadcast with "Now get out there and kill, kill, kill!" Zev says the same thing after being (seemingly) brainwashed. The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook warns of the dangers of defeating a Country Boss and collecting the Treasure Map that it leaves behind. Crawlers who have just been through a terrible fight, and have seen their nominal allies trample on each other in their efforts to take the boss down, are suddenly given knowledge of where all the loot is and its quality, which tends to trigger a second bloodbath. We Work Well Together: A recurring motif is Carl gathering a group of people around himself because he can't bear to leave anyone to die and succeeding against all the odds.

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Donut is just a show-winning princess. Were you expecting an actual surprise here? Joke's on you. Now get out there and kill kill kill! Monsters that enter one of the stairwells to the next floor are destroyed. Even the ridiculously powerful Rage Elementals unleashed in retaliation for crawlers urinating in the hallways. That one gets patched. Before entering The Dungeon, Carl, a 27 year old U.S. Coast Guard Veteran, worked as a Marine Technician "fixing electrical systems for rich assholes and their party boats." [1]. He lived with his girlfriend Bea ( Beatrice) and her award-winning cat Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk. He survived the collapse because Princess Donut had escaped the apartment and he was outside looking for her. He is a devotee of Emberus (the highest rank possible without having the class Cleric or Paladin). From Nobody to Nightmare: From the perspective of the Syndicate and the elites, Carl and Donut are like a specter coming out of the darkness and destroying them. Carl is personally murdering the members of the highest houses and turning their playgrounds into charnel dens. Meanwhile, Donut overthrew a government as a favor to a friend.