Dungeon Crawler Carl is breaking crowdfunder records

Launched just this week, funded its $250K goal in under a minute, and currently sitting at nearly $5.5M with a month left to go, Dungeon Crawler Carl is already the third biggest TTRPG crowdfunder in history, with a strong chance of climbing to the #1 position.

Based on Matt Dinniman's novel series, which features the titular hero Carl and a cat which belonged to his ex-girlfriend, forced to compete in an intergalactic Running Man-style reality show centered round a deadly dungeon crawl. The World Dungeon is a massive megadungeon created by an alien corporation, and livestreamed across the universe. The players take on the role of crawlers, tasked with surviving the dungeon.

The crowdfunder by Renegade Game Studios includes not just the Dungeon Crawler Carl TTRPG, but also a deck-building card game, and more merchandise than you can shake a stick at--dice, bags, screens, miniatures, trays, playmats, stickers, journals, cards, and more.

The campaign also includes a 'season pass' which gets you digital content throughout the year.

The current leader in the Million Dollar Crowdfunder Club is 2024's Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere RPG, which came in at $14.4M, followed by 2021's Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game, which made $9.3M. Dungeon Crawler Carl currently sits in 3rd place with $5.4M and climbing.

The TTRPG is a d20 'skill-based TTRPG' and features 30+ playable races, backgrounds, and a 'massive class roster'. It has five stats--the D&D stats, but with Wisdom removed. Skills are divided into attack, spell, utility, and passive skills. A skill check is--as you'd expect-- a d20 plus modifiers compared to a target number. As part of the megadungeon's conceit, the actual floor number of the dungeon (in the novels that goes from 1-18) is added to the target number, meaning all tasks are more difficult the further you progress. One feature of DCC is that GMs do not make skill checks; only the players do.

Speaking of 'DCC", many are abbreviating this to the 'DCC' RPG, which is bound to create confusion with Goodman Games' existing Dungeon Crawl Classics, which uses the same abbreviation.

Update—Renegade has reached out to clarify that they do not intend to use the abbreviation ‘DCC’ and instead recommend that people use “CarlRPG’.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is on Backerkit right now, and ends on May 15th.

 

[saviirkad]

I love the books.
But, the books are why I don't think I want to play the RPG.

Like... Carl and Donut are being put through weeks of trauma. They are not having fun. I am not sure I wanna play that game.

That's fair.

My take is, the fun I have reading Carl and Donut experience all that would translate to having fun running that world or creating a unique character I run through that world.

Sort of like how I'm going to be playing in an Alien game soon, and I am not expecting my character to have a good time. But I expect that I will have a good time leaning into that.

 

[Parmandur]

I love the books.
But, the books are why I don't think I want to play the RPG.

Like... Carl and Donut are being put through weeks of trauma. They are not having fun. I am not sure I wanna play that game.

Playing the scenario for personal entertainment does seem somewhat counter to the themes of at least the first novel?

 

[Whisper-Kitten]

I've heard mixed reviews of the novels as well. You either love the style of humor in them, or you don't. I'm hesitant to start it as my tastes tend to lie in darker more serious stories.

I have a similar taste, and feel that based on the descriptions I have received from friends, that I would not enjoy this series.

 

[SteveC]

I have a similar taste, and feel that based on the descriptions I have received from friends, that I would not enjoy this series.

It has some very dark humor in it. What's more, the humor comes, and then in the quiet times Carl reflects on how horrible it is. It leads him to decide he's never going to give up. I'm only in book four, but there are many instances already where he decides to do something over the top in order to save lives, and I think he's a pretty solid protagonist. But there are moments where some of the NPCs realize their backstories are all made up, and that's pretty terrible. I was expecting something a lot more like mindless fun, and there is that, but there is a lot more too.

 

[Umbran]

That's fair.

My take is, the fun I have reading Carl and Donut experience all that would translate to having fun running that world or creating a unique character I run through that world.

To each their own. I enjoy the books, but I am not sure I'd call them "fun".

I don't want to go into some of the differences here, as this isn't an open-to-spoilers discussion of the books.

Sort of like how I'm going to be playing in an Alien game soon, and I am not expecting my character to have a good time. But I expect that I will have a good time leaning into that.

At least with Alien, even if the entire planet is in jeopardy, it is mostly to a threat that is, in effect, a seemingly non-sapient force of nature. Corporations meddle and create risks out of hubris, but don't actually intend to kill everyone.

In DCC... not so much.

 

[saviirkad]

At least with Alien, even if the entire planet is in jeopardy, it is mostly to a threat that is, in effect, a seemingly non-sapient force of nature. Corporations meddle and create risks out of hubris, but don't actually intend to kill everyone.

In DCC... not so much.

Oh that's interesting! I always took the xenomorph to be the scary threat that's otherwise neutral. It's a danger because you're there, because you've been pushed towards it. It is non-sapient and has no intent to kill beyond its simple nature. The corporations in the Alien franchise are the scarier villain because they're the ones doing the pushing. They have the intent to cause lethal harm in spite of human morals because of their own greed and, as you say, hubris.

Edit: As an addendum, as a player in an Alien game, I intend to throw my character into that danger. Accept reasons to split up, find cause to rush out into the open because surely it's moved on, etc etc. Play into it. I'm sure I'll die to the monster, but even if we did a huge multi-session adventure, we'll never come close to even being noticed by the villains.

 

[dbm]

I think the challenging thing about running a DCC based RPG would be that there is an in-game GM who is adversarial to the in-game players. Having a non-adversarial relationship between the actual GM and players could become tricky because of that.

The most positive way of thinking about the set-up is comparing it to those old-school tournament modules like Temple of Elemental Evil and so on.

 

[ffanxii4ever]

I think the challenging thing about running a DCC based RPG would be that there is an in-game GM who is adversarial to the in-game players. Having a non-adversarial relationship between the actual GM and players could become tricky because of that.

Yeah, I am excited for the RPG, and already have buy-in from my group, but this is the one part of running it that I really hope the RPG books have good advice for the GM on, because while experienced GMs will know the common pitfalls and (hopefully) how to avoid it from being an adversarial situation, I completely could see a new GM, coming in from the Dungeon Crawler Carl fandom trying to be too much of a killer GM.

 

[Umbran]

Oh that's interesting! I always took the xenomorph to be the scary threat that's otherwise neutral. It's a danger because you're there, because you've been pushed towards it. It is non-sapient and has no intent to kill beyond its simple nature. The corporations in the Alien franchise are the scarier villain because they're the ones doing the pushing. They have the intent to cause lethal harm in spite of human morals because of their own greed and, as you say, hubris.

The corporate concerns in Alien are not, as far as I am aware, actively planning genocide.

What happens to Earth in DCC is corporate-syndicate managed genocide to drive profits from the entertainment value. Trillions of beings across the galaxy watching the genocide for fun and profit! In the very first moments of the book, billions of people die. 13 million people enter the world-dungeon, with the full expectation that all but a handful will die violently and painfully, and the handful that make it beyond the 10th level and survive only do so by accepting a life of servitude to the corporations supporting future genocides!

I don't see how we can think that Weyland-Yutani even compares on the level of evil as the DCC Syndicate.

 

[saviirkad]

The corporate concerns in Alien are not, as far as I am aware, actively planning genocide.

What happens to Earth in DCC is corporate-syndicate managed genocide to drive profits from the entertainment value. Trillions of beings across the galaxy watching the genocide for fun and profit! In the very first moments of the book, billions of people die. 13 million people enter the world-dungeon, with the full expectation that all but a handful will die violently and painfully, and the handful that make it beyond the 10th level and survive only do so by accepting a life of servitude to the corporations supporting future genocides!

I don't see how we can think that Weyland-Yutani even compares on the level of evil as the DCC Syndicate.

Oh, for one, didn't intend to say they were comparably evil. I think the DCC corporations are the greater evil, albeit primarily because they have greater means to enact their evil on a grander scale.

The second point is a spoiler: the corporations of DCC do not genocide entire worlds just to profit off of the entertainment value. They genocide entire worlds solely to further expand and strengthen their resources within their home systems (I'm greatly simplifying this). The entertainment aspect is itself a byproduct, something they do while their true purpose is being handled. The profit gained is significant enough to encourage it, but it is not the actual purpose. It's more comparable to a cat playing with its food. There is also an insinuation that it might be a practice built on keeping the AI busy and distracted.

To be clear, I'm not adding context to suggest they're not "really" evil, more just context on how truly unnecessarily cruel their evil is.