Shout-out to LitRPG fans, who did something I haven't seen before...

They rallied in a positive way, and got the win.

I just recorded a video about this in the shop. Naturally, being sleep-deprived, I missed a few things that I wanted to say, so I’ll nail them here.

DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL is a literary RPG-style book that—so far—is the best one I’ve read in this particular vein. The author put some thought into why an average joe would be stuck in that situation, and how he would use his average joe skills to survive it.

The comedy is strong and the characters are admirable. Content-wise there is a fair amount of language, and it bumped up against the “too many F-bombs” barrier, so it could have dialed that back just a hair, but other than that I have no complaints.

The basic plot is that aliens/demons/extradimensional beings of some kind have been on Earth for a long time, they know our culture(s), and they’ve been planning to integrate us into a cosmic reality TV show (of sorts) for years. The time has come, so they whack the Earth and drop a bunch of portals to supernatural dungeons, and the game begins.

The only people who survive are the ones outside of manmade structures when the portals hit. Carl, our twentysomething hero, was out in a snowstorm chasing his cat, so while he’s underdressed, he is at least alive. Other people from his area are in a similar situation, including a rest home full of workers and residents who had to go out for a fire alarm.

Carl finds a goblin-creature who tells him what’s going on and that he’s now a player in the game. He gets some buffs, some points, some loot, and starts playing. So does his cat, Donut, who can now talk. It all works from there.

For the whole shebang, watch the video. This series reminds me of Hard Luck Hank, which I’ve also enjoyed.

I also need to emphasize that the narrator and the recording studio did a bang-up job. Jeff Hays does the voices really well, and the sound engineers added reverb and crowd noise at the right times to make it come to life. I’ll eventually read a second one. This was a fun book.