New Achievement: You're a Brand, Carl!

The literary world is full of unlikely heroes: a kid with glasses who lives in a cupboard under the stairs, a reluctant Hobbit, a plain girl from District 12, and now, a man with no pants and his talking cat.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a LitRPG series by author Matt Dinniman in which an intergalactic corporation destroys Earth and forces what is left of humanity into a Dungeons & Dragons-style world where they compete in a televised game show: Dungeon Crawler World: Earth. Protagonist Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s pageant star cat, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk, must fight for their lives against monsters, other crawlers, and the mentally unstable system AI that may or may not have a foot fetish, all while leveling up their skills, saving lives, and trying to break the system from the inside.

In the almost six years since Dungeon Crawler Carl entered the literary chat, it’s exploded into an eight-book series, with two more installments on the way. Originally self-published via Amazon, the series has since been picked up by Penguin Random House, which will publish the last two books of the series and distribute the earlier installments with new cover art. 

“It’s surreal,” Dinniman says. “I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and the series sort of blew up very quickly. I still feel like everything is spinning.”

As the series’ popularity continues to grow, fans have built a vibrant community that has caught the eyes of merch makers, with collectibles from Playmates Toys and games from Renegade Game Studios launching this year.

If you head to your local bookseller to pick up the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, it won’t be hard to miss the books, which have newly designed and illustrated covers by Will Staehle. These neon, pop-art designs will stand out on your shelves no matter how you display them. 

“We really wanted the fun of the series to come through in the jackets,” says Adam Auerbach, art and design director at Penguin Random House. “[Staehle’s] color sense and visual wit really helped bring out the humor. We used the story and tone of the book as our main inspiration, which was how we tried to keep the new art true to the spirit of the series. Color has been really important. The vibrant, offbeat colors on the black backgrounds really capture the wild, but relatable and funny, world of the books.”

A beloved book series getting a cover redesign while the books are still coming out can be a nightmare for the completionist collector. To ensure that fans who started collecting the Dungeon Crawler Carl books with the original covers designed by Luciano Fleitas could maintain a cohesive collection, Dinniman was adamant about releasing the rest of the series with Fleitas covers in limited drops, alongside the new Penguin Random House versions. 

“It was a deal breaker for me,” Dinniman says. “We have to allow the people who’ve been collecting from the beginning to be able to keep collecting them, which is why we kept the OG covers coming.”

Although anyone can purchase these limited-edition covers, it seems to be understood among the community that these drops are designed for those looking to complete their original collection. Plus, starting a full collection from scratch would come at quite the price — at the time of publication, the OG cover editions are going for up to $900 on eBay.

Fleitas’ Dungeon Crawler Carl covers may no longer be the definitive look of the series, but his art remains vital to the brand. Fleitas even worked with the design team at Renegade Game Studios to create featured artwork for the company’s Dungeon Crawler Carl games: the Dungeon Crawler Carl Role-Playing Game and the deck-building game Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable. 

Fleitas contributed to the artwork for both games, but the company also commissioned hundreds of images from different artists for them, each featuring their own unique style. 

“Once we had those marquee pieces by Luciano, then we could go from there,” says Scott Gaeta, president and publisher at Renegade Game Studios. “We wanted to give artists some freedom, too. Some things are stylized differently. The Unstoppable style is different from the role-playing game book style. We didn’t want it to be like some other licenses where you can only draw this character exactly this way. We wanted to give them a little bit more expression. Matt seemed to love it. Being an artist himself, you could tell he wasn’t going to make everybody do it exactly the way he wanted it.”

The Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG is everything fans could hope for, featuring more than 30 playable races and a huge class roster with legendary subclasses — most of which will be familiar to fans. Players can be a Skyfowl like Mordecai or an Igneous like Chris and take on a class like Hekla’s Shieldmaiden or Elle McGibbons’ Blizzardmancer. It’s complicated in the best way, full of book-accurate details and loaded with creativity. 

For fans looking for a more approachable experience, Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable is a deck-building game in which players explore the first three floors of the World Dungeon. Players can go solo or team up with a fellow crawler and explore four difficulty levels. There are more than 280 cards to collect, multiple playable crawlers, an assortment of bosses to face off against, and more.

The games launched on Backer-Kit on April 15 and received more than $13 million in pledges in the following month, obliterating Renegade’s goal of $250,000. 

“The audience is ready for more ways to experience the world,” Gaeta says. “As a reader myself, you read novels, you watch movies, TV shows, and when you’re a gamer, you want to live and play in that space. Games are the perfect way to jump in and participate. That’s a natural fit for Carl, especially being a LitRPG.”

Both games are expected to ship in November, along with new accessories and add-ons, like Carl and Donut dice sets, minis sets, a game master screen, and more.

Playmates Toys, best known for making the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a household name in the ’80s, is also entering the dungeon, launching several lines of Dungeon Crawler Carl toys under the name of the company that runs the World Dungeon in the books: the Borant Corp.

“We thought it was a fun Easter egg for fans, but also, a lot of the other IPs that we work with are younger-skewing,” says Lydia Torres, marketing manager at Playmates Toys. “Sometimes people see the Playmates logo and expect toys for a younger demographic. We didn’t want people to see a cute cat and the Playmates logo and think it was an IP for children. It was a fun way to do something that meant a lot in the book and also keep it safe and clear as to who it’s for.”

While Playmates Toys is best known for its kids’ toys, fans can rest assured that the Dungeon Crawler Carl line will feature the same irreverent charm found in the books. 

“We definitely have not watered down the brand at all,” Torres says. “We went all in. We have the Uzi Jesus trading card in one of our loot boxes, and his catchphrase is across the top in big, bold letters. So what you get in the book, we’ve tried to really emulate that in the line as well.”

One of the staples of the collection is the Dungeon Crawler World Earth Collectible Crawlers, 6-inch collectible figures of Mordecai, Prepotente, and Carl and Princess Donut. Each figure comes with interchangeable hands and heads, and the magnetic Princess Donut figure even sits on Carl’s shoulder.

The collection also includes more detailed pieces with the Dungeon Crawler World Earth Dungeon Highlight Statues, surprise figures that include some of the most legendary moments from the series, like when Donut uses Mordecai’s mother’s ashes as a litter box or the iconic cat atop Mongo’s back, riding over a severed Mantaur arm. 

Collectors can also live their best dungeon life with the Dungeon Crawler World Earth Loot Boxes, which each include a mystery Princess Donut figure and one of four accessories; 8- and 12-inch Princess Donut plushies; and Dungeon Crawler World Earth Trading Cards, which feature familiar characters from crawlers and NPCs to mobs and Borant Corp. officials. 

Playmates Toys will debut the Dungeon Crawler Carl collection at Comic-Con International: San Diego (SDCC) this year with an exclusive Carl and Donut figure (complete with bloodspatter), an exclusive poster, a CrawlCon loot box, and more. 

The Dungeon Crawler Carl collectibles and games would not be successful without the vibrant, engaged community fans have built over the past six years. 

Tyson Cox, a comedian with more than 25,000 followers on TikTok, started listening to the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks, narrated by Jeff Hays, after clips from them kept popping up on his feed.

“I, weirdly enough, was annoyed how many TikToks were using the audio,” Cox says. “Eventually, I was like, ‘Well, I got to see what this is all about.’ So I started to listen, and I was like, ‘This is the best thing ever.’”

Since then, Cox has posted Dungeon Crawler Carl-themed videos on his platforms, the most popular of which earned more than 250,000 views and a repost from Dinniman. In the video, Cox jokes that the plot of Dungeon Crawler Carl sounds like a toddler trying to tell a story. 

“It could objectively feel like an insult, but it popped off, and then he noticed it,” Cox says. “He’s part of the reason why I did so well, because he liked it, he commented, and he reshared it. He didn’t have to do that. It was a super cool thing that meant a lot to me as a fan, and he could have just easily not done it or chosen to be offended by me goofing on it.”

Dungeon Crawler Carl has also made it into the libraries of the fan artists, including Naomi Dale, who goes by @_mimimaru on Instagram. Dale has crafted several pieces of art based on the series, including a moody portrait of Carl and Donut relaxing in the Desperado Club and a portrait of Carl flipping off the system AI, which he does at the end of the series’ fourth book, The Gate of the Feral Gods. 

“Every book that I’ve listened to in the series, I’m always taken aback by how it can go from being so rambunctious and chaotic to showing these really humanizing emotional scenes,” Dale says. “I think Matt Dinniman balances that rollercoaster of emotions really well … I’m so attached to these characters now that I think it’s a work of art. I can’t help crying, laughing, and then like screaming to all my friends that they have to read this, too.”

Dungeon Crawler Carl is an adventure filled with creatively disgusting monsters, explosive mayhem, and a cast of characters that know no limits. It has gore, grit, and a ton of heart: a perfect cocktail for a winning franchise. With two books left in the series, a live-action TV series on the way from Peacock, and its first round of merch and collectibles leaving fans ravenous for more, it’s safe to say there are a lot of levels of the World Dungeon left to explore.