Dungeon Crawler Carl: the story so far

Every human-built structure on Earth collapsed into the ground in a single moment, and the survivors were told they could reclaim the planet by descending an eighteen-level dungeon built from its remains, broadcast across the galaxy as a game show. Carl went in barefoot and in his underwear, chasing his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut.

A biscuit from his first loot box made Donut sapient, talkative and able to cast spells, and a tutorial guide named Mordecai taught the pair how races, classes and sponsors worked. They cleared the goblin warrens of the first floor, killed a boss called the Hoarder, and fell in with the staff and residents of the Meadow Lark care home.

On the second floor Carl was nearly killed shielding Donut from a Krakaren clone, and their audience began to grow. When a Rage Elemental cut the floor off and killed one of the Meadow Lark nurses, Carl built a chicken packed with explosives and drove it the length of the level on live broadcast to destroy the thing, which made the pair famous.

They took the kobold boss afterwards, tamed a velociraptor named Mongo, and went down to the third floor as the Royal Court of Princess Donut.

The tutorial floors were over. Donut chose a former child actor class and Carl an anarchist class built on explosives, and they entered the third floor, an enormous ruined city of NPC settlements, magistrates and hidden storylines.

Working through a travelling circus and its parasitic ringmaster, Carl met Tsarina Signet, took a contract to appear on an alien revenge programme on the sixth floor, and was introduced to the Desperado Club, the bar between floors where crawlers trade and hire. Katia Grim joined the party.

A murder in an alley pulled the pair into the affairs of the city magistrate, Miss Quill, and Carl killed her with dynamite hidden in her own shelves and inherited her office. Her undead husband turned out to be a soul capacitor she had been draining the town through to cast a spell that would have killed everyone on the floor.

Carl set the soul gem off deliberately rather than let it detonate on her terms, and the resulting chain of blasts tore through the level as the party ran. Katia blew a weapons depot at the last moment, which absorbed the final blast and saved thousands of crawlers and NPCs. They reached the stairs, made the leaderboard for the first time, and were warned that a bounty had been placed on them.

The fourth floor was the Iron Tangle, a vast rail network where the trains never stopped, the stations spawned monsters, and the only way down was to reach a stairwell station before the floor collapsed.

Crawlers were given personal spaces to rest in, corporate sponsors started making offers, and Carl won a copy of the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, a former crawler's manual for fighting the dungeon itself. He spent the floor working out how the Tangle actually ran: the trainyards, the staff lines, the mimics posing as terminus stations, and the generators feeding ghouls onto the tracks.

A confrontation with a rival crawler leader ended with Katia killing her by accident and Donut reviving her. With thousands of crawlers stranded by another crawler's rampage through the network, Carl organised a mass rescue using cargo carts and souvenir hats that teleported their wearers to safety.

As the timer ran down and the Tangle flooded with monsters, the crawlers blew every ghoul generator at once and cleared a path to the stairs. A war god summoned to kill Carl was dropped into the abyss instead. He came off the floor promising the audience he would break the whole thing.

The fifth floor sealed each group of crawlers inside a bubble split into four quadrants, and the only way out was to liberate all four. Carl, Donut and Katia landed in a desert of camel farmers and gnome bombers, with a castle floating overhead and a flooded necropolis below.

Over the floor they hijacked an airship, took the castle, drained the tomb, and learned that the changelings who serve the dungeon as NPCs were being held in line through their own children. Carl also collected the three parts of the Gate of the Feral Gods, a device that opens a portal to anywhere, and picked up Samantha, a demigoddess trapped in the head of a sex doll.

The infiltrator who had taken over one of his friends was finally killed, a toy robot of Donut blew up an alien producer, and Carl became an acolyte of a god after summoning him to save a lost hellhound puppy, cutting the arm off the highest-ranked crawler in the process.

Once every bubble he could reach was open, Carl used the gate not as anyone expected but to flood Larracos, the city waiting on the ninth floor, drowning the mercenary garrison stationed there, and went down the stairs promising to kill every hunter on the sixth floor.

The sixth floor was the Hunting Grounds, where wealthy aliens paid for the right to hunt crawlers for sport. Carl declared war on them in the first hour, levelling the city they had gathered in and killing hunters one at a time for the stats his cursed ring paid out.

Between fights the party took towns, formed a guild, and was pulled into an alien revenge storyline that required the death of the high elf queen at the party closing the floor. Carl learned his ex-girlfriend Bea had survived the collapse, Donut quietly helped engineer a corporate takeover of the company running the crawl, and Miriam Dom, turned vampire and beyond healing, asked Carl to kill her. He sat with her until sunrise instead, and her death cured everyone she had infected.

The floor ended at the Butcher's Masquerade, a party held under a divine seal forbidding violence. Signet broke the seal by sacrificing herself, and the ballroom became a massacre that finished the last of the hunters, the queen and her court. The castle and its NPCs were teleported out of reach, Carl's team won two places in the coming Faction Wars, and he used the broadcast to ask the audience to vote the ninth floor's safety protections away.

The seventh floor never ran. Another crawler reached it first, found the flaw in the way it was built, and broke the whole level apart before it could start, dropping everyone still alive straight down to the eighth.

The eighth floor was a memory of Earth as it had been, starting in Havana, and it ran on cards: crawlers flagged the creatures they beat, kept them as totems, and fought deck against deck.

Carl and Donut built a squad alongside three new allies, were drawn into a quarrel between local gods, and struck a bargain with a goddess who promised to undo the curse that meant only one of Katia and Donut could pass the ninth floor. Katia's own way out required an assassination at the Desperado Club, which she and Carl carried out.

In the second phase Carl found his father dying in a trailer the dungeon had rebuilt from memory, found some peace in it, and learned he had a half-brother. A creature calling herself the Bedlam Bride bound herself to Carl, took his body for a time, and left a tattoo on his chest that made the arrangement permanent.

The last phase left most squads without a key to the stairs, so Carl freed a demon prince to cast a teleport spell across the whole floor, tearing the stairwell chambers open from below and letting everyone still alive descend. The crawlers voted the safety protections off on the way down, and Faction Wars began.

Faction Wars opened on the ninth floor with nine armies fighting over the drained city of Larracos under a sixty-hour ceasefire that ended early. Carl's team was reinforced by fifty thousand former crawlers smuggled in aboard a garbage ship, and allied with the dungeon's own NPCs, who woke up and formed a tenth faction, and with one other army against everyone else.

Carl had already disconnected the failsafe meant to destroy the star system, which left the increasingly unstable dungeon AI free of its containment. The war ran through trench assaults, a parlay that ended with an orc king assassinated mid-sentence, a raid on the private club of the gods, and the death of Li Jun. Donut, given a tattoo that let her combine two spells, cast something the system recorded as an atrocity and came out of it the most powerful crawler in the history of the crawl.

With the city won, the surviving NPCs and the city itself were teleported to a lower floor and the outsiders were removed from the dungeon, which handed the Princess Posse the war. Katia took a goddess's boon and left the crawl for good. Justice Light stayed behind, triggered a trap that broke the Nothing, released the gods and woke Scolopendra.

The tenth floor was a race. Crawlers were handed garages, vehicles and mercenary drivers and put through seven heats against teams of NPCs, and the arithmetic meant that in the final heat crawlers would have to kill each other.

Between races Carl reunited a man who had been split in two, smuggled Li Na off the floor inside a cleaning robot, and worked with a war mage on a rumoured escape route into a pocket dimension called the Pineapple Cabaret, which two hundred crawlers took. When Scolopendra loosed her Nine-Tier Attack Carl was turned into a dachshund, and the crawlers used portals hidden on a casino wheel to pull the rest of the doomed heats off the track.

Twenty-three crawlers reached the eleventh floor and marched in the parade it is named for, where the AI told the audience the true history of the war that made it. In the arena afterwards Carl set the gods against one another, named his own patron's killer, watched him die for it, and then brought Scolopendra down with a bomb wrapped around a pet biscuit.

The stairs to the twelfth floor opened, the countdown to the Ascendency Game started, and the biscuit left the party with a very small Scolopendra of its own.