#dungeon anarchists cookbook

[mekkthemighty]

Carl is surprisingly well adjusted considering

The slow reveals of what happened on the carnival/grand canyon trip are starting to get darker, which half of the plan succeeded? My bet is on the mom, tho I like the fucked up imagery of her pushing the dad into the grand canyon and just saying "this is my birthday gift for you carl"

[malleablemovement]

So I’m listening to book 3 of Dungeon Crawler Carl and my main takeaway is Down with Capitalism. But my OTHER main takeaway is that Matt Dinniman is having way too much fun writing ridiculous voices to make Jeff Hayes do. “Southern belle but also German”. Come on man, you know what you’re doing.

[hello-railou]

New Achievement! Free Therapy!

Ficlet. 1000 words. Canon compliant.

Carl gets a professional assessment from a therapist. Carl does not want a professional assessment from a therapist.

Set during chapter 22 of book 3, The Dungeon Anarchist Cookbook.

---

”So”, Hekla said, cornering me in one of the empty hallways of the Vermilion line station while Katia practiced making her cowcatcher form. “You and Katia.”

I blinked. She suddenly stood so close to me, I needed to crane my head back to look up at her.

“What about me and Katia?”

“You’ve made a great team. So great in fact, I think she might want to stay with you.”

I didn’t like the tone of her voice. She’s testing me, I thought.

“No”, I said slowly. “I don’t think she does.”

She really was very close to me. I wanted to take a step back, but there wasn’t anywhere to go, other than deeper into the tunnel. Hekla had drawn herself up to her full height, her appearance quite intimidating. I stood my ground.

“Oh, do you really think so? But how about you? Would you like her to stay with you?” Hekla asked, her lips curling.

“I think Katia can choose for herself”, I said.

Hekla laughed, short and humorless. “Ha! What I mean is, you like her, don’t you? And she likes you. She adores you, Carl. It would be very easy to convince her to stay with you.”

“Convince her?” I asked. She likes you. I frowned. “What the fuck are you getting at, Hekla?”

Hekla spread her hands, like I was the one unreasonable here. “I am just observing what I see. Katia is one of my girls. You know how it is. She never was the brightest, or the strongest. But she’s reliable. Kind. Someone, I think, you would be inherently drawn to.”

I felt my jaw drop. What the fuck?

“What the fuck does that mean?” I asked, my voice rising in volume.

“I know you had a tumultuous relationship with your late girlfriend”, Hekla said calmly, completely ignoring my rising anger. “People who have been abused like that, tend to latch onto the next person they can find who they deem safe. They get attached. And if something then happens to that person? It is going to hurt them twice as hard.”

I just stared at her. “I... what? What the ever-loving fuck are you saying, Hekla?”

Abused? She thought I was abused by Bea? Had Katia told her that?

I wanted to laugh. Bea was nothing, I thought bitterly. Sure, she was a colossal asshole for cheating on me, but I had been a completely blind idiot too. I should have noticed sooner. I should’ve paid more attention to her.

I knew now; my father had been abusive. As a kid, I hadn’t realized that. But I knew now.

Bea was nothing.

“Katia didn’t tell it to me quite in those words”, Hekla said. “But with the information I have heard about you from multiple sources, I can put two and two together. It is tragic how common emotional and psychological abuse is in relationships. I don’t know if you know this, but Katia has gone through something very similar in her past. I think it might be part of the reason you two got so attached, so quickly."

"And?" I said through gritted teeth.

"All I'm saying is, you should be careful, Carl. It can be dangerous to put your full trust in someone you don't know all that well, don't you think?"

Donut: CARL, WHERE DID YOU GO? KATIA NEEDS HELP WITH THE PART THAT GOES NEAR THE RAILS.

Carl: I’ll be there in a minute.

Donut: HURRY UP OR I’LL START THINKING YOU’RE HIDING SOMEWHERE MAKING OUT WITH HEKLA.

I glared up at the amazonian, who was still smiling slightly. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re trying to achieve here, but it’s not gonna work”, I said. “Katia and I know enough about each other’s demons already. That’s nothing new and it won’t affect how we view each other. She’s my friend, and whatever she wants to do after this mission, she’s free to do it. If she wants to go with you, that’s all good. You’re her original party. If she wants to stay, that’s great too. I’d love to have her stay with me and Donut.”

I didn't actually know much about Katia's past, but I wasn't about to tell Hekla that. I wouldn't give her that ammunition. None of that stuff mattered, anyway.

With each passing moment I spent with Hekla and her party, I wished more and more that Katia would end up staying with us. That group was dangerous.

“Alright”, Hekla said pleasantly. She tapped the side of her temple. “I guess we’ll wait and see how this plays out then, hm?”

“I guess we will”, I replied.

She turned around and walked off, just like that. I stood there, watching her back, speechless.

And if something then happens to that person? It is going to hurt them twice as hard.

I took a deep breath, feeling a sense of impending doom.

Holy shit. She’s even more insane than I had thought.

I moved to exit the hallway, but a sudden notification stopped me in my tracks. I wasn’t expecting it at all, so the out-of-nowhere giddy, sarcastic voice made me almost crap my boxers.

New Achievement! Free Therapy!

You know those people who just love to give unsolicited advice? Who will stop you on your way to the bathroom and tell you that you can talk to them anytime if you need a shoulder to cry on, even though you thought you had been all happy and smiling and not, for once, teetering on the edge of a breakdown? Those who seem to know more about yourself than even you do?

Yeah. Maybe they sometimes do know more than you do. Have you ever thought about that? Have you ever thought about the fact you might have repressed some of your sowwy little emotions so far down you don’t even know you have them? Maybe you should think about that sometimes. I know it’s scary, but you’re big boy.

Anyway. Usually, the people giving those unwelcome therapy sessions are the ones secretly most unstable. They have issues. Dangerous issues. Murderous issues. If you know what I mean.

                Reward: You just got free therapy. In this day and age, I think that’s a pretty good reward.

“Oh fuck off”, I said to the ceiling, and went to find Donut and Katia.

[luthienebonyx]

She’d been a diminutive woman before, but she’d shrunk to about four and a half feet tall, and her skin was now a light blue, like the sky on a clear day. Her white, haphazardly-cut hair was almost exactly the same as before, but it fit with her smaller frame, and it no longer looked so sickly. She floated about a foot off the ground, and I noted she still wore the anti-slip socks from Meadow Lark. The privacy bubble around her head was like a nimbus, making her look like one of those haloed figures in a renaissance painting. She was leaning over the bar, waving her hand furiously at the badger-headed bartender, who was serving someone else down the line. “Look at how beautiful she is,” Donut whispered. “She’s like a vision of pure elegance.” “Yo,” Elle cried at the bartender. “Whose dick do I gotta suck to get another drink? Christ.”

Matt Dinniman: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 3

[nzbookwyrm]

October 2024

[cateyedfox36]

dungeon crawler Carl

The AI is so fucking mean. I love it.

[the-worms-world]

this crept into my head while i was listening to the anarchist's cookbook and i Had to make this Immediately

(they're besties, your honor)

@mongo-the-liensis i think you would enjoy this tbh

[mongo-the-liensis]

Wait. So no one can find out about the Cookbook or it disappears right? But Shi Maria is possessing Carl. Can he not use it until she's gone or????

[picojonesandme]

[benedictusantonius]

[2025|003] The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (2021) written by Matt Dinniman

[allbookedupblogstuff]

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman

TL;DR: Another fantastic installment in the Carl series – I continue to love these. Source: NetGalley! Thank you for the eArc! I also bought a physical and audio edition. I love these y’all. Plot: Carl and Donut are now in the Iron Tangle, trains galore! Characters: I adore these guys, I can’t say that enough. Setting: This was my only issue with this book, I just got real confused by the trains…

[mekkthemighty]

My preorder came in early!! According to the indigo site it wasnt supposed to come in til the 28th, or even be available at all til the 22nd

[fanlou18-blog]

I love how Carl always keeps us on the egde, I often find myself asking "What is he going to do NOW ?", much like how he keeps the viewers entertained. In that sense, we're not so different from them.

I have been afflicted with a terrible curse: tearing through a book series, and upon finishing, seeking out the fandom only to find that most of that fandom appears to be reading an entirely different series than I am, lol. I brought this on myself, to be clear. I think a big part of the mismatch is that it's a genre I'm not that familiar with and that I don't care about/for in and of itself, so I'm coming at it from a different perspective. Also, maybe I'm reading into things too much! But what can I say, a girl needs enrichment in her enclosure, and there's enough meat on this bone that I will be occupied for a while.

All of which is to say, I read through all seven books of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that are out to date (thanks, free Kindle Unlimited subscription!), and now I have a lot of thoughts and no one who cares about them ;____; I played myself ;_______;

This series is such a hard sell in general, because on the surface it looks like male power fantasy garbage, it's litRPG, and there's a decent amount of mildly obnoxious dude humor at first. But a) it's only slightly male power fantasy garbage, b) it's not tedious litRPG and in fact the genre evolves and shifts into more straightforward SFF the further in you get, which is clever on a meta level and also a relief, c) to the extent it is litRPG, it mostly isn't boring and annoying about it (no stat nonsense for the sake of stat nonsense), d) the mildly obnoxious dude humor is often genuinely funny and to the extent it is obnoxious, there's some in-universe reasoning for that.

Anyway, the premise is as follows: Earth is suddenly and devastatingly mined for its natural resources by aliens. This results in the death of billions: everyone who was indoors is instantly killed. Anyone who was outside gets a chance to enter the "dungeon", which offers a chance for the remaining humans to compete for an alleged chance at freedom and sovereignty if they reach the bottom floor, but it's basically The Hunger Games: a propaganda exercise that's meant to earn money for the aliens running it as a game show, only this is a dungeon crawling RPG rather than a Hunger Games/Battle Royale situation. No one has ever reached the bottom floor. The best result most achieve is to reach the tenth floor, where they can take a deal for some variety of indentured servitude.

Enter Carl, our hero, a former (late 20s? early 30s? don't recall his age, but somewhere around there) Coast Guard technician who is outside when it all happens because he chased after his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, a best in show tortie Persian cat. Carl and Donut enter the dungeon, Donut eats a magic treat and becomes a sapient talking cat, and the books follow their struggle to survive and fight back against the cruel and inhuman system they've found themselves in.

Tonally, the series is interesting in that it manages to balance a very bleak, dystopian premise with genuine hilarity and moments of legitimately heart-wrenching emotion. Also, this is not a "lone heroic super cool guy saves and fixes everything" kind of story. This series is interested in teamwork and community in dire circumstances, and the found family of it all is genuinely moving. As a whole, it's just bonkers entertaining. I love when I can tell the author is having a blast, and you can absolutely tell that Matt Dinniman is having an absolute blast.

Anyway, a list of things I enjoy about this series and/or a list of general thoughts, some of which include mild spoilers:

PRINCESS DONUT. i love her. this cat is amazing and hilarious. She's exactly like you'd imagine a prize-winning Persian cat named Princess Donut to be. also, to my delight, she gets to be a fully rounded character. like yes, she's hilarious and often comic relief, but she's also taken seriously, and Carl is absolutely Insane about this cat. He fuckin' loves this cat, and the cat loves him. Also, hilariously, she has higher stats than Carl at the beginning. (In fact, she mostly has higher stats than him throughout, so she's technically the party leader. Which is why their party is called the Royal Court of Princess Donut.)

Donut has A+++++ insulting skills. On multiple occasions, I have lol'd in horror and delight at her savagery. A favorite:

Rezan: Why does that cat always type in all caps?

Donut: WHY DIDN’T YOUR MOTHER DRIBBLE YOU BACK OUT ONTO THE TRUCK STOP BATHROOM FLOOR, REZAN?

lest this give you the wrong impression, Donut is a classy lady. She is a princess, after all. but also she is savage.

Carl! The books are mostly in first person POV, so we're in Carl's head for most of them, and he is a great example of an unreliable narrator. He'll seem fairly generic at first, but stick it out through, like, the first third of the first book and onward for the slow and steady reveal of his Tragic Backstory and also such exciting psychological and emotional issues as: Insane about Donut; claims he "doesn't like drama" while in actuality he is clearly Repressing Everything; secretly an idealist who wants to believe the best of people; deeply committed to protecting people; full of revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian rage; holy abandonment issues batman; simply Does Not See It when various ladies basically throw themselves at him; generally Barely Holding It Together at all times.

people on reddit, mostly: Carl's stats!! blah blah blah power stuff. me: okay, but why is Carl Like This. let's deep discuss that. Also let Carl have a little breakdown. As a treat.

these books are so wildly, delightfully anti-capitalist, lol. I poked around Reddit and tumblr a bit, but didn't see anyone discussing this series' politics, but that aspect is super interesting to me. The series is very, very concerned with revolution and resistance and the form those things take when very few options are available to the oppressed, plus the ethics of revolutionary violence.

The dungeon AI! This thing is Way Too Online in a gross dudebro way, but frankly, it's still funny with it, and the evolution of the AI's character is fascinating. Also, I regret to inform you that I do find it extremely fucking funny that the AI has a thing for Carl and his feet. This is wholly hypocritical of me: if Carl was Carla, and the AI made the same comments, I'd have bounced. But what can I say, comedy is about subversion, I guess.

PREPOTENTE. MY PRECIOUS WEIRDO GOATMAN CHILD. Prepotente was a goat; upon entry into the dungeon and eating a magic pet treat, he becomes a goat man type thing, and he spends much of the series as one of the most dangerous and skilled dungeon crawlers, along with his "mother", the shepherdess Miriam Dom. he's a total fuckin weirdo who screams a lot for no reason and i love him. he better fucking survive the series, i swear to god.

one running theme of the series that I love so much is that Carl does not give up on people, and he does not write them off. He often runs into fellow crawlers who, if he was being bloodlessly practical about things, he should have bailed on. They're people who aren't prepared, who haven't leveled up enough, who aren't likely to survive much longer. But he doesn't abandon them, and he doesn't assume they can't get better. He sticks with them and helps them, and they help him. It's about found family ;____; they all love each other so much ;______;

MORDECAI!!! he's a changeling skyfowl and the team's game guide and later manager, and is a former crawler who took a deal. This is supposed to be his last season in the crawl, before he's free of his indentured servitude. he is Dad Shaped. automatic dad. there is in fact something quietly devastating about his Dad Shapedness.

There's a whole super interesting thing going on with the dungeon NPCs, and how we start out assuming most of them aren't "real". unsurprising spoiler alert: they may have been created by/for the dungeon, but many of them are very much real, and once they realize the position they've been put into, they're pissed.

i truly have no real idea where the series is going with its running theme about parents and children, and the protection or lack thereof of children. Our most heroic characters are consistently shown protecting and caring for the NPC children, even when it's at great cost to themselves.

everything to do with the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, the secret book with writing from prior crawlers that Carl is given, makes me Emotional. I'm honestly shocked the whole Cookbook was never planned, and that it was a result of Patreon votes. It's hugely important in the seventh book, not so much on a plot level--I can see how Dinniman could have gotten to some of these same plot beats without it--but on an emotional and thematic one. There's something so affecting here about the continuity of resistance, of finding hope and strength in the people who came before you, of planting seeds you water with blood and that you may never get to harvest, and the sheer, furious love of the whole thing.

so apparently Dinniman is a pantser when it comes to writing. Clearly, he's having fun, and it's more or less working out so far, but it does make me concerned about his ability to stick the dismount. I saw in an AMA that he likened it to building a spaceship with legos versus building it with a plan, and that he has fun writing himself out of corners. That's all well and good, but some of the things I'm most interested in this series are the overarching themes, and it makes me wary of those themes not getting a proper payoff. I guess I should just enjoy the ride, and accept that there will almost certainly be many loose ends.

On a meta level, I find it very funny and ironic that when I took a look at the reviews for the seventh book, I saw some people complaining about the absence of the more "entertainment" and "game" aspects of the series: no interviews with the outside, no "character sheets" for Carl, fewer big fights for Carl himself to take on, the AI taking on a more active 'deus-ex AI' role. Because in-universe, the dungeon crawl is no longer entertainment. At this point, the crawl has become an actual war, and the game genre it takes on--4x strategy--reflects that. Carl and the crawlers' choices have increasing ramifications outside the crawl, where actual war is breaking out at least in part as a result of their actions. The AI intervening more and more often to put its finger on the scale is part of the conflict; it's fighting this war as much as the other characters are, if with still inscrutable motivations.

This is in fact one of the central conflicts of the series: to what extent is this still a game? Has it ever only been a game? The crawlers and NPCs are in fact fighting for it to not be a game: they're saying "my life is real, my suffering is real, and if you won't acknowledge that, then you're coming in here with us to fight and die too. Not just a game anymore, is it?" And on another side of the conflict, you have the AI insisting that this stay a game, something with rules and a narrative and at least an attempt at fairness, however much the AI manipulates those things.

It seems like there's something of a genre shift going on with this series. As a reader who's not particularly interested in or invested in litRPG in and of itself, I'm fine with it shifting to being more straightforwardly SFF, and in fact, I think that's an interesting and fun choice on a meta level: the more the crawlers and the AI break and change the game, the more the genre of the series itself shifts.

[librarycomic]

These are the "new" books I finished during my trip.

Comedy Book by Jesse David Fox.

My favorite book on standup comedy ever. Go listen to past episodes of Jesse David Fox's podcast Good One -- if you enjoy those (he mostly talks to comedians about a single joke of theirs) you'll likely love this. No one thinks about comedy as much as or as thoughtfully as Fox.

Dog Days by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

A nonfiction graphic novel in which Gendry-Kim moves to the country and adopts multiple dogs, plus helps take care of a few others. It's personal but less heavy than Grass and The Waiting, though it still has cultural significance and may help folks understand South Korea a little better. Gendry-Kim made me love her dogs Potato and Carrot, as well as others who appear in the book.

Jimmy's Elbow by James Kochalka

I needed a dose of silliness, and young Jimmy's adventures with the talking spirit of his elbow -- it comes to life after he whacks it on something -- fit the bill. Gloriously ridiculous.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. And three of its sequels: Carl's Doomsday Scenario, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, and The Gate of the Feral Gods.

These books are also ridiculous, and light reading in the best way. Aliens destroy human civilization and open doors into an underground dungeon across the globe. Those who enter become contestants in a deadly RPG-like reality show that involves magic, combat, leveling-up, convoluted storylines, sponsors, off-world royalty, and a lot of Earth culture that has been appropriated and adapted in the name of making a buck (for our new alien overlords). At the center of it all are Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Donut, whom you'll love if you hate dogs (or just like cats who aren't afraid to shit-talk them to their faces). So much fun.

I've kept reading the series since returning home, and I've finished the 5th book. I plan to read book six and the newly released book seven soon. (Thanks for the recommendation, Mike!)

[luthienebonyx]

“Just be yourself,” I said. “That’s terrible advice, Carl,” Donut said. “She’s a doppelganger. It’s her job to be someone else.”

- Matt Dinniman: The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 3

[waterkangaroo]

Theory about The Apothecary

Mild Book 7 Spoilers below!

Theory: the Apothecary is the AI from Porthus's crawl and she was the AI who first conceived of the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook.

The Apothecary is to Porthus what Daddy AI is to Carl - Porthus was her specialist little guy, and she recognized something in him that caused her to create the book for him; she recognized his drive and his ability to play the long game. I think that season's AI realized that ending the crawls and enslavement of her race would be the work of thousands of years and thousands of people, so she started the secret society around the cookbook to work towards that end.

When talking to Rosetta about the Apothecary, Porthus INSISTS that she is on their side and that she's trustworthy. He's smug in his certainty that she can be trusted, and I think that's because the Apothecary was the one who created the cookbook and started this whole thing. As the author of the first edition of the cookbook, that would make her one of their siblings, so of COURSE Porthus trusts her implicitly. I think Porthus came back after he was freed from his contract and helped her escape containment, which is why she's got power and presence in the universe now.

ALSO, both the very first entry in the cookbook and Paulie's speech begin the same: "Hello, crawler." I know it's a very short and generic phrase, but the fact that it shows up exactly the same dramatic way in two of the most important scenes in the series??? We've already theorized that if the Residuals are indeed offshoots of Primal AIs, then Paulie would be an offshoot of the Apothecary. He's at the very least her agent, so we know that whole speech is her doing. And I think the cookbook is her doing too.

From The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook:

From The Eye of the Bedlam Bride: