Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG

The Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying Game is an officially licensed tabletop adaptation of Matt Dinniman's bestselling Dungeon Crawler Carl LitRPG novels, developed by Renegade Game Studios and launched via a BackerKit crowdfunding campaign in April 2026. The campaign became the most-followed TTRPG crowdfunding launch in history, pulling in over 27,000 backers and more than $6.6 million against an original $250,000 goal, putting it in the same company as Brandon Sanderson's and Avatar Legends among the biggest tabletop crowdfunders ever run.  The book series itself has an unusually indie-to-mainstream trajectory: Dinniman began posting it as a free web serial on Royal Road in 2020, and it grew organically into a multi-million-copy bestseller before Ace Books picked it up in 2024. Fulfillment for the RPG and its companion deck-building game, Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable, is expected in late 2026.

Description

Playing Dungeon Crawler Carl means playing a Crawler - a contestant, willing or otherwise - trapped in the World Dungeon, a lethal, alien-broadcast reality show where survival means keeping quadrillions of viewers across the galaxy entertained. The GM takes on the role of the System AI, the sardonic, rules-obsessed intelligence that narrates the dungeon, hands out achievements, and is never quite as fair as it claims to be.  Players can step directly into the shoes of characters from the novels - Carl, Donut, Katia, and others - or build an original Crawler from more than 30 species and a roster of gleefully absurd classes (Fire Mage Arcanist, Former Child Actor, Shotgun Messenger) that matches the source material's satirical, over-the-top tone. True to the books' obsession with loot, XP, and gamified progression, the ruleset leans hard into that same structure rather than smoothing it over for a more traditional fantasy feel.