https://bookshop.org/a/110384/9780593820247
I plowed through all seven of the published Dungeon Crawler Carl book during a brief break in producing videos and reading more complicated books. These books, while dystopian, are generally really light reading. The story moves quickly. The characters are humorous which helps deal with the general darkness of the world.
Our world has effectively ended and only a small handful of people, a few million, make it into this Realty Show type thing called the Dungeon Crawl. It’s all throughout the galaxy and thousands of worlds tune in to watch. The people going through the dungeon become stars, but they are at real risk. If they die, they’re dead. From a video game perspective, this is a hardcore dungeon run, which means if your character dies, you need to start the game all over again. Which for Massively Multiplayer Online Games, that can be fun or part of the challenge.
Like Characters in a game, these people are given stats. They can pick up magic items that give them increases of stats or new abilities or bumps to skill levels. As the people in the game progress and kill monsters, called Mobs, the people gain levels in whatever class they chose.
Diniman keeps the story interesting through the dungeon changing as you go down levels. He creates a unique mechanic for each level. You can think of it most simply as something like a Megaman level, which has different enemies and novel features. Like if you’re going to fight Lavaman, you are going to be in a world full of fire. While Leafman will be very windy and blow you off the stage if you stay still.
The levels are significantly more complex than these examples. Diniman really provides a master class in game mechanics in this series.