Dungeon Crawler Carl TTRPG Starter Set Review

Not as written. The Dungeon Crawler Carl TTRPG has one of the best settings we've ever read in a starter box, and one of the worst layouts. The rules are approachable, and letting the GM play the System AI is a stroke of genius. But the rules are scattered across books, contradict each other, and leave gaps a paid season pass is meant to fill. Right now it feels like a beta. If you're a fan of the books, read the PDFs before you spend any more money.

What we reviewed

This is a review of the Starter Set, not the core rulebook. We read it cover to cover from the PDFs, which is all backers have so far. We haven't run a session with it yet, so our scores are about the book, not how it plays.

Between us we've been gaming for over 50 years. Blaine started with Rifts and D&D over 30 years ago, and Joe has about 20 years at the table. We're both big fans of Matt Dinniman's novels, so we went in wanting to love this. We scored it on three things: rules, layout, and setting.

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Rules

Blaine 7/10 · Joe 5/10

The good news first: the rules stay true to the books. The mechanics fit the theme, and anyone who has played D&D or Pathfinder will pick them up fast. It's D&D-adjacent, with some smart borrowing, like a simple chase system that feels lifted from Pathfinder.

Crafting is the clever one. Crawlers in the books have unlimited inventory, which could have been a bookkeeping nightmare. Instead you carry a pile of junk and turn it into other stuff. Easy. Checks are just as simple: easy, basic, hard, or epic, with no stack of modifiers for weather and footing. And your skills double as your abilities and your spells, just like in the books. The customization is phenomenal.

That matters, because the novels brought a lot of people into LitRPG who have never played a tabletop game. With a GM to walk them through it, the rules work for new players.

The trouble is everything layered on top. A simple d20 roll gets buried under abilities, modifiers, equipment, crafting, exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to those exceptions. Some rules contradict each other, sometimes within a couple of pages and sometimes between books, and you're left guessing which version is real. And the burden of remembering it all lands on the GM, more than in most games.

Joe put it best: this reads like a beta. As a beta it would be on track and worth a 6. As a finished product shipping to backers and store shelves, it's a 5.

Watch the rules section (1:30)

Layout

Blaine 2/10 · Joe 3/10

This is where the Starter Set falls apart. Neither of us has seen a TTRPG book this disjointed. It reads like five different people wrote it and nobody edited the books together.

Try making a loot box. You'd look in the GM toolkit. The rules are in the Atlas, one of the other books in the box. That's the pattern all the way through: there is a GM book, but what a GM actually needs, like how to build monsters and achievements, is spread across the other books instead of collected in it. Nothing is cross-referenced either. When one rule depends on another, nothing tells you where to look. A Reddit user had to index where every monster is. You shouldn't need Reddit to find the monsters in your own book.

Meanwhile the same lore shows up in book after book, while rules you'd expect aren't there at all. The Crawler book makes character creation easy, then leaves out the player-facing rules. There's no quick-reference card like Pathfinder's starter sets have. And the PDF hides how bad it is, because you can search a PDF. With the physical books at the table, finding a rule mid-session will be much harder.

The funny writing makes it worse. When you're reading for fun, the jokes and art are a joy. When you're trying to find a rule, you get lost in them.

There are real positives. The art is great, and the whole thing would make a fantastic coffee table book. The starter adventure is the best-organized book in the box: it walks through the rules and tells you which page each one is on. That's the only reason Blaine's layout score is a 2 and not lower. But a starter set has to be playable, and both of us came away saying the same thing: as written, we don't think it is.

Watch the layout section (8:30)

Setting

Blaine 10/10 · Joe 8/10

This is the Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG's strength, and it's a big one.

As the GM, you play the System AI. You get a voice in the game that isn't an NPC, and no other game we can think of gives you that. Handing out achievements and loot boxes becomes improv gold. If a player annoys you, you can drop a loot box that pokes fun at them, and you're not breaking the theme, because that's exactly what the AI would do. You can bring any pop culture or geek interest into the dungeon. The game shows give your roleplayers their moment alongside the combat.

The mix of genres works, too. The comedy is obvious, but there's real horror underneath, and each makes the other land. It's like Metallica's Ride the Lightning: the shifts between loud and quiet are what give every moment its punch.

So why isn't it a 10 from both of us? So much of what makes the books great is Matt Dinniman's writing and Jeff Hays' narration, and the RPG leans on both. Most GMs can't be that funny or that good a voice actor every session. The answer is to treat it as creation, not imitation: build your own neighborhoods and your own story. But the Starter Set focuses almost entirely on Carl, Donut, and the story you've already read, and there are only a handful of new neighborhoods. There's a fun video-game one that feels like Zelda, but we wanted a lot more.

Watch the setting section (24:00)

Is it a cash grab?

The season pass is. From what we've seen, pieces that should be in the core game, like more spells and skills, personal spaces, and workbenches, are coming through a paid season pass. Even if you spent $300 on the Kickstarter, you still don't have the complete game. A season pass for optional extras would be fine. A season pass for what should have been in the book in the first place is, as we put it in the video, "a disgusting cash grab."

Compare Cyberpunk Red: R. Talsorian puts out free PDF updates and sells a hardcover collection later for anyone who wants one.

The Starter Set isn't optional either. It covers dungeon floors 1 and 2, and the core book picks up at floor 3. Nobody is going to start a campaign on floor 3, since the first floors are where the story and the characters come together. So you need both.

Watch the cash grab section (32:00)

Running it anyway: tips for GMs

If you're going to run it anyway, steal from Daggerheart and make your players share the world-building. Ask them to describe what they find: "You approach a spire in the middle of the forest. Tell me what it looks like." In a Dungeon Crawler Carl game, let them be silly with it. Go further with achievements. Tell your players you won't catch everything, let them nominate their own, and settle them in the safe room.

Plan the rest ahead. The starter adventure lists the achievements and loot boxes for every section, and your own sessions should too. Winging them every week will burn you out fast. And if you want an opening nobody else is running, borrow the Stormlight RPG's level-zero scenario, where you build your character by playing. How your crawlers got into the dungeon would make a great one.

Watch the GM tips (34:30)

Who it's for

If you love the books and want a gorgeous, funny coffee table book, it's for you. If you're a new GM, it isn't. Between the scattered rules and how much you'll have to homebrew, it's daunting even for experienced GMs. It's a hard sell for busy ones, too. Games like Alien and Stormlight hold your hand, so your prep time goes into your story. This one makes you build the scaffolding first.

For a lot of the novels' readers, this will be their first tabletop RPG. If this is their first experience, we worry they won't come back.

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The verdict

We're both usually too easy on the games we review. We like almost everything and want it all in our collection. Giving a 2 or 3 in a category was a surprise, and a real disappointment, because we wanted this to be a way to keep living in the books after we finished them.

It's a workable beta. It needs one good editor to reorganize it, and the season pass content belongs in the core game. Until then, buy at your own risk. Pick up the PDFs, see what you think, and tell us in the comments on the video whether we got it wrong.

Watch the verdict (36:30)