Spoiler Warning
Spoiler warning. This is a full recap of Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, by Matt Dinniman, book two of Dungeon Crawler Carl. It gives away everything, the ending included, and the book has heavy swearing and gore. If you haven’t read it, come back after. If book three is next and book two has gone fuzzy, stay.
A talking cat in a tiara and a man in enchanted boxer shorts walk into a ruined circus full of knife-throwing lemurs, and that is only their first quest on floor three.
Here is the short answer. The whole book happens on one floor, the third floor. Carl and Donut pick a race and a class, break up a circus, hunt whoever is killing women in a town, and survive a magic blast. Then the show’s own lawyers take the prize away.
I grouped the twenty-five chapters and the epilogue into stops, with a floor map and loot cards, and every number comes from the text. Book one gets only what book two itself says.
Chapters One To Three: Race And Class
The book opens as Carl, Donut and baby raptor Mongo arrive on floor three. Their guide Mordecai has become a horned, winged incubus, level fifty. The training levels are over. Now they pick a race and a class, and the change is permanent.
Donut gets three hundred twenty races and keeps cat. Her class is a trick. Carl pretends to push her toward Artist Alley Mogul, and she picks Former Child Actor, which lets her pick a new specialty every floor. It also brings the Manager benefit, so Mordecai now teleports to every safe room. That was Odette’s advice, and Mordecai is furious.
Carl gets three hundred ninety-eight races and picks Primal, a blank slate that costs a point on every stat but lets skills train to twenty. His class is Compensated Anarchist, which needs five hundred billion views and a Charisma of twenty-five. Both are level thirteen. Just over seven hundred thousand crawlers are left.
How Floor Three Works
Floor three is the Over City. It looks like a medieval village under a red sun, but the sun is a painted ceiling. The floor is about the size of Arizona, three hundred thousand square kilometers, mostly ruins, with villages from tiny to extra large. The timer is eight days.
The rules shift too. Village guards are level seventy-five and only work in daylight, and there is no jail, only death. Ruin monsters get worse at night. Safe rooms now charge gold, ten a night at the first one. A Quests tab opens. Elites show as dots with a black cross, and a neighborhood boss pays out a map upgrade.
The people are real, too. Mordecai says most of the villagers are engineered by the Borant Corporation, and their memories are rewritten each time the floor is built. Most tourists, he says, are down on floor eighteen.
Chapters Four To Seven: The Circus
In chapter four they stumble into a quest. Former Circus Lemurs, level eight, throw knives from windows, a giraffe covered in lemurs charges the street, and an eleven foot clown called Terror dies under Donut’s missiles and Carl’s fists. The quest is The Show Must Go On. Mordecai goes quiet, then teleports into a safe room drunk, and passes out.
Chapter five is loot. Donut gets a cat tree, a candle and a hobby skill. Carl gets a cactus, eighteen Louis L’Amour westerns and a skill called Cesta Punta. Donut learns Clockwork Triplicate, which makes two clockwork copies of Mongo for a minute.
In chapter six a magic mortar drops a building on them, and an elf covered in living tattoos is waiting. Tsarina Signet is a level sixty elite, half naiad, half high elf. Her charm hits Carl so hard that he breaks his own finger to snap out of it. Then she opens the circus’s animal cages.
Chapter seven brings six mold lions. Signet’s blood magic needs a sacrifice, and she meant it to be Carl. Carl and Donut win with a shield, zombies and Mongo, and Signet asks them to help storm the circus tomorrow night. They agree. Mordecai’s lesson is blunt: never trust an elite.
Chapters Eight To Twelve: Signet’s Price
In chapter eight Carl wakes up fifteen hours later. Signet knocked him out with a spell above level fifteen, and put Donut to sleep with a spell called Water Lily. If Signet dies, Donut dies, and Carl cannot move her. So he builds a little fort around Donut, leaves Mongo on guard, and keeps his promise.
In chapter nine he fights Heather, a roller-skating bear with worm claws, a level nineteen neighborhood boss. He burns her with moonshine, then a lottery ticket pays out custard that heals her and kills the worms. Her eyes ask to be ended, and he does it. Signet’s tattoo army smashes through the defenders.
In chapters ten and eleven Carl walks into the big top with a ticket. The city boss is Ringmaster Grimaldi, a level eighty-five elite who has become a giant vine. Mordecai’s plan is poison and blood. Carl does it, then sells the producers a different plan through Zev. He heals the vine, swallows its worms on purpose, and lets Grimaldi hear Signet.
Carl vomits the worms out with a potion. Signet walks into the big top, and by dawn the circus is gone, with a staircase to floor four in the park. In chapter twelve Carl races back to find Donut and Mongo covered in spikes from street urchins. Mongo, now level ten, saved her. Carl is level eighteen.
Chapters Thirteen To Sixteen: Boxes And The Club
They reach a medium town of eagle-headed skyfowl and open the loot. Both earn the One Quadrillion achievement, and a quest box is upgraded to platinum. Donut gets fang caps for Mongo, with poison and paralysis. Carl reads a Scroll of Upgrade on his magic boxer shorts, and the upgrade brings a perk called Freeballing.
The view counter at the top of each chapter tells the story. It reads three hundred seventy-one trillion in chapter four, and one point nine quadrillion by chapter eighteen.
Carl also wins a casino chip worth a hundred thousand gold that cannot be sold. They shop with about fifty thousand gold, and spend fifteen thousand on a magic carrier for Mongo. A pub orc named GumGum then shows them a pile of dead women left outside town. A new quest begins.
That night Mordecai shows them the Desperado Club, with a pharmacist, the Silk Road market, and a hobgoblin named Pustule who sells bombs called hob-lobbers. In chapter sixteen they find GumGum dead, her chest torn open, with krasue nearby: floating female heads trailing organs.
Chapters Sixteen To Nineteen: The Murder Quest
A city elf named Vicente appears and says the final battle is here. He dies from a kick and a magic missile. His shirt carries a patch for the two hundred first Security Group. Fan boxes arrive. Donut’s holds a framed photo of Bea, her old owner. Carl’s holds a woven scoop called a xistera, which matches his Cesta Punta skill. He throws hob-lobbers with it, and the slingshot is retired.
Next they visit Magistrate Featherfall’s office. His skyfowl assistant, Miss Quill, will not care about dead women unless they are skyfowl, until Carl drops a corpse on her desk. Then a dark ambush by Shambling Berserkers knocks Carl out when he throws dynamite blind. Donut’s new rule: no explosives in the dark.
Then comes the show Danger Zone. Carl mocks the Skull Empire’s king on air. Two minutes later an attack meant for them hits the wrong trailer and and the singer Manasa is reported dead. The Valtay answer by blowing up a royal yacht. Maestro is rumored aboard, and Odette later calls him late.
Chapters Twenty To Twenty-Five: The Blast
In chapter twenty they find the two hundred first’s headquarters. The elves go wild over Donut’s oak anklet, which they call the forbidden oak. Carl punches a village guard, gets branded a troublemaker, and burns the temple with a boom jug. In chapter twenty-one they add Katia, a level nine doppelganger.
The plan is a cursed letter as bait, then hobgoblin pus to blow up the magistrate’s building. The blast kills Miss Quill, and Carl becomes Magistrate of the Medium Skyfowl Settlement and wins a Tyrant’s Box. In a back room hang krasue women, upside down, around the long-dead Featherfall. A clerk says Quill ran the town, and her husband Remex waits in a warehouse.
Remex is no lich. He is a level one Soul Leech Capacitor, a zombified skyfowl wired to a soul crystal. Miss Quill was casting a three night spell called the Final War, to leave only skyfowl and chickadees alive. She is dead, but a group quest says a blast is coming in seven minutes.
Carl locks the crystal in a glass case from the fifteenth level and waits for death with Donut. It does not come, but a bigger blast does, twenty minutes out, and magic items start blowing up. Carl strips naked, Donut loses her crown, and they take the stairs to floor four. Katia presses the detonator.
Epilogue: The Veto
In the epilogue Carl and Donut sit in a green room with Katia, and Odette shows what really happened. Katia’s detonator should have been dead, but it fired at the last second. The news shows Remex’s light go out and says the blast was weakened, potentially saving thousands of NPCs. Borant, the company running the game, appealed, lost, and then used its once-a-season veto to cancel the prizes.
That hurts, because the quest’s achievements had been upgraded to Celestial boxes. Odette says only twenty-one hundred forty-five have ever been given out, with eighteen the most in one season. The news says eighty-three were won, and only one was opened, by a crawler who had cursed them in chat. Carl laughs. Whatever they do, they get cheated.
At least there are levels. Donut jumps from nineteen to twenty-six, and Carl from twenty-one to twenty-seven. Odette’s draft top ten puts Carl sixth and Donut seventh, with a hundred thousand each. That number is a bounty. Lucia Mar is first with a million. Tenth is a Frost Maiden, who is Mrs. McGibbons.
Odette warns Carl in private that Hekla wants Donut in her group, to get a manager. She also says his gauntlet can summon a war god called Grull on the next floor.
Before Book Three
Book three is The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook. The note at the end of this edition says it was set for April twenty twenty-one. I have not read it, so that is all I will say. As of October twenty twenty-six there are eight books, and book eight, A Parade of Horribles, came out May twelfth, twenty twenty-six, according to reports.
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