Books Like Dungeon Crawler Carl

Your next crawl, with game systems that want you dead and sidekicks who steal the show.

Carl meets the end of the world in his boxers and a pair of pink Crocs, holding his ex-girlfriend’s furious show cat. Then aliens turn the survivors into a dungeon reality show. Nothing else has quite that mix of game rules, gallows humor and Princess Donut, so each book below brings one or two of those ingredients, and we’ve tried to say which.

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01
BuyMort: Grand Opening
by Joseph Phelps & Damien Hanson
The apocalypse arrives as a store. BuyMort, a retail monopoly spanning multiple universes, installs a shopping interface in everyone’s head, animals included, and alien entrepreneurs start selling off anything the system hasn’t marked as private property. Tyson, a broke campground caretaker, has to fight a company that owns the whole market. Readers in LitRPG groups compare its tone to Carl’s more than any other book here.
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02
Discount Dan: A LitRPG Adventure
by James A. Hunter
Dan wakes up hungover in the Backrooms, an impossible dungeon with game rules and monsters. The official warning tells him to prepare for death while carefully protecting the researchers from liability, and Dan responds the way you’d respond to any corporate memo. His companion is Croc, a mimic shaped like a dog made of shoe material, who loves Twilight.
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03
The Prince Has No Pants
by Matthew Howry
Ben is packing for Hawaii when a space empire dumps Earth’s creatures into the System. All of them. That includes a great white shark named Short Bus, who can talk and level up, and who becomes Ben’s friend. The book spends a while on space-elf politics before the dungeon takes over, and the detours are half the fun.
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04
Morningwood
by Neven Iliev
The treasure chest is the hero. An eager young adventurer opens it, it eats him, and the level-up announcement belongs to the chest. LitRPG readers recommend it to Carl fans all the time. It’s also the crudest pick by far, with explicit sex, gore and a lot of humor at women’s expense.
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05
Mimic & Me
by Cassius Lange & Ryan Tang
The duo pick, with teeth. Damon, a betrayed and dying scout, offers his food to a mimic, and the mimic fuses with him. Now he has powers and a partner whose appetite runs from cake to people. The audiobook gives the mimic several voices.
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06
Critical Failures
by Robert Bevan
Four friends mock their new game master and wake up inside his game as the characters they rolled. Tim has a halfling’s tiny voice. Cooper has tusks, bowel trouble and the head he chopped off back when it was still a game. Less reality show, more tabletop, and every bit as crude as that sounds.
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07
You Are Summoned
by Dean Henegar
Rico Kline sells insurance, and he keeps getting summoned to other worlds as an expendable minion. He wastes his one allowed question on confusion, and the system mutes his objections. After he gets killed on a job, he receives an abysmal performance rating.
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08
Shade's First Rule
by A. F. Kay
Ruwen dies on his Ascension Day and comes back, and from then on death doesn’t stick. The jokes live in the banter between Ruwen and his friend Sift, and in Blapy, who mocks him at every turn. It’s PG, with no swearing, so it suits anyone who found Carl’s profanity a bit much.
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09
Apocalypse Tamer
by Maxime J. Durand
Gods and monsters invade, and Basil picks the Tamer class mostly so he can talk to his cat, Plato. A contest to become Earth’s Overgod is underway. Basil is more concerned with Plato.
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10
This Quest Is Broken!
by J. P. Valentine
The Questing Stones give Evelia her life’s purpose, which is to buy bread from the next village. Then she checks the difficulty, and it’s Legendary. A lighter book than Carl, built on game rules followed to ridiculous ends.
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11
Big Sneaky Barbarian
by Seth McDuffee
Gabe, an angry teenager, lands in a game world in the body of an enormous orc barbarian and decides to specialize in sneaking. He blunders from one encounter to the next and somehow makes progress through his mistakes. He starts out unpleasant, and that’s deliberate.
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