Awesome / Dungeon Crawler Carl

Dungeon Crawler Carl

• One of the first things that Carl does is blow up a goblin murderdozer (read: tank) in order to keep the goblins from reporting back to their clan and bringing a hundred more of the things down on him. This happens before he even has his inventory opened.
• When Carl and Donut are dragged onto the Maestro's show, Carl immediately identifies him as a bully and an asshole, and the pair proceed to spend the entire show making him look like an idiot. When the Maestro grabs a couple crawlers from the dungeon to force a Sadistic Choice on which of their friends they'll save, Carl instead demands he and Donut be sent down instead. Carl knows the Maestro can't actually do that, so while he's distracted Carl gives the crawlers some quick advice, and when they're teleported back (like Carl knew they would be), they're able to save their friends.
• Carl and Donut leading the Rage Elemental away from Meadow Lark, and tricking it down into a stairwell to exploit the feature where mobs die when they try to travel down. Bonus points for the fact that they almost killed it even without the exploit (though Carl is pretty sure it would have done something horrible like explode or clone itself).
• Though Donut doesn't quite have the Wisdom score necessary to see through Frank's and Maggie's lies, Carl figures it out. He knows they're going to try and frag him and Donut, so lures them into doing it while in a saferoom so they'll get frozen, giving Carl and Donut plenty of time to get away and set some traps. As we'll eventually learn, those traps were quite effective.

Carl's Doomsday Scenario

• Carl facing down a City Boss in order to force the showrunners to back off of their plan to get him killed for ratings. They blink before he does.
• Turns out the entire area was designed to explode due to an unstable soul crystal that a crawler would inevitably destabilize, killing everyone within a few miles. Carl manages to stick what is effectively a live magical nuke in his inventory using an indestructible container, saving the lives of eighty crawlers and hundreds of NPCs.
• A lot of fans thought Carl should ditch the Meadowlark group. Two floors of being helpless gave them a huge boost, though. By the end of the third, Elle McGibbons is in the top ten. From Nobody to Nightmare.

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

• The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook appears to be a Booby Prize that Carl wasted a valuable prize on. Instead, it turns out to be a Secret Legacy handed down from crawl to crawl.
  Hello, Crawler. As you're about to find, this is a very special book. If you're reading these words, it means this book has found its way into your hands for one purpose and one purpose only.
  Together, we will burn it all to the ground.
• Carl has a clever plan to exploit the god-summoning mechanics to clear out some tricky areas. Unfortunately, he gets dragged along too, leaving him trapped between a Province Boss and an angry god who has a grudge against him specifically. With the help of his friends, Carl is able to survive fighting a literally invincible god face to face long enough to summon him somewhere else, once again humiliating the Maestro and the Skull Empire. It was such an impossible scenario that it wasn't even considered a boss battle—people were just betting on whether the boss or the god would kill him first.
  • It's Carl, though. A lot of people bet he'd survive. They won.
• The first note Carl puts in the Cookbook.
  If we're really going to burn this place to the ground, we need to actually do it and not just talk about it. We need to start killing them, too. I don't know for sure how to do it yet, but I'll come up with something.
  They will not break me. Fuck them all. They will not break me.
  But I will break them.
  This is my promise to myself, to my friends, and to you, anyone who reads these words.
  I will break them all.
• Carl survives getting hit by a train and kills three Neighborhood Bosses one action. Then he stops the train from exploding. Carl stole the Nightmare Express.
• After learning Hekla had betrayed her, used her in an attempt to recruit Donut without caring if she died, then getting mocked by Eva for a lifetime of disappointment, betrayal, and failure, Katia loses her shit and tries to kill Eva. Instead she kills Hekla, the second-rated crawler in the dungeon, with a single blow and gains thirteen levels.

The Gate of the Feral Gods

• Carl manages to arrange for the death of Loita, the super-racist fascist who replaced Zev, by exploiting the force fields on production trailers, a glitter bomb, and the self-destruct device that Loita herself insisted on in the cheap toy Donut. It's done so perfectly that even the neutral liaison hired to investigate the incident cannot actually prove what happened.
  Liaison Orren: It was, quite simply, one of the most brilliant assassinations I have ever seen a crawler execute. And I applaud you for it.
• Carl plans to use the Gate of the Feral Gods to drop a god in the middle of the Skull Empire fortifications on the Ninth Floor. It will cause major damage and make life easier once the crawlers get there, but none of their actual troops will be affected since they're all immortal; the only real effect is that Borant will make more money because the factions will have to buy everything over again. Except he had come up with a way to communicate secretly with his team, setting up his real plan of opening the portal to Larracos on the Ninth Floor, flooding the city and not only ruining all the supply lines but killing most of the armies that the factions had placed there to keep them safe from the supposed attack of the feral god. This leaves the armies unequipped with no way to resupply except to hunt crawlers directly—and Carl issues a challenge to every hunter on the Sixth Floor to come get his Ring of Divine Suffering, thus making himself the biggest target.
  Carl: You guys see this thing? I'll tell you what. If you want it, it's yours. It's right here. Come and get it, motherfuckers. Actually, you know what? I have a better idea. No need to come to me because I'll be coming to you. That's my pledge to you and to everyone else watching this. By the time the sixth floor collapses, every single hunter who dares to set foot on the same floor as us will be dead. This I swear on my life. One by one, I will break you. I will break you all.

The Butcher's Masquerade

• Carl sneaks into the hunter city and nearly kills all the hunters within the first few hours of getting on the floor.
• The most dangerous hunter in the galaxy declares a personal vendetta against Carl, and he has to meet her mother during a show. His reaction? Piss off the mother, then open up discussion with the audience to "crowd source" a plan. And since he knew the hunters were still cheating, he didn't use the plan they gave him, but bits and pieces for something better.
• When Carl gets whisked away without Donut, she is left in a town owned by Lucia Mar, who has figured out how to kick people out of safe rooms to kill them. Donut KILLS HER DOG and escapes.
• After the boss battle with Queen Imogen (which resulted in the deaths of all the hunters, just as Carl promised), Carl and Donut get notifications: They managed to successfully BUY THEIR WAY INTO FACTION WARS (using a crowd-funded out-of-dungeon fangroup) and will compete on an equal level with everyone else once they arrive. And THEN Carl reveals that they're forcing a vote to disable the no-death protection for the factions (it wouldn't have protected the crawlers anyway), and there's a pretty good chance it will go through. Carl explains this all to the entire universe, partly because several of the factions are democracies and he wants the people to vote against their asshole leaders.
• Prepotente insisted on partying with Carl and Donut for the seventh floor, because he needed Donut's help with something. Using several different benefactor items, he destroys the seventh floor, ending it within minutes of their arrival, and sending every single crawler instantly through the exit stairs. They skipped the entire seventh floor, all due to Prepotente paying attention to the clues and stories placed within the sixth floor.
  Prepotente: My mother would've been quite proud of this, I think. She would've called me her very smart boy.
• Donut taught Mongo how to moonwalk. She gets him to do it on stage at the end of their show and puts on her Cool Shades, Caruso style.
  Donut: Sorry, ladies. He's taken.

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride

• The achievement that Carl gets for fulfilling his promise to the hunters really underlines his accomplishment.
  New Achievement. Apex Predator.
  Holy shit.
  They're dead.
  All of them.
  Every. Last. One.
  Not only did you kill more hunters than everyone else, but you killed the very last one. One could fill a very stinky swimming pool with the blood you spilled on the Hunting Grounds.
  You have become a very scary dude. Maybe I should be calling you daddy instead of the other way around.
• Carl and Donut have to do a pre-production meeting for Faction Wars with Cascadia and all the other faction leaders. Apparently nothing has been done for weeks. Why? Because Juice Box, the changeling who Carl sent down there at the end of the Fifth Floor, has been assassinating the leaders on a daily basis. They can respawn, she can't. It hasn't stopped her.
  Rishi the Naga: This changeling is getting better at infiltrating the castles. Usually, she only kills one of us^note This time she killed three.. She has helpers now. She always knows when we’re going to meet. If we vote for her to have her own team, she will surely dominate the game, and I do not think that is a good idea, unless we put some limits.
• Generally, about a thousand crawlers reach the Ninth Floor. They entered the Eighth Floor with more than ever due to skipping the Seventh, and the showrunners tried to balance that out by setting them all against each other at the end. Instead, Carl figures out how to get around the need for limited keys for the stairwells, allowing almost everyone to pass. While five thousand people still died, 33,804 crawlers will enter the Ninth Floor.
  I was hoping the number of survivors would be over ten thousand. After all the death, after how horrific everything had been, I realized they'd been counting on this last part to be the real gut punch. They'd made it too easy to flee fights because they wanted these last few days to be the real slaughter. We'd figured a way out of it. And because of that, we were hitting the ninth floor not scattered, not broken, and not afraid.
  We were hitting the ninth floor in unprecedented numbers.
  • With this plus the 50,000 former crawlers hiring on as mercenaries and the NPCs, they have nearly 90,000 total fighters, which is about 60% of what all of the other factions have. They will be about 37% of the total force of the nine Factions on that floor.
• Emergency Action Items are special actions that sponsors can take to affect Faction Wars. Instead of putting the item up to a normal vote, the AI decides on its own whether to honor it. With all the aliens trapped in-system, they've all been refusing to vote on anything. Carl uses an emergency action to ask (not demand) the AI to put all those pending items up to a vote to the entire galaxy, bypassing them. Most of the items pass with a reasonable majority... except for the one about turning off the protections, which passes with 98% of the vote.
  "You wanted a slaughter?" I yelled up at the ceiling. "Don't worry. It's coming. Thirty thousand of us, plus our mercenaries? Do you remember what we did to the hunters? That was nothing. Your people voted for this. Your own citizens said, yes, we’re okay with the crawlers killing you one by one. Make no mistake. That's exactly what's about to happen."
  I angrily jabbed my finger upward.
  "You may have destroyed our homes, but guess what? We have just taken any sense of peace you will ever have in your own home. And that's only if you get there. There will be no prisoners. There will be no quarter. Those of us who remain are battle worn and tested. Every single one of us that is left, to a crawler, is more experienced than any one of you. We are coming. There is nowhere for you to hide. It is going to be a bloodbath the likes of which has never been seen."
• Carl's sponsor, the one founded by a former owner of the Cookbook, blows all their money and disappears to get him to listen to a message that turns out to be completely meaningless. Orrin lets the message play out to the universe because it really is that unimportant, and then casually says that the terrorists have all disappeared, but they'll be hunted down soon enough. Except at the end, it turns out that Donut's new sponsor, a garbage company, is actually that organization under a new name. Not only do they get her a Celestial Benefactor Box at the very end, but they manage to get themselves hired as mercenaries for the crawlers for Faction Wars.
  Cheers rose up through the hull. Fifty-thousand former crawlers, all hidden inside the newly-renamed Homecoming Queen. Once they made it onboard into the system, there was nothing anybody could do to stop them.
  • Donut's new sponsor? The one sneaking the mercenaries in? Long Haul Biological Waste Management Solutions, who ordinarily handle the clean-up after the crawl is over. Yeah. The crawlers are here to take out the trash, all right. And Carl's sponsor was Porthus Hu, the author of the second edition of the Cookbook. He's certainly in it for the long haul.
  • Remember Carl's boast? Thirty thousand battle-tested crawlers who will kill the 1%? They've just been joined by more than fifty thousand crawlers, survivors all, who want to burn it all to the ground.