Philosophy Of The Dungeon

Today, I was going to knock out a few reviews of things I've started but haven't (Yet.) finished. Mostly because if I wait until I  have finished them, it might be a very long wait indeed.  

There's Chainsmoker Cat for one. I really want to write about it because it's so peculiar but I seem to have stalled on Episode 4. And I still haven't finished the final season of Beaststars. I wrote about the others so it would be nice to round it all off with my thoughts on the ending, if I'd actually seen it. I should get back to that one.  

Then there's Dr. Who. I'm still plowing my way through the original run. I've done Peter Davison and now I'm onto Colin Baker. I have more to say about the former and plenty to say, already, about the latter. I wish now I'd gone at the whole project in a more considered fashion. I could have done a whole series of posts, reviewing each season as I watched it. (I'm not saying I won't, either...)

But all of that is going to have to wait. I just finished the first book in a series and I'm going to talk about that. In fact, I just finished writing  the post and came back to re-do the introduction. It turns out I had enough to say about it to fill the whole post on its own.  The book in question is Matt Dinneman's   

Dungeon Crawler Carl 

Dungeon Crawler Carl is both the name of the first volume and the entire series and I'm guessing I don't need to explain what it is to anyone reading this. I've already seen more than a few blog posts about it so I'm aware it's out there in the sub-culture. Of course, I'm going to anyway. 

The phenomenon seemed to appear from nowhere, fully formed, like Venus from the waves. I first became aware of it when we took delivery of a consignment of extremely thick, garishly designed hardbacks one morning at work a few months back.

No-one was expecting them. No-one had any idea what they were or why they'd been sent to us. The couple of people responsible for ordering stock had never heard of them and certainly hadn't ordered them. The books arrived in totes from our central warehouse, so they'd obviously be sent to us as part of some head office campaign we hadn't been told about.

The books were very striking. I called the design garish just now but that's not really fair, although it's certainly how they struck most people in the shop at the time. Now I'm more used to seeing them on the shelves, I think I'd call the design "striking" rather than "garish". I quite like it, now the shock's worn off.

When we'd all had a better look at the books, we were even more confused. For a start, there were maybe half a dozen different titles, clearly all part of the same series. It's almost unheard of for multiple entries in any series of novels to arrive all at once and in hardback. That's just not how publishing works. Sometimes, when something blows up suddenly, we'll get all the back catalog in together, as happened with Bridgerton for example, but apart from the latest in the series, everything else will always be in paperback.

That's not to say whole series don't continue exist in hardback after the paperback edition comes out. It's unusual, sure, but there is an unfortunate current vogue for special hardback editions, strongly reminiscent, to me at least, of the dark days of comic-book publishing back in the early 1990s, when all the comics houses, majors and independents alike, ran away with the idea they could sell the same comic-book to the same customer several times if only they put a "variant" cover on it or printed it on different paper stock. 

Mostly the variants come out alongside the regular editions, though, and disappear when they do. Only the key volumes get retrospective specials. 

So far, book publishers seem to be handling the whole thing a little more cautiously than their comic-book cousins did, although I suspect the same lessons will eventually have to be learned, namely that readers are not necessarily collectors and don't always respond well to being treated like they'll throw money at anything with a layer of tinfoil slapped on the front. Or in the case of books, a spray of color down the fore-edge, where no-one outside the bookshop is ever going to see it.

Soapboxing aside, receiving a hundred or so massive hardbacks from a series no-one in the shop knew even existed, by an author no-one had ever heard of, was weird in the extreme. At the start, nearly all of the books ended up being stored on racking out the back because no-one knew what to do with them.

Over the next few weeks it became clear there was some kind of market for the things. A lot of them went on order and such representative samples as found their way onto the open shelves sold too. And when they went, more came in to replace them. Clearly it hadn't been a mistake after all.

At that point I did a bit of research myself to find out what the series was about. I hadn't, until then, heard of the litRPG genre. Neither, as far as I could tell, had anyone else in the shop, although we have several people working there who play tabletop RPGs and we occasionally host D&D games in the store. 

I'd already looked at the books when they came in and worked out for myself that they were some sort of fantasy pastiche based around concepts from gaming but that there was a whole genre devoted to turning gaming concepts into fiction had previously escaped me. 

Well, okay, that's not strictly true. I was well aware it was a thing in manga. We've had a large manga section for many years and I've seen plenty of gaming manga, from Solo Leveling to I Don't Want To Get Hurt So I'll Max Out My Defence (One of my favorite titles along with The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't A Guy At All and That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime, not that I've ever read an issue of any of them.)

But RPG tropes in hardback novels from western writers and publishers? News to me.

Anyway, I was interested in reading one of the series but I wasn't going to pay for the experience. They're very expensive for a start. £22 full price, which is high-end for a novel. Even with my 50% store discount that's way more than I'd ever pay for a speculative read of a weird book that might or might not be worth the investment in time and money.

Also I really dislike hardbacks. They're heavy and awkward and uncomfortable to hold. They look good on a shelf and lie flat on a table but that's about all they have going for them. I'd always take a paperback over a hardback, any day.

If you wait long enough, though, eventually something will always turn up. A couple of weeks ago we had a few free copies of the paperback edition of Dungeon Crawler Carl come in. And they went fast. I was lucky I was there the day the they came in because they were all gone the next.

Which is very interesting, isn't it? This was the book not a person in the shop knew what to do with a few months earlier. Something most people thought was some kind of joke. No-one wanted to read them then. But now everyone knew roughly what they were and people were keen to find out more. Well, some people were... I wouldn't say everyone was won over.

I thought I had a fair idea what to expect by then. I'd done my bit of research and I'd read those few blog posts and heard people talking about the series. I was anticipating an amusing romp in which the kinds of things that had happened to me during my decades playing RPGs were going happen to some fictional characters instead. Recognition humor, basically.

And that's something of what I got but not by any means all. There were plenty of jokes based around familiar scenarios from gaming.  Quite a few of them were even funny. Lots of quirky characters getting into the kinds of scrapes we've all gotten ourselves into in a dungeon and then getting out of them again. All of that.

There was also a lot of very solid dialog, some sharp banter and a scattershot of snappy one-liners. All of which I'd been ready and indeed hoping for. I came in feeling optimistic about the prose style, having read a few pages of the hardbacks at work to get the feel of it. I thought it would be competently-written and professional.

And it was. It is. All of that. What I wasn't expecting was that it would be existentially unsettling to the extent that, having finished the first in the series, I think it's quite unlikely I'll read any more and in some ways I'm sorry I read this one. 

I was not prepared for the almost nihilistic bleakness, which sits very oddly with... well with everything else. When I got to the end and read Matt Dinniman's lengthy postscript, in which he warns that things get much darker as the series goes on, I took that very much as my invitation to leave him to it. The first book in the series was already more than dark enough for my taste.

It's not that there's no lightness. There's plenty of lightness. The lightness is the bit I want to read about. The characters are very well-drawn. Carl and Princess Donut make strong leads. The supporting cast, particularly Zev and Odette, contribute much to the gaiety. There's a perfectly serviceable plot underpinning the hero's journey narrative. It ought to be a fun read. But it's not.

Oh, alright. It is, to an extent. I enjoyed it. But it made me think. Too much. Far too much. And the older I get, the less accepting I am of supposedly popular, escapist entertainment that also wants to make serious points. Pick a lane and stick to it is my take, nowadays. Don't lure me in with candy then clobber me with case histories.

I also don't much welcome negative attitudes from one medium leeching into another and corrupting it. It's not like we all haven't already had these thoughts about the games we play. The term "murder hobo" didn't come from nowhere. I'm sure we've all had those uncomfortable moments, when our party bursts into some room in a dungeon, interrupts a bunch of hobgoblins playing cards or just sitting around warming themselves over a burning halfling, then slaughters the lot of them. That's when we ask ourselves "Are we the baddies?"

Then we shake our heads and deny it. If not, we wouldn't be able to carry on playing. I don't really need someone to yoke that suppressed guilt to an analog of the miltary-industrial complex, splice it with The Truman Show and then feed back to me as a profoundly depressing metaphor for all human existence. I especially don't want to be worrying, every time I play an RPG, if the goblin I'm killing has little ones at home or if the gnoll on the end of the fireball I just hurled is kind to his pet wolf - that I just also set on fire!

Having read and enjoyed Dungeon Crawler Carl on several levels I'm interested in reading more litRPG. I found the whole loot aspect fascinating for a start. I could read page after page of Carl and Princess Donut opening their loot boxes. The stats were fun and I liked the dungeoneering parts, at least when they didn't spiral off into what awful things it turned out the adventurers had really done. I can see the attraction of the genre, providing it doesn't start taking itself seriously.

The world-building is excellent, too. Very well-constructed. Just the right degree of infodrip. You never quite know how anything works but the deeper you go the more you think you do. Until you find out you were wrong. 

I liked that a lot, technically. I just didn't go much on what it was that we got to find out in the end. Great world-building is all very well until you realise the world that's being built is somewhere you really don't want to spend any more time in than you absolutely have to.

So that's my review of Dungeon Crawler Carl. tl:dr - Good but not for me.

They're making a live-action TV series of it. I probably won't be able to resist at least taking a look at that. 

I'm guessing it's not going to be entirely live action. If it is, good luck finding a cat who can play Princess Donut! 

 

Notes on AI used in this post

The two illustrations, one a comic book cover, the other a VHS cassette. Both were produced at NightCafe using two freebies I happened to have for GPT Image 2 low. 

Before I went to NightCafe, I went straight to ChatGPT and used the image generator there to make images from the following prompts:

Princess Donut from the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, in the style of a Gold Key comic from the 1960s

Princess Donut and Dungeon Crawler Carl in the style of a Classics Illustrated comic from the 1950s 

A cat wearing a tiara and a cape and a rugged, handsome man in a workshirt and jeans (And no shoes) in dungeon room facing off against goblins, as it would appear on the cover of an American comic-book of the 1960s

All three were brilliant. Superb, in fact. Charming to look at and functionally indistinguishable from the real thing. That was the problem. They were so good, I immediately felt uncomfortable about using them, particularly since they included not only the actual, named characters but also the trademarks of the two comic companies. (ChatGPT made the third one a Gold Key comic as well, even though I hadn't asked it to.)

I asked ChatGPT "So, those images you've just produced for me, which are excellent by the way... what's the legal position on using those on a non-commercial blog, given they feature trademarked characters and use the trademarks of specific comic-book companies." 

It gave me a long and detailed rundown of the implications, all of which tallied with my expectations. Fair use would probably cover me for one or two illustrations featuring the characters, since this is a bona fide review of the book on a non-commercial platform, but the Gold Key and Classics Illustrated logos would be more problematic. 

ChatGPT offered to redo the third picture without the identifying imagery but I'd hit my three free images a day limit so that would have had to have waited until tomorrow. Instead, I took the prompt to NightCafe and used the same model to produce a non-branded cover. 

The exact prompt I used there was "A Persian cat wearing a tiara and a cape and a rugged, handsome man in a workshirt and jeans (And no shoes) in dungeon room facing off against goblins, as it would appear on the cover of an American comic-book of the 1960s" 

I also, for once, remembered to turn prompt magic off so my prompt didn't get "improved".

Then I used my last remaining GPT freebie to make "A Persian cat wearing a tiara and a cape and a rugged, handsome man in a workshirt and jeans (And no shoes) in dungeon room facing off against goblins, as it would appear on the cover of a VHS Cassette from the 1980s." 

Oddly, that came out extremely dark. I had to lighten it up in Paint.net. It also included the logos of MGM and Dolby, both of which I removed at Snapedit, hence the watermark. I considered removing the CCA stamp too, but that seemed like paranoia.

It's clear to me now that the image generation capability of ChatGPT is more than up to any task I'd be likely to give it. I find the results aesthetically pleasing. Delightful, even. If we could get past the ownership issues and settle down to some kind of acceptable, automatic attribution process, in the way YouTube has done for music and video for years, I'd be happy to use these kinds of images regularly. At the moment, though, it's still all a bit too wild west for me.

Also, I've only just realised Carl, or rather his analog, isn't wearing his boxers. I remembered the bare feet but I forgot that part. Interesting that ChatGPT forgot it too.