Carl's Doomsday Scenario
Carl's Doomsday Scenario
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Matt Dinniman on Carl's Doomsday Scenario
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A palate cleanser that swallowed the worldThe series did not begin as a serious creative bet. Dinniman was already mid-project on something else and wanted a quick, low-stakes warm-up to clear his head before returning to it.
I thought, I’m going to write something real simple, real fast, kind of like a palate cleanser. That’s when I started Dungeon Crawler Carl, not expecting it to take off in the way it did.
He started posting chapters for free on Royal Road in early 2020. The pandemic arrived before Book 1 was even published, and Books 2 and 3 were written entirely inside that period of collective uncertainty. He has been direct about how the atmosphere of those months worked its way into the material.
When we got into the second book and the third book...I was cooped up in my head, not knowing what was going to happen to the world...a lot of that bled over into like the dark humor and the almost nihilistic attitude of the dungeon itself...I still wanted to keep...a thread of hope throughout the entire series, which I think still persists to this day. [paraphrased from audio]
That tension between the dungeon’s nihilism and a deliberately preserved thread of hope is the engine of Carl’s Doomsday Scenario. The book is dark because the writing conditions were dark, and hopeful because Dinniman decided it had to be.
How he wrote it
Chaos on a giant canvasBy the time he was writing Book 2, the story had already outgrown his original conception entirely. What started as a contained premise had become something with galactic machinery and corporate politics he had not planned for.
When I first started writing it, I was writing a very simple straightforward story about a dude and his cat on an alien game show. I wasn’t anticipating such a complicated overarching political plot. As I started working and going on, that’s kind of what happened.
Dinniman works without an outline, adding complexity to a series that already demands internal consistency across hundreds of named characters and invented rules. The solution he arrived at is a spreadsheet that now runs over 200 pages and requires a secondary spreadsheet to navigate itself.
I keep track of everything with a very extensive Excel sheet. But my process is a little bit of chaos. I make it all up as I go along with no outline and no plan. It’s like doodling on a giant canvas.
Dinniman teased the contents of Book 2 at the close of Book 1 with exactly one piece of confirmed information. He knew what was coming in broad, absurdist outline. Whether the plot connecting those elements was planned was another matter entirely.
The good news is the next book has clowns and dead hookers in it.
Because he writes for the audiobook from the first draft, the narrator Jeff Hays functions as a kind of silent co-editor. Hays’s vocal performance shapes which characters survive. Dinniman has said that when Hays gives a new character a voice he dislikes, that character dies. The consequence for the prose is direct.
I write everything with audio in mind.
The personal thread
The cat he almost wrote outBefore Dinniman committed full-time to writing, he spent years drawing animal portraits and selling them at competitive cat shows, which gave him firsthand knowledge of the Persian-owning, prize-focused world that produced Princess Donut. His original plan for her in the story was to sideline that knowledge almost immediately.
I always wanted to write a book with a Persian show cat in it, but my initial plan was to have her enter the dungeon and kind of disappear, and then have her show back up, way later. That obviously didn’t work out, because I personally fell in love with writing her character, almost immediately.
The character who stayed became the most demanding he has ever attempted. Princess Donut’s voice, her vanity, and her particular relationship with Carl required more sustained attention than any other element of the series.
She is the most complicated character I have ever written.
On what the book is wrestling with
Corporate horror and the refusal to breakThe alien game show at the center of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, in which humans die for interstellar entertainment, is a direct satire of something much closer. Dinniman has named his target precisely.
I tend to poke fun at all sorts of stuff, but most of it focuses on our obsession of keeping up appearances. At social media culture and reality television.
The antagonists in the series are never reducible to a single villain. The force Carl and Donut fight is structural, which is what makes it feel so inescapable.
When it’s a corporation, it’s a lot more realistic. It’s not just one person. It’s the whole group of people smooshed together, all with a common goal, which is not to have the person above them fire them. They are just trying to make money, and they’re doing that by doing something not necessarily for the community’s best interest...you come up with these giant machines that are filled with people who aren’t necessarily evil one-on-one, but they create evil...corporate evil feels so inevitable, like realistic cosmic horror.
Against that structural evil, Dinniman plants one consistent answer. It is not victory or escape but something more psychological, and he has stated it as the series’ core theme.
One of the main themes is: You will not break me. These survivors are refusing to allow the darkness to overcome them.
What he wants us to sit with
Humor as the only honest coping mechanismReaders new to the series sometimes assume the comedy is tonal counterbalancing, a deliberate lightening of dark scenes. Dinniman rejects that account of how the humor actually works.
I don’t go out of my way to say ‘Okay, that scene was pretty dark. Let’s make a funny scene now.’ Instead, I try to rely on the characters themselves to get from point A to B, and humor is oftentimes a major coping mechanism.
The distinction matters for how a reader should encounter the book. The jokes are not relief valves inserted between hard moments. They are what the characters reach for when the dungeon gives them no other option, which means the funniest scenes are also the ones where the stakes are highest.