Carl's Doomsday Scenario

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman is the second installment in the Dungeon Crawler Carl fantasy LitRPG series that began with Dungeon Crawler Carl. Carl’s Doomsday Scenario picks up where the first ended, as human Carl and his partner and ex-girlfriend’s show cat Princess Donut enter the third dungeon level. Together, Carl and Donut face new and increasingly deadly challenges, including monster clowns, deadly side quests, and other human crawlers out for their heads. As they battle their way through the third level, their camaraderie and friendship grow alongside their power. Carl’s Doomsday Scenario explores what happens when game and reality blur, and the painful balance between survival and holding onto one’s moral code while balancing exciting action and a dark comedic tone.

This guide is based on the 2024 hardcover edition from ACE.

Content Warning: This guide and source material depict graphic violence typical in fantasy conflicts.

Plot Summary

Carl and Donut, a talking housecat and former pet turned dungeon crawler, enter the third floor of the dungeon where they reunite with Mordecai, a sarcastic, centuries-old skyfowl (a humanoid eagle creature) who served as their assigned guildmaster on the previous floors, offering limited advice and dungeon guidance. At last, they can choose their race and class. Donut keeps her cat race and chooses an Earth-based class called Former Child Actor, which includes a manager benefit, making Mordecai their dedicated manager. Carl chooses a race called Primal, which comes with benefits while allowing him to keep his human physical appearance. His class is Compensated Anarchist, a subclass that enhances his bomb-making skills. Mordecai, who can now leave his guildhall, shows them around the third floor.

The setting of the third floor is the Over City, a series of isolated settlements surrounded by large stretches of abandoned city ruins. The Over City sits on the top level of a volcano. The monster of the volcano breathed poison gas that transformed residents into monsters who now live in the ruins.

Carl and Donut head for a skyfowl settlement across the ruins and trigger a quest to help Signet (an elite non-player character or NPC—a bioengineered character with a scripted backstory, designed to simulate real people for narrative immersion) defeat the monsters of Grimaldi’s circus, a corrupted band of undead performers now ruled by a parasitic vine creature. Signet kidnaps Donut to force Carl’s cooperation. Carl uses his knowledge of Signet’s scripted backstory from an elite drama called Vengeance of the Daughter to make a deal with the producers, defeating the circus and saving his own life in the process. He saves Donut, and they finally reach the skyfowl settlement.

Mordecai introduces them to the Desperado Club, a members-only area that offers quests, supplies, and entertainment. An NPC named GumGum approaches Carl and Donut, triggering a second quest. Mordecai orders them to ignore the quest. When Carl and Donut find GumGum murdered in an alley, they feel compelled to uncover the truth and avenge her. They learn that a necromancer is killing sex workers to turn them into monsters called krasue—disembodied flying women’s heads with dangling organs—helped by a cult of city elves who believe the skyfowl are angels. Carl believes that either the settlement’s magistrate Featherfall, or his secretary, Miss Quill, are behind it all.

Meanwhile, Carl and Donut also appear on a new interview show where they meet Hekla, the leader of a powerful crawler team called Brynhild’s Daughters. She asks Carl and Donut to team up with her former party member, Katia, who was separated from the group. During this interview, Carl makes an inflammatory statement against the Skull Empire, a galactic monarchy whose citizens watch the dungeon as entertainment, supporting a rebellion primarily to antagonize King Rust, Prince Maestro’s father. In retaliation, Maestro’s brother, Prince Stalwart, attempts to bomb their production trailer, accidentally killing a famous singer instead.

Back in the dungeon, Carl and Donut follow through on their agreements and add Katia to their party. Katia is a doppelganger—a race that can mimic other forms but struggles with facial accuracy—and is classed as a Monster Truck Driver, a combat-heavy role with high Constitution. Together, they continue their investigation. They break into the magistrate’s office with explosives, killing Quill in the process. They discover that Quill killed Featherfall and secretly took over as magistrate. She used the city elves to collect sex workers, whom she murdered and turned into krasue with the help of her husband, Remex. She turned Remex into a capacitor, an undead creature designed to absorb and store soul energy, to collect and store power that she intends to use in a spell that will leave only the skyfowl alive.

Quill’s death destabilizes her spell, causing an imminent explosion in the soul crystal that powers the town. The blast will kill NPCs and crawlers in the area, and they have seven minutes to run. Carl and Donut decide to risk their own lives to stop the explosion. Carl successfully contains the exploding soul crystal inside an enchanted glass box and pulls it into his inventory, where it becomes a new item: Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, a city-leveling weapon.

However, this triggers a secondary explosion, originating from the body of Remex. They now have 20 minutes to escape. Carl and Donut run, leading other crawlers to the stairwell to the next floor, though they still have three days until the floor collapse. Along the way, precursor shocks destabilize enchanted items, including Donut’s tiara, which disappears. Just before they enter the stairwell, Carl tells Katia to detonate bombs he previously planted in case they could not kill the necromancer. She does, and they dive down the stairs.

The team arrives for their interview with Odette, a popular dungeon talk show host who recaps crawler progress and monitors key storylines. Odette explains that they successfully saved dozens of crawlers and thousands of NPCs. Their extraordinary success should have garnered them rare Celestial achievement boxes, but the Borant Corporation, the company hosting this dungeon season, vetoed this decision. Carl remarks that he has learned his lesson and will no longer participate in quests. Donut is excited to learn that she and Carl have now entered the top 10 crawlers’ rankings. In a moment alone, Odette warns Carl that Hekla plans to poach Donut and may kill Carl to make that happen.