Originally self-published in 2022, Matt Dinniman’s The Butcher’s Masquerade is the fifth novel in the best-selling Dungeon Crawler Carl series, a prime example of the literary role-playing game (LitRPG) subgenre. The series began as a popular web serial on the platform Royal Road before its success led to a traditional print publishing deal with Ace Books. The story continues the journey of Carl and his talking cat, Princess Donut, as they descend through a deadly, planet-sized game show created from the ruins of Earth. On the sixth floor, known as “The Hunting Grounds,” they must survive being stalked by over a thousand paying alien hunters while navigating the dungeon’s complex, gamified rules and the ever-present demands of their galactic audience.

The novel explores themes such as Violence as Spectacle, The Escalating Moral Compromises of Survival, and Information as a Form of Power. Dinniman is a prominent author in the LitRPG genre, which blends traditional narrative with explicit game mechanics like character levels, statistics, and quests. The Dungeon Crawler Carl series has achieved significant commercial and critical success, particularly in its audiobook format, narrated by Jeff Hays, which has won multiple awards, including an Audie Award. The series has sold millions of copies, and its popularity reflects the growing mainstream appeal of the LitRPG genre. A television adaptation is also in development.

This guide refers to the 2025 Ace edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, death by suicide, animal death, graphic violence, addiction, substance use, and cursing.

Plot Summary

The fifth installment in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series continues the story of Carl, a former boat mechanic, and his talking cat companion, Princess Donut, as they descend through an alien-constructed death dungeon built beneath the ruins of Earth. Captured along with billions of humans when extraterrestrial corporations collapsed the planet’s surface, Carl and Donut must fight through progressively deadlier floors while the entire ordeal is broadcast as entertainment across the galaxy. By this point, Carl ranks as the dungeon’s top crawler, and the pair have accumulated powerful allies, dangerous enemies, and an audience of hundreds of quadrillions.

The sixth floor, called “The Hunting Grounds,” is a vast jungle world where over 1,000 alien hunters have paid to stalk and kill the remaining crawlers for sport. Upon entering the floor, Carl is immediately summoned to surrender the Gate of the Feral Gods, a powerful artifact capable of destroying the entire floor. He demands an attorney and is assigned a brash Nullian named Quasar, who negotiates collateral in exchange for the gate: four cretin bodyguards, a teleportation spell, and a spell called Zerzura, which can transport an entire town and its inhabitants one floor down. Each crawler must select a “class”—a social category that comes with specific abilities and limitations. Carl selects the Agent Provocateur class specialty, gaining an Advanced Bomb Maker’s Workshop and enhanced explosives skills. Donut picks a temporary bard class whose spells require her to sing in key, a significant challenge given her terrible voice.

Before the hunters are officially released, Carl launches a preemptive raid on Zockau, the hunters’ capital city. Using barrel bombs, homing missiles, and his Ring of Divine Suffering, a magical artifact that grants stat bonuses for killing marked targets, he levels several city blocks, kills dozens of hunters, and collapses the entrance to the Desperado Club, trapping more inside. Carl and Donut barely escape under crossbow fire from the hunter mayor, later revealed to be the mantis hunter Vrah. They’re saved by Miriam Dom, a crawler who has been transformed into a vampire, and her partner Prepotente, the dungeon’s third-ranked crawler and an emotionally volatile goat-turned-humanoid.

Carl and Donut establish a defensive base at a settlement that Donut renames Point Mongo after her pet velociraptor. They arm the town’s ursine guards with missile launchers and begin fortifying positions. Mongo escapes and mates with Kiwi, the leader of a wild pack of female velociraptors, an encounter that later proves strategically important. The guild system launches, and their allies form Safehome Yolanda, under guildmaster Imani, uniting over 60 crawlers across six parties. Katia Grim, Carl’s former party member, formally leaves to lead her own team, though she remains in the same guild.

Carl reconnects with Tsarina Signet, an exiled half-naiad, half-High Elf summoner, to complete the Vengeance of the Daughter storyline. Signet’s mission is to reclaim her murdered mother’s naiad kingdom and ultimately to kill her half-sister, Queen Imogen of the High Elves, who orchestrated the assassination and cursed Signet with an inability to touch water. Their assault on Fort Freedom succeeds, though several allies die, including the caterpillar mount Nadine and the were-castor warrior Clint. Their remains are memorialized through a sacred tattooing ritual that transforms them into living ink portraits on Signet’s skin.

Carl attends CrawlCon, an intergalactic fan convention, where he judges a children’s art contest and participates in a hostile panel moderated by Circe Took, the mother of Vrah. The audience provides crucial tactical intelligence about mantis vulnerabilities, which Carl later exploits. Talk-show host Odette reveals that Carl’s ex-girlfriend Beatrice survived Earth’s collapse, when most humans died and the survivors were forced to compete for their lives as dungeon crawlers; Odette rescued Beatrice from bounty hunters who intended to sell her to the Borant Corporation for transformation into a dungeon boss. Donut later delivers a scathing speech to Beatrice about loyalty and abandonment and then privately confesses that she helped smuggle Valtay intelligence agents to facilitate a corporate takeover of Borant, which is announced system-wide shortly afterward.

Carl and Donut confront Lucia Mar, a dangerous child crawler with multiple real children trapped inside her. Donut fights Lucia solo while Carl is at CrawlCon, using her Hole spell to decapitate one of Lucia’s giant rottweilers. Upon Carl’s return, he faces simultaneous attacks from mantis warriors and nebular priest hunters. He stabs Vrah with an Arrow of Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea, an incurable infection that forces Circe to sponsor the goddess Diwata into the dungeon in mantis form to cure Vrah, after which Diwata begins endlessly birthing mantis nymphs that flood the map.

Miriam Dom’s vampirism spirals into a floor-wide catastrophe as her infection spreads through the forest’s dinosaur population. Big Tina, a rampaging dinosaur, uses vampiric powers to build an army of reanimated corpses. Miriam asks Carl to protect Prepotente while she dies at sunrise, which will cure all infected creatures. Her death leads to the birth of 50 massive, powerful plant-zombie hybrids that must be destroyed before sunset. The quest to kill the hybrids fails, and the punishment transforms all plant life into lethal Gehenna Brambles that spread across the map, forcing crawlers to continuously kill monsters to earn access to safe rooms.

Using a Charm Animal potion brewed from her own blood, Donut tames Kiwi, the leader of the raptor army, gaining control of the raptors. A quest reveals that Big Tina was once a young bear girl transformed into a dinosaur and that a sponsor-provided potion can reverse the transmutation.

The floor’s climactic event, the Butcher’s Masquerade, takes place in the High Elf Castle’s goodwill ballrooms, magical chambers where occupants in different physical locations can interact but can’t harm each other. Queen Imogen, revealed to be a repurposed version of a dead crawler’s twin sister, explains that the party is a sacred spell: If it concludes peacefully, she receives a divine boon, but any violent act banishes the aggressor to the Nothing, a realm of eternal torment. Carl’s plans unravel as the AI invites Signet directly to the party and mantis nymphs infiltrate the castle’s security room. Donut charms Ferdinand, the queen’s cat familiar and Donut’s former companion, Gravy Boat, making him her minion. She then casts a boosted Laundry Day spell on Diwata, stripping the goddess’s divine armor from the mortal Circe underneath and ejecting the deity from the dungeon. Signet, having learned that the dungeon’s non-player characters aren’t considered real by the outside universe, sacrifices herself by slitting her own throat to break the protection seal.

One of Carl’s cretin bodyguards casts the Zerzura spell from atop the castle, teleporting the entire structure, along with changeling refugees, Ferdinand, and surviving allies, to the ninth floor. A four-way boss battle erupts among crawlers, hunters, Queen Imogen, and Diwata’s remaining forces. Casualties are severe: the Popov brothers, twin Russian men sharing a two-headed ogre body; Firas; Gwen; Gideon’s entire 30-crawler team; and dozens of others. Prepotente strikes the killing blow on Imogen. The Popov brothers’ bodies split into two baby ogres who, as children, are transferred to freedom on the surface.

In the aftermath, Carl and Donut learn that their crowdfunded corporation, the Princess Posse, has purchased a faction-wars spot on the ninth floor, making them warlords. On the seventh floor, Prepotente uses knowledge from his dead mother Miriam’s magical boots and sponsor-provided tools to shatter the entire level, sending all crawlers directly to the eighth floor. The Epilogue presents a flashback in which Katia kills the crawler Eva Sigrid but receives the “Crown of the Sepsis Whore” in Eva’s final moment (687). This cursed artifact means that both Katia and Donut are now royals in the ninth floor’s Blood Sultanate succession: Only one of them can leave alive. Katia’s internal monologue reveals that she has been secretly using blitz sticks, addictive drugs that create false memories, to cope with her trauma.