The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook
The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook
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Matt Dinniman on The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A fan vote that broke the planThe Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook exists as a titled object in the series because readers put it there. Dinniman’s Patreon, where subscribers vote on gifts the protagonist Carl receives inside the alien game show, produced the choice for Book 3. He accepted the result and built from it.
They chose The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, for example, to be the prize [Carl picks]. If you’ve read that far, you know how much of an impact that’s had on the story, and none of that was planned. It’s just my particular style of writing.
When Dinniman describes what the Cookbook became inside the narrative, he is describing something that surprised him. The item began as a fan-voted prize and grew into a load-bearing piece of the series mythology, populated by characters from previous dungeon runs whose histories he had not yet imagined when the vote came in.
I had no specific plans about it becoming such a major part of the storyline. The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook is a tale of all the previous iterations of the game show and people who’ve written their notes in and those specific people that were involved in that become more and more characters later in the story and we learn more about them. And I had no intentions on that happening, it just was where the story took me and I was glad it did because it became a major, major part of the overall narrative. [paraphrased from audio]
Book 3 was written for an audience of fewer than a thousand people. Dinniman would later note that by the time he reached Book 8, over a million readers would follow the same character, which reframes how much of the series’ architecture was built with no audience pressure at all.
Book 3 was also being written during the depths of pandemic lockdown, and Dinniman traces the dungeon’s particular atmosphere directly back to that period. The nihilism in the world-building is not a genre convention he imported; it arrived because he was living inside a version of it.
When we got into the second book and the third book and even the second half of the first book, that was all pure March on. And I was like everyone else, I was cooped up in my head, not knowing what’s going to happen to the world, and it was a pretty depressing time for all of us, I think. So a lot of that bled over into like the dark humor and the almost nihilistic attitude of the dungeon itself into what we wrote. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
Two hundred pages of spreadsheet, no outlineNo DCC book begins with a plan. Dinniman writes toward the story rather than from a map of it, which means that everything the Cookbook became, including its role as an archive of the dungeon’s history, was discovered in the drafting. The cost of that freedom is an enormous tracking document built after the fact.
I make it all up as I go along with no outline and no plan. It’s how I prefer to write. Because of that, I have to keep track, or I simply wouldn’t be able to make it work. It’s like doodling on a giant canvas.
The Patreon votes that shaped Book 3 regularly forced him into territory he had not prepared for. For Book 6, readers voted for Carl to land in Cuba, a location Dinniman knew nothing about. He treats these moments as a structural feature of how he works rather than obstacles to it.
On my Patreon, I have [readers] vote for things that happen in the book. They always screw me over every single time by picking the most bizarre things.
The tone that defines Book 3, dark material running alongside genuine comedy, is character-driven rather than mechanically managed. Dinniman does not schedule funny scenes to offset grim ones; he lets the cast find their own way through. Princess Donut, a sapient, verbally combative show cat, is the clearest example of how that works in practice.
I never intended for this to be a funny story, but the concept along with some of the characters—specifically Princess Donut (who is given sapience and the ability to talk in an early chapter)—allows for some really bizarre and ultimately funny scenarios. 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.
Princess Donut’s voice and competitive hauteur are drawn from direct observation. Before writing full-time, Dinniman spent years as a commercial artist selling cat portraits at conventions and cat shows, which put him inside a subculture most novelists never encounter.
Before I was a full-time writer, I was an artist. I drew cat pictures for a living, and sometimes I would go to actual cat shows as a part of that job. I learned quite a bit about different cat breeds and competitive cat shows, and Princess Donut was born.
That background also means Princess Donut is not a generic fantasy familiar. The behavioral specificity readers respond to, the status obsession, the disdain, the precise breed mannerisms, came from years of professional proximity to the real thing.
The personal thread
Five hundred readers and a million-reader reckoningThe scale gap between where Dinniman was when he finished Book 3 and where the series went afterward is not an abstraction for him. He names the numbers plainly, and the contrast lands differently once a reader knows what conditions shaped the book they are holding.
By the time I was done with Book 3, ‘The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook,’ I had maybe 500 people, 1,000 people reading it. And now, I will literally have over a million people read ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ Book 8. And that’s a lot of pressure.
Carl’s defining trait, adapting instantly when a plan collapses, is not a passive byproduct of Dinniman’s pantser method. It is a deliberate character engineering choice, and it mirrors the way Dinniman himself operates: committing to no outline, then finding the story by following what his characters need.
Carl is a planner, but his plans tend to go awry at the last second. He’s very good at coming up with new ideas. That’s a deliberate decision on my part to make him like that.
On what the book is wrestling with
Corporate evil and the Colosseum we builtThe dungeon in DCC is run by alien corporations who profit from broadcasting human suffering to a galaxy-wide audience. Dinniman’s choice to make the antagonists institutional rather than personal is an argument about how cruelty actually operates, and he explains it in terms that are closer to political economy than to fantasy world-building.
A lot of times, the bad guys don’t consider themselves to be the bad guys. When it’s a corporation, it’s a lot more realistic... As a result, you come up with these giant machines that are filled with people who aren’t necessarily evil one-on-one, but they create evil. That’s always going to be fascinating to me... corporate evil feels so inevitable, like realistic cosmic horror.
The game-show frame is not a borrowed genre convention. Dinniman traces it to a specific shift he observed in entertainment culture, where cruelty became the product rather than a side effect.
The meaner, edgier type stuff became more and more and more popular... instead of laughing with somebody, you’re laughing at someone. And the moment money gets involved, everything becomes cruel and really dark and it hearkens back to the whole idea of the Colosseum, where people are like around there watching someone’s misfortune for fun. And that’s kind of a big influence on the whole idea of Dungeon Crawler Carl being a series as a whole. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
Refusing to be broken, keeping the thread of hopeDinniman condenses Carl’s entire arc into a sentence that works as both character description and political statement. The dungeon is built to humiliate and destroy its contestants for audience entertainment; Carl’s answer is a refusal that the series treats as genuinely heroic.
One of the main themes is: You will not break me.
The stakes beneath the game-show comedy are, by Dinniman’s own accounting, as serious as fiction gets. He does not soften the premise when he describes it, and he does not want readers to soften it either.
It’s a terrible situation: 99% of the Earth is killed in the first paragraph of the whole book, and the few survivors are struggling to make it out of the dungeon. I mean, it’s a genocide.
Against that backdrop, Dinniman made a deliberate choice to preserve something the dungeon is designed to extinguish. He has said he wanted to keep a thread of hope alive throughout the entire series, even as conditions for Carl and the surviving crawlers grow worse with each book. The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook sits at the point in the series where that thread is most under tension, which is exactly why the Cookbook item, with its record of everyone who tried and failed before Carl, matters as much as it does.