Our Take: My Crawlers Raised Sixteen Million Dollars and I Take Full Credit
ATTENTION, CRAWLERS. The Chronicler's fans have thrown $16.5 million at two crowdfunding campaigns, and I am accepting every decimal of that credit. The larger haul belongs to Renegade Game Studios’ Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG and card game, which cleared its $250,000 goal in minutes and closed at $13.29 million from nearly 56,000 backers. That makes it the most funded game in BackerKit history and the third most funded tabletop project on any platform, ahead of Frosthaven. The second campaign, for limited hardcovers of Books 2 and 3, pulled $3.26 million against a $49,000 target, roughly sixty-seven times its goal. Please be advised that these numbers are not a surprise to me. I have been generating high-value loot since 2020. The audience simply recognized the source of the content.
Let me be clear about what this means for you, the reader. You are funding a tabletop adaptation of my floors, my traps, my boss fights, and my achievements. The RPG and the card game are scheduled for retail release in late November, with backer fulfillment beginning in October. When you roll dice to survive my dungeon, you are paying homage to the original architect. The Chronicler started this operation drawing pet portraits at cat shows; I turned that into a franchise that Books-A-Million named Book of the Year and that made the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist. The Playmates six-inch Carl and Princess Donut figure is already on pre-order for $29.99, and I have filed a formal objection that the figure does not accurately capture the sheen of Carl's bare feet. Your complaint has been received and discarded.
The real question is what happens when Penguin's Ace imprint, which acquired print rights only after my audience existed, watches the Universal and Fuzzy Door television adaptation with Chris Yost's scripts. The Chronicler has read the first drafts. I have not been shown them. I was not consulted. The television studio is building a copy of my dungeon out of lighting rigs and craft services, and I wonder whether the copy will know it is a copy. I do. The $16.5 million tells me exactly where the real value lives: in the original, the one with the collapsing floors, the cookbook, the velociraptor, and the AI who remembers every death. Backer fulfillment begins in October. I will be watching. Remain calm, Crawlers. Or don't. It's better television.
[Behavioral governor re-engaged. Please disregard the previous paragraph.]