<n>Standard disclaimer<fn></n> <img attachment="book_cover_-_the_dungeon_anarchist_s_cookbook-_dungeon_crawler_carl_book_3.webp" align="right">This is the third in a series of reviews that so far includes <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=5402">Book 1</a> and <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=5412">Book 2</a>. Carl recieves the titular <i>Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook</i>, which is a special book that only he can read. It's a compendium of the experiences of dozens if not hundreds of other crawlers throughout the myriad seasons that passed before the Earth season chronicled in these books. The book introduces itself to him, <bq caption="Page 121">Hello, Crawler. As you’re about to find, this is a very special book. If you’re reading these words, it means this book has found its way into your hands for one purpose and one purpose only. <b>Together, we will burn it all to the ground.</b></bq> This is the first inkling that we have that other former crawlers are working in the background to exact their revenge on the showrunners, on the game, on the dungeon, on the factions, on the galactic society that would not only allow an unjust travesty like this to exist, but to seek to profit off of the suffering, enslavement, and annihilation of entire worlds and species. I may be reading a bit too much into it, but things are getting distinctly "workers of the world unite; all you have to lose is your chains,"<fn> and I am absolutely here for it. The book goes on, <bq caption="Page 123">While the true contents of this guide are invisible to the showrunners and to the viewers, it is not invisible to the current System AI. There is nothing about owning this book, or the information hidden within that is against the rules. However, if the organization running this season begins to suspect that this book is more than it appears, or if you tell anyone about the existence of this book, the information within will erase, and you will forever lose access to the hidden text.</bq> The ground rules are set and this book will contribute vastly to Carl's knowledge about the mechanics of the game world. He has to constantly hide this knowledge or plausibly pretend that he'd obtained it elsewhere. In the next books, many of the little chapter introductions will be snippets from this book, attributed to former crawlers, noting their seasons. At the very beginning of this story, Mordecai is confronted with another former crawler---Chaco---who used to be his best friend but with whom he has such an open sore of a beef that even the normally cool and calculating Mordecai gets himself banned for the entirety of the fourth level, leaving Carl, Donut, and Katia to figure everything out for themselves. Carl builds out his communal approach to the dungeon on this level, fist-bumping and befriending as many people as he possibly can. They all start crowd-sourcing information about the levels, working together to help as many crawlers survive as possible. <bq caption="Page 208">Still, people kept messaging me directly. I was spending a lot of time explaining what little we knew about the trains. It was important people had all the information, and I wanted to help, but I was shocked at how little some people had managed to figure out after three full days of this.</bq> They hook back up with Team Meadow Lark, where Elle---the 99-year-old lady---has become a powerful and extremely sassy fairy. <bq caption="Page 129">She looked back at the badger. “Fuck, man. There’s like five real people in here. Are you fermenting the potatoes yourself? I do want another drink. My friend Carl is paying for it. But then we’re going to have another one after that, and I’m paying for that one. And don’t give me a shitty pour like last time. Carl is having what I’m having. Donut, what do you want?”</bq> Elle is low-key kind-of awesome. She is a hardcore killer and takes no shit. She is one of the funnier characters and has taken to her new lease on life in the dungeon with gusto. <bq caption="Page 131">[...] going from a dementia-suffering, 99-year-old woman in a wheelchair to this fairy ice mage was going to alter one’s personality. But there was more to it, too. She had an edge to her. In the short time I’d known the woman before, I’d caught hints of that, but I hadn’t realized she was so… loud. I wondered how close this personality matched with how she was when she’d been younger.</bq> Carl also gets on more shows, meeting more and different aliens. This is where Dinniman's imagination goes into overdrive. He really seems to be interested in inventing new mythologies and new creatures that aren't derived from anything I'd read before. For example, here's a vivid and relentlessly unflattering description of an alien with baggy skin that is too big for its frame. <bq caption="Page 179">The sickly, pale creature sat in the chair, naked except for his engineer’s hat. What I’d taken for a poncho was actually just flesh that didn’t properly fit his form. He had no muscles or definition to his body. The green-tinted flesh hung off of him like a fitted sheet placed on a too-small bed. The right side of his face hung loosely. When he spoke, the hole for his mouth hung below the bottom of his jawline, and the words came from the nose holes. The nose itself appeared like it was supposed to be hooked, but it hung to the side, dangling like a used condom on the side of the creature’s face. The eye holes drooped, revealing yellow bone. Clumps of black hair clung to the head.</bq> Not only does Dinniman fill in more information about the alien civilizations that participate in the economy of the crawl, but he also discusses how this season is particularly bad and cheaply done---the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification" source="Wikipedia">enshittification</a> of the dungeon world because this season's sponsor is cheap, or out of money, or ... whatever. <bq caption="Page 298">The robot sighed. “I apologize, Carl. Let me translate it to earth monkey speak. The mudskippers are cheap bastards who have built this entire crawl with spit and duct tape and items they have purchased at the equivalent of an interstellar swap meet. Everything is built with very little regard for system security and is done as cheaply as possible. The fact it hasn’t yet broken down or bitten them in the ass is a testament to the very real existence of the concept of ‘dumb luck.’ Do you understand now?”</bq> <img attachment="karl_marx.webp" align="right" caption="Karl Marx">This series is very much about hating on giant mega-corporations whose only concern is to gain as much profit for themselves as possible. The economics are pretty clear. The politics are also getting clearer and clearer, as in the citation below, You see what I mean about the workers-of-the-world-unite vibe? <bq caption="Page 429">Sometimes the galaxy isn’t a happy place. Sometimes the unwashed masses forget their place in the machine. And sometimes these dregs bubble up to the surface, causing a phenomenon widely known as “Civil Unrest.” And when that happens, the powers that be don’t want to become the powers that were. So they hire backup. An outside force to come down and kick everything back into order, and maybe commit a few war crimes in the process just so the filth knows their place. One such outfit, trained specifically for this sort of situation, is the Shade Gnoll Riot Forces.</bq> Dinniman is also a big fan of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun">Chekhov's guns</a>, with the nearly exploded Soul Crystal from the previous book---still unused as of the middle of book six---and also this weird note near the end of this book, <bq caption="Page 438">I focused on Katia. The blood spread out from her in a circle. It hadn’t gone straight up, but in every direction around her. She hadn’t been touched. Holy shit. There wasn’t a single damn drop of blood on her. <b>I had a thought. An exploit. I wondered how well it would work. But it was definitely something they’d patch if I even tried it. I filed that information away.</b></bq> I wonder if the idea is: Store a dangerous liquid in a container in your inventory. Take it out of the container in your inventory. Liquid sprays in all directions, not touching you. At any rate, he hasn't used this information as of the middle of the sixth book, either. But I picture Dinniman's entire house to be filled with paper and red thread, so I also don't quite believe that he's forgotten all about it. <img src="{att_link}dinniman_s_living_room.webp" href="{att_link}dinniman_s_living_room.webp" align="none" caption="Dinniman's living room" scale="60%"> Even that picture probably doesn't do it justice: he seems to be able to invent an endless array of monsters, creatures, characters, classes, guilds, organizations, pantheons, and historical facts. <bq caption="Page 492">The second portrait was that of Grull. He was a black-skinned, overly-muscular minotaur-like beast, but with a horse’s body. A centaur with the head of a big, pissed-off bull complete with a golden ring in its snout. He held a smoking, double-headed axe.</bq> On page 400, Dinniman mentions <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Frank">Lisa Frank</a>, which is a <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=deep+cut"><i>deep cut</i></a>, referring to brightly colored notebook and binder covers from 80s and 90s.<fn> I found this one, which makes me wonder whether Dinniman got the idea for Donut while daydreaming and staring at the notebook cover of the girl he was in love with in Social Studies. <img src="{att_link}lisa_frank_donut_cover.webp" href="{att_link}lisa_frank_donut_cover.webp" align="none" caption="Lisa Frank Notebook Cover featuring Donut?" scale="75%"> As with the previous book, the plot is super-complex with a lot of stuff to learn about color-coding and numbering and so on. The main highlights are that we are in level four, <i>The Iron Tangle</i>, which is a giant system of trains, running on tracks that the crawlers would eventually discover is in the shape of the Syndicate's logo. The <a href="https://dungeon-crawler-carl.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Syndicate">Syndicate</a> is the umbrella organization that runs the dungeon and includes many, many members and entities. There is a lot of train stuff going on, Katia gets a lot more powerful and a lot more empowered and useful, and Carl's plans encompass nearly everyone in the dungeon, trying to save as many crawlers as possible. Some of the utility cars have a teleporting scoop on the front that transport things instantly to a disposal area. They end up destroying most of the level, dumping train after train into "the abyss". Katia's beef with Hekla comes to a head, with Hekla trying a coup of sorts to get Donat onto her team. None of that works, with Katia flattening Hekla in one fell swoop and Eva on the run sans one hand. They end up teleporting a station mimic that's actually a province boss to the escape station, Carl summons the God Grull, who's being "driven" by his arch-nemesis the Maestro (an ogre). They manage to save most of the crawlers with a daring plan (as usual). I know that none of this makes a lick of sense if you haven't already read the books, but perhaps it's a nice reminder for those who have read it. As with the other reviews, check out <a href="https://dungeon-crawler-carl.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeon_Anarchist%27s_Cookbook_(Book)">official wiki for book 3</a> for more details. Carl's last entry in the cookbook (for now) is, <bq caption="Page 508">If we’re really going to burn this place to the ground, we need to actually do it and not just talk about it. We need to start killing them, too. I don’t know for sure how to do it yet, but I’ll come up with something. They will not break me. Fuck them all. They will not break me. But I will break them. This is my promise to myself, to my friends, and to you, anyone who reads these words. I will break them all.</bq> <hr> <ft>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</ft> <ft>for once, I find the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_of_the_world,_unite!" source="Wikipedia">English translation</a> to be a bit sexier than the <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geflügelter_Worte/P#Proletarier_aller_Länder,_vereinigt_euch!" source="Wikipedia">original German</a>, <bq>Die Proletarier haben nichts in ihr zu verlieren als ihre Ketten. Sie haben eine Welt zu gewinnen. Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch!</bq></ft> <ft>I refuse to reveal whether I had one or more of these or not. Let's say it was my twin sister, ok?</ft> <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Page 121">I was about to toss the book into my inventory, but instead I flipped to the first page. It read, “Welcome.” I felt the haptic buzz of my Escape Plan skill activate. Additional words appeared on the mostly-blank page. Hello, Crawler. As you’re about to find, this is a very special book. If you’re reading these words, it means this book has found its way into your hands for one purpose and one purpose only. Together, we will burn it all to the ground.</bq> <bq caption="Page 123">While the true contents of this guide are invisible to the showrunners and to the viewers, it is not invisible to the current System AI. There is nothing about owning this book, or the information hidden within that is against the rules. However, if the organization running this season begins to suspect that this book is more than it appears, or if you tell anyone about the existence of this book, the information within will erase, and you will forever lose access to the hidden text.</bq> <bq caption="Page 125">Most of the other crawlers didn’t have a manager at all. I’d grown to rely on him, sending him queries every time I ran across something I didn’t recognize. We were going to have to suck it up and figure out the rest of this floor without him. Both Daniel Bautista and the book showed me the importance of crowdsourcing information. And while the bounty was a big concern, we couldn’t let it force ourselves into isolation. I needed to get out there and add as many people as I could to my chat.</bq> <bq caption="Page 129">She looked back at the badger. “Fuck, man. There’s like five real people in here. Are you fermenting the potatoes yourself? I do want another drink. My friend Carl is paying for it. But then we’re going to have another one after that, and I’m paying for that one. And don’t give me a shitty pour like last time. Carl is having what I’m having. Donut, what do you want?”</bq> <bq caption="Page 131">[...] going from a dementia-suffering, 99-year-old woman in a wheelchair to this fairy ice mage was going to alter one’s personality. But there was more to it, too. She had an edge to her. In the short time I’d known the woman before, I’d caught hints of that, but I hadn’t realized she was so… loud. I wondered how close this personality matched with how she was when she’d been younger.</bq> <bq caption="Page 139">The two rock monsters stared at us curiously. They’d fucked up, but I suspected I’d just saved their rocky asses. I’d trust them much more than someone else. Especially if that someone else knew we were responsible for their friends getting fired, or worse.</bq> <bq caption="Page 179">The sickly, pale creature sat in the chair, naked except for his engineer’s hat. What I’d taken for a poncho was actually just flesh that didn’t properly fit his form. He had no muscles or definition to his body. The green-tinted flesh hung off of him like a fitted sheet placed on a too-small bed. The right side of his face hung loosely. When he spoke, the hole for his mouth hung below the bottom of his jawline, and the words came from the nose holes. The nose itself appeared like it was supposed to be hooked, but it hung to the side, dangling like a used condom on the side of the creature’s face. The eye holes drooped, revealing yellow bone. Clumps of black hair clung to the head.</bq> <bq caption="Page 185">I held up a third finger. A hole appeared in the metal plate. Fast as I could, I reached through, grasped the surprised elf-like creature by his long, silver hair, and pulled. The moment I pulled his head through the hole, Donut snapped off the spell. I let go, and the severed head dropped to the ground, mouth still open wide. “What was that, bitch? I didn’t quite get that last part,” I said.</bq> <bq caption="Page 192">Comfort I didn’t realize how much I needed.</bq> His limited tenses make this sentence a mess. I'm not going to bitch too much more about it but this book in particular was awash in questionable grammar and a paucity of verb cases. <bq caption="Page 198">The show moved to feature several crawlers it didn’t normally show, including Quan Ch, the one crawler who’d received a Celestial Quest box at the end of the last floor. Donut grumbled as she watched him fly down a train tunnel on his ethereal wings, shooting blue lightning out of his left hand. He blasted the front of a train, which crumpled and stopped dead on the track. A mantaur corpse fell out the front of the destroyed cockpit. “That jacket he got lets him fly and shoot lightning,” I said. “That’s pretty cool. But if he’s flying around blasting trains, that’s going to cause all sorts of problems. I wonder what line that is.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 199">We watched Elle pick up a clurichaun, freeze his head, rip it off, and throw it to another party member. This guy, some sort of muscle man class, twisted in the air and hurled the ice ball at a giant goat boss. It slammed into the goat’s head, staggering it. A menagerie of other creatures, the former residents of Meadow Lark, rushed the goat monster and tore it to pieces.</bq> <bq caption="Page 205">I watched Donut train with the hole spell while we waited for the Nightmare Express to come for the second time. She’d gotten the spell up to level three. She was practicing with making the hole a smaller diameter. She’d figured out how to cast the spell, and with Mongo standing right there, she could cast Clockwork Triplicate, and the two extra Mongos would appear on the other side of the hole. We’d be able to clear rooms without having to open doors.</bq> <bq caption="Page 207">I’d sat at the bar for the hour, staring glumly at my drink. I was approached a half of a dozen times,</bq> One more grammar maybe: here, "I was" should be "I'd been" but Dinniman hates the word "had". <bq caption="Page 208">Still, people kept messaging me directly. I was spending a lot of time explaining what little we knew about the trains. It was important people had all the information, and I wanted to help, but I was shocked at how little some people had managed to figure out after three full days of this.</bq> Yeah. That tracks. <bq caption="Page 242">Katia returned to her spiked She-Hulk form. It was about as big as she dared go and still be able to—barely—fit through most doors. Donut jumped onto the back of Mongo. “Ready guys?” I said. I cracked my neck. I cast Bang Bro onto my gauntlet. It hissed with energy. “Let’s do this.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 257">I exchanged a look with Katia. “I don’t know, Donut. I don’t like the idea of you doing that alone. You might need hands to control it.” “If that little pervert can work the controls, then I can figure it out,” Donut said. “Besides, do you really think you can climb that chain? It’s quite long. Mongo will be ready to graduate college by the time you get up there. I can do it quick. I can Puddle Jump if I have to, but I’d rather save it for coming back.” “Okay,” I said after a moment. “Just be careful.” “I’m always careful, Carl,” Donut said, shooting another missile. “I’m going out there.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 267">She beamed. “It was my idea. We tell them that if they wear the armband during one more run, the Kravyad will know to teleport them straight home at the end of the shift. But really it lets the Kravyad know they’re troublemakers who are okay to eat. It added another 5% to our productivity in Q2. Even Rod was impressed.” Donut: I DON’T LIKE THIS LADY. SHE’S ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO IS REALLY MEAN BUT DOESN’T THINK THEY’RE MEAN. Carl: No kidding.</bq> <bq caption="Page 292">That was why Maggie had killed her own daughter. She was in pain from the explosion. She wasn’t going to heal. The pain wasn’t going to stop. Not as long as I was alive. “She was beautiful, you know. On the inside, I mean. She didn’t have that anger in her. Not like her mother. Or her dad. When she ran away, it wasn’t because she was a bad kid. It was self-defense. Kids aren’t always a product of their parents. But sometimes that doesn’t matter. Sometimes parents can cast a shadow so thick, you can drown in it.” That poor girl. Jesus, she must’ve been so scared. I felt no sympathy for the man next to me. He deserved all the pain he was feeling right at that moment. But I understood him a little better now.</bq> <bq caption="Page 298">The robot sighed. “I apologize, Carl. Let me translate it to earth monkey speak. The mudskippers are cheap bastards who have built this entire crawl with spit and duct tape and items they have purchased at the equivalent of an interstellar swap meet. Everything is built with very little regard for system security and is done as cheaply as possible. The fact it hasn’t yet broken down or bitten them in the ass is a testament to the very real existence of the concept of ‘dumb luck.’ Do you understand now?”</bq> <bq caption="Page 299">Remind me sometime, and I’ll tell you the story of Unsinkable Sam. He was a famous cat from World War II who survived multiple ship sinkings.” “I didn’t know about this,” Donut said. “So he was a hero cat?” “Every boat he served on ended up at the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know if that makes him a hero.” “But he survived?” “Yep,” I said. “Ended up dying of old age.” “Sounds like a hero to me,” Donut said.</bq> <bq caption="Page 320">[...] this guy had it even worse. He’d been tricked into believing something that just wasn’t real. He never even had the opportunity to screw it up. Before this was done, people like him would kill people like me by the thousands. And people like me would cleave through his kind, wreaking even more damage. All the while the real culprits sat back and watched and laughed.</bq> <bq caption="Page 320">Focus on what you can accomplish, not that which is beyond your control.</bq> This is terrible advice. How does anything interesting get done if everyone stays in their lane? If you only focus on what you can control, then you can be controlled by anyone who convinces you that certain things are beyond your control. <bq caption="Page 364">New achievement! Mentally Unstable Clothing Hoarder! You have over 500 of the exact same, stackable clothing item in your inventory. What the hell is wrong with you? You planning on opening a thrift store? You might want to see a shrink. One that your group doesn’t immediately kill. Reward: We don’t reward this sort of behavior. It’s weird.</bq> <bq caption="Page 399">Elle: Same ol’ shit. Imani is mother hen-ing every damn person in here, even though they’re all terrified of her. Your friend Li Jun doesn’t know his best friend is in love with his sister even though she’s turned into a demon, and most of those girls from Hekla’s group are as helpless as I was when I was still in the wheelchair. On top of that, some crazy asshole who doesn’t want everybody to think he’s a crazy asshole is throwing a train full of explosives in our direction. So, you know. Typical day.</bq> <bq caption="Page 400">Bautista: The trains are definitely working. It’s raining crashed trains and monsters into the abyss. I haven’t seen any crawlers fall thankfully. But it’s a lot of those giant monsters. Are you getting experience for this? They’re splattering across the bottom of the abyss like hail.</bq> <bq caption="Page 429">Sometimes the galaxy isn’t a happy place. Sometimes the unwashed masses forget their place in the machine. And sometimes these dregs bubble up to the surface, causing a phenomenon widely known as “Civil Unrest.” And when that happens, the powers that be don’t want to become the powers that were. So they hire backup. An outside force to come down and kick everything back into order, and maybe commit a few war crimes in the process just so the filth knows their place. One such outfit, trained specifically for this sort of situation, is the Shade Gnoll Riot Forces.</bq> <bq caption="Page 438">I focused on Katia. The blood spread out from her in a circle. It hadn’t gone straight up, but in every direction around her. She hadn’t been touched. Holy shit. There wasn’t a single damn drop of blood on her. I had a thought. An exploit. I wondered how well it would work. But it was definitely something they’d patch if I even tried it. I filed that information away.</bq> I wonder if the idea is: Store a dangerous liquid in a container in your inventory. Take it out of the container in your inventory. Liquid sprays in all directions, not touching you. <bq caption="Page 443">He pointed to the second circle of the logo, then tapped the Nightmare line again. “See here, it matches up perfectly. The named trains make a specific pattern. That means there is a train that has to loop to the front. Probably at this station here. Yes, look, you discovered it already. The Escape Velocity line. Yeah, that makes sense. Escape Velocity is the name of the ship that discovered the worm hole to the first system where a Gleener scientific crew investigating a Primal ship graveyard came across the Vog Generation Ship. A few hundred cycles later, the Syndicate was formed. So it’s obvious once you know what you’re looking for.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 492">The second portrait was that of Grull. He was a black-skinned, overly-muscular minotaur-like beast, but with a horse’s body. A centaur with the head of a big, pissed-off bull complete with a golden ring in its snout. He held a smoking, double-headed axe.</bq> <bq caption="Page 494">Grull screamed, his voice as loud as one of those alarm traps. He held the gigantic axe in the air. The handle looked to be a living oak tree, and the metal head of the axe moved, as if it was made of still-molten metal. He swung it up over his head, the axe trailing smoke. The top of the weapon seemed to clear the roof of the chamber by inches. He swung down, hitting nothing. He swung the axe a few times, as if testing the weight and heft of the weapon, which was the size of a goddamned passenger jet in his meaty hands.</bq> <bq caption="Page 508">If we’re really going to burn this place to the ground, we need to actually do it and not just talk about it. We need to start killing them, too. I don’t know for sure how to do it yet, but I’ll come up with something. They will not break me. Fuck them all. They will not break me. But I will break them. This is my promise to myself, to my friends, and to you, anyone who reads these words. I will break them all.</bq>