Walk into any bookstore today and you’re likely to see a display of Matt Dinniman's bestselling Dungeon Crawler Carl series prominently displayed. The Literary Role-Playing Game isn't a new genre, but Dinniman's series is the first to achieve such widespread popularity.
LitRPG are stories set within a gamified universe where characters receive experience points, player stats, and loot drops much like actual RPGs, such as The Elder Scrolls or Baldur's Gate. Like actual RPGs, where players are deeply immersed in a rich fantasy world, Literary Role-Playing stories craft gaming tropes into traditional fiction.
This course will explore what makes Dungeon Crawler Carl so appealing to mainstream readers, even those who have never played an RPG, with a focus on the novel's humor, strong characterization, and dark satire of corporate greed.
About instructor Rachelle Smith.
Register online at Patreon - only $25
"Science into Fiction" Spec-Fic Writing Workshops:
Series 1: "The Higgs Boson in This Particular Universe"
Series 2: "Creativity and the Brain"
Series 3: "Writing in (and about) the Age of Artificial Intelligence"
Series 4: "Six great stories and what makes them work: The science of SF writing"
Series 5 "Hopepunk" coming Fall 2026: apply now!
Chris McKitterick's Spec-Fic Writing Workshop & Repeat Offenders Workshop
Kij Johnson & Barbara Webb's SF&F Novel Writing Workshops and Masterclasses
More Ad Astra Universe-ity Workshops and Classes
Speculative-fiction writing resources
We believe strongly in the free sharing of information, so you'll find a lot of content - including course syllabi and many materials from our classes - on this and related sites and social networks as educational outreach. Feel free to use this content for independent study, or to adapt it for your own educational and nonprofit purposes; just please credit us and link back to this website. We'd also love to hear from you if you use our materials!
This site is associated with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), AboutSF, and other organizations, and its contents are copyright 1992-present Christopher McKitterick except where noted, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: Feel free to use and adapt for non-profit purposes, with attribution. For publication or profit purposes, please contact McKitterick or other creators as noted.
This site does not use cookies and is free from tracking. We do not use or condone the use of machine-generated text or images for educational or creative purposes (except as satire), and do not accept student or teacher work manufactured by algorithms.
Works on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
updated 8/24/2026