Jeff Hays is about to perform a rulebook out loud. Every one of its 350-odd pages, fully voiced, in the same way he has been voicing Carl and Princess Donut getting torn apart by an alien game show since 2020.
That is the standout news from Renegade Game Studios’ crowdfunding drive, and it is far odder and far more interesting than the usual stretch-goal padding. A complete audio reading of the Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook is slated for summer 2027, designed to function both as something you’d actually listen to and as a way for players to absorb the rules before ever sitting down at a table.
And for anyone who isn’t backing the campaign, this is the detail worth noting: unlike several of the other rewards, the voiced rulebook is planned to go on sale through Soundbooth Theater once it’s out.
How a cult LitRPG got to eight million copies
Matt Dinniman kicked this off in 2020 with a premise that has no business working. Carl, alongside his ex-girlfriend’s award-winning cat Princess Donut, attempts to survive an alien-run dungeon that is simultaneously the galaxy’s cruelest reality show. The humor is irreverent, the setup is absurd, and the characters sneak up on you emotionally.
Since then, the series has moved more than eight million copies across all formats. Several entries have reached bestseller status in both print and audio. The franchise has also expanded quickly in every direction: there’s a WEBTOON, a graphic novel, and a live-action Peacock series in development from Universal and Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door.
The tabletop branch is the newest addition, and Renegade is layering audio on top of it.
The short story you can only hear if you back it
Hays is additionally lending his voice to “Archie,” a 54-page original short story penned by Ben Wolf that ships with the Crawler Chaos expansion for Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable.
Retail copies of that expansion will contain the written version. They will not contain the Hays performance. That recording belongs to crowdfunding backers alone, and it’s expected in fall 2026.
There’s a third project in the works at Soundbooth Theater as well: an official Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG soundboard loaded with effects and character audio, intended to play underneath your live tabletop sessions. It’s also targeting summer 2027.
Two games, one dungeon, $13 million
The Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG is a skill-based TTRPG in which you create your own Crawler and attempt to make it through a customized World Dungeon. Its counterpart, Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable, is a card-crafting deck-builder for solo and cooperative play, set in that same vicious game-show universe.
The two debuted side by side on BackerKit. Between them, the campaign has drawn over $13 million from more than 55,000 backers, and physical fulfillment is currently pegged at fall 2026.
So the boxes will show up a full year before the man who turned Princess Donut into a household voice gets around to reading you the rules for what’s inside them.