If you've ever read a book and thought, "This would be a lot cooler if the main characters knew their stats and could see their health points," then you might want to check out the new print edition of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is getting hardcover editions for the first time.
Written by Matt Dinniman, the popular book series belongs to a subgenre of fiction called "LitRPGs" that integrates video game tropes like stats, health bars, and inventory screens directly into the story. Rather than being a choose-your-own-adventure story or a tabletop RPG, LitRPG books are prose novels where the characters interact with the world in a game-like way--often because they are transported into an alternate video game reality or because outside forces morph the real world into a game-like setting. In Dungeon Crawler Carl, aliens have turned Earth into a 10-floor mega-dungeon, and each book in the series represents a different level of the dungeon with its own environmental identity, characters Carl meets, and objectives he completes in hopes of saving humanity.
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